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Thoughts on why Jony Ive, a close friend of Laurene Powell Jobs, isn't named in Apple's OpenAI suit; sources: Apple tests AI to record Genius Bar customer chats (Mark Gurman/Bloomberg)

Alibaba launches preview of 2.4T parameter Qwen3.8 Max, says it's comparable to frontier AI models and second only to Fable 5, will make it "open-weight soon" (Bloomberg)

AI is reshaping entry-level professional services jobs, as companies redesign hiring, training, and workplace culture rather than simply cut junior roles (Andrew Hill/Financial Times)

Sources: Kimi developer Moonshot told investors it is preparing for a Hong Kong IPO in as early as six months; its ARR hit $300M in June, up from $200M in April (Bloomberg)

10h

Analysis: OpenAI and Anthropic employees are donating to campaigns more heavily and cohesively than Google, Meta, and Airbnb employees did post-IPO (Alexandra Lindsay/The San Francisco ...)

10h

A profile of businessman Sebastian Rucci, whose past ventures were subject to legal probes, as he bids to build California's biggest data center, a $10B project (Zusha Elinson/Wall Street Journal)

11h

Big US pizza delivery chains are struggling as apps such as DoorDash and Uber Eats give independent pizzerias and other restaurants greater market access (Haley Zimmerman/Financial Times)

11h

Sources: CIA operative Jonny Gannon spied on G42 to probe its China ties and helped the UAE gain expanded access to US AI chips by allaying US suspicions (Wall Street Journal)

11h

Alibaba open-sources its chip software, following similar plays from Huawei and Moore Threads, as Chinese GPU makers try to break the dominance of Nvidia's CUDA (Ann Cao/South China Morning Post)

13h

Analysis finds 60+ "jacket apps" on the App Store disguised as simple games and utilities that become gambling apps when accessed from Brazilian IP addresses (9to5Mac)

13h

A look at AI's potential impact on insurance-coverage decisions like prior authorization as the Trump admin starts to pilot using AI to evaluate Medicare claims (Joshua Cohen/Ars Technica)

15h

UK's incoming PM Andy Burnham is expected to scrap Keir Starmer's plans for digital ID cards; last year a petition opposing the cards attracted ~3M signatures (Geraldine McKelvie/The Guardian)

19h

Permit hurdles push up costs for AI data centers; Oracle pivoted from gas turbines to costlier fuel cells for its Project Jupiter in NM, costing billions more (Ann Davis Vaughan/The Information)

19h

Prediction market political betting on insider info spreads in DC; sources: WH lawyers raised alarms over anonymous Polymarket bets on the Iran ceasefire timing (Wall Street Journal)

21h

How the Trump administration shifted from a "light-touch" approach to AI policy to an interventionist stance that led to restrictions on top AI models in the US (Leo Schwartz/The Information)

23h

Grassroots org HumansFirst says it organized 142 protests across 42 US states on July 18 against what it calls the "unaccountable" buildout of data centers (Reuters)

A review of Microsoft's 13-inch Surface Laptop shows 8GB of RAM is not enough for a good Windows 11 experience; PC makers have unveiled upcoming 8GB laptops (Antonio G. Di Benedetto/The Verge)

Analysis: recent open weight models lag frontier closed models' cyber capabilities by 4 to 7 months, a narrower gap than the 6 to 10 months through most of 2025 (AI Security Institute)

SEC filing: GameStop says it owns 9.8% of eBay, signaling its intent to press ahead with a bid for the company after its unsolicited $56B offer was rejected (Reuters)

Feathery, which develops an AI operating and decisioning system for financial services, raised $30M in total funding, including a recently completed Series A (FinTech Global)

China's National Data Administration says the country's daily AI token consumption hit 140T in March 2026, up from 100T in December 2025 and 100B in early 2024 (Minxiao Chang/South China Morning Post)

London-based Risk Ledger, which helps organizations manage supply chain cyber risks, raised a £24M Series B led by Axiom Equity, taking total funding to £33.8M (Ionut Arghire/SecurityWeek)

Data infrastructure startup Cribl acquires CardinalOps, which offers AI-powered threat detection tools and had raised $40M, sources say for around $100M (Meir Orbach/CTech)

Sources: China's National AI Industry Investment Fund gained voting rights in DeepSeek by joining its $7.4B round; other investors like Tencent and JD got none (Bloomberg)

Thira, an AI startup founded by Apptio co-founders to develop AI agents that handle back-office tasks such as IT support, raised a $21M seed led by Madrona (Todd Bishop/GeekWire)

Japan plans to buy 27,500 Nvidia Rubin chips to develop a domestic AI foundation model for robots, in a Noetra-led effort that includes SoftBank, Sony, and NEC (Bloomberg)

Anthropic says Claude Fable 5 will be included in Max and Team Premium plans at 50% of limits from July 20 and via usage credits for Pro and Team Standard users (Claude/@claudeai)

China's BrainCo unveils what it says is the world's first integrated "brain-to-robot" platform that lets users control robots using an EEG headset (Minxiao Chang/South China Morning Post)

Memo: the DOJ says federal employees can now download TikTok on government devices, citing TikTok US' transfer of control, lifting a 2022 congressional ban (David Shepardson/Reuters)

Sources: AI inference chip startup Etched is raising funds at a ~$20B valuation and is raising capital at a $10B valuation in a separate round led by Sequoia (Wall Street Journal)

Sources: Trump Media pitched a monthly fee of as much as $100K for the Truth API, with fast access to Trump's posts, for banks, algorithmic traders, and others (Reuters)

Sources: the Trump administration is considering plans for an independent regulator to vet the safety of AI models; the regulator would report to the SEC (Bloomberg)

Filings: a group of major music publishers has agreed to end a copyright infringement dispute with X over the use of their music on the social media platform (Blake Brittain/Reuters)

The Philadelphia Semiconductor Index sank ~10% for the week, its largest weekly fall in over a year, and is now down ~20% from its late-June all-time high (Reuters)

Sources: Valar Atomics, which makes small nuclear reactors intended to power data centers, is in talks to raise $1B at a ~$5B pre-money valuation (The Information)

Apple raises iPhone prices in Japan by up to 11%, likely due to the Japanese yen's depreciation against the US dollar over the past year (Joe Rossignol/MacRumors)

Amazon apologizes after some AWS users received bills as high as $1.5T due to "an issue with unit pricing within the estimated billing computation subsystem" (Robert Booth/The Guardian)

Sources: OpenRouter has discussed a potential sale to a bigger tech company that could value it at billions of dollars, a premium to its $1.3B valuation in May (The Information)

Sources: SpaceX is in talks with the DOD about providing the agency with access to data-center capacity worth billions of dollars for running AI models (Wall Street Journal)

Apple raises the price of Apple Music, with the individual plan up by $1 to $11.99, and some Apple One bundles, citing rising licensing costs (Chance Miller/9to5Mac)

Sources: Apple and the DOJ are in early discussions about settling a 2024 antitrust lawsuit alleging that Apple violated antitrust laws (Bloomberg)

Sources: Meta is in talks to rent computing power from its data centers to Anthropic in a deal that could be worth ~$10B over two years (New York Times)

Models like Kimi K3, Grok 4.5, and Muse 1.1 may prevent the dominance of 2-3 frontier labs with 90% inference margins from hurting other AI ecosystem layers (Gavin Baker/@gavinsbaker)

Kimi K3 hype shouldn't alarm the US about "losing the AI race" to China; K3 is a good model but not frontier-level and likely lacks dangerous cyber capabilities (Transformer)

ASML plans to give its ~45K employees globally a €20K bonus, issued as a share award that vests in 2030, joining other chip industry companies offering payouts (Sarah Jacob/Bloomberg)

AI inference startup General Compute gets a $400M loan from tech investment firm Upper90, seemingly the first deal to use inference-specific chips as collateral (Tim Fernholz/TechCrunch)

Sources: the EU is set to approve the $55B acquisition of EA under its subsidy rules on July 30; the deal includes Saudi Arabia's PIF, Silver Lake, and Affinity (Foo Yun Chee/Reuters)

San Francisco sends legal notices to Apple and Google, demanding they take down 13 AI apps used to make deepfake nude images; Google says it deleted five apps (Matt Burgess/Wired)

Sources: Apple has sent personal legal warnings to ~40 former employees who now work at OpenAI, directing them to preserve documents and meet with its lawyers (Michael Acton/Financial Times)

At the World AI Conference, Xi Jinping touts open-source AI, pledges to help the Global South build AI capabilities, and calls unequal AI access an "injustice" (Reuters)