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GTA 6 leaker CyberLeek releases more footage, including a video of a character spelling "leek" with bullet holes in a wall, suggesting direct access to the game (Robert Purchese/Eurogamer.net)

Slack launches Slack Code, adding dedicated, project-specific channels that let teams collaborate with AI coding agents "like teammates" across all Slack plans (Jess Weatherbed/The Verge)

Source: Meta is spending hundreds of millions per year on Azure to consume trillions of AI tokens weekly, becoming one of Microsoft's largest AI customers (Brody Ford/Bloomberg)

Sources: Trump officials expect Elon Musk to spend $100M to $200M in the November midterm elections, with a focus on voter turnout in key races, including Texas (Hugo Lowell/Wired)

Australia passes the News Bargaining Incentive, which will tax tech giants 2.5% on their Australian ad revenue unless they strike deals with local news media (Christine Chen/Reuters)

PitchBook: California-based startups have raised ~$366B in 2026 so far across 4,000+ companies, more than triple the total of all other 49 states combined (Paul Kiernan/Wall Street Journal)

Muon Space, which is building a spacecraft platform for orbital data centers and AI computing, raised a $250M Series C, with participation from Google (Yash Roy/Bloomberg)

Stripe's OpenRouter deal, its largest-ever acquisition, is a bet on a future where users turn to a mix of AI models and gives it a foothold in the token market (Kate Clark/Wall Street Journal)

Alibaba reports Q1 revenue up 9% YoY to ~$40B, meeting est., and net income down 75% to ~$1.6B due to heavy AI spending and weak domestic retail consumption (Luz Ding/Bloomberg)

Binance launches Agent OS, a platform that lets AI agents analyze markets and execute trades on users' behalf; users set limits on AI agents' access and trades (Jagmeet Singh/TechCrunch)

South Korea media: SK Hynix and its union reach a tentative deal on a 6.3% wage hike and paying out 60% of profit-sharing bonuses in shares and 40% in cash (Yoolim Lee/Bloomberg)

Uber, Verne, and Pony.ai launch autonomous rides in Zagreb, making the Croatian capital the first European city where users can book such rides via Uber's app (Anzar Mehraj/Reuters)

London-based Callosum, whose software matches AI tasks with different models and chips, raised a $100M seed from Atomico, the UK Sovereign AI Fund, and others (Bloomberg)

Virginia's Loudoun County hosts 250+ data centers, generating huge tax revenues, as it moves to slow construction in response to pushback from residents (Cecilia Kang/New York Times)

A look at Backstory, an experimental AI image authentication tool from Google DeepMind, offered for testing to journalists, researchers, and other fact checkers (Andrew Deck/Nieman Lab)

China's humanoid robot makers derive much of their revenue from government-backed training centers that sell training data back to them, raising demand concerns (William Langley/Financial Times)

Sources: China is restricting or delaying exports to Taiwan of germanium- and quartz-based materials used in fiber optics, photonics, and chip manufacturing (Nikkei Asia)

How Unitree's Go series, which helped the company dominate the quadruped robot market, drew on openly published US university research funded by the US military (Michael Martina/Reuters)

Pornhub says the UK's new internet age checks have boosted non-compliant porn sites, which occupied seven of the top 10 search results for "free porn" in June (Daniel Thomas/Financial Times)

The EU appears to be shifting from outsized regulatory fines against Big Tech to technical DMA orders that force compliance, such as sharing search data (Jacob Parry/Politico)

President Trump says CFTC Chair Michael Selig is working to bring crypto platform Hyperliquid onshore, lifting shares of HYPE-holder Hyperliquid Strategies ~30% (Bloomberg)

The US Army is phasing out its drone assault battalion, as part of a "back-to-basics" approach; it was created in January to learn from the conflict in Ukraine (Wall Street Journal)

Samsung announces a virtual Galaxy event for August 27 at 8am ET, where the Galaxy S26 FE is expected (Alan Friedman/PhoneArena)

German insurance giant Munich Re agrees to acquire cyber insurance provider At-Bay for $575M; At-Bay raised $276M and had a $1.35B valuation in 2021 (Meir Orbach/CTech)

Trump urges Congress to pass the Clarity Act at a White House event with execs including the CEOs of Coinbase and Robinhood; the bill has stalled in the Senate (Bloomberg)

Sources: YouTube is offering top creators millions to post videos exclusively on YouTube for a period and will penalize those that post to Netflix concurrently (Lucas Shaw/Bloomberg)

Former Meta engineering director Arturo Béjar testifies that Mark Zuckerberg prioritized growth and engagement over child safety on Facebook and Instagram (Reuters)

Google announces new study tools, including a student hub, notebooks, and interactive 3D visualizations in Gemini, plus student offers for Google AI plans (Amanda Caswell/Tom's Guide)

Letter: Stripe told investors January 1 marked the "beginning of the singularity", a major inflection point in long-term trends, and H1 revenue rose 41% YoY (Axios)

Sources: SpaceX approached Cognition about a potential acquisition, but Cognition didn't engage; Cognition CEO Scott Wu says the company is "not for sale" (Bloomberg)

Sources: OpenAI CFO Sarah Friar told employees at an all-hands that OpenAI "will be a public company in 2027", or sooner if "our business continues to inflect" (CNBC)

Sources: AI chip startup Fractile is in talks to raise ~$600M at a $6.5B pre-money valuation, up from ~$1B in May, and has an initial ~$250M deal with Anthropic (Bloomberg)

Source: Nvidia has discussed an investment in Mercor as part of a round valuing the startup at $20B; Nvidia paid Mercor tens of millions of dollars last quarter (The Information)

Stripe agrees to acquire New York-based OpenRouter; a source says Stripe is paying $7.5B, with $1.5B going to the startup's founders and $6B to its investors (Erin Griffith/New York Times)

The US FTC says businesses must disclose when they use personalized pricing and it will "deploy enforcement resources" against companies that do not disclose it (Dave Michaels/Wall Street Journal)

Stripe Agrees to Buy AI Firm OpenRouter; No Terms Disclosed (Bloomberg)

Meta launches a Mac app for Meta AI and says Meta AI can now work directly with Instagram and Facebook accounts, Meta ad campaigns, and Google Workspace (Emma Roth/The Verge)

OpenAI is testing Private Safety Processing, a new technique to identify misuse patterns while preserving zero data retention protections, with early customers (Ina Fried/Axios)

The US CFTC bans former Alameda CEO Caroline Ellison and FTX co-founder Gary Wang from trading for five years, as part of a settlement over their roles at FTX (Nicola M White/Bloomberg)

Nielsen rolls out changes to make its ratings more accurate, including using data from smartwatch-like devices worn by its panelists without requiring logins (Loree Seitz/The Wrap)

Google Pixel 11 review: a great design, fantastic camera features, and some Pro phone specs, but few gen-to-gen hardware improvements and it's expensive at $899 (Cameron Faulkner/The Verge)

Pixel 11 Pro review: Magic Capture can be useful, Rambler might be Google's best feature in years, but the gaming performance is subpar and HiLight is useless (Julian Chokkattu/Wired)

Google Pixel 11 Pro Fold review: a tougher body, an IP68 rating, and a decent triple rear camera, but an iterative hardware upgrade with a dated-looking design (Dominic Preston/The Verge)

Google Pixel Watch 5 review: improved GPS is good, gesture controls are great, but it's $50 more expensive and the new health features haven't rolled out yet (Victoria Song/The Verge)

Memo: the GOP asks AI companies to stem the public backlash against data centers, saying the issue could kill its chances of holding a vital Senate seat in Ohio (Alex Isenstadt/Axios)

Rivian spinout Also, which is developing autonomous driving tech, raised a $150M Series D led by Prysm Capital, after announcing a $200M round in March 2026 (Kirsten Korosec/TechCrunch)

Network Bio, which is developing an AI foundation model from datasets of patient tissue and blood samples created by pooling access to biobanks, raised $50M (Brian Gormley/Wall Street Journal)

Flipkart co-founder Sachin Bansal's Bengaluru-based fintech Navi raised $100M from Prosus, its first institutional funding, sources say at a ~$1.3B valuation (Jagmeet Singh/TechCrunch)

Amazon makes its AI-powered Alexa+ free on all compatible Fire TV devices in the US, automatically upgrading users even if they don't subscribe to Prime (Sarah Perez/TechCrunch)

Sources: Veeda, which is developing world models and is led by ex-Nvidia VP of AI Research Sanja Fidler, raised a $90M+ seed and is backed by Khosla and Radical (Murad Hemmadi/The Logic)