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How "synthetic insider" attacks raise the stakes for corporate cyber defense; a Verizon analysis of 22K incidents finds 12% were carried out by internal actors (Hannah Murphy/Financial Times)

Sources: parts of the Trump administration are reigniting efforts to implement de facto bans on foreign open-source models, as Chinese AI models gain momentum (Maria Curi/Axios)

Chinese open models like Kimi K3 and Qwen3.8 Max shift the industry's focus back to marginal costs and cost of goods sold, as inference costs scale with revenue (Ben Thompson/Stratechery)

An interview with Expedia CEO Ariane Gorin, who calls AI "a growth opportunity", as she prepares the online travel company to face potential disruption from AI (Stephanie Stacey/Financial Times)

How PayPal CEO Enrique Lores, appointed earlier in 2026 to revive the payments pioneer, may handle Stripe and Advent's takeover offer, based on his HP tenure (Wall Street Journal)

The EU fines Alibaba's online marketplace AliExpress €550M for failing to do enough to prevent the sale of illegal products, the largest DSA fine to date (Barbara Moens/Financial Times)

Sources: Chinese startup Moonshot AI is seeking formal approval from investors to start a Hong Kong IPO process, which could happen in as soon as six months (Juro Osawa/The Information)

A look at Israel's influence campaign in the US that's included millions of AI-driven texts and a $45M+ contract with ex-Trump campaign strategist Brad Parscale (Wall Street Journal)

Trial lawyers, with big liability litigation earnings, are among the most active lobbyists against autonomous vehicles, even as data shows clear safety benefits (Alex Tabarrok/Marginal Revolution)

How smart home devices have given abusive partners a new tool to remotely manipulate, intimidate, and disturb their victims, in a form of tech-assisted abuse (Financial Times)

Cambridge-based CuspAI raised a $450M Series B led by Kleiner Perkins and NEA, and launches a coalition for AI materials discovery for chip and other industries (Bloomberg)

Retail traders are shifting from Big Tech to stocks boosted by AI like SK Hynix and Marvell; five of the Magnificent Seven stocks trail the market this year (Hannah Erin Lang/Wall Street Journal)

LSEG: Morgan Stanley collected $2.3B in debt and equity capital market fees in H1 2026, up from $1.4B in H1 2025, driven by AI infrastructure financing deals (Financial Times)

Blackstone agrees to invest an undisclosed sum in South Korea-based Futronic, which makes actuators used in industrial robots, sources say at a ~$675M valuation (Manuel Baigorri/Bloomberg)

Sources detail Kalshi's and Polymarket's efforts to undermine each other, including lobbying regulators, trying to derail deals, and waging influence campaigns (New York Times)

Filing: Zhongji Innolight, China's leading optical transceiver maker, aims for an $8B Hong Kong IPO, the city's largest since Alibaba's $12.9B debut in 2019 (Dave Sebastian/Bloomberg)

Draft: the Trump admin plans to use the UN General Assembly to push a global "freedom of expression" declaration that EU lawmakers call an attack on tech rules (Eliza Gkritsi/Politico)

As memory stocks fall, investors worry capacity expansion could lead to oversupply, while others believe AI demand will break the industry's boom-and-bust cycle (Financial Times)

SK Group Chair Chey Tae-won says the memory shortage has prompted governments to intervene for domestic industries, and SK Hynix must expand capacity faster (Moon Joon-hyun/The Korea Herald)

Sources: the EU Parliament plans to roll out EPGenAI Hub to MEPs and staff as early as Sept., letting them access Meta, OpenAI, Anthropic, and Mistral models (Max Griera/Politico)

France's National Gambling Authority blocks access to Polymarket's website, citing concerns of exposing users to significant losses and manipulated trading (Sudip Kar-Gupta/Reuters)

10h

TSMC CFO Wendell Huang says TSMC will use its new $100B US commitment, announced last week, to expand its Arizona capacity amid a "multi-year demand mega trend" (Jenny Lee/CNBC)

10h

As companies stay private longer, VC firms, like Spark, Gigafund, and Greenoaks, are investing in companies later on and buying stakes without seeking influence (Wall Street Journal)

11h

A look at the nonprofit Current AI, backed by $400M in commitments from many partners including $100M from France, that's funding open, public AI infrastructure (Kate Park/TechCrunch)

13h

Hugging Face says it used the open-weight GLM-5.2 hosted on its own compute for breach forensics, after US frontier model safety guardrails blocked the requests (Edward Targett/The Stack)

14h

Hugging Face says an agentic AI system hacked its data pipeline, accessing several internal clusters and credentials; its own AI-based triage caught the breach (Hugging Face)

15h

Moonshot AI pauses new subscriptions, saying that over the past two days Kimi K3 demand nearly passed the limit of its capacity, and also reworks its plan tiers (@kimi_moonshot)

16h

As many companies cut AI costs by using cheaper models, some, like Shopify, go all-in on frontier models, barring engineers from using anything else (Belle Lin/Wall Street Journal)

17h

Kalshi and Polymarket bets on the FIFA World Cup final top $5.69B; Dune Analytics says total wagers on the platforms surpassed $50B for the first time in June (Lauren McCarthy/New York Times)

19h

Sources: Apple is piloting a system in Apple Stores called Live Notes that lets Genius Bar staff make transcripts and summaries of conversations with customers (Mark Gurman/Bloomberg)

21h

Alibaba launches a 2.4T parameter Qwen3.8 Max preview that it says rivals frontier AI models and is second only to Fable 5, plans to make it "open-weight soon" (Bloomberg)

23h

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)

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 ...)

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)

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)

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)

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)

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)

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)

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)

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)

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)

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)

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)