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Techmeme

Microsoft cuts Xbox Game Pass Ultimate price from $29.99 to $22.99/month and PC Game Pass from $16.49 to $13.99, but both tiers won't get new Call of Duty games (Tom Warren/The Verge)

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Filings: crypto PACs amassed a ~$180M war chest for the 2026 midterms, including Fairshake's $166M, giving them the ability to outspend some GOP super PACs (Bloomberg)

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Anthropic started requiring government-issued photo IDs and selfies from some users to prevent access from US adversaries like China, Russia, and North Korea (Juro Osawa/The Information)

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OpenAI enables cost-per-click ads inside ChatGPT, setting bids at between $3 and $5 per click, in addition to CPMs (Digiday)

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Humble unveils a fully electric cabless autonomous truck called the Humble Hauler and comes out of stealth with a $24M seed led by Eclipse (Lily Mae Lazarus/Fortune)

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Draft of SpaceX's confidential IPO prospectus: Elon Musk increased his stake in SpaceX last year by purchasing $1.4B of stock from current and former employees (The Information)

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Australia-based Syenta, which aims to use electrochemical "stamping" to speed up chip manufacturing, raised $26M and says Pat Gelsinger will join its board (Stephen Nellis/Reuters)

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Stripe and Paradigm-backed Tempo launches a "stablecoin advisory" for businesses and is working with DoorDash to let delivery workers get paid in stablecoins (Jack Kubinec/Fortune)

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YouTube makes its deepfake detection tool available to anyone at high risk of having their likeness abused, expanding it from public officials and politicians (Alex Weprin/The Hollywood Reporter)

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Trump says his administration had "some very good talks" with Anthropic during a WH meeting last week and "it's possible" there will be a deal with DOD (Ashley Capoot/CNBC)

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Tim Cook had an extraordinary run and impeccable timing in stepping down, with Apple in a better place than it has ever been as AI becomes its next big test (Ben Thompson/Stratechery)

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Sources: Revolut is aiming for a valuation of $150B to $200B in an IPO; founder Nik Storonsky said this week that Revolut would IPO in 2028 at the earliest (Financial Times)

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UK's Ofcom launches an investigation into Telegram over concerns of CSAM being shared on the platform and it being used by predators to groom children (Muvija M/Reuters)

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The UK proposes an amendment to the Children's Wellbeing and Schools Bill to ban smartphones in all schools in England; a ban was previously just advisory (Sally Weale/The Guardian)

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Tim Cook's 15-year legacy by the numbers: Apple's market cap grew from $350B in 2011 to $4T+ now, net income rose ~700% to $112B for FY 2025, and more (Vlad Savov/Bloomberg)

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A profile of John Ternus, a mechanical engineer by background, who joined Apple in 2001 and whose biggest success was helping Mac's transition to Apple Silicon (Rolfe Winkler/Wall Street Journal)

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Longtime colleagues say John Ternus will bring back Jobs-era decisiveness, shifting from Cook's era when decisions were made collectively by top executives (Mark Gurman/Bloomberg)

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A look at EU efforts to cut reliance on US tech; study: Amazon, Microsoft, and Google hold ~70% of EU cloud and US vendors get 80% of enterprise software spend (Politico)

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Tim Cook reshaped Apple in his own image and exits as CEO on his own terms, seemingly picking the right successor in John Ternus, much like Jobs did with Cook (John Gruber/Daring Fireball)

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A look at transnational scam syndicates in Cambodia, running hundreds of online scam operations and call centers and infiltrating Cambodia's ruling class (Wall Street Journal)

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Chinese PCB maker Victory Giant surges ~57% in its Hong Kong trading debut after raising ~$2.6B in its IPO, the largest in the city so far this year (Eunice Xu/South China Morning Post)

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Sources: Jeff Bezos' Project Prometheus is close to a $10B fundraising deal, which includes an initial $6.2B raise in November, at a $38B post-money valuation (Financial Times)

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In an email to employees, Johny Srouji details newly combined hardware engineering and hardware technologies division, organized across five key areas (Mark Gurman/Bloomberg)

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Apple says Tim Cook, as executive chairman, "will assist with certain aspects of the company, including engaging with policymakers around the world" (Marcus Mendes/9to5Mac)

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The US Air Force cancels RTX's ground-control network for the US' next generation of GPS satellites after years of delays and cost overruns (Anthony Capaccio/Bloomberg)

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Q&A with Canva CEO Melanie Perkins on the company's growth in enterprise, competing with AI labs, token pricing, investing in its own models, and more (Nilay Patel/The Verge)

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A US jury finds Uber liable for a sexual assault by a driver in 2019, handing Uber a second consecutive defeat in its first trials of 3,000+ pending lawsuits (Emily Steel/New York Times)

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OpenAI rolls out Chronicle, which builds memories from screen captures to make Codex more aware of context, as a research preview for Pro subscribers on macOS (Zac Hall/9to5Mac)

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John Ternus, senior VP of Hardware Engineering, will become Apple's next CEO on September 1; Tim Cook will become executive chairman of Apple's board (CNBC)

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Apple says Johny Srouji, who most recently served as senior VP of Hardware Technologies, will assume an expanded role leading Hardware Engineering (Apple)

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Amazon agrees to invest up to $25B in Anthropic, on top of the $8B that it has already invested; Anthropic commits to spend $100B+ on AWS over the next 10 years (Ashley Capoot/CNBC)

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John Ternus, senior VP of Hardware Engineering, will become Apple's next CEO on September 1; Tim Cook will become executive chairman of Apple's board (Apple)

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Microsoft pauses new GitHub Copilot signups for Pro, Pro+, and Student tiers, tightens usage limits, removes Opus models from Pro, and limits Opus 4.7 to Pro+ (The GitHub Blog)

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Docs: Microsoft plans to eventually move GitHub Copilot from request- to token-based billing, as the week-over-week cost to run it has nearly doubled since Jan. (Edward Zitron/Ed Zitron's Where's ...)

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RaveDAO's RAVE has lost $6.6B+ in market cap and its price has sunk ~98% since Saturday, after ZachXBT called on exchanges to probe if it was being manipulated (André Beganski/Decrypt)

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A profile of far-right influencer Nick Fuentes, who has been kicked off most mainstream social media but made ~$900K from "fanatical" donors since early 2025 (Washington Post)

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Filing in California's antitrust lawsuit: CA accuses Amazon of price-fixing by pressuring brands to ask competing retailers to increase prices on some products (David McCabe/New York Times)

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A new media company called MTS launches for "monitoring the situation" across tech, business, politics, and culture, with backing from a16z and others (a16z)

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WhatsApp says it is testing a new subscription called WhatsApp Plus, which includes features like expanded pinned chats, custom lists, and new chat themes (Ivan Mehta/TechCrunch)

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Moonshot introduces Kimi K2.6, an open-weight model that it says shows strong improvements in long-horizon coding tasks, available under a modified MIT License (Kimi AI)

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Deezer says AI-generated tracks now account for 44% of daily uploads, totaling ~75K tracks per day and 2M+ per month, but account for just 1-3% of consumption (Aisha Malik/TechCrunch)

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Sources: UK-based CuspAI, which aims to use AI for discovering new materials, is in discussions to raise at least $200M, taking its valuation to over $1B (Yazhou Sun/Bloomberg)

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China's iQiyi plans to overhaul its streaming service into an AI content hub, with an app redesign and Nadou Pro AI tool handling "every aspect of film-making" (Bloomberg)

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A look at creators and organizations warning of AI's existential threats to humanity; some organizations sponsor social media posts and partner with influencers (Nitasha Tiku/Washington Post)

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Adobe introduces CX Enterprise, an AI agent-based platform that aims to help corporate customers automate digital marketing and other functions (Belle Lin/Wall Street Journal)

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Filing: Michael Saylor's Strategy bought $2.54B in bitcoin over the past seven days, its largest acquisition since November 2024; Strategy owns ~$61B in bitcoin (Matt Haldane/Bloomberg)

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Sources: Google has created strike team to improve its coding models; Sergey Brin told DeepMind staffers that they must aggressively pivot to catch up on agents (Erin Woo/The Information)

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Huawei launches the Pura X Max, a passport-style foldable with a 5.4-inch cover display and a 7.7-inch internal display, in China, starting at ~$1,613 (Jess Weatherbed/The Verge)

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A Blue Origin rocket failed to correctly place a BlueBird satellite from satellite networking company AST into its intended orbit; ASTS falls 7%+ (Jake Rudnitsky/Bloomberg)

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Nigeria-based Terra, which makes pilotless drones and defense systems, raised $34M from Joe Lonsdale, Lux Capital, and others, as jihadist groups drive demand (Nduka Orjinmo/Bloomberg)

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