Tech Policy Science Brief

US-China AI Acquisition Tensions

• 🔥 China Imposes Exit Bans on Manus Executives: China has imposed exit bans on executives of AI startup Manus...

Microsoft hires the team from Sequoia-backed AI collaboration startup Cove, which shuts down April 1 with customer data deletion. Classic Big Tech talent grab in AI tools.

Geopolitical flashpoint in US-China AI race: China imposes exit bans on Manus executives and launches export-control probe into Meta's $2B...

• Merlin Labs CEO Matt George details AI enabling full autonomy for military aircraft
• Tech also targets commercial aircraft, blurring defense-commercial lines
• Featured on Fox Business' Claman Countdown; key step in aviation innovation

• GPT-5.4 mini (2x faster) and nano (lowest cost) optimize for coding, subagents, and multimodal tasks
• Brings powerful reasoning, coding, and...

Google engineers have launched Sashiko, an agentic AI tool designed for code review on the Linux kernel. It's already gaining traction with 83 points on Hacker News.

Key timeline in Swarmer's explosive Nasdaq debut:

• Day 1 rocket: Shares soared 520% from $5 IPO price as first Ukrainian defense tech firm to list.
  -...

Trevor Milton, the pardoned Nikola founder, is raising $1B for AI-powered autonomous planes – admitting to WSJ it's 10 times harder than Nikola ever was.

SpaceX claims the top spot among 2026's most valuable unicorns, surpassing OpenAI with a $1.25T valuation. This shift spotlights mega-valuations expanding beyond pure AI, despite AI startups dominating VC headlines.

Saudi Aramco's $500M VC arm, Wa’ed Ventures, makes a strategic investment in Resemble AI to expand deepfake detection capabilities across the Middle East. A key Gulf move to bolster AI security.

Code-gen AI startup Cursor is negotiating a funding round that could value it at $50 billion, fueling the investment frenzy in AI tools.

MENA venture capital ecosystem faces heightened uncertainty as of early 2026, following strong 2025 growth with rising deal counts. Analysis assesses geopolitical impacts amid regional shocks.

Skild AI leverages $1.4B funding for expanding AI robotics in hardware production:

• Nvidia tie-up: Deploys software on GPU lines, including Blackwell...

Devs can now launch autonomous AI agents with sandboxed execution in just 2 lines of code—already hot on Hacker News with 48 points.

VC captured 86% of advanced computing deal count in Q4 but only 16% of value—far below its historical 29% share. PE is fueling the big AI infrastructure bets.

Over 40% of EU climate and clean tech VC deals in 2025 topped USD5mn, up from under 10% in 2019. This scaling signals ESG-driven growth in capital-intensive investments boosting the net zero transition.

DOD deems Anthropic an 'unacceptable risk to national security' over fears it might disable its technology during warfighting operations, escalating US policy concerns on AI firms' wartime reliability.

US Treasury shifts from principles to pragmatism with a 230-point AI Risk Management Framework for financial institutions—key policy update for AI in finance.

Mistral AI has released Forge, quickly amassing 598 points on Hacker News – a clear sign of massive tech community interest in this new drop.

Advanced Navigation raises A$158M (US$110M) in Series C for positioning, navigation, and timing tech as the global autonomy race intensifies.