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How AI is shaping the 2026 US midterms, as public anger grows against data center expansion and the AI industry emerges as one of the biggest financial backers (Bloomberg)

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LSEG: tech companies have raised $3.1B from mainland China stock market listings YTD, up 5x+ from a year earlier, as AI and chip companies drive onshore IPOs (Reuters)

The rapid pace of AI progress has created a pervasive fear of missing out across Silicon Valley, fueling anxiety among founders, executives, employees, and VCs (Bloomberg)

Sports clips' rise on platforms like YouTube has left broadcasters debating whether to use them to attract younger viewers or protect their subscription revenue (Lillian Rizzo/CNBC)

Tokyo-based Sakana AI's Fugu and China-based 360's cybersecurity model Tulongfeng claim to rival Anthropic's banned Mythos and Fable 5 amid the US export ban (Kate Park/TechCrunch)

AI executives and lobbyists say they are seeking regulatory clarity from the Trump administration but are wary of pressing for answers, fearing retaliation (Politico)

10h

A look at South Korea's four vocational "meister" schools that train students to work in semiconductor manufacturing, leading to jobs at Samsung and SK Hynix (Max Kim/New York Times)

10h

Source: the Trump administration is close to allowing Anthropic to restore access to Fable 5; limits could be lifted as soon as this coming week (Axios)

11h

Polymarket says its annualized revenue is now $1B+; Dune Analytics: daily volume on Polymarket's US platform rose from ~$50M in mid-May to $200M+ by June 20 (Davis Giangiulio/CNBC)

12h

Streaming services must comply with a California law that bans playing ads louder than the content being watched from July 1, but its implementation is unclear (Scharon Harding/Ars Technica)

15h

A look at advanced chip packaging, now more reliant on TSMC and its partners in Taiwan than ever, and the efforts to address this bottleneck in the US (Don Clark/New York Times)

19h

Sources: Meituan, Baidu, Xiaomi, and other Chinese tech giants have been trimming their workforces, fueling Chinese workers' concerns of being replaced by AI (Wency Chen/South China Morning Post)

19h

Japanese financial giant SBI agrees to acquire Bitbank, a top 10 Japanese crypto exchange by trading activity, for ~$289M, with the deal set to close in October (Jamie Crawley/CoinDesk)

20h

Source: Intel has promised to deliver SpaceX and Apple a toolkit this fall to test its 14A node before they make final commitments to produce chips with Intel (Tripp Mickle/New York Times)

21h

Insurance tech startup Corgi denies accusations that it used Papermark's open source software code to develop its software and present it as its own (Julie Bort/TechCrunch)

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Sources: the CFTC began an extensive investigation of Polymarket earlier this year; the agency's former acting head killed a separate investigation in July 2025 (New York Times)

22h

Sources: Apple is lobbying the Trump admin for clearance to buy memory chips from US-blacklisted Chinese company CXMT to ease pressure from rising chip prices (Financial Times)

22h

Sources: SpaceX and Charter have held executive-level talks on a consumer mobile phone offering, which would help SpaceX become a DTC mobile phone provider (Kelcee Griffis/Bloomberg)

23h

Anthropic says the US government is allowing Mythos 5 to be redeployed to critical infrastructure operators, and is working to restore general access to Fable 5 (@anthropicai)

Sources: Meta lobbyists are urging California lawmakers to exempt social media platforms from legislation that would increase penalties in child-harm cases (Tyler Katzenberger/Politico)

Letter: the US lifts its block on Mythos 5, allowing Anthropic to release it to more than 100 US institutions; sources: talks about Fable 5 are ongoing (Semafor)

Anthropic Moves Toward Deal With US to Lift Curbs on AI Models (Bloomberg)

How AI-native law firms use "management services organization" structures to access capital historically barred from US law firms, including PE and VC funds (Stephen Foley/Financial Times)

Sources: Zuckerberg urged execs to explore Polymarket and Kalshi partnerships, as the Arena prediction app targets 100M monthly active "predictors" aged 18-34 (Mike Isaac/New York Times)

AWS hikes prices for Nvidia GPUs in its EC2 Capacity Blocks service, which let businesses rent AI compute in advance, by 20%; Trainium chip pricing is unchanged (Catherine Perloff/The Information)

Oracle's stock fell 19% this week, the steepest weekly drop since a 20% plunge in August 2001, amid concerns about its debt load and AI investments (Jordan Novet/CNBC)

The FTC fast-tracks approval for SpaceX to acquire Mesh, which raised a $50M Series A in February to make high-efficiency optical transceivers for data centers (Bloomberg)

OpenAI says GPT-5.6 Sol and Terra were capable of identifying vulnerabilities but were unable to execute autonomous, end-to-end attacks against hardened targets (OpenAI)

Sources: Paul Meade, Apple's top executive in charge of Vision Pro and smart glasses efforts, is leaving for OpenAI to work on the company's AI-powered devices (Mark Gurman/Bloomberg)

Uber expands the list of criminal convictions that disqualify US drivers and expands the background-check timeline, possibly removing ~0.5% of active US drivers (Natalie Lung/Bloomberg)

Sources: Russian hackers were behind a 2025 ransomware attack on Jaguar Land Rover that used "mind-blowing" encryption and cost UK's economy an estimated $2.5B (New York Times)

OpenAI appoints ex-Uber India head Prabhjeet Singh as its first managing director for India, to scale its presence in its second-largest market after the US (Jagmeet Singh/TechCrunch)

GPT-5.6 Sol matches Mythos Preview on ExploitBench, adds Ultra mode with subagents for complex workflows, and max reasoning for deep problem-solving (OpenAI)

OpenAI hopes to make GPT-5.6 generally available in the coming weeks and says "this kind of government access process" should not become the long-term default (Amrith Ramkumar/Wall Street Journal)

OpenAI releases three versions of GPT-5.6, called Sol, Terra, and Luna, as a limited preview to ~20 companies, with participants disclosed to the US government (Axios)

President Trump threatens to impose a 100% tariff on any country that imposes a digital services tax on US companies (Kevin Breuninger/CNBC)

Sources: Revolut told new hires they'll have to work in office at least three days a week from next year, retreating from its long-held remote-first approach (Financial Times)

Sources: Apple's 14" and 16" OLED touch screen MacBook Pros will be powered by the existing M5 Pro and M5 Max chips and have an updated industrial design (Mark Gurman/Bloomberg)

How US federal AI policy has gone from implausibly libertarian to increasingly draconian and opaque, and how to fix it, including using independent auditors (Dean W. Ball/Hyperdimensional)

Sources: DeepSeek's $7.4B raise was prompted by the release of Mythos as CEO Liang Wenfeng realized DeepSeek couldn't compete without a massive war chest (The Information)

Sources: Donald Trump Jr. got ~$300K in Kalshi equity after becoming a strategic adviser in 2025, when the company was valued at ~$2B; Kalshi is now worth $22B+ (George Steer/Financial Times)

Q&A with Tim Sweeney on his vision for a cross-platform gaming social system, Unreal Engine 6, AI's PR challenges, the state of AAA game development, and more (Tim Clark/PC Gamer)

Italy is investigating Microsoft 365's price hike, saying Microsoft did not adequately inform users that it was integrating AI tools like Copilot into the suite (Giulia Segreti/Reuters)

A study of 408 teens in Australia finds 80%+ were still using social media three months after the ban came into force, citing inadequate age verification checks (Anna Bawden/The Guardian)

Binance tells EU customers that it will stop providing services for them from July 1, after Greece rejected its application for a bloc-wide license last week (Financial Times)

Despite the "DeepMind mafia" pulling billions into London AI startups, none of Demis Hassabis' former lieutenants is building a homegrown UK frontier AI model (Tim Bradshaw/Financial Times)

Shares of Japanese NAND flash maker Kioxia slid 12% on Friday after a report that OpenAI was considering delaying its IPO sparked a selloff in AI-related shares (Sam Nussey/Reuters)

Sources: during SpaceX's IPO roadshow, COO Gwynne Shotwell told investors that it may launch a Starlink mobile service and build its own terrestrial US network (Financial Times)

Swiss watchmaker Swatch seeks $170M from Samsung in a London trial over 26 digital watch face apps that allegedly cloned luxury brand designs, including Omega (Alistair Gray/Financial Times)

OpenAI says 97.9% of its employees are now using Codex, up from ~40% in August 2025; non-developer Codex usage is up 137x for individuals and 12x within OpenAI (Thomas Claburn/The Register)