TheChek News Flow

On Tuesday, Google released Gemini 3, its latest and most advanced foundation model, which is now immediately available through the Gemini app and AI search interface.

Coming just seven months after the Gemini 2.5 release, the new model is Google’s most capable LLM yet, and an immediate contender for the most capable AI tool on the market. The release also comes less than a week after OpenAI released GPT 5.1, and a mere two months after Anthropic released Sonnet 4.5 — a reminder of the blistering pace of frontier model development.

A more research-intensive version of the model, called Gemini 3 Deepthink, will also be made available to Google AI Ultra subscribers in the coming weeks, once it passes further rounds of safety testing.

“With Gemini 3, we’re seeing this massive jump in reasoning,” said Tulsee Doshi, Google’s head of product for the Gemini model. “It’s responding with a level of depth and nuance that we haven’t seen before.”

Some of that reasoning power is already registering on independent benchmarks. With a score of 37.4, the model marked the highest score on record on the Humanity’s Last Exam benchmark, meant to capture general reasoning and expertise. The previous high score, held by GPT-5 Pro, was 31.64. Gemini 3 also topped the leaderboard on LMArena, a human-led benchmark that measures user satisfaction.

According to Google, the Gemini app currently has more than 650 million monthly active users, and 13 million software developers have used the model as part of their workflow.

Alongside the base model, Google also released a Gemini-powered coding interface called Google Antigravity, allowing for multi-pane agentic coding similar to agentic IDEs like Warp or Cursor 2.0. Specifically, Antigravity combines a ChatGPT-style prompt window with a command-line interface and a browser window that can show the impact of the changes made by the coding agent.

“The agent can work with your editor, across your terminal, across your browser to make sure that it helps you build that application in the best way possible,” said DeepMind CTO Koray Kavukcuoglu.

Trump has decried effort as a Democratic ‘hoax’ but says he will sign measure if Congress sends it to his desk

WASHINGTON—The House passed legislation Tuesday mandating the disclosures of a trove of government files related to sex offender Jeffrey Epstein, a milestone in a long-running fight that divided the Republican Party and President Trump’s MAGA movement.

The 427-1 vote came after a band of Republicans bucked party leaders and joined with Democrats to force the matter over the opposition of GOP leadership. The one lawmaker to vote against the measure was Rep. Clay Higgins (R., La.).

Epstein survivors and their backers in Congress fought “so hard against the most powerful people in the world, even the president of the United States, in order to make this vote happen today,” said Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene (R., Ga.), whom Trump tagged as a traitor over her push to release the files.

“Watching this actually turn into a fight has ripped MAGA apart,” she said.

Trump blasted the effort for months, saying it was a Democratic-driven campaign to embarrass Republicans and distract from GOP policy wins. But as it became clear that dozens of Republicans were likely to break ranks and support the measure to force the Justice Department to release documents, he reversed course. He said he supported passage of the bill and would sign it into law if it got to his desk, while continuing to call it a “hoax.”

Trump’s comments cleared the way for more Republicans to support the measure, including House Speaker Mike Johnson (R., La.), who had criticized the effort and its GOP backers.

Ahead of the vote, survivors of Epstein’s abuse as teenagers held a press conference Tuesday alongside Greene and other main bill proponents, Reps. Thomas Massie (R., Ky.) and Ro Khanna (D. Calif.). Victims expressed frustration with past Democratic and Republican administrations’ lack of action but particularly targeted Trump and GOP lawmakers, for what they saw as their efforts to block or slow down the files’ release.

“Your career is in front of you, and that choice will follow you,” said Haley Robson, a survivor of Epstein’s abuse, to lawmakers, while holding a photo of herself as a child. “Everybody will know.” Another Epstein victim, Jena Lisa Jones, added: “I’m begging you, President Trump, stop making this political.”

Trump has said he cut off ties with Epstein long before the financier was first arrested in 2006. Epstein pleaded guilty to soliciting a minor for prostitution in 2008. Trump and Epstein socialized together in the 1990s and early 2000s. Trump later banned Epstein from his Mar-a-Lago club, the White House has said. Epstein died in 2019 in jail after he was arrested a second time and charged with sex trafficking conspiracy.

Trump, in comments to reporters Tuesday, said he has “nothing to do with Jeffrey Epstein. I threw him out of my club many years ago because I thought he was a sick pervert, and I guess I turned out to be right.”

The legislation needed two-thirds of House lawmakers—roughly 290 members—to pass, under fast-track procedures. It now goes to the Senate, where Senate Majority Leader John Thune (R., S.D.) hasn’t said whether he would take up the bill.

Bill supporters aired concerns that the Justice Department might not fully comply if the measure becomes law. Justice Department officials could cite a number of reasons why the material should stay under wraps, but it wasn’t clear whether they would do so. A department spokesman didn’t immediately respond to a request for comment.

The Justice Department could also cite as a continuing investigation a review Trump recently ordered into Epstein’s relationship with former President Bill Clinton and other Democrats. Attorney General Pam Bondi assigned the investigation to Jay Clayton, U.S. attorney for the Southern District of New York, but shared no further details of what the probe would cover.

In comments Tuesday at a press conference, Johnson made clear he wasn’t happy about the legislation, which he said amounted to “a political show vote” by Democrats who were trying to embarrass Trump after ignoring the issue when they had more power. He said the bill has insufficient privacy protections for victims who haven’t stepped forward publicly and could lead to the distribution of child pornography. Johnson said he hoped the Senate would amend the legislation.

The lives of victims and other innocent people “would be made to suffer more harm if Congress is not careful in what we’re doing,” Johnson said.

Backers of the bill said it has sufficient protections, and the legislation allows the attorney general to redact or withhold information that would identify victims. Massie said that Congress could add additional privacy measures, but that would require a new round of votes. He called the objections a “red herring,” noting the support from Epstein survivors for the legislation.

Democrats highlighted Trump’s last-minute decision to support the bill.

“Donald Trump appears to have chickened out on the Epstein scandal,” House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries (D., N.Y.) said. “He’s caved. It’s a complete and total surrender.”

Heading into Trump’s second term, many MAGA supporters were demanding further disclosures in the Epstein case, thinking there was a list of powerful men whose identities were being protected. Earlier this year, Bondi told Fox News that a list of Epstein’s clients was “sitting on my desk right now to review,” then in February announced the release of a first set of documents.

But the material contained few revelations, drawing criticism from right-wing influencers. In July, the Justice Department backtracked on Bondi’s pledge to release more files, saying that after an “exhaustive review,” it had found no “incriminating client list” or additional documents warranting public disclosure. Amid pressure on Capitol Hill, the House Oversight Committee over the summer sent subpoenas to the Justice Department and the Epstein estate seeking documents related to Epstein.

The discharge petition put forth in early September by Massie reached its 218th signature earlier this month, after the long delayed swearing-in of Rep. Adelita Grijalva (D., Ariz.). She won her election in late September but Johnson had declined to install her, citing the government shutdown and his decision to keep the House out of session until it was resolved. Her signature was the crucial one needed to force House leadership to hold a vote.

After the House vote, Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer (D., N.Y.) and his colleagues are expected to “launch an all-out blitz pressuring Thune to bring it to the floor for a vote,” according to a Senate Democratic aide.

Two Senate Republicans—Josh Hawley of Missouri and Rand Paul of Kentucky—already have cast votes to advance a companion Senate measure, and at least two others, Sens. Lisa Murkowski of Alaska and Susan Collins of Maine, have indicated that they support the release of records. In the 53-47 GOP-led Senate, a total of 13 Republicans are needed to join Democrats in order to hit the 60-vote threshold needed to advance legislation.

Anthropic also commits to purchase $30 billion from Microsoft cloud computing business Azure

Three of the biggest companies in artificial intelligence announced a partnership featuring tens of billions of dollars in spending, adding to an investment spree that is aimed at supercharging AI model development.

Under the partnership, Nvidia NVDA -1.29%decrease; red down pointing triangle and Microsoft MSFT -2.47%decrease; red down pointing triangle will invest up to $15 billion in Anthropic, a competitor to OpenAI whose models are popular with coders and businesses. Anthropic, in turn, said it would buy $30 billion of computing capacity from Microsoft Azure running on Nvidia AI systems. The chip titan will also work with Anthropic on design and engineering.

The alliance is the latest sign in the global AI race that the biggest players must work with one another despite potential business rivalries and policy disagreements. Microsoft is a big investor in Anthropic rival OpenAI and offers its models to customers, while Nvidia Chief Executive Jensen Huang and Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei have clashed over chip exports and the number of jobs lost to AI.

The companies don’t want to lose out to competitors who are also plowing money into data centers for training models and offering new products.

“We are increasingly going to be customers of each other,” Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella said in a video statement with Amodei and Huang. Azure is deploying hundreds of thousands of Nvidia graphic processing units for training models.

Anthropic models will now be available on Azure, Microsoft said. The company already uses AI models from Anthropic in its 365 tools. It is considered critical for model developers to have access to customers of top cloud providers Microsoft, Amazon Web Services and Google to increase usage.

The new partnership is the latest in an array of deals between technology giants and hot AI startups aimed at stoking growth in the fast-evolving sector. Also Tuesday, Google launched Gemini 3, an updated version of its own model.

The flurry of deals and vast sums that technology titans and investors alike are plowing into new infrastructure have raised concerns in recent weeks about whether AI-powered products will generate enough revenue to justify it.

Nvidia and competitor AMD have both struck deals that have bolstered Anthropic rival OpenAI using funding from their own balance sheets, raising concerns among investors that the AI boom is being propped up by risky “circular” financing.

Anthropic has committed to initially buying up to 1 gigawatt worth of computing power from Microsoft—using the equivalent amount of electricity required to power roughly 750,000 homes for a year—that will be deployed using Nvidia’s Grace Blackwell servers, which employ the company’s current most-advanced AI chips, and its Vera Rubin systems, which are set to launch next year.

If the $30 billion doesn’t get to a gigawatt of capacity, Anthropic could spend more to get to that point, meaning the spending total would be even higher.

Concerns about an AI bubble have contributed to a recent dip in the stock market. Microsoft shares were down about 4% in Tuesday morning trading, while Nvidia shares were down about 3%, part of broad declines in the market.

Nadella said the partnership builds on Microsoft’s roughly $135 billion stake in OpenAI by providing Microsoft customers with more choice.

Microsoft and OpenAI recently struck a new deal that gives Microsoft a 27% stake in the startup’s new public-benefit corporation. The tech giant has broken off from the startup in some ways. Microsoft is pursuing its own AI breakthroughs through its Microsoft AI division, which plans to develop AI self-sufficiency from OpenAI by building, testing and releasing its own voice, image and text models.

Microsoft has access to OpenAI’s models until 2032, a schedule company executives have said gives the company time to make its own models into leading technology.

Microsoft AI CEO Mustafa Suleyman has praised OpenAI and the work the companies have done together, but he has also distanced himself from OpenAI and competitors in some ways, such as by declining to develop AI that simulates erotica.

In a recent interview with business streaming show TBPN, Nadella said the company is focused on being a “platform company” with many partners, and that it has its own capabilities of creating world-class AI technology. Numerous companies use Microsoft’s Azure cloud computing services to train their AI models and run workloads.

Amodei said Microsoft’s emphasis on enterprise platforms was a natural fit for Claude, which is frequently used in business applications.

Anthropic recently raised $13 billion from investors at a $183 billion valuation and has forecast turning a profit far more quickly than OpenAI, which plans to spend heavily on computing in the years ahead.

Anthropic is unique among AI companies in that it isn’t heavily reliant on Nvidia chips because it works closely with Amazon and Google.

A former OpenAI executive, Amodei has criticized Huang and the Trump administration for being willing to export AI chips to China and the Middle East, arguing that they are threatening national security and could boost China in the AI race.

Huang has said Amodei is being overly restrictive with his policy positions and pushed back earlier this year when the Anthropic CEO predicted massive white-collar job losses caused by AI.

“I pretty much disagree with almost everything he says,” Huang said at the time. He added that Amodei seems to think AI is so scary that only Anthropic should be building models and suggested it was a strategy to control the whole industry.

Amodei called that statement an “outrageous lie.”

The two executives complimented each other on Tuesday, with Amodei crediting Nvidia for fueling much of the AI boom and Huang saying Nvidia’s developers love Anthropic’s Claude models.

“Now your business is on a rocket ship,” Huang told Amodei.

Investigators search properties linked to alleged scheme to defraud Patrick Drahi’s company of hundred of millions of euros

Police in France have raided companies and properties across the country as a probe intensifies into an alleged scheme by employees and suppliers to defraud Patrick Drahi’s telecoms group Altice.

The country’s financial prosecutor said 15 homes and 14 companies in Île-de-France, Corsica, Var and Vosges had been visited simultaneously more than two years into a probe investigating “a vast, corrupt system” that operated “to the detriment of Altice group”.

More than 70 investigators were involved in the operation supported by Eurojust, an agency based in The Hague that facilitates cross-border serious crime investigations by EU member states. 

Investigators also seized about €14mn from bank accounts as well as vehicles and luxury goods, the prosecutor’s office said. No formal charges have been brought.

The probe was opened after the July 2023 arrest in Portugal of Armando Pereira, Drahi’s fellow co-founder, kicking off a period of turmoil at debt-laden Altice just as it was looking to renegotiate its borrowing and considering asset sales to help relieve the pressure.  

Pereira’s home in France was among the properties raided on Tuesday, his lawyers confirmed.

The Portuguese executive is suspected of running a scheme whereby Altice was overbilled on procurement and other contracts, leading to allegations that several hundred million euros were siphoned off illegally. Altice has previously said it was the victim of a scheme to defraud the company. Pereira denies wrongdoing.

“This complex scheme allegedly relied on a network of shell companies interposed between Altice and certain suppliers, enabling the overbilling of services and goods,” France’s financial prosecutor said on Tuesday. 

“The funds thus obtained then allegedly fuelled money-laundering operations involving entities based in France and abroad, benefiting the main instigators of this system,” it added. 

Altice declined to comment.

Pereira’s lawyers said they were pleased that, after two years, things were “finally moving forward”, adding that their client had been co-operating with the justice system and “strongly” supported a formal investigation being opened.

“We also hope that the Swiss, US Securities & Exchange Commission, and French justice systems will take a very close look at the activities and assets of Patrick Drahi and his associates in this case,” they added.

Drahi, who built Altice through debt-fuelled acquisitions, has previously denied knowledge of the alleged scheme and said the allegations had come “as a huge shock”.

Pereira was his right-hand man for decades. Altice conducted internal probes and cut ties with some suppliers in the months after Pereira’s arrest, which was the result of a three-year investigation by Portuguese authorities.

The raids coincide with high-stakes asset sales by Drahi as he looks to withdraw from telecoms altogether, having renegotiated Altice France’s €24bn debt pile this year in one of Europe’s biggest such restructurings.

Renegotiations on the debt of Altice’s international holdings are expected to kick off soon. Shares in Altice USA, the only listed entity in the group, have slid 95 per cent in the past five years.

An offer by a consortium of France’s three other telecoms groups — Iliad, Bouygues and Orange — to buy SFR, Altice’s operator in the country, was dismissed as too low last month, although the parties continue to believe a deal can be done. Any sale will face competition hurdles from regulators in Brussels and Paris. 

Intuit sees the opportunity to expose its products, such as TurboxTax and QuickBooks, to a broader range of potential users on ChatGPT

OpenAI and Intuit agreed to a multiyear partnership in which the financial technology firm will deepen its use of OpenAI models and make applications available on the artificial intelligence company’s ChatGPT.

The companies said they expect the deal to generate more than $100 million in revenue for OpenAI over an unspecified number of years.

In an interview, Intuit Chief Executive Sasan Goodarzi and OpenAI CEO of Applications Fidji Simo described the partnership as an end-to-end agreement that will engage Intuit employees and customers. It will expose Intuit products TurboxTax, QuickBooks, Credit Karma and Mailchimp to a broader range of potential users on ChatGPT, according to Goodarzi.

Intuit will gain extensive access to OpenAI’s APIs. The companies said the partnership will allow Intuit to leverage OpenAI frontier models for cutting-edge use cases across the business. The contract also includes Intuit’s continued use of ChatGPT Enterprise across the company. It helps Intuit employees incorporate AI into daily workflows and further improve productivity, the companies said.

Intuit currently uses OpenAI’s large language models, and will continue to use other commercial third-party LLMs and open-source LLMs, as well as their own proprietary custom-trained financial models developed for product or domain-specific use.

The combination of ChatGPT’s accessibility and Intuit’s expertise is “a way to unlock financial literacy…at a scale that hasn’t been tried before,” said Simo. OpenAI announced in May that she was joining the company. Her prior roles included CEO of Instacart and head of the Facebook app.

“We are turning ChatGPT from a tool that was very useful, but fairly insular and not connected to the rest of the ecosystem, into a tool that is connected to incredibly helpful services,” she said.

The idea is to make ChatGPT useful in every part of life, without simply backing a series of applications in one super app. Rather, the idea is to create a “personal super assistant,” Simo said.

Goodarzi said the biggest opportunity for Intuit is reaching untapped customers who are engaged with ChatGPT.

The deal comes at a time when anxiety over AI is felt at multiple levels, from stock valuations and debt levels to the ability of AI and data center companies to generate enough revenue to justify it all.

While the overall impact of AI isn’t overstated, expectations about the pace of adoption are, according to Goodarzi.

Over time, Goodarzi said AI will “spark more global innovation than the world experienced with the advent of electricity or the internet. I think that’s not overblown.” However, he cautioned that the pace at which consumers and businesses fully integrate AI into every part of their lives is “a bit overblown,” because difficult tasks such as those involving money and finance require high trust and accuracy.

News Corp, owner of The Wall Street Journal, has a content-licensing partnership with OpenAI.

Paramount, Comcast and Netflix are preparing bids to buy all or part of Warner Bros. Discovery, a crown jewel of the industry.

Warner Bros. Discovery, the media giant that owns HBO, CNN and the Warner Bros. movie studio, has been sold and renamed three times since the turn of the century. Here comes the fourth.

The company announced plans to consider a sale last month, and the deadline for initial bids is Thursday. Three heavyweights — Netflix, Comcast and Paramount — are expected to pursue all or part of the company to cement their primacy in Hollywood.

Each of the three companies is preparing arguments for why it is the best option, according to several people with knowledge of their plans. And the arguments are not just about money (though a lot of them are about money). They are also about politics. The deal, like all major mergers and acquisitions, will need approval from federal enforcers, and President Trump has often made clear his preferences for media ownership.

So the bidders will need to make a persuasive case to Warner Bros. Discovery’s board of directors that they can navigate the financial and regulatory hurdles. Here is the situation facing the three of them:

Paramount: Deep Pockets and Ties to Trump

Paramount, the conglomerate behind CBS News, films like “Top Gun” and fading cable networks like MTV, is widely viewed as the front-runner in the bidding contest. And that is because of its financial and political advantages.

The older Mr. Ellison is also a longtime supporter of Mr. Trump. The Trump administration blessed the Ellison family’s takeover of Paramount, and the president has praised the younger Mr. Ellison in briefings with reporters.

But the new mogul has not yet convinced the board of Warner Bros. Discovery that Paramount’s approach would be best for shareholders. David Zaslav, the company’s chief executive, will be a power broker with board members as they weigh offers, not least because of his relationships with influential shareholders like John Malone. Paramount has offered Mr. Zaslav a role as co-chief executive of the combined company, giving him a seat at the table in any potential deal. Mr. Ellison wants to buy all of Warner Bros. Discovery, including traditional cable channels like TNT, saying it would give shareholders the most lucrative way to cash out.

Competitors and possibly consumer groups are also likely to raise concerns with regulators about any Paramount deal, because shared ownership of Warner Bros. and Paramount Pictures would strengthen the movie studios’ hand at the struggling box office. The combined company would also own a huge group of cable networks as well as overlapping businesses in Europe, where regulators must also approve any deal.

Paramount has privately resolved to keep the movie studios separate, and has argued that media companies need to be larger to compete with deep-pocketed technology giants like Amazon and Google. In a letter to the board of Warner Bros. Discovery, Mr. Ellison argued that a deal between the two would be good for the industry, “creating a more robust streaming platform to compete with the dominant tech giants and larger media players.”

Comcast: An Open Role for Zaslav?

Comcast, the cable and wireless giant that owns NBC, the Universal movie studio and lucrative theme parks, is taking a different approach.

Comcast wants only Paramount’s studio and streaming service, in an effort to supercharge its own businesses, a person with knowledge of discussions inside the company said. That would avoid regulatory scrutiny of a concentrated ownership of cable networks. (Like Paramount, though, Comcast would need to contend with questions stemming from its ownership of two major movie studios.)

Comcast has at least one other carrot for Mr. Zaslav: It could offer him a major role overseeing its media business, because NBCUniversal hasn’t had a dedicated media chief executive since 2023. Brian Roberts, the chairman and co-chief executive of Comcast, shares a mentor with Mr. Zaslav in Mr. Malone.

But Comcast has roughly $99 billion in debt, reducing its ability to make a lucrative cash offer to compete with Paramount. (Comcast has abundant free cash flow and is in good standing with its ratings agencies, meaning it could take on additional debt at favorable terms for a bid.)

And Mr. Trump has a well-known grudge against Mr. Roberts, whom he has called a “disgrace to the integrity of broadcasting.” Still, the company has joined many others in trying to cultivate a relationship with the president in his second term; Comcast recently donated millions to help fund the construction of a ballroom at the White House.

Netflix: Plenty of Money and Motivation

Netflix, the king of the entertainment industry, is also focused on buying only Warner Bros. Discovery’s streaming service and studio, a person with knowledge of discussions inside the company said. And with a market value of about $470 billion, it has plenty of money at its disposal.

Buying Warner Bros. Discovery’s studio and streaming businesses could further distance Netflix from competitors like Disney and Paramount. The deal would come with intellectual property, including characters like Batman and Harry Potter, that is a potential gold mine for Netflix. The Warner Bros. studio lot in Burbank, Calif., could also be valuable.

But all of that may raise red flags with government antimonopoly enforcers. Some lawmakers have already criticized a potential deal over antitrust concerns. Representative Darrell Issa, a Republican from Southern California, sent a letter last week to Pam Bondi, the attorney general, raising concerns about the potential combination.

In the letter, Mr. Issa wrote that combining Netflix’s “300 million global subscribers” with “HBO Max’s subscribers and Warner Bros.’ premier content rights” would push the entity to “above a 30 percent share of the streaming market: a threshold traditionally viewed as presumptively problematic under antitrust law.”

But Netflix may argue that the company is dwarfed by tech companies like Google, whose YouTube has leapfrogged its rivals to become one of the most popular streaming services.

Netflix may also argue that it poses a reduced antitrust risk because it does not already own one of the major Hollywood studios. Netflix and HBO Max, the Warner Bros. streaming service, already have significant overlap, and Netflix could argue that combining the two services would give customers more bang for their buck.