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Subscribe to enjoy similar stories.IF There has been a common narrative around artificial intelligence this year, it is that advances in the technology are shaking up the vast—and hitherto cosy—world of software. In order to keep this blitzkrieg going, the labs at the forefront of AI need to raise enormous amounts of money.

Subscribe to enjoy similar stories.In the history of literature, several outstanding novels have captured the personal and societal challenges associated with upward mobility. Once a man could make his fortune through intrepid adventure (R.L.

Subscribe to enjoy similar stories.There was once a time when software did as it was told. You used the keyboard to type in input, and the computer complied with an expected output—unless it was in the mood to crash. We’ve been used to this equation for decades.But AI systems are beginning to work differently.

Subscribe to enjoy similar stories.Mid-cap information technology (IT) services companies believe they are less vulnerable to AI-led disruption than their larger peers. This optimism is underscored by their growth as companies earning between $1-2 billion grew faster than the big six last year.Executives from these companies attribute their resilience to nimble organizational structures, domain expertise and the ability to adapt faster to AI technologies due to fewer organizational layers.Over the last two months, bosses of mid-cap IT services firms have taken a more optimistic view of new software rollouts by AI companies.

Subscribe to enjoy similar stories.At first, the legal battle between Nayara Energy Ltd—the Indian refiner backed by Russia’s Rosneft—and SAP India appeared to be a conventional contract dispute.However, it quickly raised larger questions around foreign sanctions, India’s technological dependence on multinational software providers, and whether global geopolitical developments could disrupt critical infrastructure operations within the country.After Justice Vikas Mahajan heard both parties, the court recorded its judgement on 30 April.Mint explains the case and why it matters.The dispute started in July 2025, when SAP India Pvt Ltd suspended all critical software support services including SAP ECC support (maintenance for its legacy core business suite), marketplace access, SSCR keys (developer credentials required to modify SAP source code), and expert services.SAP said this was done after the European Union imposed sanctions on Rosneft, the Russian oil refinery that has a 49.13% stake in Nayara.Nayara approached the Delhi High Court in September, saying the suspension blocked access to software critical for refinery operations and regulatory compliance. The company noted it was unable to implement GST 2.0 updates and argued that the disruption "poses a serious risk to India’s sovereignty and public interest", given that its refinery accounts for 8.5% of the nation’s energy production.Nayara argued that SAP was using the European Union trade curbs to not provide services to the energy firm despite its contractual obligations in India.

Subscribe to enjoy similar stories.The democratization of programming has arrived—as an artificial intelligence (AI) model prompt. The ability to command a machine was a specialized art, restricted to a class of engineers fluent in cryptic computer languages. No longer.

Subscribe to enjoy similar stories.BENGALURU: Small Indian IT services firms are increasingly diverging in performance, as weak deal momentum and sharper competition reshape growth patterns across the sub-$1 billion revenue cohort.Within the segment, revenue growth slowed in fiscal year 2026 (FY26) compared with the previous year, underscoring a widening gap between outperformers and laggards even as one company entered the $100 million revenue club.Save for Sasken Technologies Ltd, which doubled its revenue last fiscal year on the back of its largest acquisition, Birlasoft Ltd and Cyient DET reported their second straight year of revenue decline. Mastek Ltd and Zensar Technologies Ltd grew at 3.1% each in FY26, slower than the 10.9% and 5.4% growth, respectively, in the previous year.The divergence reflects intensifying competition among smaller IT firms as they defend market share against larger peers, while also adjusting to rapid artificial intelligence (AI)-driven shifts in demand and client priorities.At the same time, the ranking within the segment is shifting.

Subscribe to enjoy similar stories.It has been a sad few years for the venerable central processing unit. The one-time standard-bearer of the computing revolution has been pushed aside in recent years with the rise of generative artificial intelligence powered by graphics processing units, or GPUs, which are used for a lot more than graphics these days.But now attention is swinging back to the main brain of data-center computing, the CPU.

Subscribe to enjoy similar stories.WASHINGTON—On a recent call with the heads of the biggest artificial-intelligence companies, Vice President JD Vance was alarmed.New AI models such as Anthropic’s Mythos, which are capable of finding software vulnerabilities on their own, threatened to disrupt small-town banks, hospitals and water plants by starting cyberattacks that local governments weren’t equipped to handle, Vance said.“We all need to work together on this,” Vance told chief executive officers including OpenAI’s Sam Altman, Dario Amodei of Anthropic, Elon Musk of SpaceX, Sundar Pichai of Alphabet’s Google and Satya Nadella of Microsoft, according to people familiar with the matter.The April call, which followed a White House briefing that played a role in sparking Vance’s concern over the latest AI model capabilities, set in motion a chaotic administration response to Mythos that threatens to increase government oversight of AI and overhaul the administration’s tech agenda. The concern expressed by Vance, paired with other moves by the White House to get involved in the rollout of AI models, marks a shift from previous language about winning the AI race against China and removing barriers to deploying models.The White House is weighing an executive order that could create a formal oversight process for the most-advanced models.

Subscribe to enjoy similar stories.Indian IT’s mid-tier firms are narrowing the gap with the industry’s six largest players in terms of incremental revenue, even as growth slows across the board amid AI disruption and demand uncertainty.Coforge, Mphasis and five similar companies saw growth moderate, but the rate of decline in new business in FY26 was slower than that of the country’s six largest software exporters, which include the likes of Tata Consultancy Services (TCS) and Infosys.Together, these seven mid-tier companies, each with annual revenue between $1 billion and $2 billion, added $1.1 billion in new business in FY26, down from $1.25 billion in FY25. In comparison, the six largest firms, with annual revenue in a range of $5-30 billion, added $1.9 billion, down from $2.28 billion in FY25, according to a Mint analysis of company filings.This suggests that mid-tier tech firms are closing the gap with larger peers in incremental business.

Subscribe to enjoy similar stories.Competition between OpenAI and Anthropic, the two most prominent artificial intelligence start-ups, is intensifying as they race to expand relationships with major financial institutions.San Francisco-based Anthropic, which makes the Claude AI assistant that rivals OpenAI’s widely used ChatGPT, is launching a slate of new AI agent offerings for banks, investment managers, and insurers.The agents are meant to help those companies’ employees build presentations, synthesize webs of data sets and filings, build financial models, and complete other tasks, Anthropic said on Tuesday.Anthropic announced the new agents one day after it said it would partner with Blackstone, Goldman Sachs, and private-equity firm Hellman & Friedman to create a new, unnamed entity for expanding Claude across midsize companies. OpenAI is forming a similar venture, Bloomberg News reported on Monday, underscoring stiff competition.Anthropic, run by the former OpenAI executive Dario Amodei, has muscled further into financial services since it launched a suite of tools catering to banks, financial-technology firms, and others last year.The so-called agents have pressured software stocks, whose businesses, investors worry, could be threatened by the AI-driven tools.

Subscribe to enjoy similar stories.Any doubts that China has become the heartland of the global car industry are quickly dispelled by a visit to the country’s main motor show. Beijing’s noisy and crowded event this year was twice as large as in 2024 (it moves to Shanghai on alternate years) with around 180 new cars on display. The show, which concluded on May 3rd, demonstrated once again that foreign carmakers are lagging behind their Chinese rivals in the race to the industry’s future.Yet the show also illustrated the extent to which foreign carmakers are looking to remake themselves in the image of their ascendant Chinese competitors.

Subscribe to enjoy similar stories.New Delhi: Situated 33 kilometers from the busy streets of Pune is Chakan, home to automobile manufacturers and their suppliers. One company in this area is electric bus maker Eka Mobility.

Subscribe to enjoy similar stories.Soumya Sankar Bose’s new show We Need to Talk In Whispers at Experimenter, Ballygunge, in Kolkata is inspired by a journal he found on an overnight train journey from Howrah to Koraput. It seemed to be a curious “exploration of thanatology,” as the exhibition notes explain, a repository of “suicide notes” and “memories people hold on to in their final moments”.

Subscribe to enjoy similar stories.In the cool green depths of Uttarakhand, a young audio engineer chose an unusual career path. Rohit had grown up amid the impact of human-animal conflicts, and each incident he encountered shocked him to the core. He decided he wanted to tell the world the real stories behind the hundreds of tiger attacks that occur in India, and, in doing so, combine his audio expertise with his experiences with wildlife.Setting up a YouTube channel, Wilderness, the young man dove head-first into the no-compromises setup he felt the stories deserved.

Subscribe to enjoy similar stories.This summer’s World Cup was supposed to be the triumphant return of the planet’s favorite sport to America. But as the U.S. men’s national team prepares to host the tournament for the first time since 1994, its opening game has even hardcore fans feeling left out.The first match, against Paraguay on June 12 in Los Angeles, should have been a sold-out celebration.

Subscribe to enjoy similar stories.India’s outsourcing industry, its largest white-collar employer, is a juggernaut that has all but stopped moving. The dollar revenue at the top five software-services exporters has grown slower than 3% for 10 straight quarters—a shadow of the double-digit expansion in the previous two decades. As these companies squeeze hiring to survive the existential challenge posed by artificial intelligence (AI), the aftershocks are starting to upend everything from real-estate demand to mortgage-underwriting norms.

Subscribe to enjoy similar stories.The rise of artificial intelligence-powered self-learning tools is forcing India’s upskilling companies to redesign their programmes to attract a broader, non-technical learner base.Upskilling firms such as Great Learning, Temasek-backed upGrad and Prosus-backed Eruditus, among others, have introduced no-code tracks within existing skilling programmes and launched targeted courses for non-technical learners in areas that previously required coding knowledge, the firms told Mint.This comes amid rapid improvements in generative AI models, which are increasingly capable of performing tasks that once required months of technical training.Learners are now wary of sitting through three to six-month-long courses for something that can be done in minutes using AI, said Arjun Nair, co-founder of Great Learning, which was formerly a Byju’s group company.“The models have become dramatically better. Whether it is Claude, Gemini, or OpenAI models, their capabilities have improved sharply in the last three to six months,” Nair said.

Subscribe to enjoy similar stories.Early-stage fintech investors in India are shifting away from consumer-facing models that are heavily regulated and pivoting to software and infrastructure businesses that promise steady growth with minimal policy risk.Funds are increasingly backing software, infrastructure and B2B fintech models with AI that are less exposed to regulatory shocks, experts said.The shift follows a reset between 2021 and 2025, when tighter rules on digital lending, first-loss default guarantees and data governance curbed growth and raised compliance costs, pushing investors to favour B2B models over balance-sheet lenders.Data from Tracxn over the last 24 months showed that investors are becoming more selective within fintech, with capital moving toward software and infrastructure layers rather than large consumer-facing models.Funding picked up in areas such as payments infrastructure, which more than doubled, wealth-tech management platforms, which rose sharply by up to four times, and software tools for fund managers, where investments increased nearly eight-fold.In contrast, investor interest cooled in consumer payments, which fell about 60%, online lending, down roughly 16%, and online trading platforms, where funding more than halved over the same period.“Consumer fintech is crowded and heavily regulated and as a fund we don’t see too many white spaces,” said Sahil Anand, founder and managing partner at Cedar Hill Capital, a new fintech fund.While private equity and venture capital investors are not abandoning lending or regulated fintech in the growth to late stages, those bets have become selective, favouring scaled, profitable firms.Investors have become selective towards firms that have adapted

Subscribe to enjoy similar stories.One day in March 2026, a senior software developer, Kovanikov, found himself thoroughly offended. He had just received a cold outreach email from the CEO of AI startup, Composio, inviting him to call in. The email was obviously written by an AI assistant, Jarvis.

Subscribe to enjoy similar stories.Telecom operators Bharti Airtel Ltd and Vodafone Idea Ltd are evaluating the risks posed by Anthropic’s Claude Mythos, an AI model that identifies cybersecurity vulnerabilities in operating systems.“We are talking to suppliers (to understand the vulnerabilities) because we don't do this, the software is owned by them,” Randeep Sekhon, chief technology officer (CTO) at Bharti Airtel, told reporters on the sidelines of an industry event by the Cellular Operators Association of India (COAI) on Friday.Sekhon’s comments assume significance as Anthropic has said its latest model, Claude Mythos—currently available to a limited set of companies—can identify cybersecurity vulnerabilities in their digital infrastructure.This has raised concerns that, if accessed or misused by malicious actors, it could increase the risk of cyberattacks across critical infrastructure sectors such as telecom and banking.Sekhon, however, emphasized that it was too early to comment on the actual impact on telecom operators.“These are not systemic risks putting networks in danger. They are typically smaller software bugs that earlier may not have been discovered through routine checks,” Sekhon said, adding that telcos are users of technology and not builders of technology.On Thursday, Union finance minister Nirmala Sitharaman chaired a high-level meeting with banks and key stakeholders to assess risks from emerging threats linked to the AI model.