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Sources: Mercor and other firms gathering data for AI labs are driving demand to buy or license internal datasets from startups shutting down or being acquired (Alix Coutures/The Information)

A Wyoming woman joined a federal suit against xAI alleging her stepfather used Grok to turn one childhood photo of her into 7,000+ CSAM images he traded online (Washington Post)

Anthropic details Claude's text watermark: it only shows Claude was likely involved, is sparse in code and factual text, and disappears after a full rewrite (Anthropic)

Alibaba's open-weight models have accumulated 3B+ global downloads in the past six months; Hugging Face: Google had 418M downloads while Meta had 227M in 2026 (Saritha Rai/Bloomberg)

Shanghai's tech-focused Star 50 index is up 29% in 2026, and its P/E ratio is 150+, above Nasdaq 100's 35, fueled by Beijing's tech push and an investor frenzy (William Sandlund/Financial Times)

BCG: enterprise users spent a total of $300M on quantum computing in 2025, outranking the combined spending of research labs and governments for the first time (Isabelle Bousquette/Wall Street Journal)

Effective altruism, hit by the SBF turmoil, is drawing record funding as Anthropic and OpenAI IPOs are set to mint new millionaires wedded to "effective giving" (Financial Times)

Point2 Technology, which develops RF-based data center interconnection tech, raised a $136M Series B from LB Investment, Arm, Maverick Silicon, and others (Giacomo Lee/SDxCentral)

SF-based Vals, which develops evaluations and benchmarks to test AI models on real-world tasks, raised a $40M Series A led by a16z at a $400M valuation (Abhinaya Prabhu/Tech Funding News)

Sources: China plans to soon lift a travel ban on Manus founders as the company unwinds its $2B acquisition by Meta; CEO Xiao Hong plans to return to Singapore (Zijing Wu/Financial Times)

Sources: Uber and Rapido discussed merging their India ride-hailing operations in May; talks collapsed after disagreements over the proposed deal's structure (The Economic Times)

Dynatrace agrees to acquire Arize, which specializes in AI observability and the AI development lifecycle, for $915M, including ~$815M in cash (Larry Dignan/Constellation Research)

Sources: OpenAI's repeated exec reshuffles and departures have frustrated some staff as it prepares for an IPO; it disbanded its "preparedness" team in July (Financial Times)

Source and letter: the US plans to tell 35 partner countries they'll be excluded from the US-led Pax Silica initiative if they also join China's rival framework (Michael Martina/Reuters)

How dual-valuation deals became pervasive in the current frenzied AI funding cycle, with prestige VC firms monetizing their brand names by getting better prices (M. Sriram/Newcomer)

Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick says the US is "not in favor" of Apple buying Chinese memory chips, and there have to be "other solutions to the memory issue" (Wall Street Journal)

Sources: Anthropic projects 2028 revenue of ~$190B-$200B, vs. a revenue run rate of $47B in May, as bankers and investors price the company ahead of an IPO (Echo Wang/Reuters)

Waymo receives approval from the California Public Utilities Commission to expand across 18 counties, including Sacramento and San Diego (Fred Lambert/Electrek)

Sources: Nvidia has reworked a deal to finance an OpenAI Ohio data center campus so that it would initially guarantee only half of its planned $250B backstop (Anissa Gardizy/Wall Street Journal)

SpaceX closes its $60B acquisition of Cursor, two months after SpaceX formally announced it had agreed to acquire the startup (Bloomberg)

Z.ai says GLM-5.3 scores 84.5% on CyberGym, vs. Mythos 5's 83.8%, and its most sensitive cybersecurity functions will only be available to verified users (Reuters)

Filing: Nvidia has a nearly $21B stake in SpaceX and a $30B stake in Intel; Nvidia invested as much as $2B in xAI in 2025 and $5B in Intel (Lynn Doan/Bloomberg)

Docs: Anthropic told investors it generated $11.5B+ in revenue, with positive adjusted operating income, in Q2, up from $787M in Q2 2025 and $4.73B in Q1 2026 (Bloomberg)

Amazon adds a clause in its user agreement that seeks to prevent shoppers from filing class-action lawsuits against it, after removing a similar clause in 2021 (Spencer Soper/Bloomberg)

The US OCC conditionally approves a bank charter application for Trump family's World Liberty Financial, allowing it to directly issue its USD1 stablecoin (Reuters)

Investor letter: Thrive's 2022 early-stage $516M fund that invested in OpenAI and SpaceX was worth $3.7B+ as of the end of June, net of fees and other charges (Natasha Mascarenhas/Bloomberg)

Sources: PayPal is in talks to sell itself to a group including Stripe and Advent, which proposed paying $60.50/share in July; PayPal is seeking a higher price (Wall Street Journal)

Risk report: Anthropic raises misalignment risk estimate from very low to low and says it doesn't plan to release a stronger internal model called "Model 2" (Madison Mills/Axios)

Source: OpenAI CFO told investors that enterprise business now generates more revenue than ChatGPT-led consumer business; enterprise customers grew 32% in July (Kate Rooney/CNBC)

Nevada granted Tesla a robotaxi permit, but capped the fleet at 10 vehicles, not 5,000 that Tesla sought, banned airport pickups, and ordered other restrictions (Joann Muller/Axios)

Google adds a toggle in Gemini and Flow to remove visible watermarks from AI-generated images, videos, and music; SynthID watermarks and C2PA metadata remain (Emma Roth/The Verge)

Apple officially opens ad bookings for businesses on Apple Maps ahead of an upcoming full rollout across the US and Canada (Ryan Christoffel/9to5Mac)

Alibaba releases weights for Qwen3.8 models under Apache 2.0 license, including Qwen3.8-27B, which it says beats Qwen3.7-Plus and excels in real-world coding (@alibaba_qwen)

In Q2, "other income", mostly from investment gains, at Amazon and Alphabet totaled ~$121B after taxes and made up 66% and 71%, respectively, of profits (Jonathan Weil/Wall Street Journal)

Source: Greg Brockman is "in founder mode" and getting more involved across every level of OpenAI to build out a leadership team ahead of an expected IPO (Madison Mills/Axios)

France's top court blocks a bill banning social media for under-15s, saying it infringed upon freedom of expression; Macron orders the PM to rework the bill (Reuters)

Sources: stablecoin payments company RedotPay has delayed its plans for a US IPO to 2027 or later, as it seeks regulatory approvals and deals with legal issues (Bloomberg)

Chip equipment maker Lam Research plans to invest $3B+ over five years to expand its global R&D network, as it seeks to increase its experiment capacity by 50%+ (Anzar Mehraj/Reuters)

DeepSeek debuts DeepSeek Harness under the MIT license in developer preview, touting a design where "everything is a plugin" that can be swapped out as a plugin (Carl Franzen/VentureBeat)

Sources: Alibaba is nearing a deal to sell its Lingxi Games to PE firm Trustar Capital at a potential $1.5B+ valuation, as Alibaba continues its reorganization (Bloomberg)

Epic v. Google: in a compliance hearing, a judge orders Google to remove "anticompetitive friction" for installing third-party app stores from its Play Store (Sean Hollister/The Verge)

Sources: JPMorgan Chase terminated its banking relationship with Polymarket in 2025 over regulatory concerns, though it still maintains some ties to the company (Financial Times)

Blackbird and Airtree revalue Canva at $34.9B, down from $42B in 2025, as it struggles in the AI era; Canva's internal valuation falls to $31B, down from $38.9B (Australian Financial Review)

Z.ai debuts GLM-5.3, which uses the same base model as GLM-5.2 with scaled post-training for stronger coding skills, and says it'll release weights in two weeks (Z.ai)

A look at Quincy, a rural Washington farming town of 8,500 that benefited from a data center boom as its poverty rate fell from 29.4% in 2012 to 6.2% in 2024 (Nathaniel Meyersohn/CNN)

The White House puts tariffs on drones and their components, including a 100% levy on "particularly sensitive" models, aiming to cut US reliance on Chinese tech (Demetri Sevastopulo/Financial Times)

Sources: Apple trained a China-specific LLM with Alibaba's support, which would make Apple the first foreign company to offer a proprietary AI model in China (Reuters)

SMIC co-CEO Zhao Haijun says the company raised its prices following negotiations with customers in Q1, and that it will charge more for wafers processed in Q3 (Reuters)

Sources: the CFTC has launched a probe into prediction markets' "mention markets", prompting Kalshi to remove bets on word choices from sports-related offerings (Bobby Allyn/NPR)

Pony AI plans to deploy 2K+ robotaxis across Europe in partnership with Uber and add four more European cities, after Zagreb, with a later Middle East expansion (Bloomberg)