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Munich-based defense tech startup Helsing raised a $1.8B Series E from Dragoneer, Iconiq, and others at an $18B valuation; Germany made a €270M order this year (Mark Bergen/Bloomberg)

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Docs: Uber lobbied for a "phased transition" to AVs, giving it an edge over self-driving developers; Uber says AV industry proposals overlook drivers' rights (Aarian Marshall/Wired)

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Eating disorder therapists say patients are increasingly using AI chatbots for advice, while AI also appears to be directing more patients to helplines (Julie Jargon/Wall Street Journal)

A look at ADI Predictstreet's troubled launch, marked by tiny trading volumes, withdrawal bugs, and other issues, as it tried to challenge Kalshi and Polymarket (Wall Street Journal)

A Taiwanese minister says TSMC plans two more advanced chip packaging plants in the Chiayi Science Park, with all four set to generate $9.35B+ in annual output (Wen-Yee Lee/Reuters)

Open-weight AI models are facing an existential policy test in the US, with Anthropic leading a campaign against Chinese models over distillation concerns (Nathan Lambert/Interconnects AI)

How museums are using AI chatbots to reach new audiences, as some museum staff worry AI-generated inaccuracies and bias could undermine them as trusted sources (Naomi Rea/Financial Times)

A profile of Asha Sharma, an outsider elevated by Satya Nadella to lead Xbox, where she made sweeping job cuts and shed game studios within her first few months (Financial Times)

Memo: Tang Jie, founder of Z.ai, the Chinese lab behind the GLM models, argues frontier AI capabilities should stay "as open and widely accessible as possible" (Bloomberg)

Sources: Cursor is building a general-purpose AI agent codenamed Sand, aimed at non-developers, that handles emails, texts, and documents to rival Claude Cowork (Grace Kay/The Information)

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OpenAI, Meta, and SpaceXAI may be able to put pressure on Anthropic by emphasizing cost efficiency, as business customers increasingly scrutinize AI spending (Bloomberg)

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Anthropic says it is "extending Claude Fable 5 access on all paid plans, as well as keeping Claude Code's weekly rate limits 50% higher, through July 19" (The Economic Times)

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Sources: Apple is already taping out M7 with major NPU upgrades, and plans M7 Ultra with 1.5TB RAM, and M8, for 2028; new Pencils are coming with a new iPad Pro (Mark Gurman/Bloomberg)

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AI coding tool users are flooding open-source projects with low-quality contributions, overwhelming maintainers and potentially eroding community engagement (Sam Learner/Financial Times)

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A look at the growing anti-AI movement in the Bay Area, as the disappearance of Sam Kirchner, co-founder of a hard-line activist group, has the movement on edge (Zusha Elinson/Wall Street Journal)

AirDNA: during the FIFA World Cup group stage, platforms such as Airbnb saw 52K+ new listings in US host cities, while hotel bookings fell short of expectations (Financial Times)

NYC-based Vendelux, a live B2B event information platform for CMOs and marketing and sales teams, raised a $50M Series B led by Tribeca Venture Partners (Lucia Moses/Business Insider)

EU Justice Commissioner Michael McGrath says the EC is set to propose new digital rules by year-end aimed at protecting consumers from online spending traps (Laura Dubois/Financial Times)

A look at Bending Spoons' hiring process: the company, which owns Vimeo, AOL, and Evernote, received 800,000 job applications last year and made only 286 hires (Ben Cohen/Wall Street Journal)

Current AI market dynamics point to frontier models becoming commodity infrastructure as the token crunch eases, with value shifting to products built on top (Benedict Evans)

Psychologist Peter Gray argues that school stress, not smartphone use, is the main driver of the teen mental health crisis, challenging Jonathan Haidt's thesis (Kaitlyn Tiffany/The Atlantic)

Apple's lawsuit could sidetrack OpenAI's hardware aspirations for years, or possibly forever, as the startup gets into yet another controversy and messy divorce (M.G. Siegler/Spyglass)

Apple's OpenAI lawsuit follows months of simmering tensions and highlights OpenAI's hardware chief Tang Tan's strained relationship with former boss John Ternus (Mark Gurman/Bloomberg)

Filing: Google urged the European Commission not to target DNS resolvers, VPNs, or IPs to fight piracy, calling the measures ineffective and easily circumvented (Ernesto Van der Sar/TorrentFreak)

US software development job postings on Indeed have grown by ~15% since the launch of Claude Code in February 2025, while overall job postings fell by 7% (Guillermo Gallacher/Indeed Hiring Lab)

How members of the extremist group Boko Haram are using AI chatbots to design explosives, fix or upgrade weapons, and brainstorm attack ideas (New York Times)

SK Hynix's historic US stock market listing is a bet that the AI boom is breaking the memory chip industry's decades-long boom-and-bust cycle (Bloomberg)

An analysis of 1M+ social media posts from April 24 to June 30: ~25% of longform posts with 250+ words were fully AI-generated; on LinkedIn, the figure was 41% (Max Spero/Pangram Labs)

Sources detail the Trump admin's heavy-handed intervention to aid Intel, including pushing it to expand local capacity and pressuring Apple to use Intel's fabs (Robbie Whelan/Wall Street Journal)

Sources: activist investor Elliott has built a large stake in car insurance software maker CCC, which is exploring a potential sale and has a ~$3.5B market cap (Bloomberg)

OpenAI's head of safety, Johannes Heidecke, is leaving as OpenAI integrates its research and safety teams; Mia Glaese will become VP of research and safety (Maxwell Zeff/Wired)

Thinking Machines says its mission is to build AI that people and organizations can shape and make their own, and that "extends human will and judgment" (Thinking Machines Lab)

SK Hynix CEO Kwak Noh-Jung says the memory industry is heading for its worst-ever supply shortage in 2027 and demand will outstrip supply beyond 2030 (Reuters)

Meta says it will discontinue a feature that allowed users to generate images in Meta AI using public Instagram accounts, following days of criticism (Corbin Bolies/Variety)

In response to Apple's trade secret theft lawsuit, OpenAI says "we have no interest in other companies' trade secrets" (Marcus Mendes/9to5Mac)

CISA says weak security controls around the use of public GitHub repos allowed a contractor to accidentally leak private cloud access keys and other credentials (Eric Geller/Cybersecurity Dive)

Bluesky interim CEO Toni Schneider becomes the company's permanent CEO, four months after succeeding Jay Graber (Lucas Ropek/TechCrunch)

A US NLRB judge rules that Atlassian had illegally fired an employee in 2023 for pushing back against manager layoffs, and orders reinstatement and compensation (Noam Scheiber/New York Times)

Apple says OpenAI leadership "normalized" misconduct and OpenAI's hardware business is "rotten to its core by its illegal reliance" on stolen trade secrets (Sarah Perez/TechCrunch)

In its lawsuit, Apple chronicles in vivid detail how its former employees that went to work for OpenAI allegedly violated their confidentiality agreements (Aaron Tilley/The Information)

Apple alleges that a former Apple engineer kept a work-issued Apple laptop and exploited a bug to access Apple's cloud file storage while employed by OpenAI (Megan Morrone/Axios)

Apple claims OpenAI recruited 400+ ex-Apple employees, including an iPhone engineer who allegedly downloaded confidential hardware files before joining OpenAI (Mark Gurman/Bloomberg)

Apple alleges that Tang Tan, OpenAI's chief hardware officer and a former Apple VP, has directed Apple staffers interviewing at OpenAI to share Apple secrets (CNBC)

Apple sues OpenAI, alleging that ex-Apple employees stole "Apple's trade secrets for the benefit of OpenAI", and says OpenAI never responded to its concerns (Chance Miller/9to5Mac)

Source: Greg Brockman will continue to oversee OpenAI's products as the company doesn't plan to hire anyone to replace Fidji Simo after she stepped down (CNBC)

The Department of Commerce loosens export controls to the UAE, letting G42 and US companies like Apple, Meta, and xAI export AI chips to UAE without a license (Karen Freifeld/Reuters)

China drops a numerical target for urban job creation in its five-year plan, the first such omission since the 1990s, amid volatility fueled by AI displacement (Bloomberg)

Filing: college social app Fizz accuses Maveron's Jerry Lu of giving confidential info to rival Sidechat after he met with Fizz as a potential investor in 2022 (Sarah Perez/TechCrunch)

Privacy advocates, CAA, and SAG-AFTRA slam Meta's Muse Image, which lets users create AI images using the likenesses of people with public Instagram accounts (Ina Fried/Axios)

Analysis: Alphabet, Amazon, Meta, Microsoft, and Oracle, the top spenders on new US data centers, collectively added ~$350B in debt over the past five years (Bloomberg)