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Techmeme

A look back at BitTorrent, launched by Bram Cohen 25 years ago, and how media piracy fueled its growth while its architecture shielded it from legal liability (Janko Roettgers/The Verge)

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Sources: Anthropic moves to close loopholes that let Chinese firms like Ant use its models via workarounds including cloud providers and overseas subsidiaries (Financial Times)

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Blackstone's QTS abandons plans to build its portion of a 2,100-acre data center campus in Virginia, following years of local opposition and legal challenges (Dawn Lim/Bloomberg)

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Letter: chip sector group SEMI, including Micron and Samsung, warns Scott Bessent US policies affecting prices or production capacity would worsen the shortage (Maggie Eastland/Bloomberg)

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Sources: Alexandr Wang said Meta's model currently in training, codenamed Watermelon, matches GPT-5.5 and uses an "order of magnitude more compute than Avocado" (Business Insider)

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Sources: Anthropic's bankers have hired UK law firm Freshfields to advise on its IPO; it also advised on Google's acquisition of Wiz and ServiceNow's Armis deal (The Information)

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Spotify removed 500K+ streams of Malcolm Todd's Earrings after a 70% surge in 24 hours sent it to #1 on Spotify USA and coincided with suspicious Kalshi wagers (Stephanie Stacey/Financial Times)

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Finnish quantum computing company IQM closed up 2% in its Nasdaq debut Thursday after going public via a SPAC merger at a ~$1.9B valuation (Anna Heim/TechCrunch)

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Sources: Crusoe is in active talks to raise ~$3B in a funding round expected to value the company in the ~$30B range, up from a ~$10B valuation in October (Bloomberg)

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At a town hall, Mark Zuckerberg said Meta's AI agent development has not accelerated as expected and its reorganization was not as "clean" as it could have been (Katie Paul/Reuters)

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Source: crypto payments and settlement startup Mesh is raising funding led by Binance at a ~$2B valuation, six months after raising $75M at a $1B valuation (Lucinda Shen/Axios)

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Travel app Hopper agrees to a $35M FTC settlement over allegations the company misled users by imposing hidden fees and misrepresenting the total costs (Lauren Forristal/TechCrunch)

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Internal memo: Tesla plans to impose a $200-per-week limit for staff's AI spending beginning July 6; the tally excludes beta versions of xAI products (Grace Kay/The Information)

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Sources: ElevenLabs held early talks with investors on a secondary share sale for staff that would value the startup at ~$22B; it was valued at $11B in February (Bloomberg)

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UK-based StirlingX, which develops secure data intelligence systems for defense and critical infrastructure, raised a $20M Series A, following a $11M seed (Cate Lawrence/Tech.eu)

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Memo: Microsoft is merging the consumer and enterprise versions of its Copilot chatbots into a single app featuring coding tools and AI agents dubbed AutoPilot (The Information)

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Tripo AI, which is developing 3D foundation models and world models for use in games, raised $150M, a month after it said it raised $200M (Dean Takahashi/GamesBeat)

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Emails disclosed in a court filing detail the uneasy back-and-forth between Dario Amodei and DOD's Emil Michael and how Anthropic's relationship with DOD soured (Wall Street Journal)

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Sources: Palmer Luckey's Erebor Bank is in talks to raise money at an $8B+ valuation, up from $4.35B in 2025; its deposits are up from $1.1B in March to $4.05B (Bloomberg)

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Kling AI, the Kuaishou AI video generator spin-off, raised $2B at a $15B pre-money valuation and says the round could extend to as much as $3B (Zheping Huang/Bloomberg)

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Sources: Anthropic has initiated early-stage development of a custom AI server chip and held preliminary discussions with Samsung about manufacturing the chip (Qianer Liu/The Information)

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Global VC funding hit a record $510B in H1 2026, with OpenAI and Anthropic accounting for $217B, or 43% of the total; in Q2, VCs put $205B into 5,000+ startups (Gené Teare/Crunchbase News)

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Microsoft invests $2.5B and forms the Microsoft Frontier Company to embed 6,000 forward-deployed engineers with customers to help deploy AI systems (Todd Bishop/GeekWire)

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Sam Altman proposes a "US-led international forum" to establish AI standards, provide analysis of capabilities and risks, and make AI models available to allies (Sam Altman/Financial Times)

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SoftBank and its telecom unit launch SB Neo to offer AI chips and cloud services to big companies, aiming to provide 10GW of capacity in the US by around 2030 (Min-Jeong Lee/Bloomberg)

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Z.ai launches ZCode, an "Agentic Development Environment" purpose-built for its GLM-5.2 model; Z.ai's GLM Coding Plan tiers range from $16.20 to $144 per month (Michael Nuñez/VentureBeat)

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Filings: Trump purchased up to $5M each in Broadcom, Meta, Amazon, Apple, Microsoft, and Nvidia stocks on July 23, the same day he unveiled his AI action plan (New York Times)

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Amazon says Leo now has 396 satellites in low-Earth orbit, following a July 1 launch, which is "enough to support continuous service across initial latitudes" (Thomas Ricker/The Verge)

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German software giant SAP says it's encouraging workers to invent new, more valuable jobs aided by AI, to try to avoid layoffs; SAP cut nearly 10K staff in 2024 (Jim Tankersley/New York Times)

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The US DOJ says Peter Stokes, a 19-year-old dual US-Estonian citizen, was extradited from Finland to face charges of participating in Scattered Spider hacks (Joe Warminsky/The Record)

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President Trump says Micron will invest $250M in Trump Accounts; Micron says it will come via an employee matching program and a $250 deposit in some US states (New York Times)

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Cloudflare sets a September 15 deadline for AI companies to differentiate their web crawlers into search, AI training, and AI agents or face being blocked (Samantha Elkins/NBC News)

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Germany-based Quantum Systems, which sells surveillance drones used by Ukraine, raised $1.2B led by Blackstone, Noteus, Airbus, and Advent at an ~$8B valuation (Yazhou Sun/Bloomberg)

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An interview with Amazon SVP of Devices Panos Panay on designing custom chips for Echo and Fire TV devices, experimenting with AI-enabled gadgets, and more (Arjun Kharpal/CNBC)

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The European Court of Justice rules that Google's earlier defeat against a €4.1B European Commission penalty over abusing Android's market power should stand (Bloomberg)

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A look at the CSOP SK Hynix Leveraged ETF, which trades in Hong Kong and has ballooned into a $13B fund, becoming the world's largest single-stock leveraged ETF (Bloomberg)

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A survey of US adults finds 56% support banning social media for under-16s, while 21% oppose; majorities across demographic and partisan groups support a ban (Pew Research Center)

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Nansen: about two-thirds of Trump's memecoin investors are currently in the red, and 85% of World Liberty's $WLFI buyers on the secondary market are underwater (Wall Street Journal)

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UK lawyers say the tide of AI-assisted employment claims is straining an already overloaded employment tribunal system, whose backlog has doubled in two years (Delphine Strauss/Financial Times)

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CarbonSix, which is developing AI automation and robotic intelligence tech for manufacturing, raised a $40M Series A co-led by DSC Investment and LB Investment (FinSMEs)

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Indian IT company Persistent Systems offers to acquire its Germany-based peer Nagarro for $1.45B; Indian IT companies are ramping up M&A as AI reshapes growth (Sayan Chakraborty/Nikkei Asia)

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An EU draft proposal dated June 30 shows the bloc is weighing weaker climate impact rules for gas-powered data centers, after heavy lobbying from tech groups (Financial Times)

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Nvidia promises to financially backstop young cloud providers like Firmus that rent out its AI chips, in exchange for a revenue share through a new program (Phoebe Liu/The Information)

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Sources: OpenAI has discussed giving a 5% stake to the US government as the company seeks to clear political obstacles by securing buy-in from the Trump admin (Financial Times)

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Sources: data center operator Switch seeks a ~$2B funding round valuing the company at ~$50B, including debt, led by a $400M investment from Andreessen Horowitz (Bloomberg)

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Sources: Apple has told suppliers to prepare to produce ~10M foldable iPhones in 2026, up from 7M-8M previously, and 80M iPhones in total across new models (Nikkei Asia)

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Sources: Apple is in negotiations to buy chips from CXMT and YMTC, two Chinese semiconductor makers on a Pentagon blacklist, for use in devices sold in China (Bloomberg)

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X launches Live Studio, an updated livestreaming hub within Creator Studio with a simplified desktop setup, chat control options, custom thumbnails, and more (Andrew Hutchinson/Social Media Today)

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India-based short video app ShareChat's parent company Mohalla Tech plans to raise up to $400M in an IPO in 2027; ShareChat has ~65M micro-drama viewers monthly (Sankalp Phartiyal/Bloomberg)

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Amazon's emissions rose 16%+ YoY in 2025, driven by data center construction and delivery fuel, while Google's "ambition-based" emissions jumped 18% YoY in 2025 (Bloomberg)

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