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Filing: OnlyFans gross revenue hit $7.2B in FY ending Nov. 2024, up from $6.6B YoY, and paid $5.8B to creators, up from $5.3B; creator accounts grew 13% to 4.6M (Daniel Thomas/Financial Times)

Email: TikTok plans to lay off several hundred UK trust and safety staff in the UK and Asia, citing "technological advances" such as LLMs in content moderation (Financial Times)

China's Shanghai index hit a decade high on August 22, driven by gains in local chipmakers Cambricon and Hygon, after Nvidia reportedly halts H20 production (Bloomberg)

OpenAI sets up a legal entity and plans to open its first office in India after launching ChatGPT Go, its cheapest plan, in the country on August 19 (Munsif Vengattil/Reuters)

Sources: EU officials are fast-tracking digital euro plans, and considering Ethereum or Solana over a private blockchain after the US passed the Genius Act (Nikou Asgari/Financial Times)

Vivo demos Vivo Vision, its first MR headset, which looks like an Apple Vision Pro clone but is ~40% lighter with micro-OLED displays, and could cost ~$1,400 (David Heaney/UploadVR)

Sources: the Trump admin plans to reallocate $2B+ from CHIPS Act to fund critical minerals projects, aiming to cut US reliance on China for key resources (Reuters)

OpenAI says its Chief People Officer Julia Villagra will leave on August 22; Villagra joined in February 2024 and was promoted to the role in March 2024 (Anna Tong/Reuters)

Filing: OpenAI says Elon Musk talked to Mark Zuckerberg in February about backing a $97.4B OpenAI bid, but neither Zuckerberg nor Meta signed a letter of intent (Financial Times)

Jensen Huang says Nvidia is in talks with China over H20 security concerns, is hopeful for a resolution, and reiterates that the H20 has no "security backdoors" (Nikkei Asia)

Sources: Nvidia told suppliers like Amkor and Samsung to halt H20 chip production after China urged local tech firms to avoid H20 over alleged security concerns (Qianer Liu/The Information)

Y Combinator filed an amicus brief in support of Epic Games in their antitrust lawsuit against Apple, calling App Store fees "a punitive tax on innovation" (Marcus Mendes/9to5Mac)

Sources: Meta has poached Frank Chu, an Apple exec who led AI teams focused on cloud infrastructure, training and search, despite Meta's plans to slow hiring (Mark Gurman/Bloomberg)

Clothing subscription service Rent the Runway gives up around 86% ownership to three lenders in exchange for $240M+ in debt relief and $20M in fresh financing (Bloomberg)

Zoom reports Q2 revenue up 5% YoY to $1.22B, Enterprise revenue up 7% to $730.7M, vs. $716.7M est., raises FY 2026 forecast above est.; ZM jumps 6%+ after hours (Brody Ford/Bloomberg)

Source: the Trump administration considers taking equity stakes in CHIPS Act recipients but not in firms that are increasing US investment, like TSMC and Micron (Wall Street Journal)

Source: Meta has signed a deal with Google, worth more than $10B over six years, to use Google Cloud's servers, storage, networking, and other services (The Information)

Anthropic says it worked with the US National Nuclear Security Administration on a classifier to block concerning chats, like those on building nuclear reactors (Morgan Chalfant/Semafor)

Russia orders that state-backed messenger app MAX, which critics say could be used to track users, must be pre-installed on phones and tablets from next month (Andrew Osborn/Reuters)

Trump signs an EO creating the National Design Studio to improve "websites and physical sites"; sources say he's tapping Airbnb co-founder Joe Gebbia to lead it (Gregory Korte/Bloomberg)

a16z hires Anne Neuberger, formerly a senior cybersecurity official in the Biden White House, as a senior adviser to work on "American Dynamism, AI, and cyber" (Patrick Howell O'Neill/Bloomberg)

Google will provide Gemini for Government to US federal agencies at $0.47 per agency through 2026; OpenAI and Anthropic are offering their products for $1/year (Julia Shapero/The Hill)

The DOJ says it will no longer target developers who create decentralized crypto platforms without criminal intent, as part of a regulatory retreat on crypto (Chris Prentice/Reuters)

Google says the median Gemini app text prompt consumes 0.24Wh of energy, about the same as running a microwave for a second, and emits 0.03g of CO2 equivalent (Casey Crownhart/MIT Technology Review)

Medium's CEO explains how the platform's AI policy has evolved as it adopts some AI tools while prioritizing human curation and inviting community feedback (Tony Stubblebine/The Medium Blog)

Sources: Anthropic is in talks to raise $10B, significantly above the previously reported $5B, due to strong investor demand (Bloomberg)

Interviews with three Google executives on the new Pixel phones, why Pixel won't ever be a "giant player", improving the devices by ~30% each year, AI, and more (Bloomberg)

Sources: Crusoe is discussing raising $1B+ at a $10B valuation; the company, which is helping build OpenAI's first Stargate facility, had $250M revenue in 2024 (The Information)

Nine current and ex-Apple staffers accuse VP of Fitness Tech Jay Blahnik of bullying and inappropriate behavior; Apple settled a sexual harassment complaint (Tripp Mickle/New York Times)

Apple raises the price of Apple TV+ in the US and some markets globally after previously raising the price in 2023; in the US, the price will rise $3 to $12.99 (Todd Spangler/Variety)

Thoma Bravo agrees to acquire HR software provider Dayforce for $12.3B, paying $70 per share, a 32% premium to Dayforce shares before reports of a possible deal (Dan Primack/Axios)

GFW Report: on August 20, China's Great Firewall blocked all TCP port 443 traffic, used for HTTPS, for ~74 minutes, an unusual move; the cause may be accidental (Nathaniel Mott/Tom's Hardware)

Autonomous driving tech startup Nuro closed its $203M Series E at a $6B valuation, adding $97M from Uber, Nvidia, and others to the $106M tranche from April (Rafe Uddin/Financial Times)

Google expands AI Mode to 180 countries and territories in English, following the US, the UK, and India, and plans to add more languages and regions "soon" (Abner Li/9to5Google)

In a study, Google says a median Gemini app text prompt uses 0.26mL of water and produces 0.03g of CO2 equivalent; critics say Google is omitting some key data (Justine Calma/The Verge)

CBP data: between April and June 2025, CBP searched 14,899 devices carried by international travelers, up from a record 12,766+ between January and March 2022 (Matt Burgess/Wired)

Sources: Take-Two lays off 80+ staff at BioShock studio Cloud Chamber, or ~33% of its ~250 staff, and delays the next BioShock game to late 2026 or early 2027 (Jason Schreier/Bloomberg)

DeepSeek details V3.1 and says it surpasses R1 on key benchmarks and is customized to work with next-gen Chinese-made AI chips, after unveiling it on August 19 (Bloomberg)

An interview with GM SVP of Software and Services Engineering David Richardson on GM's new AI team, building factory "cobots", or collaborative robots, and more (Isabelle Bousquette/Wall Street Journal)

In a UK tribunal filing, former Meta employee Samujjal Purkayastha alleges Meta misled advertisers by inflating its Shops ads metrics and bypassed Apple's ATT (Trishla Ostwal/Adweek)

A profile of Stability AI, which under CEO Prem Akkaraju and Chair Sean Parker has shifted from building frontier AI models to a Hollywood-focused SaaS company (Zoë Schiffer/Wired)

Q&A with Coinbase CEO Brian Armstrong on starting the company, battling North Korean hackers, stablecoin adoption, the GENIUS Act, pro-crypto Congress, and more (John Collison/Cheeky Pint)

SpaceX inks an Alaska Air deal for Starlink's Wi-Fi; sources: SpaceX is courting Middle Eastern airlines, a potential watershed moment against legacy operators (Bloomberg)

Filing: Alibaba plans to spin off its Shanghai-based self-driving unit Banma through a Hong Kong IPO, reducing its stake from 44.72% to 30% post-IPO (Aileen Chuang/South China Morning Post)

Analysis: Baidu's stock is trading at a forward P/E ratio of ~9.7, the lowest of any profitable Hang Seng Tech Index company, amid AI competitiveness concerns (Jeanny Yu/Bloomberg)

Alibaba-backed Z.ai, formerly Zhipu, launches a general-purpose AI agent app, which lets users use natural language to book hotels, order takeaway, and more (Danielle Popov/South China Morning Post)

India's lower house of parliament passes a sweeping online gaming bill to impose a blanket ban on real-money games nationwide, threatening a $23B industry (Jagmeet Singh/TechCrunch)

Sources: China's H20 curbs were triggered by US Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick's not selling China the "best stuff" remark, which officials found "insulting" (Financial Times)

TRM Labs launches Beacon Network, a real-time alert system for illicit crypto activity, partnering with law enforcement and exchanges like Binance and Coinbase (Jesse Hamilton/CoinDesk)

Meta froze hiring in its AI division last week with sources saying exceptions need Chief AI Officer Alexandr Wang's permission; the freeze's duration is unclear (Meghan Bobrowsky/Wall Street Journal)