MiniMax released the MiniMax-01 series — MiniMax-Text-01 and the vision-language MiniMax-VL-01 — as downloadable weights on Hugging Face and GitHub, with a 68-page technical report.

It is a 456 billion parameter mixture-of-experts model with 45.9B active parameters per token, 80 layers and 32 experts under top-2 routing, and it replaces most attention with Lightning Attention: one softmax attention layer after every seven linear ones, which is what lets it train at a 1M-token context and extrapolate to 4M at inference. On RULER it scores 0.910 at 1M tokens where Gemini 1.5 Pro manages 0.850, and on LongBench v2 it posts 56.5 overall against GPT-4o's 51.4 — above the 53.7 human baseline. MiniMax reports 100% retrieval on a 4M-token needle test. The weights are under a custom MiniMax Model Agreement while the inference code is MIT, and API pricing is $0.20 per million input tokens.

Three packages appeared on npm — cursor-retrieval, cursor-always-local and cursor-shadow-workspace — published by a user under a verified snyk.io email address. They were named after extensions bundled inside Cursor, the AI code editor, and on install they phoned home with the username, hostname, working directory and environment variables to a researcher-controlled server. OpenSSF's package analysis scanner flagged all three as malicious.

Snyk's CTO confirmed it was Snyk Security Labs testing whether Cursor's build pulled VSCode-style extensions from the public registry, that the packages were labeled as test packages and time-boxed to 24 hours, and that the team found no indication Cursor was vulnerable. Anysphere's co-founder said Cursor had not hired Snyk, that Snyk apologized, and that the theory it was an npm error could not hold because the names were Cursor's bundled extensions, which are not published to a registry at all.

Executive Order 14141 directs the Departments of Defense and Energy to make federal sites available to be leased for frontier AI data centers and the generation to power them, with each department to identify at least three candidate sites by 28 February 2025 and the Interior Department to nominate suitable public lands by 15 March — aiming at sites fully permitted by the end of 2025.

Developers selected will be contractually required to bring online clean generation matching the full electricity demand of their data centers, plus safeguards around national security and community impact. Agencies are also ordered to study the effect of AI data centers on electricity prices.

The Bureau of Industry and Security published the Framework for Artificial Intelligence Diffusion, effective immediately with compliance from 15 May 2025. It puts a worldwide license requirement on advanced computing ICs under ECCNs 3A090.a and 4A090.a and creates ECCN 4E091, a new worldwide licensing requirement on the weights of closed-weight dual-use AI models trained above 10^26 operations — the first time US export law has reached model weights rather than hardware.

Chip flows are governed by per-country total-processing-performance quotas, with 18 listed allies treated favorably and a presumption of denial for Tier 3 destinations. A companion interim final rule extended licensing and due-diligence duties to foundries and packaging firms. Nvidia's government affairs lead called it unprecedented and misguided, a 200-plus-page regulatory morass drafted in secret, and warned that we are likely handing most of the global AI and GPU market to our Chinese competitors.

Satya Nadella told staff that Microsoft is creating CoreAI — Platform and Tools, an engineering organization led by Jay Parikh, the former global head of engineering at Meta, as executive vice president reporting directly to Nadella.

It merges the full Developer Division, the AI Platform group, and a set of Office-of-the-CTO teams including AI Supercomputer and AI Agentic Runtimes. The stated mission is to build the end-to-end Copilot and AI stack for first-party and third-party customers to build and run AI apps and agents. Nadella's framing: agents will re-form every SaaS category, and 30 years of change is being compressed into three.