President Donald Trump on Thursday threatened to withhold funding for states that regulate AI, arguing that 50 different regulatory regimes hamper the industry's growth. President Trump signed an executive order in this regard. That funding refers to the $42 billion included in Broadband Equity Access and Deployment. It directs the Secretary of Commerce to evaluate state laws for conflicts with Trump's AI priorities and to block those states in conflict from accessing. “We want to have one central source of approval," Trump told reporters, flanked by top advisers, including Treasury Secretary Scott. "To win, United States AI companies must be free to innovate without cumbersome regulation.” The order targets states such as Colorado, whose efforts, according to the White House, can result in "ideological bias and produce false results.” Trump's order called for his administration to work with Congress to craft a national standard that forbids state laws that conflict with federal policy, protects children, prevents censorship, respects copyrights, and protects communities. California Governor Gavin Newsom, whose state is home to several major AI companies, signed a bill this year requiring major AI developers to explain their plans to mitigate potential catastrophic risks. New York state last month became the first to enact a law requiring online retailers that employ "surveillance pricing" to disclose their use of algorithms and customers' personal data. Florida Governor Ron DeSantis, a Republican, has proposed an AI bill of rights that includes data privacy, parental controls, and consumer protections. Other states have passed laws banning AI-generated non-consensual sexual imagery and unauthorized political deepfakes. The Trump Administration has embraced AI as a critical technology, working closely with U.S. companies to boost investment in a sector where China has also made great strides.
This month, Google launched Workspace Studio, a new automation productivity tool for everyday work, designed to build AI agents and powered by Gemini 3’s multimodal understanding. Previously known as Workspace Flows, Workspace Studio offers full integration with Gmail, Chat, Drive, and other Google productivity apps, and it also connects to Asana, Jira, Mailchimp, and Salesforce. The new platform orchestrates work relying on pre-built connectors and custom extensions. Google summarized some business cases of this tool: Summarize upcoming meetings in Chat based on the meeting’s details, attendees, and attachments. Automatically capture meeting action items, translate them, and share them with your team. Intelligently detect and label high priority emails in your inbox. Save attachments to a Drive folder and record them in Sheets—all without leaving Gmail. Use a team of Gems to auto-draft email replies for negative customer feedback.
Harvey.ai, an AI platform for law firms, closed a $150 million funding round last month, valuing the company at $8 billion, double its valuation from the previous year. Andreessen Horowitz led the round. Harvey is backed by the investment arm of RELX, a $85 billion publishing group with a market cap, which owns the legal database LexisNexis. Harvey signed a deal with LexisNexis in June. The San Francisco-based three-year-old startup has raised more than $1 billion, including the new round, outstripping its rivals in valuation and fundraising. Annually, it generates more than $100 million in recurring revenue, or ARR. Harvey was founded in 2022 by Weinberg, then a junior lawyer with O'Melveny & Myers, and his friend and former DeepMind researcher Gabe Pereyra. The legal AI tools market is crowded: • Harvey is head-to-head with the Swedish startup Legora, which has a $1.8 billion valuation. • Other tech startups are Luminace, Clio, and Ironclad. • Chasing legal niches is EvenUp’s tool for personal injury lawyers, and Finch for paralegals. • Thomson Reuters, which owns case law database Westlaw, last year snapped up Casetext, another Harvey rival, in a $650 million deal.
AI can replace 11.7% of the U.S. labor force, amounting to $1.2 trillion in wages across finance, health care, and professional services. This is the main finding of an MIT study conducted using its simulation tool, the Iceberg Index, that simulates how 151 million U.S. workers interact across the country and how they are affected by AI. Researchers found that layoffs and role shifts in tech, computing, and information technology account for just 2.2% of total wage exposure, or about $211 billion. The Iceberg Index also challenges a common assumption about AI risk — that it will stay confined to tech roles in coastal hubs. It runs population-level experiments, revealing how AI reshapes tasks, skills, and labor flows long before those changes show up in the real economy. "Basically, we are creating a digital twin for the U.S. labor market," said Prasanna Balaprakash, ORNL director and co-leader of the research.
Anthropic announced Claude Opus 4.5, the latest version of its flagship model, following the launch of Sonnet 4.5 in September and Haiku 4.5 in October. It includes improvements to memory for long-context operations. "Claude Opus 4.5 is state-of-the-art on tests of real-world software engineering," and "is the best model in the world for coding, agents, and computer use," said the company. Opus 4.5 is already available in the apps, API, and on all three major cloud platforms. For developers, pricing is $5/$25 per million tokens. This model will face competition from other recently released frontier models, most notably OpenAI’s GPT 5.1 (released on November 12) and Google’s Gemini 3 (released on November 18). Alongside Opus, Anthropic released updates to the Claude Developer Platform, Claude Code, desktop app, and consumer apps.
