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As "nudify" tools proliferate, unleashing a new form of bullying among kids, parents and schools are struggling to protect young victims from AI deepfakes (Wall Street Journal)

A profile of UC Berkeley professor Hany Farid, the world's leading digital forensics expert for 20+ years, who says he is now struggling to identify AI fakes (New York Times)

Sources: Alibaba is in talks to buy Chinese fresh grocery delivery platform Pupu for $1.5B, in a bid to better compete with food delivery rivals like Meituan (Cathy Chan/Bloomberg)

Madrid-based Orbio, which uses AI agents to help businesses interview, onboard, and manage frontline workers, raised a $21M Series A led by Dawn Capital (Dominic-Madori Davis/TechCrunch)

Inside the Signal group chat where Sergey Brin, Marc Andreessen, Garry Tan, and other tech elites toss out strategies to oppose a proposed California wealth tax (Emily Shugerman/The San Francisco ...)

Sources: ByteDance is in talks with Shanghai-based Iluvatar CoreX to purchase AI inference GPUs, and is also considering a deal to buy Baidu's Kunlunxin chips (Reuters)

Health wearables are booming, with both Oura and Whoop eyeing IPOs, but investors remain cautious after Fitbit's struggles and low consumer hardware margins (David Wainer/Wall Street Journal)

Rylo, which develops real-time speech and sign-language translation tools for deaf and hard-of-hearing users, raised $85M led by General Catalyst and Canaan (Sophie Shulman/CTech)

Hypha, which extracts data from private-market documents to create workflows for underwriting, portfolio monitoring, and asset management, raised a $50M seed (Ryan Lawler/Axios)

Sandstone, which builds AI-powered workflow automation tools for legal teams at small and mid-sized businesses, raised a $30M Series A led by Lightspeed (Russell Brandom/TechCrunch)

Sundar Pichai faced a walkout at his Stanford commencement speech, as 100+ students left amid chants of "Free, free Palestine" over Google's ties with Israel (Zain Khan/New York Post)

Sources: Frank founder Charlie Javice, sentenced in September 2025 to 85 months for defrauding JPMorgan Chase, has been seeking a presidential pardon from Trump (Wall Street Journal)

A profile of Kalshi COO Luana Lopes Lara, who has overseen a tremendous pace of growth over the past year as the company faces political and regulatory backlash (Emily Nicolle/Bloomberg)

Chinese Tesla drivers are using tiny plastic heads to fool Tesla's distracted-driving controls, which appear unable to distinguish figurines from real people (Zeyi Yang/Wired)

10h

A government crackdown on online casinos operating in the Isle of Man has led to a major tax revenue loss, accelerating the island's slide toward a fiscal cliff (Jack Adamović Davies/Bloomberg)

12h

Satya Nadella says companies must own their AI "learning loops" to compound human and token capital, or risk ceding all value to a handful of frontier models (Satya Nadella/@satyanadella)

13h

Sources: senior Anthropic technical staff are in DC to meet WH officials and try to fix the Mythos 5 dispute; both sides say they are eager to resolve the issue (Maria Curi/Axios)

14h

Canadian PM says the Anthropic ban shows the dangers of "over-reliance on certain models", and compares the risks to those that led to the 2008 financial crisis (Bloomberg)

14h

Sources: UK plans to announce an "Australia plus" under-16 social media ban, including restrictions on chats with strangers on gaming apps and under-18 curfews (The Guardian)

16h

EU says it is looking at the practical consequences of US restricting Anthropic's models, notes such measures "should not be discriminatory against partners" (Reuters)

16h

Siri AI is good enough to ease Apple's AI crisis; sources: the ability to tap third party AI models beyond OpenAI's is already active in internal iOS 27 builds (Mark Gurman/Bloomberg)

17h

Since Russia ratcheted up control over the internet this year, some Russians are turning to solutions like using multiple phones and VPNs to evade restrictions (Andrew Osborn/Reuters)

17h

Ajinomoto says it can meet demand through 2030 for ABF, a key material for advanced chipmaking substrates, and plans to expand capacity instead of hiking prices (Wall Street Journal)

20h

After years of uncertainty, including delayed listings, memory chipmaker Kioxia's shares soared 56x in 18 months, making it Japan's most valuable company (Shuhei Ochiai/Nikkei Asia)

23h

As the 2026 FIFA World Cup begins, there is still no clear replacement for "Sports Twitter", which was a perfect second-screen experience during live events (Andrew Webster/The Verge)

Challenger, Gray & Christmas: out of ~398K US jobs cuts in 2026 through May, employers cited AI as the reason for ~88K of them, up from ~54K in all of 2025 (Hyunsoo Rim/Sherwood News)

Nothing CEO Carl Pei says memory is now the costliest phone component, accounting for 50%+ of BOM in some models, and predicts phone prices will rise into 2027 (Stevie Bonifield/The Verge)

US export controls on Anthropic reignite debate in India over the country's AI ambitions, which are increasingly tied to tech developed and governed in the US (Jagmeet Singh/TechCrunch)

US officials: the Trump administration's decision to impose export controls on Anthropic followed multiple tense calls between Dario Amodei and admin officials (Politico)

Companies are grappling with whether and how to curb employee wagers on prediction markets that may use confidential info, as platforms tighten their own rules (Financial Times)

Q&A with labor researcher Molly Kinder on her recent, widely discussed "Messy Middle" essay on AI-driven disruption of knowledge jobs and how to address it (Casey Newton/Platformer)

Source: the White House imposed export controls on Mythos partly over suspicions a China-linked group had accessed it (Reed Albergotti/Semafor)

How the AI boom is revolutionizing US stock markets, as hyperscalers cut buybacks and boost capex, including Alphabet's planned ~$85B in equity offerings for AI (Robert Armstrong/Financial Times)

Source: the White House is unlikely to extend export restrictions to other AI companies (Leo Schwartz/The Information)

European political figures say Anthropic disabling access to Fable 5 and Mythos 5 is a "wake-up call" about the risks of depending on the US for AI tech (Nathan Rennolds/Associated Press)

Report: opponents blocked or delayed at least 75 US data center projects in Q1 2026 worth ~$130B; data center opposition groups doubled to 833 across 49 states (Allan Smith/NBC News)

David Sacks says Dario Amodei refused to "fix the jailbreak or de-deploy the model" after "a highly credible trusted partner" reported a Fable jailbreak (David Sacks/@davidsacks)

Sources: Amazon CEO Andy Jassy is among tech leaders who raised concerns with Trump officials about Mythos 5, setting in motion new export restrictions (The Information)

US barring foreign nationals, including Anthropic staffers in the US, from using Fable 5 and Mythos 5 marks a new phase in the US trying to control Anthropic (New York Times)

A review of The Yahoo Boys, a deeply reported book on four online scammers in Lagos, Nigeria, exploring how and why they scam and the local impact of the trade (Jessica Loudis/Bloomberg)

Luta Security CEO says US government restrictions on Mythos follow a jailbreak report by Amazon researchers and calls the restrictions a "complete overreaction" (Amrith Ramkumar/Wall Street Journal)

After years of false dawns, Big Tech, startups, and governments are betting on commercially useful quantum computers by 2030, as skeptics worry about hype (Michael Peel/Financial Times)

An interview with Corning CEO Wendell Weeks on risk-sharing provisions that protect the company in multibillion-dollar fiber deals with Nvidia, Meta, and Amazon (Christopher Mims/Wall Street Journal)

South Korea's "semiconductor belt" town Dongtan has become one of the fastest-rising affluent areas, driven by windfall bonuses for Samsung and SK Hynix workers (Daniel Tudor/Financial Times)

Huawei unveils HarmonyOS 7, introducing an "agent-friendly" architecture that connects to 2,000+ specialized AI agents and features an enhanced voice assistant (Iris Deng/South China Morning Post)

A Ukrainian extradited from Ireland to the US pleads guilty to conspiracy to commit wire fraud for his role in Conti ransomware attacks between 2021 and 2022 (Lawrence Abrams/BleepingComputer)

Anthropic says it believes the US government's export control order for Mythos 5 and Fable 5 is a "misunderstanding" and that it is working to restore access (Ananya Palyekar/Reuters)

Moonshot AI releases Kimi K2.7-Code, claiming 30% lower reasoning token usage compared to K2.6, available under a modified MIT license (Sean Michael Kerner/VentureBeat)

Crypto-data provider Blockworks says it has acquired its rival Messari; source: Blockworks paid more than $10M for Messari, which was valued at $300M in 2022 (Vicky Ge Huang/Wall Street Journal)

Anthropic says it is disabling Fable 5 and Mythos 5 for all customers after the US government issued an export control order, citing national security concerns (Anthropic)