AI News from June 26, 2026

A planned 600MW AI data centre in Fife, Scotland, spanning 150 acres, has sparked fierce local opposition over environmental and community impact.

Google announced new connected AI tools for education at ISTE 2026, including study notebooks and free ACT and GRE practice tests powered by AI.

Rapid advances in AI voice cloning from short audio clips are raising serious concerns about identity misuse and scams, with UK law lagging behind.

ON Semiconductor is acquiring Synaptics for nearly $7 billion in its largest-ever deal, accelerating its strategy in physical AI and edge computing.

ElevenLabs has rolled out support for Google's SynthID invisible watermarking technology to help identify AI-generated audio content online.

Google has made the Interactions API generally available as the new default for Google AI Studio, the Gemini API, and all developer documentation.

Anthropic argues that its rapid accumulation of power and resources is necessary for responsible AI development, drawing criticism from rivals.

At VivaTech 2026, industry leaders from OpenAI, Amazon, and others shifted focus from AI hype to pressing questions around security, data sovereignty, and real business value.

Naveen Rao, formerly head of AI at Databricks, launched Unconventional AI, which promises to make inference processing vastly more power-efficient using novel hardware.

Patronus AI raised $50 million to create simulated environments that evaluate and stress-test increasingly autonomous AI agents on complex multi-step tasks.

General Intuition has raised $320 million to scale AI trained on millions of hours of gameplay, betting action data can help AI develop real-world reasoning.

Amazon announced an additional $13 billion investment to expand AI and cloud infrastructure in India through 2030, lifting its total planned commitment to $48 billion.

The Trump administration asked OpenAI to stagger the release of GPT-5.6 over security concerns; the government will approve customer access on a case-by-case basis.