Half of American adults now use AI chatbots, but a plurality believe the technology will ultimately damage society, and overwhelming majorities have lost confidence that either the government or the companies building it will manage it responsibly. A new Pew Research Center report released Wednesday, based on a survey of 5,119 US adults conducted in This story continues at The Next Web

More than one million people in the Netherlands now rely exclusively on social media for news, according to the 2026 Digital News Report published on Tuesday. They use no news websites, no television, no radio, and only 12% say they trust what they encounter on those platforms. The group represents 7% of Dutch adults, up from 2% This story continues at The Next Web

The problem with letting an AI agent loose inside a company is not that it might forget who it is. It is that it has no reason to hold back. A human employee is restrained by the fear of being fired. An agent, as one investor in Arcade.dev put it, “will exhaustively exploit every permission This story continues at The Next Web

The race to power artificial intelligence has a problem that solar panels and wind turbines cannot fix on their own: the electricity has to be there at 3am, in still air, under cloud. Critical Energy, a Los Angeles startup founded by a former SpaceX engineer, has raised $22mn to chase that always-on demand with geothermal, This story continues at The Next Web

Marketing leaders have never had access to more data, yet proving the business impact of advertising has become increasingly difficult. As budgets face greater scrutiny and finance teams demand clearer evidence of return on investment, many chief marketing officers are discovering that traditional performance metrics no longer satisfy the questions being asked in the boardroom. Tal This story continues at The Next Web

China has spent two years telling the world it intends to win the AI race. Its new five-year employment plan is the quieter admission that winning it could cost a lot of people their jobs. The State Council, effectively China’s cabinet, has issued its blueprint for employment policy from 2026 to 2030. Buried in a This story continues at The Next Web

Meteor.js is one of those open-source projects developers have lived with for years. It has over 44,800 GitHub stars, more than 500,000 active installations worldwide, and still sits inside products across many countries. Behind its largest release in over ten years, Meteor 3.0, is Henrique Schmaiske, CTO of Meteor Software, who started the work in April 2022 This story continues at The Next Web

Poland produced one of the world’s most valuable AI companies almost by accident. Now it is spending public money to make sure the next one stays closer to home. Vinci, the venture arm of Poland’s state development bank BGK, has taken an $11mn stake in ElevenLabs, the AI-voice firm valued at $11bn. The same day, This story continues at The Next Web

The word “agent” is everywhere in enterprise software right now, which is exactly why Convey does not want to use it. The startup has raised a $38mn Series A led by Andreessen Horowitz, with Khosla Ventures and Pear VC joining. Its pitch is a deliberate rebrand: not AI agents that complete tasks, but AI “teammates” This story continues at The Next Web

There is an unglamorous deadline bearing down on corporate IT, and it has just produced one of London’s more interesting AI raises. Conduct, a 35-person startup founded by three former Palantir engineers, has raised a $60mn Series A co-led by Index Ventures and ICONIQ, with SAP itself investing. The round takes its total funding to This story continues at The Next Web