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California launches a tool to serve as an "early warning system" for widespread AI-driven job loss, linking AI exposure with unemployment insurance claims (Jo Constantz/Bloomberg)

Upside, which provides social workers with AI-powered housing insights, raised a $20M Series A led by Aquiline with Flare Capital, 645, and others participating (Cailey Gleeson/Fierce Healthcare)

How the US AI build-out is pushing up prices for electricity, software, and more; in a survey, 81% of economists say it will add to inflation over the next year (Justin Lahart/Wall Street Journal)

Elastic announces a ~7% reduction in its workforce, and says "advances in AI and automation are letting us operate with leaner teams"; ESTC closed down 8.70% (Richard Speed/The Register)

YouTube rolls out changes to Shorts, including adding a setting to double playback speed, eliminating the "dislike" button, and more (Lucas Ropek/TechCrunch)

Doc: the DOD has quietly revised its doctrine on how the US military picks its targets, envisioning "systems where AI initiates actions with human monitoring" (Katrina Manson/Bloomberg)

NHTSA proposes eliminating the mandate for manual brake pedals in "vehicles designed to be driven exclusively by automated driving systems" (Sean O'Kane/TechCrunch)

Apple says it removed VK's apps from the App Store to comply with sanctions; VK says they were removed without warning and it has never been under US sanctions (Reuters)

Patronus AI, which builds simulated digital environments for evaluating AI agents, raised a $50M Series B led by Greenfield, bringing its total funding to $70M (Marina Temkin/TechCrunch)

Om Malik, a longtime technology writer, founder of Gigaom, and a partner at True Ventures, died on Wednesday at 59 (Om Malik/On my Om)

Source: Google is asking publishers that test new AI features in Google News to grant it broad rights to their content, including to potentially train AI models (Ann Gehan/The Information)

Chipmaker Onsemi agrees to buy Synaptics in a nearly $7B all-stock deal expected to close in the middle of 2027; ON drops 9%+ and SYNA jumps 11%+ after hours (Samantha Subin/CNBC)

Source: Muon Space, which operates satellite networks for climate and national security monitoring, is raising $250M; it has raised ~$181M since its 2021 launch (Alan Neuhauser/Axios)

Sources: OpenAI leans toward holding off its IPO until 2027 after warnings that Sam Altman's desired $1T valuation may not be met in current market conditions (New York Times)

Sources: Sam Altman told staff the US government asked OpenAI to stagger the release of GPT-5.6 over security concerns, approving "access customer by customer" (The Information)

Apple stock closed down 6.15% on Thursday after the company raised some product prices, its worst fall since April 2025 (MacKenzie Sigalos/CNBC)

Story Protocol, a blockchain-based IP ownership network that raised $140M, rebrands as Data Foundation to build an on-chain registry for AI training data (Olivier Acuna/CoinDesk)

The US awards $250M in CHIPS funds to a startup co-founded by billionaire mining magnate Robert Friedland to develop silicon-carbide chips and pulsed-power tech (James Attwood/Bloomberg)

Microsoft quietly extends the Extended Security Updates program for Windows 10 consumers by a year, letting eligible users get updates through October 12, 2027 (Zac Bowden/Windows Central)

Netris, which helps neoclouds automate network configuration to bring their data centers online faster, raised a $15M Series A from a16z (Ram Iyer/TechCrunch)

Sources: Kraken is in talks to acquire a 15% stake in DeFi protocol Aave at a $385M valuation, investing 35,000 ETH in return for 250,000 AAVE tokens (Will Canny/CoinDesk)

Notion plans to shut down its Gmail client Notion Mail on September 22 and go "all in" on AI agents to run inboxes, saying 50%+ of users do not open the inbox (Zac Hall/9to5Mac)

Microsoft says the price of Xbox consoles will increase on August 1 by $100 for 512GB models and $150 for 1TB models, the third price increase since 2025 (Kenneth Shepard/Kotaku)

Google launches a Google Finance app for Android, with market data, financial news, and an AI-powered "Key Moments" feature, and plans an iOS version this year (Aisha Malik/TechCrunch)

Nebulock, which helps security teams proactively find and remediate threats across a company's security stack, raised a $25M Series A led by FirstMark (Chris Metinko/Axios)

Sources: Bumble explores a sale amid slowing growth in the online dating sector; its shares fell 48% over the past 12 months, giving it a market cap of $388M (Milana Vinn/Reuters)

Sources: Apple plans to skip higher-end M6 chips and launch its next Pro and Max chips in 2027 as part of the M7 lineup, to boost on-device AI capabilities (Mark Gurman/Bloomberg)

Memo: Meta Superintelligence Labs is hiring three founders and other team members behind AI security startup Virtue AI; two founders report to Nat Friedman (Madison Mills/Axios)

General Intuition, which trains AI agents in spatial reasoning via gameplay footage, raised $320M led by Khosla at a $2.3B valuation, for $454M in total funding (Rebecca Bellan/TechCrunch)

Anthropic hires French telecom group Orange's Chief AI Officer Steve Jarrett to help Anthropic "better understand and adapt" its products to Europe and Africa (Gianluca Lo Nostro/Reuters)

Sources and a draft document: the US proposes that the EU sign on to an AI partnership to help secure chip supply chains; the one-page statement had few details (Alberto Nardelli/Bloomberg)

Sony's Bungie says it is laying off a "significant number of employees", including "most of the Destiny team"; Bungie has an estimated headcount of 800 (Ethan Gach/Kotaku)

Sources: Google expands the scope of its months-old AI coding strike team to "midtraining" to try to catch up with Anthropic, after major executive departures (Erin Woo/The Information)

Sail, whose software optimizes how AI models run on existing chips, emerges from stealth with $80M in seed and Series A led by Kleiner at a $450M valuation (Lily Mae Lazarus/Fortune)

Apple says "the rapid expansion of AI data centers has created an extraordinary surge in demand for memory and storage"; the MacBook Neo rises from $599 to $699 (Mark Gurman/Bloomberg)

Apple raises Mac, iPad, and other product prices by 15%-25%, saying it has "never seen a component price increase this much, this quickly"; iPhone is unchanged (Rolfe Winkler/Wall Street Journal)

Australian payments startup Airwallex raised $320M led by Lee Fixel's Addition at an $11B valuation, and is incubating blockchain payments startup Metal (Jeff Kauflin/Forbes)

Scaled Cognition, a reliability-focused lab that develops the Agentic Pretrained Transformer model, raised a $100M Series A led by Khosla at a $750M valuation (Steven Rosenbush/Wall Street Journal)

Exponential View: global AI sales, excluding China, hit $25B in Q1, exceeding an estimated $21B in data center and chip depreciation costs; margins remain thin (Jacob Reid/Bloomberg)

OpenAI, Anthropic, Amazon, Microsoft, and others launch Raise Us, a new non-profit led by ex-Commerce Secretary Gina Raimondo to help US workers adapt to AI (Lydia DePillis/New York Times)

Preliminary findings: the EU says Azure and AWS are "the largest and second largest" cloud services in the EU, as the bloc weighs up tougher DMA oversight (Samuel Stolton/Bloomberg)

How risk modelers like Fathom and Verisk are using AI and diffusion models to bypass the limits of physics-based "cat" models to predict natural disasters (Financial Times)

IBM details a 0.7nm chip manufacturing process that utilizes a "nanostack" 3D transistor architecture, which it says could continue chip innovation for 10 years (Don Clark/New York Times)

A profile of incoming WhatsApp CEO Kunal Shah, who studied philosophy, advised Sequoia India, and joins a growing pool of Indian-born executives at US companies (Financial Times)

Alibaba's Hong Kong stock closed down 4.43% after Anthropic accused Alibaba of "illicitly" accessing its AI models, down 36.24% YTD; Xiaomi and Baidu fell ~2% (Jeanny Yu/Bloomberg)

Arm EVP Mohamed Awad says its chip architecture now accounts for 50%+ of the hyperscale cloud computing market, as AI demand transforms the data center industry (Cheng Ting-Fang/Nikkei Asia)

Qualcomm CEO Cristiano Amon says the company is designing data center chips specifically for Chinese customers that are in compliance with US export controls (Yifan Yu/Nikkei Asia)

Mirendil, founded by former Anthropic researchers and seeking to build self-improving AI for open-source developers, raised a $200M seed at a $1B valuation (Tina Li/Wall Street Journal)

Coval, which develops simulation and evaluation tech for testing, launching, and monitoring AI voice and chat agents, raised a $28M Series A led by Norwest (Duncan Riley/SiliconANGLE)

As China's working-age population shrinks, a consensus is emerging that it must deploy embodied AI robots into as many tasks as possible, as soon as possible (Financial Times)