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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)

Source: PayPal's board sees Stripe and PE firm Advent International's $53B takeover bid as undervaluing the company and facing regulatory and financing hurdles (Reuters)

A NY school district is piloting Realbotix's humanoid robot teacher to help STEM students; Realbotix rebranded after acquiring sex doll company RealDoll in 2024 (Chase DiBenedetto/Mashable)

US Homeland Security says it seized 30K+ SIM cards in June and July in a nationwide operation it claims dismantled infrastructure used in telephone fraud (Lorelei Smillie/Bloomberg)

Netflix says roughly 300 titles used generative AI this year, mostly in post-production, "to deliver higher quality output more quickly and at a lower cost" (Emma Roth/The Verge)

An NYT reporter finds AI-generated, unauthorized biographies of herself and other journalists on Amazon, where AI-made books with elusive "authors" proliferate (Kashmir Hill/New York Times)

Netflix reports Q2 revenue up 13% YoY to $12.56B, vs. $12.59B est., and says it will give fewer engagement updates starting in 2027; NFLX drops 8%+ after hours (Lillian Rizzo/CNBC)

Kimi-K3 is now #1 on the Frontend Code Arena benchmark, surpassing Claude Fable 5; the model scored 88.3 on Terminal Bench 2.1, only below GPT-5.6 Sol's 88.8 (Michael Nuñez/VentureBeat)

DoorDash launches a limited beta of DoorDash CLI, which lets users place orders via an AI agent, available by waitlist to macOS developers in the US and Canada (Sarah Perez/TechCrunch)

Google updates its AI video editor Vids with Gemini Omni and a feature that lets users create custom digital avatars using a selfie and voice recording (Sarah Perez/TechCrunch)

Moonshot AI releases Kimi K3, a 2.8T-parameter AI model that it says rivals Opus 4.8 and GPT-5.5, and plans to release model weights by July 27 (Kimi)

After reports of GPT-5.6 deleting files, OpenAI says the issue most often occurs in full-access mode without sandboxing and it is working to mitigate the risk (Tibo/@thsottiaux)

Crypto.com raised $400M from Citadel Securities in its first institutional funding round, valuing the Singapore-based crypto exchange at $20B (CoinDesk)

Sources: Google is months behind schedule on delivering Gemini 3.5 Pro as it tries to improve its capabilities, particularly in coding; GOOG closes down 4.43% (Bloomberg)

Beehiiv launches Community, which lets subscribers chat with each other, adds programmatic ads and an AI tool that helps creators manage their audiences (Ivan Mehta/TechCrunch)

Meta's Oversight Board says top AI models may be restricting free expression in its first evaluation of LLMs, as it seeks to expand its influence beyond Meta (Karissa Bell/Engadget)

Google says users in the US can now link to and interact with some apps in AI Mode, including Instacart, Canva, and YouTube Music (Aisha Malik/TechCrunch)

Roblox unveils Build, which lets users create basic games through text prompts directly within its mobile app, powered by Roblox's models and open-source models (Jay Peters/The Verge)

Fora, which connects travel agents with travelers and offers agents AI tools, raised a $60M Series D at a $1B valuation led by Forerunner and Tactile Ventures (Dominic-Madori Davis/TechCrunch)

Google renames NotebookLM to Gemini Notebook and rolls out an update giving every notebook a secure cloud computer, letting it write and execute code natively (Josh Woodward/Google)