British fintech Revolut confirmed that it disclosed sensitive customer information to an unauthorized third party after receiving fraudulent requests sent from a legitimate government agency email domain. The exposed data included customers' identity and contact details, including their birth date, postal and email addresses, and phone numbers, as well as copies of their identity documents including passports and driver's licenses, according to a notification emailed to affected customers and reviewed by TechCrunch. The data may have also included verification selfies, account statements, and transaction histories, the firm said in its notification. A Revolut spokesperson confirmed to TechCrunch that a 'limited' number of customers were impacted and said the company had contacted those customers directly. Revolut, however, did not disclose the exact number of impacted individuals. It also did not answer whether the incident was limited to a specific market and declined to disclose the government agency involved....

A bipartisan group of U.S. lawmakers has asked the U.S. government to ban several hack-for-hire firms ' companies that carry out cyberattacks on behalf of paying clients. The lawmakers accuse the firms of targeting Americans and abusing foreign courts to silence U.S. reporting on their activities. Democratic senators Ron Wyden of Oregon and Sheldon Whitehouse of Rhode Island, as well as Republican congressman Pat Harrigan of North Carolina on Wednesday sent a letter to U.S. Secretary of Commerce Howard Lutnick, urging him to add three Indian companies to the department's economic sanctions 'entity list.' The list effectively bars U.S. businesses from transacting with a named entity, with the aim of restricting the companies from accessing critical technology needed to function, including software licenses and cloud infrastructure. In the letter sent to Lutnick and shared with TechCrunch, the lawmakers say BellTroX, CyberRoot, and Sunkissed Organic Farms (which previously operated under its former name, Appin) have for more than a decade conducted cyberattacks and targeted espionage against Americans, business owners, and their lawyers to 'manipulate ongoing litigation.'...

This Series D round, which Mistral said is 'the largest equity fundraising round ever completed by a European technology company,' was led by Samsung Electronics, with EQT-managed Scaleup Europe Fund and existing investor PSG Equity joining as co-leads. Mistral said it will use the funding to scale its compute capacity, build infrastructure, accelerate commercial growth, and expand its international footprint. The money could also help clarify its positioning ' the company says its goal is not to build a European ChatGPT, and though its models haven't gone mainstream, it still envisions itself as an AI lab. The funding will help Mistral pursue a subtle shift in strategy that aims to further address concerns in Europe and elsewhere about being too dependent on the United States for tech, especially with the intensifying politics around AI regulation and products Stateside. In addition to a push to build 1 GW of compute capacity in Europe by 2030, Mistral in August unveiled tools that let its customers choose which regions their AI queries are processed in. It's also started hosting third-party, open-weight AI models (Chinese ones, too) to bolster its positioning as an AI services provider that wants its customers to control which AI models they use and how they use them....

In a lawsuit that The New York Times filed against OpenAI, the Trump administration has contributed a 20-page brief in defense of the ChatGPT maker's unlicensed use of copyrighted material to train its LLMs. 'The United States has a strong interest in continuing to develop a robust and competitive artificial intelligence industry that sets the standard for the practice and procedure of AI use globally' As such, it is critical for the United States to 'retain global leadership in artificial intelligence,'' the brief reads, referencing an executive order that President Donald Trump signed last year. The LLMs powering chatbots like ChatGPT, Claude, and Gemini are trained on incomprehensibly massive databases of published works, including copyrighted books, articles, and other media that AI companies feed into these databases without permission. Many publishers, including The New York Times in this case, have sought to argue that it is illegal for AI companies like OpenAI to train AI models on their copyrighted material....