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Elsevier pledges €1M a year and 4,000 free AI licences for European research

Elsevier says it will put about €1 million a year into European AI research, most of it in the form of software that researchers and clinicians would otherwise have to buy. The pledge includes 4,000 free licences spread across four of the company's AI tools.

What was promised

The Dutch scientific publisher announced the commitment as part of RAISE, the European Commission's pledging initiative for AI in science.

October 15, 2026 Miriam Česáková
Ilustrační obrázek

Agility and FORT Formalise Digit 5 Safety Stack Ahead of EU Machinery Rules

Agility Robotics and FORT Robotics announced a memorandum of understanding on 1 October 2026 to build the safety stack for Digit 5, Agility's next humanoid. The agreement covers a handheld pendant, communications on the robot, and an off-robot bridge that connects Digit 5 to safety equipment already installed inside a facility. What it does not include: volumes, prices, or a deployment date. This is a reading of what the two companies actually committed to — and of the single field-hour figure that can be checked against reality.
October 15, 2026 Daniel Cesak
Ilustrační obrázek

Digit 5: Agility's humanoid drops the safety cage, lifts 22.7 kg, costs $200,000

Agility Robotics’ Digit 5 is not the first humanoid to promise a fence-free warehouse, but it is one of the first to attach hard numbers to the promise: a $200,000 machine with a 90-minute runtime, a 9-minute recharge and a claimed 91% duty cycle. For a European logistics operator, the real story is the five-year cost — roughly €370,000 per unit — and whether that survives a real picking floor.

The arithmetic behind 20+ hours a day

Agility is not promising a general-purpose domestic helper.

October 15, 2026 Daniel Cesak
Ilustrační obrázek

Nvidia Splits $2.25 Billion Between European Startups and UK AI Safety Labs

Nvidia has added $2 billion to its European spending plans and set aside $250 million of computing power for UK research into AI agent safety. One of those figures is equity money for startups. The other is five years of GPU time for the wider UK research community, with three labs named as beneficiaries of a share. Nobody has published which GPUs, or how the time gets divided.
October 15, 2026 Daniel Cesak
Ilustrační obrázek

European small firms use AI agents eight times more than in May, but the EU gap stays wide

OpenAI's economic research team reports that weekly active small-business users of its agent tools in the EU grew 8.1 times between May and October 2026. The same dataset puts EU companies at about 10% of global high-intensity AI business users, against 65% in North America.

Two numbers, one dataset, opposite moods. Agent use inside European small and medium-sized companies is climbing fast. The share of European firms that use AI heavily stays small and is not moving at the same speed.

October 15, 2026 Daniel Cesak
Ilustrační obrázek

DeepMind gives 200 European researchers its science models and $3M in compute

Google DeepMind has opened five of its scientific models to a maximum of 200 European researchers. The package covers AlphaFold 3, AlphaGenome, WeatherNext, AlphaEvolve and AlphaEarth Foundations, and comes with $3 million in Google Cloud credits. The vehicle is RAISE, an EU pilot with €107 million from Horizon Europe behind it. Per seat, the compute credit works out to about $15,000.

What was actually opened

The five models cover different fields.

October 15, 2026 Daniel Cesak
Ilustrační obrázek

TD Bank cuts a 15-hour mortgage review to under 3 minutes with agentic AI

TD Bank's in-house AI unit Layer 6 has pushed agentic AI into two more stages of the mortgage lifecycle, funding and discharge, after starting with pre-adjudication. The bank's own figures put average pre-adjudication processing time at 15 hours before the system and under 3 minutes after it. Underwriters still make the credit call — and the logging layer that makes that call auditable is the part European lenders should cost out first.

What TD automated

The system comes from TD's AI research centre, Layer 6.

October 14, 2026 Daniel Cesak
Ilustrační obrázek

Agility Robotics Heads for Nasdaq: $2.5 Billion Valuation, $1.8 Million in Sales

Agility Robotics has cleared the last big paperwork step before listing on Nasdaq. According to the joint Form S-4 registration statement filed with the US Securities and Exchange Commission by the Oregon company and Churchill Capital Corp XI, the SPAC it plans to merge with, the filing was declared effective on 13 October 2026. Shareholders vote on 2 November. If the vote passes, the combined business is set to trade as AGLT.
October 14, 2026 Daniel Cesak
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