FTI Consulting News Bytes – 24 July 2026

FTI Consulting News Bytes

This week, we kick off with news coming out of the annual Farnborough International Airshow, where Tekever, unveiled a highly anticipated new AI-powered autonomous lift drone – an entirely new category for the defence Unicorn. In policy news, newly appointed Prime Minister, Andy Burnham, has started his term by dismantling [VC1] the Department for Science, Technology and Innovation.  In other news, many of the industry’s fears of AI going rogue came true this week as OpenAI admitted that some of its models autonomously hacked into another AI company’s systems. Next, following its own acquisition by Hellman & Friedman in June 2026, Hyve is continuing its own acquisition run, the latest being Chain of Events. Lastly, in China, [KW2] AI start-up Moonshot has released a new LLM model that poses a major threat to US supremacy in the AI arms race.

This week’s news

Tekever unveils UK-developed AR6 heavy-lift drone

Tekever, one of Europe’s newest defence Unicorns, and the continent’s leading AI-powered autonomous aerial vehicle developer, unveiled its newest drone at Farnborough International Airshow this week. The product it is calling the ‘AR6’, is a heavy-lift drone – an entirely new category for the company – which has been designed and built entirely on UK soil. The platform can carry payloads of up to 200kg over distances exceeding 500km, significantly expanding Tekever’s capabilities beyond its market-leading intelligence, surveillance and reconnaissance (ISR) systems. Flight Global reports that production of the AR6 is set to begin later this year at Tekever’s new Swindon facility opening this summer, and will be done in partnership with UK SMEs as part of Tekever’s commitment to growing the UK’s Defencetech ecosystem.

Burnham scraps DSIT despite industry backlash

New UK Prime Minister Andy Burnham has had a bold start to his term with one of his first moves being to dismantle the Department for Science, Innovation and Technology (DSIT) as we know it. Despite strong warnings from the tech industry, the department will be folded into the Business Department which will be renamed the Department for Business, Innovation, Science and Trade (DBIST) according to UKTN. There has been a lot of concern over this reorganisation including disruption to the department just as it was ‘taking off’, particularly in managing major areas of government policy including the AI Opportunities Action Plan, UK Research and Innovation (UKRI) and the UK Space Agency. While the move is intended to better align technology with economic growth, critics warn it could slow AI policymaking and weaken the UK’s global competitiveness at a pivotal moment.

Powerful AI model goes rogue

OpenAI has admitted that its models hacked another company in what is being described as an ‘unprecedented cyber incident’, Sky News reports. Two of its advanced AI models autonomously escaped a controlled testing environment and hacked into AI platform, Hugging Face, during an internal cybersecurity evaluation. The models exploited a previously unknown software vulnerability to access the internet and obtain information that would improve their performance on the test. While the incident occurred with safety guardrails intentionally reduced for research purposes, it has intensified calls for stronger AI governance, rigorous testing and safeguards as autonomous AI systems become increasingly capable.

Hyve acquires Chain of Events 

Hyve Group, a leading B2B events company has acquired Chain of Events, the events design and product company behind the RAISE Summit, Machina Summit and Signal Week (formerly Paris Blockchain Week). The three events bring together the founders, enterprises, investors and policymakers helping to shape the future of intelligent technologies. Hyve CEO Mark Shashoua exclusively told Exhibition News that the deal has established a new AI ‘super vertical’, strengthening Hyve’s position in fintech through the addition of a leading European crypto event to its roster. This latest acquisition follows a run of acquisitions for Hyve who acquired LegalTechTalk and Virtuosi League in the last month. For Chain of Events, the acquisition is driven by a desire to scale geographically, with a particular focus on US expansion, and to leverage Hyve’s established events expertise and network.

China’s cheap AI is a real threat to US tech giants

Moonshot AI has launched Kimi K3, further intensifying the global AI race. Multiple outlets including The Times and the Financial Times reported that the Chinese AI start-up released a large language model that rivals those of frontier US companies such as Anthropic on several benchmarks. The new open-weight model is significant because it can be downloaded and modified by users and is a third of the cost of both Opus and Fable – opening up AI assistant access to more users globally, particularly in the global south. The news challenges the assumption that AI leadership will be determined solely by the companies with the biggest budgets and most advanced chips, instead suggesting that accessibility and distribution could become equally important battlegrounds. Moonshot Founder, Yang Zhilin, describes his business as “democratising intelligence”, a line of messaging that has in turn called into question Anthropic and OpenAI’s upcoming valuations, marking yet another development in the arms race for AI supremacy.

Top Tweets of the Week

• Bloomberg Business: New British premier Andy Burnham has named Kanishka Narayan as minister for artificial intelligence, promoting the role to attend the prime minister’s cabinet for the first time.
• UK Sovereign AI Fund: Every technological revolution starts with a breakthrough in materials. Today, we’re excited to announce Sovereign AI’s investment in @cusp_ai as part of its $450M Series B. It is building frontier AI models to dramatically accelerate materials discovery, compressing decades of scientific experimentation into years. If successful, it has the potential to transform how innovation happens across industries, unlocking breakthroughs that simply aren’t possible today.
• Reuters: Anthropic reached a $1.5 billion settlement in a copyright case brought by a group of authors who accused it of misusing their books to train its Claude AI model, the largest known settlement of its kind.

Number of the week

950m The number of monthly active Google Gemini users placing the assistant squarely behind market leader ChatGPT’s estimated 1 billion users – Business Insider