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Techmeme

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)

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

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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)

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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)

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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)

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

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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)

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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)

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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)

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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)

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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)

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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)

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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)

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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)

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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)

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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)

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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)

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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)

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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)

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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)

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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)

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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)

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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)

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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)

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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)

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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)

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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)

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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)

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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)

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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)

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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)

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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)

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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)

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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)

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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)

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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)

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How Larry Ellison's $45M donation to a group supporting President Trump brought Ellison deeper into Trump's circle, helping Oracle and his son's WBD acquisition (Wall Street Journal)

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Assort Health, which develops AI voice agents for health care to handle scheduling and more, raised a $120M Series C led by Menlo Ventures at a $1.2B valuation (Heather Landi/Fierce Healthcare)

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Paris-based Tsuga, whose observability software runs in customers' own clouds to help them skip per-byte ingestion costs, raised a $35M Series A led by Singular (Ana Maria Constantin/The Next Web)

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TRM Labs: Iran-linked crypto wallets, including those tied to Iran's central bank, have moved $3.84B+ in transactions through crypto exchange CoinEx since 2019 (Wall Street Journal)

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NAND flash maker Kioxia, Japan's most valuable company since June 12, plans to offer US depositary shares in spring 2027 amid AI-driven demand for memory chips (Bloomberg)

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Sources: Meta is accelerating plans to use LLMs to review content and ads, replacing ~50% of human review requests in 2026 and aiming for 90% by year-end (Financial Times)

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New Zealand-based Partly, which develops an AI model for the auto parts industry, raised a $50M Series B led by DST at a $500M valuation, as it enters the US (Duncan Riley/SiliconANGLE)

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The Netherlands is lobbying the US not to expand chip equipment export controls that would constrain ASML's ability to sell immersion DUV machines to China (Bloomberg)

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Facebook brings back Facebook Creator Studio as a stand-alone app with built-in AI chatbot to help creators grow their audiences through personalized guidance (Aisha Malik/TechCrunch)

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Digital advocacy firms like CiviClick and Influent appear to use AI to generate mass public comments on local energy projects, mostly favoring fossil fuel use (Bloomberg)

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An Amazon seller reveals how middlemen on chat apps offer access to Amazon employees who allegedly grant favors, like reinstating suspended accounts, for a fee (Spencer Soper/Bloomberg)

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Hang Ten Systems, led by former Infosys CEO Vishal Sikka, launches with a $32M seed led by Mayfield to help enterprises use AI to run software at a lower cost (Jagmeet Singh/TechCrunch)

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Trase, which is building an operating system and infrastructure layer for AI agents in industries like health care and defense, raised a $107M seed led by Arch (Brock E.W. Turner/Axios)

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Paris-based digital health insurance startup Alan raised €480M led by Prosus at a €5.5B valuation, and is set for €1B+ in annual recurring revenue by year's end (Tim Bradshaw/Financial Times)

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