What's up: RSM plans $1 billion investment in AI; Qualcomm to buy Alphawave IP; Tesla loses robotics leader.

Good morning. Today Apple’s Worldwide Developers Conference kicks off and the company is expected to showcase a range of new offerings, including those related to artificial intelligence.

Some developers are not holding their breath, the WSJ's Isabelle Bousquette finds.

“What Apple is doing is interesting; it’s just not interesting enough to break through the noise,” said Grant McDonald, chief executive and co-founder of AI-powered parenting advice app Bobo.

As the tech industry chases AI-driven innovations at breakneck speed, Apple’s AI moves have been underwhelming. The company is under pressure to both continually update its AI tools for developers and build out the consumer experience encapsulated in Apple Intelligence, still a work in progress.

Some developers are not sure that this year’s WWDC releases, which reportedly could include access to Apple’s small, on-device AI models, will change perceptions.

“We don’t really know what the quality is going to be,” said Roman Khaves, founder and CEO of AI-powered dating advice app RIZZ. “The expectation is not that high.” Read the story.

RSM US’s AI investment follows peer BDO USA’s announcement last month that it would spend more than $1 billion over a five-year period to bolster its AI strategy. Big Four firms Ernst & Young, PricewaterhouseCoopers, KPMG and Deloitte have collectively plowed billions of dollars into AI in recent years.

Meta Platforms is in talks to make an investment that could exceed $10 billion into data labeling startup ScaleAI, Bloomberg reports. 

Qualcomm agreed to buy U.K.-listed semiconductor company Alphawave IP Group for about $2.4 billion as it seeks to boost its portfolio of technology used for AI, data centers and data storage.

Quantum computing company IonQ agreed to buy a UK-based Oxford Ionics in a $1.1 billion all-stock deal, FT reports. IonQ says the acquisition will help it produce a fault-tolerant quantum machine by the end of the decade.

Apple in a research paper questioned the capabilities of reasoning models from the likes of DeepSeek, OpenAI and Anthropic, Marketwatch reports. Using controlled experiments, Apple found that as complexity increased, accuracy at a certain point declined  until facing "a complete accuracy collapse."

Milan Kovac, one of Tesla’s top artificial-intelligence executives left the company on Friday, a setback for the Optimus robotics project that Chief Executive Elon Musk says is pivotal to the future of the company.

Waymo, Google's robot-taxi business, cut service in downtown Los Angeles Sunday after at least five of its vehicles were set on fire during protests there, the New York Times reports.

Buying bitcoin is becoming a fad for a growing list of companies that have nothing to do with crypto but believe digital assets can boost their stocks, WSJ reports. About 60 companies with no previous ties to the market are now pursuing the “bitcoin treasury strategy,” according to Standard Chartered Bank, citing data from BitcoinTreasuries.net. 

Standoffs between protesters and law-enforcement officers in downtown Los Angeles escalated Sunday night, capping a tense day in which demonstrators, police, rubber bullets and helicopters overran a neighborhood that is home to City Hall and federal buildings. (WSJ)

Republican senators’ competing demands for President Trump’s tax-and-spending bill risk pulling it apart. (WSJ)

Export controls will be at the top of the agenda of trade talks between the U.S. and China on Monday. U.S. negotiators are set to press Xi Jinping’s representatives to speed up exports of rare-earth minerals and magnets. (WSJ)

WPP said Chief Executive Mark Read would step down at year-end, triggering a search for a successor as the advertising and marketing giant grapples with AI-driven change and the fallout from tariffs that could hurt client spending. (WSJ)

The WSJ CIO Journal Team is Steven Rosenbush, Isabelle Bousquette and Belle Lin.

The editor, Tom Loftus, can be reached at thomas.loftus@wsj.com.