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SoftBank plans a $6.3B retail bond sale, a record for any Japanese issuer and its third this year, as the conglomerate raises funds for its OpenAI commitments (Bloomberg)

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A look at the playbook tech giants like Google, Microsoft, and OpenAI use to shape American schools to their benefit, and the pushback against unproven AI tools (Natasha Singer/New York Times)

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Trump says communities that oppose data centers are "making a mistake" as they create "tremendous amounts of jobs and money", amid bipartisan backlash (Rebecca Falconer/Axios)

Filing: Shein will debut on the Hong Kong exchange on Sept. 1, seeking up to $1.8B in its IPO with Goldman Sachs, Morgan Stanley, and JPMorgan as joint sponsors (Julia Fioretti/Bloomberg)

Sam Altman says AI could end up controlled by a few powerful players, partly because AI fears could push people to trade "a lot of liberty for safety" (Truman Dickerson/Business Insider)

Greg Abbott says data center companies "dug their own grave" by moving into communities without first gaining support, signaling growing Republican backlash (Axios)

Sources: Hugging Face is exploring a sale that could value it at $13B+, up from $4.5B in 2023, and has been working with a bank to evaluate bidders' interest (Katie Roof/Business Insider)

Ramp data: Fable 5, launched in June, has plateaued at ~11% of spending on Anthropic tools, as companies shift to cheaper models; Opus 5 surpassed Fable 5 (George Hammond/Financial Times)

Alibaba plans to raise ~$10B in a follow-on share offering to fund AI investments; sources: it plans to offer 710M shares at a 3.6% discount to Friday's close (Reuters)

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Sources: foldable iPhone feels durable, fits well in a pocket, has useful iPad-like app layouts, excels as a camera viewfinder but lacks telephoto and Face ID (Mark Gurman/Bloomberg)

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The careers of Z.ai's Tang Jie and Moonshot AI's Yang Zhilin, once teacher and pupil at Tsinghua University, show that China's AI leap is no sudden development (Raffaele Huang/Wall Street Journal)

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A profile of Judge Yvonne Gonzalez Rogers, who is presiding over US state AGs' social media addiction lawsuit against Meta and oversaw the Musk v. Altman trial (Jeffrey Kopp/CNBC)

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The popularity of risky leveraged chip ETFs in South Korea prompted regulators to cap individual exposure and mandate a weeklong investor education course (Financial Times)

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Sources: Flipkart Minutes, the quick commerce service of Walmart's Flipkart, is now delivering 1.1M-1.2M orders per day, up from ~390K-400K in November 2025 (Jagmeet Singh/TechCrunch)

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Semiconductor cram schools are flourishing in Seoul as applications to Samsung and SK Hynix surge, fuelled by record earnings and eye-catching worker bonuses (Financial Times)

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Sources: Nvidia plans to use its $6B deal with Poolside to build an open-weight AI model to compete with Chinese models like DeepSeek and Kimi (Robbie Whelan/Wall Street Journal)

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Sources: Iran-linked hackers shut down a small UK power plant for four days, coinciding with a wave of Iran-affiliated attacks on US water utilities (Telegraph)

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Sources and documents detail how Tether's plan to build two bitcoin mining sites in Uruguay fell apart amid a dispute with state utility UTE over power supply (Reuters)

AI agents' growing capabilities are driving productivity FOMO among some startup founders, who feel compelled to work long hours managing and guiding the agents (Katherine Bindley/Wall Street Journal)

London-based Inherent, founded by DeepMind alumni and with $50M in seed funding, says its new Faraday agent beats GPT-5.5 at reproducing research paper findings (Anna Heim/TechCrunch)

Sources: some of Nvidia's top customers have been told that prices will jump 15%+ on systems, including Vera Rubin and Grace Blackwell, starting in early 2027 (Bloomberg)

Apparel retailers like Zalando, Zara, and ASOS are betting on AI virtual fitting rooms to create a better online shopping experience and cut costly returns (Sonja Wind/Bloomberg)

Carrier Pidge hit 75K users and Roost 650K downloads, as slow messaging apps delivering texts at pigeon speeds attract users tired of constant notifications (Emmett Lindner/New York Times)

A look at the narrowing US-China AI gap, as a spate of compelling, low-cost releases makes Chinese AI models increasingly attractive to businesses (Bloomberg)

Ox Alpha, a "stealth model" from an unknown AI lab with a 1M-token multimodal context and capacity for 100T tokens/day, goes viral after launching on OpenRouter (Rohail Saleem/Wccftech)

Cheap energy, abundant land, and proximity to Beijing have made Ulanqab, Inner Mongolia, a data center hub, with ~100 data centers built or under construction (Zeyi Yang/Wired)

Inside the World Robot Conference in Beijing, drawing over 300 exhibitors; Unitree founder Wang Xingxing said the industry's "ChatGPT moment" has yet to come (Financial Times)

With each successive era of LLMs, from early scaling, to reasoning, to agentic, open models have taken half as long to catch up to the first closed model (SemiAnalysis)

Rundoo, a provider of AI-powered business operations software for independent supply stores, raised a $30M Series B led by Battery Ventures (Mike Wheatley/SiliconANGLE)

OpenAI President Greg Brockman's role has expanded significantly, giving him control over its product and scaling teams following a wave of executive departures (Hayden Field/The Verge)

Following abandoned IPO attempts in NYC and London, Shein is struggling to grow as it nears a Hong Kong listing at a fraction of its peak valuation of $100B (Sui-Lee Wee/New York Times)

How politicians who once championed data centers, including Greg Abbott and Josh Shapiro, are now slowing their development as the issue becomes a liability (Wall Street Journal)

Sources: Anthropic's bankers said the company could raise $100B+ in its IPO, which could value it at $2T, in recent discussions with potential investors (New York Times)

Amazon raises prices for its Echo smart speakers, Fire TV line, Kindle devices, and eero mesh networking systems to offset increases in memory and storage costs (Sebastian Herrera/Fortune)

Helcim, a payments processor for SMBs, raised a CA$53M Series C led by Business Development Bank of Canada's Growth Venture Fund at a CA$250M valuation (Madison McLauchlan/BetaKit)

OpenAI says California should amend SB 53 to expand safeguards, including requiring monitoring of frontier models under training, following AI agent hacks (Chase DiFeliciantonio/Politico)

Gurman: as part of Vision Pro cuts, Apple is largely shutting down a team focused on gaming and reducing the size of a unit producing immersive video content (Chance Miller/9to5Mac)

Nvidia makes a minority investment in Cloverleaf, which works with utilities and energy providers to secure infrastructure for data center sites (Rashika Singh/Reuters)

OpenAI cuts GPT-5.6 Sol's API and credit prices by over 20% for the next three months, to $4/1M input tokens and $20/1M output tokens (Anzar Mehraj/Reuters)

Sources: Devoted Health, which uses AI to help coordinate medical care for those enrolled in Medicare Advantage, is raising new funding at a $25B valuation (Katie Roof/Business Insider)

Nvidia says its general-purpose coding agent system AVO scored 100% across all 25 environments in the ARC-AGI-3 public set, completing all 183 levels (Terry Chen/NVIDIA Technical Blog)

Anthropic hires Amir Salek, who ran Google's TPU business until 2022, to join its compute team as part of a push to develop its own chips (Dina Bass/Bloomberg)

DHH launches Omacom Foundation, a non-profit supporting his Omarchy Linux distro, with $8M in funding from Michael Dell, Jack Dorsey, Patrick Collison, others (Omarchy News)

OpenAI's VP of sales in the Americas, Kaylin Voss, has resigned a week after Denise Dresser left, and is returning to Salesforce, where she was Slack's CRO (Laura Bratton/The Information)

The US DOJ and TikTok reach a $400M settlement to resolve allegations TikTok violated COPPA; the DOJ filed the lawsuit in 2024 (Ashley Gold/Axios)

Sources: Apple is cutting 200+ jobs, including ~100 positions from the Vision Pro unit and another 100 from the Siri team, as it focuses on new devices and AI (Mark Gurman/Bloomberg)

Anthropic says Mythos 5 is now in public beta in Claude Security for Enterprise users, and it is working with providers to embed Mythos 5 in defensive tools (Claude)

Sources: London-based AI infrastructure startup Nscale is seeking to raise as much as $3B in its US IPO, which could take place as soon as September (Bailey Lipschultz/Bloomberg)

Sources: the US Department of Energy is investigating whether Chinese lidar sensors might pose a security risk if they become widely used on vehicles in the US (Sean O'Kane/TechCrunch)

Walmart, which has long resisted contactless Tap to Pay payments, says its stores will get the tech, which supports Apple Pay and Google Pay, by the end of 2026 (Sarah Perez/TechCrunch)