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On 30 April 2026, Elon Musk told a California federal court that xAI used model distillation of OpenAI systems to help build its Grok chatbot— the first on-record admission by a major U.S. competitor of tapping a rival’s proprietary AI outputs.
From April 1-11 2026, four astronauts flew 690,000 mi around the Moon—farther than any humans ever—then, on April 29, parlayed the feat into a headline-grabbing Oval Office visit where President Trump quipped he could make the cut as an astronaut.
On 28–29 Apr 2026, 57 countries met in Santa Marta, Colombia for the first ever Conference on Transitioning Away from Fossil Fuels—excluding the U.S., China and India—where France unveiled a detailed timetable to eliminate coal by 2030, oil by 2045 and gas by 2050.
On 29 April 2026, the WMO and Copernicus jointly released the European State of the Climate 2025 report showing Europe has warmed 0.56 °C per decade over the last 30 years—more than twice the global rate—and logged record extremes in 2025, including a million hectares burned by wildfires.
On 27 Apr 2026, China’s National Development and Reform Commission abruptly blocked and ordered the unwinding of Meta’s already-completed US$2 b purchase of Singapore-based, China-founded AI-agent start-up Manus, citing national-security rules on outbound tech transfer.
On 27 April 2026, China’s National Development and Reform Commission formally nullified Meta’s already-closed US$2 billion acquisition of Singapore-based AI-agent startup Manus and instructed both parties to unwind the deal within weeks.
On 28 April 2026, ministers opened the inaugural Santa Marta Conference and agreed to establish ongoing working groups and a science panel—creating the first permanent, non-UN forum dedicated to designing legal and financial pathways to end fossil-fuel use.
On 28 Apr 2026, a federal jury trial began in Oakland where Elon Musk testified that OpenAI’s 2019 shift to a for-profit model violated its founding nonprofit charter and asked the court to unwind the structure, oust CEO Sam Altman, and award $150 billion in damages.
On 28 April 2026 Google quietly amended its 2025 defense contract, granting the renamed Department of War full classified access to Gemini AI models for “any lawful government purpose,” reversing the company’s 2018 pull-out from military AI work.
On 24 April 2026, DeepSeek released preview versions of its open-source V4 model that run natively on Huawei Ascend NPUs, matching top U.S. systems in benchmark tests while charging roughly one-sixth their inference prices.
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