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Sources and filings: Google assembled a ~$200B financing program for Anthropic, with $150B+ tied to TPUs and involving Broadcom, Blackstone, Apollo, and others (Financial Times)

A look at Alphabet's moonshot lab X and interviews with its staff, including CEO Astro Teller, on reinventing itself and what its next big thing might be (Harry McCracken/Fast Company)

Filing: Apple asks a US judge for a preliminary injunction barring two former staff and OpenAI from accessing, acquiring, using, or disclosing confidential info (Reuters)

OpenAI disputes Apple's account of pre-lawsuit contacts, rejects claims that ex-staff used confidential information, shares iMessages and emails, and more (OpenAI)

Q&A with Bluesky CEO Toni Schneider on the AT Protocol, ActivityPub, scaling moderation, Bluesky's reputation as a progressive social media network, and more (Nilay Patel/The Verge)

Sources: HP, Asus, and Acer have started using small amounts of DRAM chips from CXMT in their laptops for non-US markets, amid an unprecedented memory shortage (Nikkei Asia)

Apple says it "briefly removed Telegram from the App Store" over CSAM on Monday, restoring it after Telegram "promptly removed the content and banned the user" (Marcus Mendes/9to5Mac)

Sources: to fight critics on social media, DHS sent platforms hundreds of subpoenas and asked posters to sign letters saying speech about ICE "may" be a crime (Wall Street Journal)

TikTok agrees to settle three more teen social media lawsuits ahead of trial; 2,600 cases with similar claims are pending in California federal court (Dietrich Knauth/Reuters)

Texas halts approval of data center grid connections until audits are performed; projects representing 474+ GW are in the queue, over 5x the grid's peak demand (The Texas Tribune)

Amazon becomes the fifth company to reach a $3T market cap, joining Nvidia, Alphabet, Microsoft, and Apple, after hitting $2T in June 2024; AMZN closed up 4.58% (Jeran Wittenstein/Bloomberg)

Snap reports Q2 revenue up 19% YoY to $1.6B, above $1.54B est., DAUs up 5% to 493M, vs. 487M est., forecasts Q3 revenue above est.; SNAP jumps 10%+ pre-market (Jonathan Vanian/CNBC)

Palantir reports Q2 revenue up 93% YoY to $1.94B, above $1.8B est., US commercial revenue up 149%, and raises FY26 revenue guidance; PLTR jumps 14%+ pre-market (Samantha Subin/CNBC)

Samsung says it's restricting app registrations and removing apps with SDKs that can turn smart TVs into residential proxy exit nodes, after a similar ban by LG (Zack Whittaker/TechCrunch)

Court docs: an FBI agent has been charged with amassing ~$1M worth of cryptocurrency, largely by making unauthorized withdrawals from a criminal target overseas (Devlin Barrett/New York Times)

US satellite internet provider Hughesnet files for Chapter 11 after losing subscribers to Starlink and plans to focus on business and government customers (Michael Kan/PCMag)

Doc: Microsoft asks Xbox 360 game developers to opt in for PC compatibility, bringing the games to its next-gen Project Helix console, "Xbox PCs", and handhelds (The Verge)

The White House says it has met its deadline to establish a voluntary framework for evaluating advanced AI models; it did not provide details of the framework (Maria Curi/Axios)

China revises its regulations to tighten protection of chip layout designs, including punitive damages for serious infringement, taking effect from October 15 (Eduardo Baptista/Reuters)

Valar, which is making small modular nuclear reactors to power data centers, raised a $1B Series B led by Sequoia at a $6B post-money valuation (Bloomberg)

Mariana Minerals, which builds and operates mines using its MarianaOS software platform, raised a $310M Series B, bringing its total funding to $400M (Allie Garfinkle/Fortune)

India proposes extending tax exemptions until 2041 for foreign companies that provide machinery to contract manufacturers, changes that Apple had lobbied for (Reuters)

Sources: the Trump administration invites staffers from OpenAI, Google, Anthropic, and others to the White House on Tuesday to review the AI oversight framework (The Information)

UK court filing: in July, Apple launched a new legal challenge against the UK government's attempt to create a "backdoor" to access encrypted customer data (Tim Bradshaw/Financial Times)

Zenity, which develops a platform for securing AI agents, raised a $125M Series C led by Norwest Venture Partners, taking its total funding to ~$185M (Meir Orbach/CTech)

Visa plans to acquire Israeli company BioCatch, which uses AI to detect fraud and distinguish legitimate users from attackers in real time, for $2.4B in cash (Katherine Hamilton/Wall Street Journal)

Horizon3, whose AI penetration testing platform NodeZero helps find and exploit attack paths in production systems, raised a $250M Series E at a $2B valuation (Kate Park/TechCrunch)

Michael Saylor's Strategy sold 1,638 bitcoin for ~$104.7M from July 27 to August 2, reducing its holdings to 842,138, with a $10.9B paper loss at current prices (James Hunt/The Block)

June, which aims to help enterprise AI deployment by finding bottlenecks and building agents, emerges from stealth with $20M led by Marc Benioff's Time Ventures (Tim Fernholz/TechCrunch)

The EU's AI Act enforcement powers take effect, letting it evaluate AI models before regional release, restrict EU market access, fine model providers, and more (Kai Nicol-Schwarz/CNBC)

Source: Dario Amodei expressed concern about staff coming to Anthropic for the money rather than the mission, as Anthropic, OpenAI, and others battle for talent (Axios)

Sources: South Korean AI chip designer DeepX raised a ~$29M Series D at a ~$2.2B valuation, and is in talks to raise ~$209M at a ~$2.4B valuation by September (Yoolim Lee/Bloomberg)

Alibaba prices Qwen3.8-Max at $2 per 1M input tokens and $6 per 1M output tokens via its API, below Kimi K3's $3/1M input tokens and $15/1M output tokens (Henry Siu/The Information)

Artificial Analysis: DeepSeek's V4-Flash costs $0.14/1M input and $0.28/1M output tokens, or $0.03 per test, far below Kimi K3's $0.86 and GPT-5.6 Sol's $1.86 (Eduardo Baptista/Reuters)

Ofcom Chair Ian Cheshire says he is overseeing a "wide-ranging" review aimed at refitting the regulator to new duties overseeing Big Tech and enforcing the OSA (Daniel Thomas/Financial Times)

YouTuber Hank Green faces online criticism after using ChatGPT to help research a script, and says his LLM usage "is not healthy for me or good for the world" (Anthony Ha/TechCrunch)

London-based AI chip startup Olix raised $312M led by Fundomo, with participation from Arm, at a $3.3B valuation, up from $1B+ after raising $220M in February (Tim Bradshaw/Financial Times)

A profile of Nanit, a maker of AI-equipped baby cameras for hyper-detailed tracking, which says it has 1M daily users and $100M+ in annual revenue (Sapna Maheshwari/New York Times)

An analysis of US police and court records finds 50+ officers were charged or accused of misusing license-plate readers like Flock's, including for stalking (Washington Post)

A look at the growing tensions over AI data centers in London, Europe's biggest data center hub, as housing, power, and water come under increasing strain (Francesca Perry/Financial Times)

Indeed: UK employers are creating jobs for senior staff in software engineering and IT, where AI enhances the value of experience, while cutting back elsewhere (Irina Anghel/Bloomberg)

Japanese startups are racing to enter defense drone production, as Tokyo seeks to cut reliance on Chinese industrial drones, which control 91% of Japan's market (Mitsuru Obe/Nikkei Asia)

A detailed recap of the real-world target hacks by OpenAI and Anthropic models, exposing failures in AI alignment training and lack of meaningful supervision (Zvi Mowshowitz/Don't Worry About the Vase)

An unsecured police dashboard exposed China's extensive tracking of foreigners, aggregating data from surveillance cameras, facial recognition tools, and more (New York Times)

A look at Central Asia's emerging data center race, led by Uzbekistan's 6MW TAS-1 due by year-end and Kazakhstan's 125MW facility with 100K Nvidia chips by 2027 (Yevgeniya Mikhailidi/Nikkei Asia)

Alibaba says its 2.4T-parameter Qwen3.8-Max tops Moonshot's Kimi K3 on some benchmarks, and it plans to release Qwen3.8-Max and Qwen3.8-27B's weights next week (Luz Ding/Bloomberg)

Two independent teams used GPT-5.6 Sol Ultra on the same quantum cryptography problem, filing papers three hours apart, raising questions over scientific credit (Peter Hall/Scientific American)

A look at the US open-weight AI model ecosystem, as VCs question the revenue potential of open-weight startups like Arcee, Reflection AI, and Poolside (Wall Street Journal)

Robinhood says Q2 prediction markets revenue rose 10x+ YoY to $156M, topping stock and crypto for the first time, as speculators shift to real-world event bets (Yueqi Yang/The Information)

Four US states rolled back or paused data center tax incentives, and nine others are weighing repeal measures, potentially adding 7% or more to equipment costs (Ann Davis Vaughan/The Information)