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Rockstar Games announces that pre-orders for Grand Theft Auto VI will go live on June 25; TTWO jumps 5%+ (Zack Zwiezen/Kotaku)

Apple opens iOS to alternative app marketplaces in Brazil and changes App Store commission structure following a settlement with competition watchdog CADE (Marcus Mendes/9to5Mac)

Former Trump AI adviser Dean Ball is joining OpenAI to lead a new team called Strategic Futures, focused on frontier AI policy and internal governance (Ashley Gold/Axios)

Sources: General Intuition, which trains AI agents in spatial reasoning, is in talks to raise $300M from Jeff Bezos and others at a $2B+ valuation (Rebecca Bellan/TechCrunch)

Amazon's AI chief Peter DeSantis says the company is in talks to sell its custom Trainium AI chips for use in third-party data centers (Mark Bergen/Bloomberg)

Filings: Waymo pulls its ~4K robotaxis from highways after finding 13+ instances of the cars driving into highway sections under construction (Sean O'Kane/TechCrunch)

Seattle-based Gradial, which makes AI agents that automate enterprise marketing workflows, raised a $65M Series C led by Insight Partners at a $675M valuation (Kerry Flynn/Axios)

Sources: the early Chinese backers of Manus, including HSG, ZhenFund, and Tencent, plan to buy the AI startup back from Meta at the $2B price Meta paid (The Information)

Architect Labs, which aims to use AI to cheapen and speed up the process of designing custom chips, raised a $24M seed led by Kindred Ventures (Max A. Cherney/Reuters)

Sources: as early as next week, the EU is set to unveil its preliminary findings that AWS and Azure seem to meet the criteria for regulation under the DMA (Bloomberg)

As David Sacks steps back and Sriram Krishnan prepares to leave, Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick and others are leading AI policy in the Trump administration (Maria Curi/Axios)

Hive's stock jumps 5%+ after the company announced a $220M, three-year GPU cloud contract with Bell Canada and Cohere, as it pivots away from bitcoin mining (James Van Straten/CoinDesk)

Former Gojek CEO and Indonesian education minister Nadiem Makarim is charged with taking ~$46M in rewards tied to a Chromebook procurement contract for schools (Bloomberg)

An in-depth look at Meta's AI-fueled rampage through its engineering organization, 30% to 50% of engineers on core teams reassigned to data labeling, and more (Gergely Orosz/The Pragmatic Engineer)

Prem AI, a Swiss startup that lets hedge funds and law firms run AI models on their own infrastructure, is raising a $100M Series A, targeting a $500M valuation (Natalia Kniazhevich/Bloomberg)

Accenture says it will buy a majority stake in Dragos and fully acquire runZero and NetRise in a combined deal for the cybersecurity startups valued at $4.18B (Anhata Rooprai/Reuters)

Verse Enterprises, which wants to provide energy-management software for 100 data centers by 2027, raised a $54M Series B from Nvidia and others (Summer Maxwell/Bloomberg)

Trump, who entered office opposing AI regulation, is shaping the industry through case-by-case interventions without clear rules, creating major uncertainty (Axios)

AI inference startup Baseten is raising $1.5B in a dual-tiered deal, with some investors putting in money at an $11B valuation and others at a $13B valuation (Angel Au-Yeung/Wall Street Journal)

Report: DeepSeek's first external funding round has a non-negotiable term for investors to not poach its staff or encourage them to start their own companies (CNBC)

Guardrails Alliance, a super PAC that has raised $5M, debuts to advocate for AI safety legislation and counter pro-industry lobbying, running ads for Alex Bores (New York Times)

Dream, co-founded by ex-NSO Group CEO Shalev Hulio with a focus on protecting critical infrastructure, raised $260M at a $3B valuation, up from $1B in 2025 (Galit Altstein/Bloomberg)

Intel stock jumps around 9% in premarket trading, after Trump said "Apple has agreed to work with Intel to design and build its Chips in America" (Kai Nicol-Schwarz/CNBC)

A look at 764, an online group the FBI declared domestic terrorists due to members manipulating teen girls into sharing sexual pictures and cutting themselves (Margi Murphy/Bloomberg)

As tech giants rush to build AI infrastructure, some residents living near data centers say a constant infrasonic vibration is ruining their health and homes (Adeel Hassan/New York Times)

A PwC study suggests that AI is rewarding companies that use it to enhance human skills, while leaving those that use it merely to cut costs further behind (Saritha Rai/Bloomberg)

Businesses have started using Kalshi to hedge business risks; Kalshi says institutional trading volume on its platform has grown 800% since November 2025 (Michael J. de la Merced/New York Times)

The Bank of Korea warns rising bonuses at some South Korean chipmakers could fuel broader wage growth and consumer spending, complicating the inflation outlook (Heesu Lee/Bloomberg)

SpaceX's all-stock Cursor deal illustrates the power of public markets, which could help SpaceX narrow the gap with Anthropic and OpenAI through acquisitions (New York Times)

Nation-state hackers are increasingly using preinstalled software on low-cost home devices to create residential proxy networks and mask cyberattack traffic (Robert McMillan/Wall Street Journal)

South Korean and Taiwanese tech companies that helped build China's hardware sector during the smartphone boom now reap the AI boom as US curbs sideline China (New York Times)

A Blackstone-led consortium agrees to take control of software company Medallia from Thoma Bravo, which will lose the entire $5B it invested in Medallia (Financial Times)

NeuralTrust, which offers tech that lets enterprises discover, monitor, govern, and secure AI agents, raised a $20M seed led by Alstin Capital (Tamara Djurickovic/Tech.eu)

Sources: JPMorgan Chase has stopped its staff in Hong Kong from accessing Anthropic's AI models, following a similar move by rival Goldman Sachs (Financial Times)

Sources: ByteDance has been Microsoft's biggest AI customer in recent years, largely using OpenAI models, and is on track to spend $1B+ a year on Azure services (Bloomberg)

Midjourney unveils its first hardware product, the Midjourney Scanner, an ultrasound-based full-body scanner; it is unclear how AI fits into the medical effort (Richard Lawler/The Verge)

Nvidia researchers unveil ENPIRE, an agent harness framework that develops robotic self-improvement strategies for physical tasks with minimal human supervision (Jeremy Hsu/Ars Technica)

A survey of US adults: 49% reported using chatbots in 2026, up from 33% in 2024, 24% said that they use chatbots on a daily basis, and 44% said they use ChatGPT (Pew Research Center)

Sources: the White House's move to restrict Mythos 5 came after it ordered Anthropic to revoke South Korea-based SK Telecom's access over alleged ties to China (Wired)

Filing: Roelof Botha joins SpaceX's board as an independent director and will serve on the audit committee, seven months after stepping down as Sequoia steward (Allie Garfinkle/Fortune)

Google confirms it has ended production of the Nest Mini and Nest Audio, but they "will continue to be fully supported" with updates, patches, and customer care (Chris Martin/Tech Advisor)

Noam Shazeer leaves Google to join OpenAI as lead for architecture research; he rejoined Google as a Gemini co-lead in 2024 during the $2.7B Character.AI deal (The Information)

AWS Summit: Amazon unveiled AWS Continuum, which uses AI to find and fix code vulnerabilities, AWS Context, which organizes company data for AI agents, and more (Todd Bishop/GeekWire)

Frontier, a group including Stripe, Google, Salesforce, and newly joined Anthropic, commits $915M to buy carbon-removal credits, on top of $1B already pledged (Yusuf Khan/Wall Street Journal)

Trump administration officials say Anthropic must ensure Fable 5's guardrails can't be circumvented before rerelease; experts say that may not be possible (Hugo Lowell/Wired)

Apple's plan of moving Hide My Email aliases to private.icloud.com will let services easily distinguish them from normal iCloud email addresses and block them (Arseniy Shestakov)

Mastodon adds email newsletters, letting writers send their posts to subscribers' inboxes, even to readers without a Mastodon account, as part of Mastodon 4.6 (Sarah Perez/TechCrunch)

In an interview, Tim Cook says Apple price hikes are "unavoidable" to offset surging memory and storage chip costs, and "the situation has become unsustainable" (Rolfe Winkler/Wall Street Journal)

Snap's stock closed down 8.14% on Wednesday, after the company launched its $2,195 Specs AR glasses on Tuesday; SNAP is down ~41% YTD (Lucas Ropek/TechCrunch)

Bernie Sanders proposes legislation to create a sovereign wealth fund financed via a one-time 50% stock tax on AI companies that reach $200M in annual AI sales (Joey Cappelletti/Associated Press)