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OpenAI, Anthropic, and other top AI companies are offering startups token credits and special promotions, as the AI companies seek lasting streams of revenue (Wall Street Journal)

A profile of Rachel Whetstone, who has led comms for Google, Meta, Uber, Netflix, and now Sierra, as her husband Steve Hilton runs for California governor (Emily Shugerman/The San Francisco ...)

WiseTech co-founder Richard White steps down as chair amid a police probe over claims he exploited a woman's immigration status for sex; WTC jumps 7%+ (Peter Vercoe/Bloomberg)

A profile of Bernadette Meehan, a US diplomat who became Wikimedia Foundation CEO in January, as Wikipedia faces threats from MAGA, AI, and foreign autocrats (Tiffany Hsu/New York Times)

Syntiant, which develops low-power AI processors, files for a US IPO, reporting a $20.9M net loss on $64.5M in revenue for the three months ended March 31 (Pragyan Kalita/Reuters)

Samsung estimates Q2 operating profit of ~$58.44B, a 19-fold jump from a year earlier and above a ~$57.02B estimate, and revenue up 129% YoY to ~$111.7B (Reuters)

xAI rebrands to SpaceXAI and debuts a new logo (Kelsey Vlamis/Business Insider)

Anthropic researchers detail J-space, a small set of neural patterns in Claude that reveals internal thoughts that don't appear in the model's output (Anthropic)

BonkDAO, which oversees the Bonk memecoin, says it was the target of a "malicious governance proposal" that resulted in a loss of $20M worth of Bonk tokens (Daniel Kuhn/The Block)

Sources: Vista Equity and Quinti made a takeover bid for Criteo that values the French ad tech company at a 50%+ premium to its stock price in recent weeks (Bloomberg)

Source: Thrive Capital spinoff Thrive Holdings seeks to raise around $2B from SoftBank, Altimeter, D1, and others, after previously raising $1B (Julia Hornstein/The Information)

Sources: CISA's Attack Surface Evaluation team is using Mythos to audit government code repositories and has already uncovered a large number of vulnerabilities (Raphael Satter/Reuters)

SCOTUS declines to block a Texas law requiring app stores and developers to verify the age of mobile device users, and for minors to obtain parental consent (Andrew Chung/Reuters)

Sources: the US considers housing the Strategic Bitcoin Reserve at Commerce instead of Treasury amid concerns over Treasury's legal authority to manage it (Bloomberg)

Xbox appoints Helen Chiang as its first COO; Chiang was previously corporate vice president for the Minecraft Franchise and the studio head of Minecraft (Sam Smith/GamesBeat)

Source: Xbox Game Pass currently has about 30M subscriptions; document: Microsoft had projected Game Pass subscriptions would reach around 77M this year (Ben Fritz/Wall Street Journal)

A term sheet shows Tencent is seeking to raise as much as $1.55B in a selldown of part of its stake in short-video app operator Kuaishou through a block trade (Julia Fioretti/Bloomberg)

Tencent releases Hy3, a 295B-parameter model that it says is competitive with GLM-5.1 and 5.2, under the Apache 2.0 license, following a preview launch in April (Sam Witteveen/VentureBeat)

Source: Mercor hit over $2B in gross revenue run rate in June, double its pace in April, and is profitable on a free cash flow basis (Julia Hornstein/The Information)

Illinois Governor JB Pritzker signs SB 315, a bill requiring annual third-party safety audits of leading AI companies; OpenAI and Anthropic backed the bill (Adam Harrington/CBS News)

Nintendo plans to stop selling the original Switch, Lite, and OLED in Europe from mid-February 2027 and update the Switch 2 to comply with new EU battery rules (Andrew Webster/The Verge)

Filing: Strategy sold 3,588 bitcoin for ~$216M between June 29 and July 5 to replenish its USD reserve; its holdings have an $11.4B paper loss at current prices (James Hunt/The Block)

Microsoft's Xbox unit plans to cut 3,200 jobs over the next year, including 1,600 on Monday, and divest up to five studios, including Ninja Theory, in a "reset" (Bloomberg)

Microsoft is laying off ~4,800 employees, or ~2.1% of its workforce; most are in sales or Xbox, where ~20% of jobs are set to be cut by the end of FY 2027 (Tom Warren/The Verge)

Reddit says its AI-powered content moderation systems caught 25K "spammy posts and comments" per day in Q1, reducing users' exposure to such content by 20% YoY (Natalie Lung/Bloomberg)

Broadcom agrees to expand its Apple partnership through 2031 to develop and supply custom chips; in 2023, the companies announced a multibillion-dollar 5G deal (Akash Sriram/Reuters)

Anthropic signs a 20-year, ~$19B lease to use a TeraWulf data center in Kentucky, set to have a ~400MW capacity and to start delivering power in H2 2027 (CNBC)

AI agent training platform Bespoke Labs raised $40M across a seed led by 8VC and a Series A led by Wing, saying the funding gives it almost two years of runway (Natalie Breymeyer/Axios)

Filing: Brookfield-backed data center company Csquare seeks to raise up to $1.35B in an IPO, selling 50M shares at $23 to $27 each for an up to $4.18B valuation (Ryan Vlastelica/Bloomberg)

How Masayoshi Son is remaking SoftBank in his own image, betting on AI; SoftBank trades at a ~50% discount to its net asset value, as some question his strategy (David Keohane/Financial Times)

A profile of Samsung union leader Choi Seung-ho, who helped win a ~$26B bonus package for chip employees, as he tries to resolve the rift over bonus gaps (Yoolim Lee/Bloomberg)

An interview with Agility Robotics CEO Peggy Johnson on why the startup is going public via a SPAC, the physical layer as its core advantage, safety, and more (Connie Loizos/TechCrunch)

AI-driven drops in labor income and gains in capital income could hit Ireland's tax base, with 6%+ of its workforce in tech and heavy exposure to US companies (Olivia Fletcher/Bloomberg)

Some US voters are using AI tools as nonpartisan researchers, seeing them as a viable alternative to traditional news coverage, voter guides, and social media (Jennifer Medina/New York Times)

Ripple secures CASP authorization from Luxembourg's financial regulator, making it fully MiCA-compliant to offer crypto services across 30 EEA countries (Brian Danga/The Block)

Shenzhen-based Even Realities, a startup that makes smart glasses without cameras, raised a $150M pre-Series B led by Meituan and Tencent (Kate Park/TechCrunch)

SK Hynix launches a US share sale on the Nasdaq to raise ~$28B, selling 17.79M new shares; the final listing price is due Thursday before trading starts Friday (Reuters)

Document: a draft US Treasury Department report is set to warn about the AI market's risks, likening some key aspects to the dotcom crash in the early 2000s (Eric Katz/NOTUS)

Claude Opus 4.8 and Sonnet 5 seem worse at tool calls than older models, likely due to post-training that assumes Claude Code-like harnesses as targets (Armin Ronacher/Armin Ronacher's Thoughts and Writings)

SemiAnalysis: Nvidia delays its next-gen AI rack system Kyber NVL144 by 12+ months to 2028 due to PCB manufacturing issues, and cancels its NVL72x2 architecture (Anniek Bao/CNBC)

Shanghai-based AI chipmaker Biren raises ~$892.5M in a new share sale to boost GPU production; Biren's stock is up 150%+ since its January Hong Kong IPO (Ann Cao/South China Morning Post)

Researchers document JadePuffer, the first known "agentic ransomware", which adapts in real time and retries steps to execute an end-to-end extortion operation (Bill Toulas/BleepingComputer)

A US federal judge orders the DOD to shield Alibaba from a law that led lobbyists to drop it as a client while she weighs the measure's constitutionality (Kate O'Keeffe/Bloomberg)

How companies like Nvidia and Neura Robotics are building safety systems for humanoid robots to minimize risks like a bipedal robot losing stability (John Keilman/Wall Street Journal)

A look at Threads and an interview with Head of Threads Connor Hayes, as the platform passes 500M MAUs and increasingly resembles Reddit with a community focus (Eli Tan/New York Times)

Kuo: Apple suppliers plan to ship <1M iPhone fold units in Q3 2026, which may push the start of device pre-orders and sales to Q4, with weeks of delivery delays (Ming-Chi Kuo)

Tesla rolls out its Robotaxi service without a safety monitor in Miami, its fifth city, as it aims to expand to a dozen US states by the end of 2026 (Grace Kay/The Information)

ByteDance's Doubao and Alibaba's Qwen will disable humanlike and user-created agents before July 15, as China's anthropomorphic AI interaction rules take effect (Wency Chen/South China Morning Post)

Data centers offer US a chance to get ahead in the next key technologies and to build domestic supply chains based on demand rather than subsidies and tariffs (Josh Zoffer/Financial Times)

Chainalysis: addresses linked to Iran, Russia, North Korea, and other US-sanctioned entities received $100B+ in crypto last year, almost 8x the amount in 2024 (Patricia Kowsmann/Wall Street Journal)