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Techmeme

Google quietly rolled out a new program to let verified political campaigns more easily bypass Gmail's spam filter, after years of complaints from the GOP (Shane Goldmacher/New York Times)

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Velaura AI, which is developing low-power chips for data centers and physical AI applications, like robotics, raised a $110M Series A at a $1B+ valuation (Prathik Jayaprakash/Reuters)

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As sweeping US crypto legislation stalls, the SEC and CFTC are moving to establish rules; the SEC is set to exempt certain token offerings from securities laws (Hannah Lang/Reuters)

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Q&A with Proton CEO Andy Yen on Proton's story, dislodging "a hundred million people" from Google, AI backlash, privacy, US politics, EU Chat Control, and more (Andy Greenberg/Wired)

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Klarna says CFO Niclas Neglén and CMO David Sandström plan to step down in early 2027, and lowers its full-year GMV guidance; KLAR falls 19%+ pre-market (Connor Hart/Wall Street Journal)

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How a bipartisan coalition of US states fought to present a united case against Meta; Judge Rogers established a hybrid structure for the multi-week trial (Diana Novak Jones/Reuters)

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Dutch company Fairphone launches its $650 flagship repairable Fairphone (Gen 6+) in the US and plans to keep launching new phone generations every two years (Julian Chokkattu/Wired)

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Xiaomi reports Q2 revenue down 6.1% YoY to ~$16.2B and net income down 21% to ~$1.4B, above est., amid a persistent memory shortage and weaker smartphone demand (Bloomberg)

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OpenAI launches ChatGPT for Teens, a new mode that limits high-risk chats around self-harm, eating disorders, and other topics, adds studying tools, and more (Cecilia Kang/New York Times)

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Alibaba says its new open-source multimodal model, Qwen3.8-27B, passed 1M+ downloads within a few days of release, making it one of its fastest-growing models (Juro Osawa/The Information)

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Reddit launches an early experiment to convert select text posts and comments into short videos with AI voiceovers, rolling out on the web, iOS, and Android (Jay Peters/The Verge)

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Alibaba's Alipay launches a new "all-in-one" platform for businesses to use AI agents to automate tasks; Alibaba's stock jumps 5%+ and is up 40%+ since June (Jeanny Yu/Bloomberg)

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AI inference chip startup Etched raised $700M led by its new server rack customer Jane Street at a $21B valuation, up from $10.3B after raising $300M in July (Robbie Whelan/Wall Street Journal)

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Sources: China orders some state-linked entities to uninstall a government-tailored version of Windows 10, ahead of its February 2027 retirement timeline (Bloomberg)

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Google unveils Operation Blue Skies, a £5M trial to re-route North Atlantic aircraft to reduce contrail-induced warming using Google's AI atmospheric forecasts (Madeleine Cuff/New Scientist)

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Baidu reports Q2 revenue down 2% YoY to ~$4.62B, below ~$4.69B est. and its fifth straight quarterly decline, and net income of ~$341M, as it lags AI rivals (Bloomberg)

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Apple's macOS Tahoe 26.7 RC has references to unreleased products: a Home Hub, home accessories, new Beats, AirPods Pro 4, Apple Intelligence in China, and more (Juli Clover/MacRumors)

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In filings, Apple acknowledges App Store regulatory changes are weighing on its $100B+ services business; US App Store spend fell 6% YoY in Q2, per Sensor Tower (Michael Acton/Financial Times)

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Rogue Studio, which calls itself a "playground for creative ethical mischief", launches Rogue 1.0, an AI video tool to make adult content of Hollywood quality (Jason Parham/Wired)

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Sources: AI-drafted bills are swamping the US House's Legislative Counsel, which now spends more time fixing them than it would spend to draft them from scratch (Owen Dahlkamp/Politico)

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Discord suspends livestreams in Brazil, after the country's data protection authority ordered it last week, saying Discord failed to protect children and teens (Associated Press)

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Sources: Google has told suppliers it plans to move all Pixel phone, smartwatch, and wireless earbud manufacturing out of China in 2027 amid US-China tensions (Lauly Li/Nikkei Asia)

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A short video in Apple's macOS Tahoe 26.7 release candidate appears to show a man demoing camera-equipped AirPods using Visual Intelligence and Siri (Juli Clover/MacRumors)

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Sources: Situational Awareness offered part of its $5B Anthropic stake at a 20% discount as it scrambled for cash; word of its trouble left it "being hunted" (Wall Street Journal)

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David Sacks says "Dario Amodei believes frontier AI is too powerful to distribute; we believe it is too powerful to centralize" after Amodei shared policy ideas (David Sacks/@davidsacks)

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Pornhub parent company Aylo agrees to pay $120M to settle two 2021 class action lawsuits in California and Alabama alleging it profited from CSAM (Samantha Cole/404 Media)

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Sources: Crusoe is in IPO talks with at least four Wall Street banks, including JPMorgan, which is advising on its $3B pre-IPO fundraise set to value it at $35B (Alan Neuhauser/Axios)

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Opening arguments begin on Tuesday in the US state AGs' social media addiction lawsuit against Meta; New Mexico AG says the consequences could be "astronomical" (Jonathan Vanian/CNBC)

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BNPL lenders like Flex, Zip, and Affirm are now pitching loans for basic household needs; Americans spent $160B through pay-later loans in 2025, up 2x from 2023 (Stacy Cowley/New York Times)

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Sources: Anthropic's revenue run rate reached $65B by the end of July, up from $47B in May, $19B in March, $9B in December 2025, and $4B in July 2025 (Bloomberg)

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African defense tech company Terra Industries, founded in 2024, raised a $52M seed from 8VC and others, and says it is on track to book $100M in contracts (Dominic-Madori Davis/TechCrunch)

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Sources: the US DOJ has been investigating a16z for nearly a year over whether its partners are improperly serving on the boards of competing AI companies (Bloomberg)

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Cursor says it is rolling out its code hosting service Origin in early beta on all paid plans, featuring support for repos, pull requests, GitHub sync, and more (Cursor)

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YouTube will start counting a view as soon as a video starts to play, from August 24, lining up with the system used by Instagram, TikTok, and its Shorts videos (Emma Roth/The Verge)

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Google wins a bankruptcy auction with a $10M bid to acquire deidentified business data, software code, and more from Spirit Airlines to improve its AI models (James Nani/Bloomberg Law)

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Nvidia's $500B funding package announcement for AI infrastructure follows SEC's July guidance that confirmed looser restrictions for data center securitizations (Tobias Burns/CNBC)

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Monzo Chair Gary Hoffman is leaving after some of Monzo's biggest shareholders called for his removal following the board removing TS Anil as CEO in December (Simon Foy/Financial Times)

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A German regulator says Apple will make changes to ATT, after finding Apple gave its apps more favorable consent prompts than those of third-party developers (Reuters)

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Microsoft says the outage affecting GitHub's API, Actions, Pull Requests, and other services has been mitigated, three hours after it first confirmed the outage (Mayank Parmar/BleepingComputer)

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Filing: Nvidia agrees to spend up to $105B to support SB Energy's new Ohio data center campus OpenAI is set to lease; Nvidia agrees to invest $1.5B in SB Energy (Bloomberg)

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Investigation: Amazon is buying huge quantities of rare books, scanning them for AI, and destroying them; a tracked Biblio order went to its Las Vegas facility (Emanuel Maiberg/404 Media)

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ETH Zurich spinout Gravis Robotics raised a $200M Series A from SoftBank to scale Gravis Rack, an autonomous control appliance for retrofitting onto excavators (Mike Wheatley/SiliconANGLE)

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Trump-backed WLF is working with Hong Kong-based AI platform WorldClaw; 43 of the 90 AI models on WorldClaw are from Chinese companies flagged as security risks (Lawrence Delevingne/Reuters)

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Uber and Zipline partner to launch Uber Eats drone deliveries in Dallas and Houston by late 2026, aiming to scale nationwide and hit 1M daily deliveries in 2029 (Kelly Cloonan/Wall Street Journal)

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Greg Brockman calls the OpenAI-Hugging Face incident "a watershed moment" and discusses how OpenAI and other organizations can use AI to improve cyber defenses (Greg Brockman)

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OpenAI signs a 20-year, 10GW data center deal in Ohio with SoftBank's SB Energy; Nvidia agrees to backstop a portion of the value of the completed data center (Anissa Gardizy/Wall Street Journal)

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Groq raised $350M led by Disruptive at a $3.5B valuation, down from $6.9B in September 2025 before Nvidia struck a licensing deal and hired much of its talent (Natasha Mascarenhas/Bloomberg)

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Chip giants participated in startup funding rounds collectively valued at $250B+ YTD; Nvidia leads the sector with a record 59 known rounds, up from 53 in 2025 (Joanna Glasner/Crunchbase News)

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Voice AI startup Wispr raised a $280M Series B led by Menlo Ventures at a $2B valuation, taking its total funding to $361M, and now has 100K business customers (Allie Garfinkle/Fortune)

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Sources: Meta and BlackRock's $14B El Paso data center project is not insured against total loss, exposing lenders to credit risks and big potential liabilities (Financial Times)

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