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Techmeme

Coinbase's chief legal officer, Paul Grewal, is stepping down after six years; VP of legal Molly Abraham moves into his role with the title of general counsel (Hannah Lang/Reuters)

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Federal Reserve Chair Kevin Warsh names Marc Andreessen and Xbox CEO Asha Sharma to lead a task force on the economic impact of new technologies, including AI (Andrew Ackerman/Washington Post)

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Google says it will automatically add a disclosure to ads that are made with its AI advertising tools, expanding the disclosure beyond election ads to all ads (Sarah Perez/TechCrunch)

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PitchBook: US venture funding hit $412.7B in H1 2026, up 30% on all of 2025, with AI startup funding accounting for 86%, or $355.9B; Q2 saw seven $1B+ rounds (Duncan Riley/SiliconANGLE)

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Anthropic, set to add usage-based billing for Fable 5 on July 12, aims to return the model to Claude's subscription plans "when sufficient capacity allows" (Maxwell Zeff/Wired)

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The EU Parliament advances a bill letting tech companies scan for CSAM, reviving a proposal rejected in March, with an exemption for E2EE services like WhatsApp (Sam Clark/Politico)

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OpenAI is discontinuing ChatGPT Atlas, its standalone desktop browser, in favor of the new ChatGPT desktop app (Zac Hall/9to5Mac)

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Sources: AI contractor marketplace Mercor is discussing raising new funds at a roughly $20B valuation, less than a year after raising money at a $10B valuation (Bloomberg)

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OpenAI merges Codex and ChatGPT desktop apps for Mac and Windows under a new ChatGPT desktop app, allowing users to switch between Codex, Chat, and Work (Zac Hall/9to5Mac)

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GPT-5.6 Sol costs $5 per 1M input tokens and $30 per 1M output tokens, GPT-5.6 Terra costs $2.50 and $15, and GPT-5.6 Luna costs $1 and $6 (OpenAI)

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OpenAI broadly releases GPT-5.6, and launches ChatGPT Work, an AI agent that can gather context across apps and files to create documents, on Mac and Windows (Axios)

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Microsoft President Brad Smith says the US now has AI "regulation without transparent or complete rules", and adds that "without rules, businesses can't plan" (Beatrice Nolan/Fortune)

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Kraken Technology, which designs and builds autonomous maritime platforms, such as uncrewed subsurface vessels, raised a $175M Series B at a $1B valuation (John Reynolds/Tech.eu)

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Bun's creator says he rewrote Bun from Zig to Rust using a Claude Fable 5 prerelease version in 11 days, noting it would've taken three engineers "about a year" (Jarred Sumner/bun.com)

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Character.AI launches three human-written, AI-generated microdramas, whose characters users can chat with, and aims to eventually let users make their own shows (Ivan Mehta/TechCrunch)

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Meta prices Muse Spark 1.1 at $1.25/1M input tokens and $4.25/1M output tokens; Alexandr Wang says improving coding and agentic performance was a key focus (Ina Fried/Axios)

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Meta launches a Meta Model API, which Mark Zuckerberg says will have "aggressive and attractive" pricing at ~25% of the cost of OpenAI's and Anthropic's models (Kurt Wagner/Bloomberg)

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Meta releases Muse Spark 1.1, capable of more advanced coding and a "step-change" from the first generation, available to US developers via a public API preview (Dominic Preston/The Verge)

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European startups raised $24B in Q2, up 66% YoY and the strongest quarter in four years; UK startups raised $10.4B, above Germany's $3.2B, and France's $2.4B (Gené Teare/Crunchbase News)

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Anthropic debuts a "reflection" dashboard in beta for Free, Pro, and Max users with memory turned on, to track their Claude activity over 1, 3, 6, or 12 months (Anthropic)

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Databento, which sells financial data feeds, raised a $97M Series B led by NEA, taking its total funding to $127M, and says it is "profitable every month" (Lily Mae Lazarus/Fortune)

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Micron raises its US capex commitment to $250B through 2035, adding $50B for New York, Idaho, Virginia, and other projects, and invests $500M in GlobalWafers (Maggie Eastland/Bloomberg)

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Ollama, which helps developers run open-weight AI models locally, raised a $65M Series B led by Theory Venture, following a $15M Series A led by Benchmark (Julie Bort/TechCrunch)

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PrismML shrunk Qwen 3.6 to 27B parameters and ran it on an iPhone 17 Pro, bigger than any prior mobile model; sources: Apple talked with PrismML about its tech (Aaron Tilley/The Information)

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Memo: Meta plans to start manufacturing its in-house AI chip, codenamed Iris, from September, as part of its plan to boost its computing power to 14GW in 2027 (Reuters)

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India scraps import duties on some parts used to make devices like phones until March 31, 2029, removing 7.5% and 5% levies, which might help Apple and Xiaomi (Nikunj Ohri/Reuters)

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Apple supplier Luxshare fell in its Hong Kong trading debut, closing down 1.6%, after raising ~$3.1B in the city's biggest listing in 2026 so far (Bloomberg)

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Enterprise AI agent startup Lyzr is raising a $100M Series B at a ~$500M valuation, up from $250M in a Series A in 2026, and says agents wrote investment memos (Saritha Rai/Bloomberg)

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Internal DOJ memo: attorneys on crypto cases should expect less cooperation from Binance, which is adding asset freeze requirements; Binance denies any changes (Leo Schwartz/The Information)

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US cybersecurity and data resilience company Rubrik plans to invest $500M+ in the UK over the next five years and establish its European headquarters in London (Paul Sandle/Reuters)

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Interpol and law enforcement agencies arrest 5,811 suspects and seize $293M in an operation combating social engineering scams and fraud across 97 countries (Sergiu Gatlan/BleepingComputer)

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Leaked renders via Android Headlines show the Samsung Galaxy Z Flip 8, Z Fold 8, Watch 9, and Watch Ultra 2; the Galaxy Z Fold 8 is likely the new wide foldable (Lawrence Bonk/Engadget)

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Sources: Sonos' layoffs include some top design and product executives, like VP of Design Dana Krieger; CEO Tom Conrad says the changes reduce management layers (Chris Welch/Bloomberg)

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The AI data center boom has led to surging demand for power transformers, with average lead times for orders, once measured in months, now stretching into years (Financial Times)

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A Brown University professor suspected his class used AI to cheat after a take-home midterm averaged 96%, prompting an in-person final, which averaged 48.6% (Emma Whitford/Inside Higher Ed)

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Companies are mobilizing internal groups of "AI champions" to drive adoption; BCG says 74% of front-line employees now use AI regularly, up from 51% in 2025 (Isabelle Bousquette/Wall Street Journal)

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Shanghai-based GPU maker Iluvatar CoreX raised ~$902M in a Hong Kong share sale; the company's stock has soared 257% since its January IPO, which raised ~$473M (Bloomberg)

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Filings: Grubhub parent Wonder is raising hundreds of millions of dollars at a $9B valuation; a source says founder Marc Lore indicated he will contribute $200M (The Information)

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Cognition releases SWE-1.7, trained from Kimi K2.7 and available in Devin at 1,000 tokens/second, claiming it nears frontier-level intelligence at a lower cost (Cognition)

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Block agrees to pay $45M and offer live customer support for Cash App to settle claims by 46 US states that the company failed to protect users from fraud (Daniel Wiessner/Reuters)

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Sources: Reno-based AI chip startup Positron is in talks to raise ~$750M in two phases, at valuations of $3.5B in the first tranche and ~$5B in the second (Bloomberg)

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The FTC settles with John Deere over a 2025 right-to-repair lawsuit, requiring the company to provide farmers and shops with equipment and software for 10 years (Boone Ashworth/Wired)

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OpenAI says it found widespread task issues in SWE-Bench Pro, estimates ~30% of tasks are broken, and retracts its earlier recommendation to adopt the benchmark (OpenAI)

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Meta announces its first data center in Canada, a 1GW facility in Alberta that will cost the company about $9B and take two to three years to construct (Jonathan Vanian/CNBC)

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Grok 4.5 is available in Grok Build, in Cursor, and from the SpaceXAI console, but not in the EU; it costs $2 per 1M input tokens and $6 per 1M output tokens (Axios)

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SpaceXAI launches Grok 4.5, its first model built in partnership with Cursor, designed to "handle difficult, long-running" legal, finance, and coding tasks (Carmen Arroyo/Bloomberg)

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OpenAI rolls out two versions of GPT-Live: GPT-Live-1, powering ChatGPT Voice for Go, Plus, and Pro users, and GPT-Live-1 mini, the default for free users (Sabrina Ortiz/The Deep View)

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OpenAI launches GPT-Live, a new generation of voice models built on a full-duplex architecture, meaning they can listen and speak at the same time (OpenAI)

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Prime Intellect, which helps companies build their own AI agents by offering computing power and specialized tools, raised a $130M Series A at a $1B valuation (Marina Temkin/TechCrunch)

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Arkenstone Defense, which is building software to handle back-office work for defense tech startups, emerges from stealth with a $35M seed led by J2 Ventures (Barratt Dewey/Tectonic Defense)

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