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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)

The Alphabet Workers Union sends a layoff protections petition with 4,500+ signatures to Sundar Pichai, calling for guaranteed severance, buyouts, and more (Sanya Mansoor/The Guardian)

Sources: Z.ai is on track to achieve an annual recurring revenue of $1B, a first for a Chinese AI company, after achieving its full-year sales target in July (Bloomberg)

Sources: Dave Brown, the outgoing SVP of AWS Compute, AI, and Platform, will join Meta in the coming weeks, where he will work on Meta's data center build-out (Anissa Gardizy/Wall Street Journal)

Sources: Tata plans India's first large-scale chip fab, in Dholera, Gujarat, mostly using 90nm nodes, a far humbler start than the 28nm node it touted earlier (Bloomberg)

In an internal meeting, Satya Nadella criticized Claude Fable 5 for being "editorially controlled", saying its refusal to do "any random thing" makes no sense (Jordan Novet/CNBC)

Source: Demis Hassabis plans to hold meetings with US policymakers in Washington next week about his proposed US-based Standards Body for "Frontier-class" AI (Shirin Ghaffary/Bloomberg)

Court doc: a US federal jury says Japanese chipmaker Kioxia owes Viasat $229M for infringing Viasat's patent for flash memory that helps devices use less energy (Blake Brittain/Reuters)

Source: Microsoft plans to release an AI security tool this month that uses models from Anthropic, OpenAI, and itself, as a cost-effective alternative to Mythos (Aaron Holmes/The Information)

Kalshi launches a biotech pilot, starting with 13 biotech contracts offering wagers on the outcomes of late-stage clinical drug trials and regulatory decisions (Madison Muller/Bloomberg)

Sources: Coatue is leading a $3B investment in Databricks that values the data analytics software company at $188B, a 40% increase from its December valuation (Wall Street Journal)

US stocks of chip, memory, and storage makers fell sharply on Thursday; SNDK closed down 12.63%, STX 10%, Western Digital 9.15%, Intel 5.84%, and Micron 5.65% (George Steer/Financial Times)

Memo: MLB bans the use of league-provided dugout iPads to access GenAI for in-game strategy calls; sources say at least a third of teams used AI this way (Eno Sarris/The Athletic)

Filing: South Korean authorities conducted an on-site search of Chinese chipmaker Montage's offices in connection with potential competition law violations (Nikita Maria Jino/Reuters)

Sources: Dassault Systèmes is in talks to buy drug trial software maker ArisGlobal from Nordic Capital for about $2B, extending its push into life sciences (Financial Times)

The EU accepts X's plan to meet DSA transparency obligations and give researchers access to data, giving X six months to implement it, following a €120M fine (Foo Yun Chee/Reuters)

Source: UK robotics startup Humanoid raised $150M in the first tranche of a Series A at a $1.2B pre-money valuation and seeks another $80M-$100M by September (Rocket Drew/The Information)