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Paris-based UMA, founded by ex-Tesla Optimus scientist Rémi Cadene and ex-Google DeepMind researcher Pierre Sermanet, demos its Northstar AI humanoid robot (Benoit Berthelot/Bloomberg)

Sources: Beijing recently held meetings with Alibaba, ByteDance, Z.ai, and others to discuss restricting overseas access to advanced open and closed AI models (Fanny Potkin/Reuters)

Survey: Chinese companies plan to allocate 46% of their AI accelerator budget to domestic products in the next 12 months, up from 30% today, a shift from Nvidia (Gao Yuan/Bloomberg)

Sources: DeepSeek is in the early stages of developing its own AI chip designed for inference, in a bid to reduce its reliance on Nvidia and Huawei hardware (Reuters)

US autonomous military vehicle startup Forterra says it deployed 100+ Lancer UGVs, based on Polaris ATVs, in Ukraine since 2025, completing 1,100+ missions (Tim Fernholz/TechCrunch)

European banking watchdogs ECB and ESRB warn that frontier AI models pose "systemic risks to the financial system", giving lenders four months to prepare (Financial Times)

UK-based AI infrastructure startup Nscale secures a $900M line of credit to expand its data center buildout across Europe, the US, and the Asia Pacific (Mauro Orru/Wall Street Journal)

Munich-based nuclear fusion startup Proxima Fusion raised €411M led by trading firm XTX and UK-based East X at a €2.4B valuation, with participation from Google (Bloomberg)

OpenRouter: Chinese AI models have drawn 30%+ of token use by US companies each week since February 8, peaking at 46%, up from 11% over the previous 12 months (Kai Nicol-Schwarz/CNBC)

Counterpoint: China smartphone sales fell 13% YoY during the 618 shopping festival as brands raised prices to offset memory costs; Honor fell 33% and Xiaomi 24% (Reuters)

Alibaba's Qwen models have made it an AI powerhouse, but the company has struggled to turn their global popularity into a profitable business (New York Times)

Court filing: Meta says four US states seek $1.4T over claims it designed Facebook and Instagram to addict youth and misled the public; its market cap is ~$1.5T (Diana Novak Jones/Reuters)

OpenAI, Anthropic, and other top AI labs are offering startups token credits and special promotions, as the AI labs seek lasting streams of enterprise revenue (Wall Street Journal)

A profile of Rachel Whetstone, who has led comms for Google, Meta, Uber, Netflix, and now Sierra, as her husband Steve Hilton runs for California governor (Emily Shugerman/The San Francisco ...)

WiseTech co-founder Richard White steps down as chair amid a police probe over claims he exploited a woman's immigration status for sex; WTC jumps 7%+ (Peter Vercoe/Bloomberg)

A profile of Bernadette Meehan, a US diplomat who became Wikimedia Foundation CEO in January, as Wikipedia faces threats from MAGA, AI, and foreign autocrats (Tiffany Hsu/New York Times)

Syntiant, which develops low-power AI processors, files for a US IPO, reporting a $20.9M net loss on $64.5M in revenue for the three months ended March 31 (Pragyan Kalita/Reuters)

Samsung estimates Q2 operating profit of ~$58.44B, up 19x from Q2 2025 and above ~$57.02B est., and revenue up 129% YoY to ~$111.7B; Samsung's stock drops 5%+ (Reuters)

xAI rebrands to SpaceXAI and unveils a new logo; Elon Musk said in May that xAI would be dissolved as a separate company and become the AI products from SpaceX (Kelsey Vlamis/Business Insider)

Anthropic researchers detail J-space, a small set of neural patterns in Claude that reveals internal thoughts that don't appear in the model's output (Anthropic)

BonkDAO, which oversees the Bonk memecoin, says it was the target of a "malicious governance proposal" that resulted in a loss of $20M worth of Bonk tokens (Daniel Kuhn/The Block)

Sources: Vista Equity and Quinti made a takeover bid for Criteo that values the French ad tech company at a 50%+ premium to its stock price in recent weeks (Bloomberg)

Source: Thrive Capital spinoff Thrive Holdings seeks to raise around $2B from SoftBank, Altimeter, D1, and others, after previously raising $1B (Julia Hornstein/The Information)

Sources: CISA's Attack Surface Evaluation team is using Mythos to audit government code repositories and has already uncovered a large number of vulnerabilities (Raphael Satter/Reuters)

SCOTUS declines to block a Texas law requiring app stores and developers to verify the age of mobile device users, and for minors to obtain parental consent (Andrew Chung/Reuters)

Sources: the US considers housing the Strategic Bitcoin Reserve at Commerce instead of Treasury amid concerns over Treasury's legal authority to manage it (Bloomberg)

Xbox appoints Helen Chiang as its first COO; Chiang was previously corporate vice president for the Minecraft Franchise and the studio head of Minecraft (Sam Smith/GamesBeat)

Source: Xbox Game Pass currently has about 30M subscriptions; document: Microsoft had projected Game Pass subscriptions would reach around 77M this year (Ben Fritz/Wall Street Journal)

A term sheet shows Tencent is seeking to raise as much as $1.55B in a selldown of part of its stake in short-video app operator Kuaishou through a block trade (Julia Fioretti/Bloomberg)

Tencent releases Hy3, a 295B-parameter model that it says is competitive with GLM-5.1 and 5.2, under the Apache 2.0 license, following a preview launch in April (Sam Witteveen/VentureBeat)

Source: Mercor hit over $2B in gross revenue run rate in June, double its pace in April, and is profitable on a free cash flow basis (Julia Hornstein/The Information)

Illinois Governor JB Pritzker signs SB 315, a bill requiring annual third-party safety audits of leading AI companies; OpenAI and Anthropic backed the bill (Adam Harrington/CBS News)

Nintendo plans to stop selling the original Switch, Lite, and OLED in Europe from mid-February 2027 and update the Switch 2 to comply with new EU battery rules (Andrew Webster/The Verge)

Filing: Strategy sold 3,588 bitcoin for ~$216M between June 29 and July 5 to replenish its USD reserve; its holdings have an $11.4B paper loss at current prices (James Hunt/The Block)

Microsoft's Xbox unit plans to cut 3,200 jobs over the next year, including 1,600 on Monday, and divest up to five studios, including Ninja Theory, in a "reset" (Bloomberg)

Microsoft is laying off ~4,800 employees, or ~2.1% of its workforce; most are in sales or Xbox, where ~20% of jobs are set to be cut by the end of FY 2027 (Tom Warren/The Verge)

Reddit says its AI-powered content moderation systems caught 25K "spammy posts and comments" per day in Q1, reducing users' exposure to such content by 20% YoY (Natalie Lung/Bloomberg)

Broadcom agrees to expand its Apple partnership through 2031 to develop and supply custom chips; in 2023, the companies announced a multibillion-dollar 5G deal (Akash Sriram/Reuters)

Anthropic signs a 20-year, ~$19B lease to use a TeraWulf data center in Kentucky, set to have a ~400MW capacity and to start delivering power in H2 2027 (CNBC)

AI agent training platform Bespoke Labs raised $40M across a seed led by 8VC and a Series A led by Wing, saying the funding gives it almost two years of runway (Natalie Breymeyer/Axios)

Filing: Brookfield-backed data center company Csquare seeks to raise up to $1.35B in an IPO, selling 50M shares at $23 to $27 each for an up to $4.18B valuation (Ryan Vlastelica/Bloomberg)

How Masayoshi Son is remaking SoftBank in his own image, betting on AI; SoftBank trades at a ~50% discount to its net asset value, as some question his strategy (David Keohane/Financial Times)

A profile of Samsung union leader Choi Seung-ho, who helped win a ~$26B bonus package for chip employees, as he tries to resolve the rift over bonus gaps (Yoolim Lee/Bloomberg)

An interview with Agility Robotics CEO Peggy Johnson on why the startup is going public via a SPAC, the physical layer as its core advantage, safety, and more (Connie Loizos/TechCrunch)

AI-driven drops in labor income and gains in capital income could hit Ireland's tax base, with 6%+ of its workforce in tech and heavy exposure to US companies (Olivia Fletcher/Bloomberg)

Some US voters are using AI tools as nonpartisan researchers, seeing them as a viable alternative to traditional news coverage, voter guides, and social media (Jennifer Medina/New York Times)

Ripple secures CASP authorization from Luxembourg's financial regulator, making it fully MiCA-compliant to offer crypto services across 30 EEA countries (Brian Danga/The Block)

Shenzhen-based Even Realities, a startup that makes smart glasses without cameras, raised a $150M pre-Series B led by Meituan and Tencent (Kate Park/TechCrunch)

SK Hynix launches a US share sale on the Nasdaq to raise ~$28B, selling 17.79M new shares; the final listing price is due Thursday before trading starts Friday (Reuters)

Document: a draft US Treasury Department report is set to warn about the AI market's risks, likening some key aspects to the dotcom crash in the early 2000s (Eric Katz/NOTUS)