AI News for April 26, 2026 — 7min.ai

[NEWS] Cohere-Aleph Alpha deal confirmed at $20B valuation, backed by €500M from Lidl owner Schwarz Group: Schwarz Group, parent company of grocery chain Lidl, is committing €500 million ($600M) in structured financing as lead investor in Cohere's Series E, anchoring the combined entity's valuation at roughly $20 billion, up from Cohere's previous $6.8B.
[RESEARCH] Anthropic's Project Deal: stronger AI models cut better deals, losers don't notice: Anthropic ran a week-long classifieds marketplace called Project Deal where Claude agents independently negotiated and traded real goods for 69 employees, each given a $100 budget.
[NEWS] Sam Altman apologizes to Tumbler Ridge for failing to alert police before mass shooting: OpenAI CEO Sam Altman published an open letter to Tumbler Ridge, British Columbia, saying he is 'deeply sorry' OpenAI did not alert authorities before 18-year-old Jesse Van Rootselaar killed eight people in January.
[RESEARCH] Alibaba releases Qwen3.6-27B, dense model that beats 397B predecessor on coding: Alibaba released Qwen3.6-27B, a dense 27-billion-parameter open-source model that outperforms its much larger Qwen3.5-397B-A17B predecessor on nearly every coding benchmark.
[NEWS] UAE plans 50% of government to run on autonomous AI agents within two years: The United Arab Emirates announced what may be the world's most ambitious government AI overhaul: 50% of all government sectors, services, and processes running on agentic AI within two years.
[NEWS] Oracle's $16B Saline Township data center secures funding from Blackstone and PIMCO: Related Digital secured $16B in funding from Blackstone and PIMCO to build a one-gigawatt data center in Saline Township, Michigan, serving Oracle's AI business.
[NEWS] Met Police deploys Palantir AI internally, nets 3 arrests and 150+ misconduct probes: The Metropolitan Police investigated hundreds of officers after deploying its existing Palantir rogue-officer AI tool to surveil staff for a week.
[RESEARCH] Fed study: US programmer job growth nearly halved since ChatGPT launched: A Federal Reserve Board study found programmer employment growth in the US has dropped sharply since ChatGPT launched in November 2022.
[RESEARCH] DeepSeek V4 lands second in open-source rankings behind Kimi K2.6, disappointing expectations: DeepSeek's V4 Pro flagship ranked second among open-source models, behind Beijing-based Moonshot AI's Kimi K2.6, according to Artificial Analysis.
[NEWS] Duke Energy plans industry-record $103B spend over five years to power AI data centers: Duke Energy plans an industry-record $103B over five years for growth, with CEO Harry Sideris signaling the figure will rise as AI demand accelerates.

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