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Sources: possible cyberattacks targeting water and wastewater utilities have now been reported in at least 12 US states, and Iran is the prime suspect (ABC News)

Pavel Durov says an extortionist planted "illegal porn in a public chat" to get the app pulled from the App Store and manipulated Apple into "overreacting" (Emma Roth/The Verge)

Mistral releases Shieldstral, a 3B multimodal safety classifier that it says matches models up to 7x its size on text safety, available under Apache 2.0 (Mistral AI Blog)

Sources: the White House doesn't plan to publicly release its voluntary AI framework; details will be available to the companies that are part of the process (Maria Curi/Axios)

Internal email: Microsoft introduces token budget limits for employees' AI use, saying "tokenmaxxing is not what we are optimizing for" (Emanuel Maiberg/404 Media)

Anthropic names Mariano-Florentino Cuéllar, an ex-California Supreme Court justice and a special assistant in Obama's WH, as its first global affairs chief (Jeffrey Dastin/Reuters)

Sandisk and SK Hynix announce the High Bandwidth Flash (HBF) open specification that enables up to 512GB memory modules with 0.4 TB/s to 3.0 TB/s bandwidth (Anton Shilov/Tom's Hardware)

Sources: the US is preparing to set a price floor and impose tariffs on polysilicon, a material critical to chips, later this month, in a bid to counter China (Reuters)

The DOJ secures a $3.2M settlement from OpenAI to resolve allegations it discriminated against US workers by preferring workers with temporary employment visas (Jimmy Jenkins/Bloomberg)

Researchers: ChainDrop, a Shai-Hulud-based worm, has compromised 1,300+ npm packages, like Keyv, Cacheable, and flat-cache, with a combined 2B monthly downloads (Bill Toulas/BleepingComputer)

Oligo, which offers runtime security tools, raised $60M from Ballistic Ventures, Canon Capital, and others, bringing its total funding to $140M (Duncan Riley/SiliconANGLE)

Nvidia makes Alpamayo 2 Super, its frontier open reasoning model for robotaxis and AVs, available for commercial use under the OpenMDW-1.1 license (Jessica Soares/NVIDIA)

Ambrook, which offers accounting software, raised a $30M Series B led by Lachy Groom as it expands beyond farming into trucking, construction, and real estate (Alex Konrad/Upstarts Media)

New Jersey files an antitrust lawsuit against Amazon, alleging it abuses its dominance to impose low pay and poor conditions on independent delivery drivers (Jody Godoy/Reuters)

A World Bank report says developing economies stand to benefit more from AI boosting their workers' output than they will lose in jobs being replaced by AI (Joseph Cotterill/Financial Times)

Convex, which provides an AI-optimized application backend for developers, raised a $57M Series B led by Insight Partners, taking its total funding to $110.5M (Maria Deutscher/SiliconANGLE)

Analysis: in 2026 so far, US police arrested at least 37 people in connection to data center protests and intervened to prevent confrontations in 12 more cases (Joe Wilkins/Futurism)

Obsidian Security, which helps companies secure AI agents, raised an $85M Series D at a $1.1B valuation, after raising a $90M Series C in April 2022 (Akash Sriram/Reuters)

HappyRobot, which uses AI to automate freight operator communications, raised a $150M Series C at a $1.2B valuation, after a $44M Series B in September 2025 (Lily Mae Lazarus/Fortune)

Sources: Polymarket is in early talks with prospective investors to raise ~$1B at a $20B+ valuation, up from $15B in April 2026 and $9B in October 2025 (Todd Gillespie/Bloomberg)

Sources: Anthropic agreed to a $10B deal for computing capacity in Norway from Nvidia-backed AI cloud startup Volta Infra, which says the deal is for six years (Bloomberg)

AI cloud startup Volta Infra raised $300M led by a16z and Altimeter at a $2.4B valuation and says it landed a $10B contract with an unnamed leading AI developer (Dina Bass/Bloomberg)

Sources: CXMT is set to manufacture small quantities of LPDDR6 smartphone memory around 2026's end, as it seeks to compete with Micron, SK Hynix, and Samsung (Bloomberg)

Sources: the FCC is drafting a restriction on US imports of new models of Chinese data center optical transceivers, set to take effect upon publication in 2026 (Alexandra Alper/Reuters)

Uber is defending 4,000+ rider sexual-violence lawsuits by aggressively examining plaintiffs' drinking, clothing, and more, after promising to protect survivors (Emily Steel/New York Times)

In a rare interview, Huawei's top chip scientist, Liao Heng, warns of the looming physical limits Western chipmakers face and lauds Huawei's Tau Scaling Law (Bloomberg)

Sources: the US is focused on promoting US AI models to be more competitive, after officials considered taking a more interventionist approach to open-source AI (New York Times)

Bending Spoons agrees to acquire Airtable in an all-cash deal valuing the US software company at $1.285B, set to close by 2026's end, its first post-IPO deal (Reuters)

How Wall Street learned to love the blockchain, as US regulators accept tokenized assets and other tech can offer significant advantages in speed and efficiency (Nikou Asgari/Financial Times)

Spotify reports Q2 revenue up 14% YoY to €4.8B, Premium Subscribers up 9% YoY to 300M, MAUs up 12% YoY to 777M, below 778M guidance, and a €545M net income (Todd Spangler/Variety)

Source: Apple passed $10B in annual sales in India for the first time in FY 2026, up from $9B in 2024-25 and $6B in 2022-23, as it expands its retail footprint (Sankalp Phartiyal/Bloomberg)

Sources: Beijing is growing concerned about the cyber capabilities of Mythos and other US-developed frontier AI models and their potential as offensive weapons (Bloomberg)

Sources and filings: Google assembled a ~$200B financing program for Anthropic, with $150B+ tied to TPUs and involving Broadcom, Blackstone, Apollo, and others (Financial Times)

A look at Alphabet's moonshot lab X and interviews with its staff, including CEO Astro Teller, on reinventing itself and what its next big thing might be (Harry McCracken/Fast Company)

Filing: Apple asks a US judge for a preliminary injunction barring two former staff and OpenAI from accessing, acquiring, using, or disclosing confidential info (Reuters)

OpenAI disputes Apple's account of pre-lawsuit contacts, rejects claims that ex-staff used confidential information, shares iMessages and emails, and more (OpenAI)

Q&A with Bluesky CEO Toni Schneider on the AT Protocol, ActivityPub, scaling moderation, Bluesky's reputation as a progressive social media network, and more (Nilay Patel/The Verge)

Sources: HP, Asus, and Acer have started using small amounts of DRAM chips from CXMT in their laptops for non-US markets, amid an unprecedented memory shortage (Nikkei Asia)

Apple says it "briefly removed Telegram from the App Store" over CSAM on Monday, restoring it after Telegram "promptly removed the content and banned the user" (Marcus Mendes/9to5Mac)

Sources: to fight critics on social media, DHS sent platforms hundreds of subpoenas and asked posters to sign letters saying speech about ICE "may" be a crime (Wall Street Journal)

TikTok agrees to settle three more teen social media lawsuits ahead of trial; 2,600 cases with similar claims are pending in California federal court (Dietrich Knauth/Reuters)

Texas halts approval of data center grid connections until audits are performed; projects representing 474+ GW are in the queue, over 5x the grid's peak demand (The Texas Tribune)

Amazon becomes the fifth company to reach a $3T market cap, joining Nvidia, Alphabet, Microsoft, and Apple, after hitting $2T in June 2024; AMZN closed up 4.58% (Jeran Wittenstein/Bloomberg)

Snap reports Q2 revenue up 19% YoY to $1.6B, above $1.54B est., DAUs up 5% to 493M, vs. 487M est., forecasts Q3 revenue above est.; SNAP jumps 10%+ pre-market (Jonathan Vanian/CNBC)

Palantir reports Q2 revenue up 93% YoY to $1.94B, above $1.8B est., US commercial revenue up 149%, and raises FY26 revenue guidance; PLTR jumps 14%+ pre-market (Samantha Subin/CNBC)

Samsung says it's restricting app registrations and removing apps with SDKs that can turn smart TVs into residential proxy exit nodes, after a similar ban by LG (Zack Whittaker/TechCrunch)

Court docs: an FBI agent has been charged with amassing ~$1M worth of cryptocurrency, largely by making unauthorized withdrawals from a criminal target overseas (Devlin Barrett/New York Times)

US satellite internet provider Hughesnet files for Chapter 11 after losing subscribers to Starlink and plans to focus on business and government customers (Michael Kan/PCMag)

Doc: Microsoft asks Xbox 360 game developers to opt in for PC compatibility, bringing the games to its next-gen Project Helix console, "Xbox PCs", and handhelds (The Verge)

The White House says it has met its deadline to establish a voluntary framework for evaluating advanced AI models; it did not provide details of the framework (Maria Curi/Axios)