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Q&A with CuspAI's Max Welling on its AI Materials Foundry, partnerships with Nvidia and others, Geoff Hinton and Yann LeCun joining its advisory board, and more (John Thornhill/Financial Times)

Though Google's SynthID tech for watermarking AI images is hard to break, there will always be ways to create AI-generated content without any labeling (Ryan Whitwam/Ars Technica)

A look at ByteDance's efforts to become China's leading company across all aspects of AI, from frontier models and video generation to infrastructure and chips (Financial Times)

Airlines are using AI to adjust seat prices more quickly, capturing more revenue while narrowing the pricing gaps that once let travelers find bargain fares (K Oanh Ha/Bloomberg)

As the UK slips in Ookla's mobile download speed and Opensignal's network quality rankings, operators blame planning rules and low prices for underinvestment (Financial Times)

In Q4, Microsoft's Anthropic investment saw a $3.2B gain, while its OpenAI investment was marked down ~$600M but has generated a $5B gain on a full-year basis (Julie Bort/TechCrunch)

The FCC's ban on foreign "advanced robotic devices" includes any new ground-based, software-controlled wireless robot over 4.4 pounds, including robot vacuums (Sean Hollister/The Verge)

Onyx Security, whose platform enables enterprises to deploy AI agents securely, raised a $113M Series B led by Bessemer, taking its total funding to $153M (Meir Orbach/CTech)

Samsung reports Q2 revenue up 130% YoY to ~$118.1B, vs. ~$118.9B est., and operating profit up 1,814% to ~$61.46B, vs. ~$60.68B est., on robust AI demand (Jenny Lee/CNBC)

Microsoft reports Q4 capex up 70% YoY to $41B; an accounting change lowers its 2026 capex forecast to $175B from $190B, while spending plans remain unchanged (Reuters)

In an internal meeting, OpenAI finance chief Sarah Friar told employees that the company's annualized recurring revenue in July was higher than in Q2 as a whole (CNBC)

Source and docs: Intel has given access to its Atom processor tech to Rosaic, a new startup led by Amarjit Gill; Lip-Bu Tan and Gill are longtime co-investors (Reuters)

Source: the European Commission plans to designate OpenAI's ChatGPT and Roblox as "very large online platforms" under the DSA as soon as August (Bloomberg)

Robinhood reports Q2 revenue up 32% YoY to $1.31B, vs. $1.29B est., event contracts revenue up over 10x to $156M, and crypto revenue down 38% to $100M (Bill Peters/MarketWatch)

Microsoft reports Q4 Windows OEM and Devices revenue down 7% YoY, Xbox hardware revenue down 13%, and Xbox content and services revenue down 10% (Emma Roth/The Verge)

Arm reports Q1 revenue up 22% YoY to $1.29B, vs. $1.26B est., royalty revenue up 22% YoY to $715M, and forecasts Q2 profit above estimates (Reuters)

Meta reports Reality Labs Q2 revenue up 16% YoY to $431M, vs. $423.4M est., and a $4.62B operating loss, vs. $5.07B estimated (Jonathan Vanian/CNBC)

Meta reports free cash flow of $784M in Q2, down 91% YoY, and now expects 2026 capex to be $130B-$145B, compared with its prior forecast of $125B-$145B (Reuters)

Qualcomm reports Q3 revenue down 4% YoY to $9.95B, forecasts Q4 profit below est., and expects revenue from Apple to fall faster; QCOM drops 7%+ after hours (Reuters)

Meta reports $2.4B in charges related to legal proceedings in Q2 and $1.18B in severance expenses in connection with the May 2026 layoff of about 8,000 staff (Todd Spangler/Variety)

Microsoft reports Q4 Azure and other cloud services revenue up 43% YoY, vs. 40% est., and says Azure revenue in FY 2026 exceeded $100B for the first time (Jordan Novet/CNBC)

Meta reports Q2 revenue up 28% YoY to $60.8B, family DAP up 3% to 3.6B on average for June, forecasts Q3 revenue below estimates; META drops 8%+ after hours (Meta)

Microsoft reports Q4 revenue up 18% YoY to $90.1B, vs. $87.62B est., and says 365 Copilot has 30M+ paid seats, up from 20M+ in Q3; MSFT jumps 7%+ after hours (Microsoft)

Waymo gradually resumes freeway routes, starting with Phoenix, more than two months after suspending them to improve performance around construction zones (Kirsten Korosec/TechCrunch)

Google launches its Lyria 3.5 music generation model in Google Flow Music, highlighting improved musicality, lyrics, vocal quality, and creative control (Google)

Thinking Machines Lab co-founder Lilian Weng is returning to OpenAI after announcing earlier this week she was leaving TML over workload-related health concerns (The Information)

OpenAI launches ChatGPT for Academic Researchers, giving 100K scientists, mathematicians, and engineers free access to its frontier models through 2027 (Ina Fried/Axios)

Anthropic's cryptanalysis results on HAWK and AES show AI can now understand existing cryptanalysis results, turn them into new attacks, and even extend them (Matthew Green/A Few Thoughts ...)

Investors continue to dump chipmaker stocks on Wednesday following disappointing results from SK Hynix; Sandisk is down 7.5%+, Arm 6.5%+, and AMD 6.5%+ (Financial Times)

Qualcomm says it has signed a 10-year deal to supply chips for BMW's future digital cockpit and advanced driver-assistance systems (Harshita Mary Varghese/Reuters)

Groundcover, which provides observability software that can monitor AI agents, raised a $100M Series C led by One Peak, bringing its total funding to $160M (Meir Orbach/CTech)

Encore AI, which studies companies' customer interactions to train and deploy AI voice agents, raised a $30M Series A led by Team8, Planven, and The Garage (Ram Iyer/TechCrunch)

ChipAgents, which uses AI agents to help speed up the process of chip design, raised a $60M Series A2 led by B Capital, bringing the expanded round to $134M (Max A. Cherney/Reuters)

Survey: 77% of US adults support in-class cellphone bans for middle and high school students, up from 74% in 2025 and 68% in 2024; just 18% oppose such bans (Jeffrey Gottfried/Pew Research Center)

Brookfield and NextEra partner to develop a $100B, 1.2GW+ AI data center campus at a former DOE uranium-enrichment site in Kentucky, set to open in 2032 (Robb M. Stewart/Wall Street Journal)

A look at OpenAI's open-source agent harness that now powers Codex and ChatGPT Work, as the company works to optimize the harness to cut runaway token usage (Jason Hiner/The Deep View)

Eliyan, which aims to license tech and make physical "chiplets" to ease AI chip data transfer bottlenecks, raised a $145M Series C at a $1B valuation (Stephen Nellis/Reuters)

X settles a long-running legal battle with the World Federation of Advertisers, ending a case that accused brands like Mars and Shell of illegally boycotting X (Daniel Thomas/Financial Times)

DoorDash says the FAA granted it Part 135 air carrier certification to operate a drone delivery service and it plans to launch drone deliveries in the fall (Natalie Lung/Bloomberg)

Source: OpenRouter was recently generating ~$140M in annualized revenue, or ~$12M per month, up nearly 3x since April, making Stripe's $10B offer a big premium (The Information)

GlobalFoundries says the US plans to award it $300M in CHIPS Act funding to bolster R&D of silicon photonics tech to power more efficient AI data centers (Reuters)

Samsung Galaxy Z Fold 8 review: comfortable when shut, the 4:3 inner display is great, and impressive battery life, but no telephoto or IP68 and some app errors (Dominic Preston/The Verge)

The UK CMA opens an investigation into Microsoft over a potential consumer law breach involving users paying more to renew Microsoft 365 after it added Copilot (Upmanyu Trivedi/Bloomberg)

New York-based AI detection startup Pangram raised $9M led by Menlo, and releases Pangram 4.0 and its first AI image detection model, claiming 99.5% accuracy (Niko Gallogly/New York Times)

BNY, the world's biggest bank for safeguarding assets, plans to use blockchain tech for its transfer agency record-keeping systems that service ~$8.6T in assets (Financial Times)

OpenAI, Google, Meta, BlackRock, and others are recruiting electricians and carpenters by the thousands, with some of the highest pay the industry has ever seen (Lydia DePillis/New York Times)

Lake Mary, Florida-based Spur Intelligence, which helps distinguish human and bot traffic to find fake users and threats, raised $200M led by Insight Partners (Julie Bort/TechCrunch)

Freehand, which builds AI agents to manage supply chain spend and operations for Fortune 500 companies, raised a $75M Series B, after a $25M Series A in 2024 (Mary Ann Azevedo/Crunchbase News)

London-based Agon, which is developing sovereign AI training infrastructure for European defense, emerges from stealth with a $7M pre-seed and a $23M seed (Ingrid Lunden/Resilience Media)

Sources: Moonshot AI hit a $35B valuation after closing a $3.5B round, exceeding its initial target of $1B to $2B, and plans a Hong Kong IPO as soon as 2026 (Bloomberg)