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Sources: the US and China plan to hold AI talks in September when President Xi visits the US, realizing a significant outcome of the Trump-Xi summit in May (Laurie Chen/Reuters)

Memo: the Army CIO reinstates limits on Army members' AI token usage; docs show the DOD's Ask Sage tool can access 100M tokens via an annual "enterprise pack" (Vittoria Elliott/Wired)

Sources: BlackRock leads a $12B+ debt sale for Meta's new El Paso data center, as Meta signs a lease for a BlackRock-backed data-center project in Pennsylvania (Wall Street Journal)

A Washington judge grants a request to temporarily block Kalshi from offering sports-related bets in the state, citing a breach of the state gambling law (Timmy Shen/The Block)

Sources: China is weighing tightening AI and chip tech export controls and is consulting leading domestic AI companies, in a bid to slow advanced tech exports (Financial Times)

Sources: TSMC plans to hike advanced and mature node prices by up to 10% in 2027, plus a 10%-15% premium for advanced chip orders exceeding original forecasts (Cheng Ting-Fang/Nikkei Asia)

A profile of Sarah Guo, Greylock's youngest GP before she founded Conviction in 2022, which has since backed six of the 21 AI-native companies now worth $10B+ (Dom Cooke/Colossus)

GitHub says individuals and orgs have invested $100M+ in open source maintainers and projects via GitHub Sponsors since 2019, with $10M in the past five months (Stephanie Lincoln/The GitHub Blog)

Sony Music files a second copyright suit against Udio, alleging the AI music company copied 30,117 recordings without permission to train its AI models (Murray Stassen/Music Business Worldwide)

Singapore-based Ant International, a payments company which spun out of Ant Group in 2024, raised $1.2B from investors including Ant Group and Alibaba (Reuters)

Study: off-balance sheet debt at Alphabet, Microsoft, Amazon, Meta, and Oracle grew an estimated ~8x since 2022 to ~$1.65T, above ~$1.35T in balance sheet debt (Kohei Yamada/Nikkei Asia)

South Korean customs data: for the first 20 days of July, the country's chip exports rose 180% YoY to $22.1B, and computer-related product shipments rose ~232% (Heesu Lee/Bloomberg)

How Google's AI Search is endangering the open web; Cloudflare says that between June 2025 and April 2026 human traffic to many businesses' websites fell ~40% (Kate Conger/New York Times)

Researchers found sandbox escapes or boundary bypasses in Cursor, Codex, Gemini CLI, and Antigravity by writing files trusted tools later use; most are patched (Ax Sharma/BleepingComputer)

Samsung debuts Samsung Galaxy Card, a Visa from Barclays that offers 5% cash rewards for purchases directly from Samsung, its first US credit card (John Velasco/Tom's Guide)

A judge approves Anthropic's $1.5B settlement with authors, the first major US case of its kind to settle; some authors opted out and have other ongoing suits (Blake Brittain/Reuters)

Source: Ancestry.com pitches a risky $1.75B term loan at 4 to 4.25 percentage points above the benchmark to refinance debt from its 2020 Blackstone acquisition (Bloomberg)

Snap reaches a deal to settle the second case set for trial over social media harm to minors, following TikTok and YouTube, leaving Meta as the only defendant (Bloomberg)

X relaunches its Android app after a year-long rewrite from scratch; Nikita Bier calls it "one of the largest engineering projects" in the company's history (Sarah Perez/TechCrunch)

Taiwan indicts a former TSMC executive for allegedly stealing trade secrets, in what authorities say is the first National Security Act case involving China (Cheng Ting-Fang/Nikkei Asia)

Natural, which aims to help companies let their AI agents make autonomous payments, raised a $30M Series A led by Forerunner, bringing its total raised to $40M (Marina Temkin/TechCrunch)

OpenAI paused internal access to an unreleased model that disproved the Erdos unit distance conjecture after it repeatedly found ways to act outside its sandbox (OpenAI)

Anduril and Archer unveil an autonomous aircraft platform designed for commercial and military uses, along with an autonomous attack rotorcraft called Thunder (Reuters)

Cybersecurity companies say hackers are exploiting vulnerable WordPress versions to take over websites; WordPress patched two critical security flaws last week (Lorenzo Franceschi-Bicchierai/TechCrunch)

Source: Z.ai completed construction of a 1 GW data center housing only Chinese chips; Z.ai has built or operates several computing clusters each with 10K+ chips (Bloomberg)

Chicago-based Empirical Security, which uses AI to help companies predict threats by monitoring exploited vulnerabilities, raised a $25M Series A (Chris Metinko/Axios)

Levent Alpöge, a mathematician who works at Anthropic, says he was able to disprove the 87-year-old Jacobian conjecture with the help of Fable 5 (Matthew Sparkes/New Scientist)

Infinity, founded by Jeremy Nixon, the creator of hacker network community AGI House, to build an inference library that runs on all chips, raised a $15M seed (Dominic-Madori Davis/TechCrunch)

CAISI Director Chris Fall is resigning after taking over the federal AI testing institute in April; NIST Director Arvind Raman will serve as acting director (Maria Curi/Axios)

Source: Tencent is in talks to acquire Israeli game developer SuperPlay in a deal valuing SuperPlay at $1B-$1.5B; Playtika acquired SuperPlay in 2024 for $690M (Golan Hazani/CTech)

Billionaire-backed Building A Better California reserves $87M in TV ad time to oppose California's proposed one-time wealth tax; Sergey Brin put $82M into BABC (New York Times)

Chinese open models are proper competition that should be welcomed, not something to ban or treat as a danger, and open-sourcing is an old business strategy (Bill Gurley/Washington Post)

Sensor Tower: the number of new apps released in Apple's App Store doubled to ~560K in H1, vs. the ~600K added in all of 2025, as vibecoded apps flood the store (Kalley Huang/New York Times)

UK government data: ~35% of UK businesses with 10+ staff use AI, up from 12% in September 2023, and the average number of AI tools grew from 1.4 in 2023 to 1.6 (Delphine Strauss/Financial Times)

AMD plans to ship Helios, its first rack-scale AI system to rival Nvidia, later in 2026 to Microsoft, Meta, OpenAI, and others; Helios costs an estimated $5M+ (Katie Tarasov/CNBC)

Sources: Google is developing a specialized server chip, informally dubbed "Frozen v2", that integrates its Gemini AI model blueprint into the silicon, for 2028 (The Information)

How "synthetic insider" attacks raise the stakes for corporate cyber defense; a Verizon analysis of ~22K incidents found 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 in February to revive the payments pioneer, may handle Stripe and Advent's takeover offer, based on his decades at HP (Wall Street Journal)

The EU fines Alibaba's online marketplace AliExpress €550M for failing to prevent the sale of illegal products on its platform, 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)