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Techmeme

Privacy advocates, CAA, and SAG-AFTRA slam Meta's Muse Image, which lets users create AI images using the likenesses of people with public Instagram accounts (Ina Fried/Axios)

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Analysis: Alphabet, Amazon, Meta, Microsoft, and Oracle, the top spenders on new US data centers, collectively added ~$350B in debt over the past five years (Bloomberg)

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SK Hynix opens up 14% at $170 after raising $26.5B in the largest ever US market debut by a foreign company (Kif Leswing/CNBC)

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Phia, a shopping app co-founded by Phoebe Gates that has raised $43.5M, appears to be using fake clicks or "cookie stuffing" to claim affiliate commissions (Bloomberg)

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Munich-based QuantumDiamonds, which uses quantum sensors to detect chip defects, raised €91M, including €76M under the European Chips Act (Cristian Dina/The Next Web)

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Like the Claude app it imitates, the new ChatGPT "Super App", which merges Codex with ChatGPT, is a tangle of toggles and strange UI decisions (M.G. Siegler/Spyglass)

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An RIAA-led coalition representing labels and artists proposes two tags for AI content: one for entirely AI-generated songs and another for "AI-assisted" tracks (Katherine Sayre/Wall Street Journal)

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Xreal launches $299 A01 Plus AR glasses, weighing just 62 grams and featuring 1080p micro OLED panels with a 120Hz refresh rate and a 50-degree field of view (Cameron Faulkner/The Verge)

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The UK designates Microsoft, Google, Amazon, and Oracle as critical third-party financial sector suppliers, bringing them under direct regulatory oversight (Muvija M/Reuters)

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Malaysia Prime Minister Anwar Ibrahim plans to debut an agentic AI avatar of himself within days, which is meant to help the public navigate government services (Saritha Rai/Bloomberg)

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Circle says it received US regulator approval to start a national digital-currency trust bank, allowing it to offer institutional custody services (Vildana Hajric/Bloomberg)

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A US court sentences a former ransomware negotiator to 70 months in prison for colluding with BlackCat to extort $75.3M from five of his employer's clients (Matt Kapko/CyberScoop)

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In preliminary findings, the EU Commission said Facebook's and Instagram's "addictive design" violates the DSA, telling Meta to make changes or risk hefty fines (Adam Satariano/New York Times)

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Polymarket is seeking CFTC and NFA approval to offer margin trading in the US, which would let users bet on events with less capital upfront and attract traders (Bloomberg)

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Taiwan's leading DRAM maker Nanya Technology expects its capex to exceed ~$6.2B in 2027, up ~4x YoY, and reports unaudited Q2 revenue of ~$2.6B, up 684% YoY (Wen-Yee Lee/Reuters)

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Memo: MiniMax CEO Junjie Yan tells employees he will forgo his salary until MiniMax achieves AGI and promises to allocate personal shares to employee incentives (Juro Osawa/The Information)

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OpenAI and Google are selling their advanced AI models to Singapore-based subsidiaries of Alibaba, Baidu, and Tencent, exposing a gap in the US' AI controls (Madhumita Murgia/Financial Times)

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Interviews with employees and insiders reveal how CXMT is amassing tech, funding, and state support to challenge top memory chipmakers and build local suppliers (Gao Yuan/Bloomberg)

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A look at Meta Superintelligence Labs' growth in the past year, including a top-tier RL environment and compute ramp that could catch up to Anthropic and OpenAI (SemiAnalysis)

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Sources: Manus' investors and management are discussing unwinding Meta's $2B buyout at the same valuation, with Tencent in talks to become the largest investor (Zijing Wu/Financial Times)

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Carlyle agrees to sell US data center power and infrastructure platform Copia to EQT; sources: the deal values Copia at $2.6B, a more than 5x return for Carlyle (Financial Times)

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Oxylabs, which develops web data scraping infrastructure, received a $130M investment at a $3.6B valuation from Warburg Pincus, its first outside investment (Mike Wheatley/SiliconANGLE)

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MiniMax is looking to raise as much as $2B by selling 35.6M shares at ~$34 each and offering ~$830M in zero-coupon convertible bonds due in 2027 (Bloomberg)

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1X says its humanoid robot Neo's five-fingered hands have tendon-style actuators that give it 25 degrees of freedom of movement, nearly the same as a human hand (Boone Ashworth/Wired)

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How the internet, smartphones, social media, and now generative AI are accelerating a drop in the reading of longer works like books (Rose Horowitch/The Atlantic)

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SAP will make it easier for customers to switch to rival service providers or end contracts, averting a possible EU antitrust fine after a September 2025 probe (Foo Yun Chee/Reuters)

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SK Hynix raises $26.5B in the largest ever US market debut by a foreign company, selling 177.9M ADRs for $149 each; the sale was more than 7x oversubscribed (Bloomberg)

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Fidji Simo says she has decided to leave her full-time role at OpenAI and transition to being a part-time adviser after her medical condition worsened (Wall Street Journal)

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Mercor acquires Deeptune, which builds reinforcement learning environments for AI agents, three months after CEO Brendan Foody backed Deeptune's $43M Series A (Lily Mae Lazarus/Fortune)

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Sources: Netflix executives are increasingly worried about declining engagement and are exploring adding live TV and bundling streaming services like Peacock (Wall Street Journal)

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Coinbase's chief legal officer, Paul Grewal, is stepping down after six years; VP of legal Molly Abraham moves into his role with the title of general counsel (Hannah Lang/Reuters)

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Federal Reserve Chair Kevin Warsh names Marc Andreessen and Xbox CEO Asha Sharma to lead a task force on the economic impact of new technologies, including AI (Andrew Ackerman/Washington Post)

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Google says it will automatically add a disclosure to ads that are made with its AI advertising tools, expanding the disclosure beyond election ads to all ads (Sarah Perez/TechCrunch)

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PitchBook: US venture funding hit $412.7B in H1 2026, up 30% on all of 2025, with AI startup funding accounting for 86%, or $355.9B; Q2 saw seven $1B+ rounds (Duncan Riley/SiliconANGLE)

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Anthropic, set to add usage-based billing for Fable 5 on July 12, aims to return the model to Claude's subscription plans "when sufficient capacity allows" (Maxwell Zeff/Wired)

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The EU Parliament advances a bill letting tech companies scan for CSAM, reviving a proposal rejected in March, with an exemption for E2EE services like WhatsApp (Sam Clark/Politico)

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OpenAI is discontinuing ChatGPT Atlas, its standalone desktop browser, in favor of the new ChatGPT desktop app (Zac Hall/9to5Mac)

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Sources: AI contractor marketplace Mercor is discussing raising new funds at a roughly $20B valuation, less than a year after raising money at a $10B valuation (Bloomberg)

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OpenAI merges Codex and ChatGPT desktop apps for Mac and Windows under a new ChatGPT desktop app, allowing users to switch between Codex, Chat, and Work (Zac Hall/9to5Mac)

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GPT-5.6 Sol costs $5 per 1M input tokens and $30 per 1M output tokens, GPT-5.6 Terra costs $2.50 and $15, and GPT-5.6 Luna costs $1 and $6 (OpenAI)

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OpenAI broadly releases GPT-5.6, and launches ChatGPT Work, an AI agent that can gather context across apps and files to create documents, on macOS and Windows (Axios)

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Microsoft President Brad Smith says the US now has AI "regulation without transparent or complete rules", and adds that "without rules, businesses can't plan" (Beatrice Nolan/Fortune)

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Kraken Technology, which designs and builds autonomous maritime platforms, such as uncrewed subsurface vessels, raised a $175M Series B at a $1B valuation (John Reynolds/Tech.eu)

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Bun's creator says he rewrote Bun from Zig to Rust using a Claude Fable 5 prerelease version in 11 days, noting it would've taken three engineers "about a year" (Jarred Sumner/bun.com)

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Character.AI launches three human-written, AI-generated microdramas, whose characters users can chat with, and aims to eventually let users make their own shows (Ivan Mehta/TechCrunch)

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Meta prices Muse Spark 1.1 at $1.25/1M input tokens and $4.25/1M output tokens; Alexandr Wang says improving coding and agentic performance was a key focus (Ina Fried/Axios)

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Meta launches a Meta Model API, which Mark Zuckerberg says will have "aggressive and attractive" pricing at ~25% of the cost of OpenAI's and Anthropic's models (Kurt Wagner/Bloomberg)

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Meta releases Muse Spark 1.1, capable of more advanced coding and a "step-change" from the first generation, available to US developers via a public API preview (Dominic Preston/The Verge)

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European startups raised $24B in Q2, up 66% YoY and the strongest quarter in four years; UK startups raised $10.4B, above Germany's $3.2B, and France's $2.4B (Gené Teare/Crunchbase News)

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Anthropic debuts a "reflection" dashboard in beta for Free, Pro, and Max users with memory turned on, to track their Claude activity over 1, 3, 6, or 12 months (Anthropic)

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