The U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) is updating its guidance for COVID-19 vaccines, prioritizing shots for those at highest risk for serious infection while requiring additional large clinical studies to evaluate the safety and effectiveness for healthy Americans. "The FDA’s new Covid-19 philosophy represents a balance of regulatory flexibility and a commitment to gold-standard science,” wrote Prasad and FDA Commissioner Dr. Martin Makaryan in article published Tuesday in The New England Journal of Medicine. “The FDA will approve vaccines for high-risk persons and, at the same time, demand robust, gold-standard data on persons at low risk.” Between 100 million to 200 million Americans would be eligible for COVID vaccines under this new standard, according to the article, compared to previous guidance that recommended vaccines for almost all individuals.

Microsoft's (NASDAQ: MSFT) announced its own research and discovery artificial intelligence platfrom Microsoft Discovery on Monday, with the goal to "transform" the scientific discovery process from "scientific knowledge reasoning to hypothesis formulation, candidate generation, and simulation and analysis." The platform acts as a specialized AI agent, collaborating with researchers to develop new scientific discoveries "with speed, scale, and accuracy," Microsoft says, adding that R&D teams can build their own custom AI team tailored to their specific needs and suggest which tools or models the agent should use or create. Microsoft's new platform joins rival Google's (NASDAQ: GOOG) (NASDAQ: GOOGL) AI co-scientist tool, launched earlier this year, designed to help R&D teams create hypotheses and research proposals.

Moody's Ratings downgraded the United States' sovereign credit rating to Aa1 from Aaa (the highest possible rating), citing risks associated with the federal government's budget deficit alongside the rising cost of its existing debt in a high interest rate macroeconomic environment. “Successive U.S. administrations and Congress have failed to agree on measures to reverse the trend of large annual fiscal deficits and growing interest costs,” Moody’s analysts said in a statement. “We do not believe that material multi-year reductions in mandatory spending and deficits will result from current fiscal proposals under consideration.” The agency's downgrade brings its rating more in-line with its peers -- Standard & Poor's downgraded the U.S. to AA+ from AAA in August 2021, and Fitch Ratings cut its U.S. rating to AA+ from AAA in August 2023.

The United States and United Arab Emirates announced Thursday the creation of a massive artificial intelligence campus in Abu Dhabi as part of a joint partnership between the two nations. The U.S. Commerce Department said the facility will be the largest of its kind (the campus is planned to span 10 square miles and provide 5 gigawatt capacity) outside of the U.S., and will be built by UAE firm G42 in collaboration with several unnamed U.S. companies. "In the UAE, American companies will operate the data centers and offer American-managed cloud services throughout the region," U.S. Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick said in a statement. "The agreement also contains strong security guarantees to prevent diversion of U.S. technology." Key AI business leaders including Nvidia's (NASDAQ: NVDA) Jensen Huang, OpenAI's Sam Altman and Cisco's (NASDAQ: CSCO) Jeetu Patel each joined President Donald Trump at his UAE visit.

Warner Bros. Discovery (NASDAQ: WBD) announced Wednesday it is renaming its streaming platform Max back to HBO Max this summer, restoring the name to tie it back to the HBO brand after two years. The rebrand represents a new era for the streaming platfrom as it plans to rescale its content to focus more on quality over quantity, the company said at the Warner Bros. Discovery Upfront said in a presentation in New York. The entertainment giant expects the rebrand to also "amplify the uniqueness that subscribers" look for from the HBO brand, like recent box-office movies and docuseries, alongside its original content. "The powerful growth we have seen in our global streaming service is built around the quality of our programming," said CEO David Zaslav in a statement. "Today, we are bringing back HBO, the brand that represents the highest quality in media, to further accelerate that growth in the years ahead."