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Spotify launches a DM feature that lets users share audio and send text chats, available to mobile users aged 16 years and older in "select markets" this week (Jess Weatherbed/The Verge)

Yield Sec: illegal gambling operators captured 71% of Europe's online betting and casino market in 2024, or €80.65B, as regulators struggle with crypto casinos (Navya Menon/Bloomberg)

The US taking a 10% equity stake in Intel is a terrible idea and a dangerous turn in US industrial policy, but also the least bad option to make Foundry viable (Ben Thompson/Stratechery)

Stanford researchers: over the past three years, employment has dropped 13% for entry-level workers just starting out in fields that are the most exposed to AI (Rachel Metz/Bloomberg)

Court filing: Tesla rejected a $60M settlement offer in a lawsuit over a fatal 2019 crash of a Model S with Autopilot, before a jury awarded a $243M verdict (Mike Scarcella/Reuters)

A profile of film studio A24, valued at $3.5B in June 2024, as it focuses on big budget projects and explores AI tools via A24 Labs, drawing mixed reactions (Alex Barasch/New Yorker)

Shopify updated a help page in May to tighten its rules against "hateful content" like racist merchandise, after removing a similar ban in July 2024 (Thomas Seal/Bloomberg)

Bengaluru, home to about 33% of India's 1,800+ GCCs and key to the $300B tech industry, struggles as its infrastructure lags behind rapid tech sector growth (Financial Times)

Japanese media groups Nikkei and Asahi Shimbun jointly sue Perplexity in Tokyo, alleging the AI startup "copied and stored" their articles without permission (Financial Times)

SoftBank shares are up 61% in 2025, making it one of Tokyo's top performers, on the back of AI and chip investments, as some investors question the upside (Nikkei Asia)

Q&A with Harsh Jain, CEO of Dream11 parent Dream Sports, on India's real-money gaming law, which he says erased 95% of the group's revenue and all its profits (Moneycontrol)

LinkedIn is expanding its BrandLink video ads program with new publishers and creators, and says payouts to them have more than tripled year over year (Jaspreet Singh/Reuters)

Google says NotebookLM's Video Overviews now support 80 languages, and Audio Overviews now provide more detailed non-English summaries (Lauren Forristal/TechCrunch)

Forty-four US AGs sign an open letter to 11 chatbot and social media companies, warning they will be held accountable if their AI chatbots knowingly harm kids (Samantha Cole/404 Media)

Sources: Doug Beck, director of the Pentagon's Defense Innovation Unit, resigns; DOD officials had previously raised concerns about his donations to Democrats (Reuters)

So far in 2025, at least 10 biotech companies have pivoted into crypto to boost stock prices, frequently sparking frenzied but short-lived spikes in shares (Bloomberg)

The US Commerce Department voids a Biden administration deal with the nonprofit Natcast to oversee $7.4B in semiconductor research funds, calling it illegal (David Shepardson/Reuters)

Filing: Intel warns the US taking a 10% stake could trigger "adverse reactions", including in international sales, which made up 76% of revenue last fiscal year (Chris Eudaily/CNBC)

Sources: the Trump administration is considering imposing sanctions on EU or member state officials responsible for implementing the EU's DSA (Humeyra Pamuk/Reuters)

Google plans to begin verifying the identity of all developers who distribute apps on Android, even from outside the Play Store, starting in September 2026 (Mishaal Rahman/Android Authority)

YouTube used AI to make changes in some videos without telling the creators; YouTube calls it an experiment to unblur, denoise, and improve video quality (Thomas Germain/BBC)

Nvidia says the Jetson AGX Thor, its latest "robot brain" chip module, is now on sale for $3,499 as a developer kit; the module will ship next month (Kif Leswing/CNBC)

xAI sues Apple and OpenAI, alleging their deal to integrate ChatGPT into Apple devices stifles competition and Apple unfairly favors OpenAI in App Store ranking (Mike Scarcella/Reuters)

Thoma Bravo buys Verint for $1.23B in a deal valuing the customer service automation software provider at $2B, days after the PE firm bought Dayforce for $12.3B (Ryan Gould/Bloomberg)

Riyadh-based Humain debuts Humain Chat, an Arabic and English conversational AI app powered by its Allam LLM and designed around Islamic values and heritage (Omar El Chmouri/Bloomberg)

An interview with Eric Trump on how he became a crypto evangelist after several banks cut off the Trump family's accounts following the January 6 Capitol riot (Vicky Ge Huang/Wall Street Journal)

Docs: xAI terminated its status as a public benefit corporation as of May 9, 2024; XAI Holdings, which houses xAI and X, also doesn't have a PBC designation (Lora Kolodny/CNBC)

Perplexity launches Comet Plus, a $5/month service similar to Apple News+, and says it has allocated $42.5M for publishers, which will receive 80% of revenue (Bloomberg)

Netflix plans to open its first Netflix House locations, 100K-sq-ft entertainment and shopping venues, in Philadelphia on November 12 and Dallas on December 11 (Jennifer Maas/Variety)

PDD Holdings, which owns Pinduoduo and Temu, reports Q2 revenue up 7% YoY to ~$14.53B, above est., and net income down 5% YoY to ~$4.5B, driven by discounts (Reuters)

a16z, OpenAI's Greg Brockman, and others launch Leading the Future, a pro-AI super PAC network with $100M+ in funding, hoping to emulate crypto PAC Fairshake (Wall Street Journal)

How German delivery giant DHL uses automation and AI to help offset an ageing workforce, with one in three support staff set to retire in the next five years (Andrew Hill/Financial Times)

Sensor Tower: Temu's MAUs in Latin America grew 143% YoY to 105M in H1 2025; Mexico, Chile, and Uruguay want to tax low-cost imports to protect local businesses (Bloomberg)

Sources detail Intel's two-week roller-coaster ride, from Trump demanding CEO Lip-Bu Tan step down to the US government becoming Intel's biggest shareholder (Wall Street Journal)

How Masayoshi Son became President Trump's favored foreign investor, after cultivating close ties since Trump's first term, leading to SoftBank's $2B Intel deal (Financial Times)

Sources: TSMC plans to stop using Chinese chipmaking equipment, like AMEC's etching tools, from its most advanced 2nm process to avoid potential US restrictions (Cheng Ting-Fang/Nikkei Asia)

Sources: Spotify has been unable to settle on the features that should be in a super premium plan, discussed for years, and hasn't come to terms with partners (Lucas Shaw/Bloomberg)

Spotify Co-President and CBO Alex Norström says price increases are "part of our toolbox now", adding that they will be accompanied by new services and features (Financial Times)

A look at the growing torrent of US state-based AI bills, as the states shift from comprehensive AI regulation to focus on narrower issues, like mental health (Dean W. Ball/Hyperdimensional)

Sony's gaming execs, designers, and studio founders describe how it wants its first-party studios to contribute more to revenue growth and take measured risks (David Keohane/Financial Times)

Vertical streaming apps charging $20/week are beating Netflix and other SVOD platforms in user growth with their mini-dramas optimized for mobile viewing (Tatum Hunter/Washington Post)

Q&A with Grindr CEO George Arison on developing AI-powered features like Wingman and A-List, Grindr's new telehealth service Woodwork, his RTO mandate, and more (J. Edward Moreno/Sherwood News)

A look at FoundHer House, an all-female hacker house in San Francisco that has become a hot spot for dinners and panel discussions sponsored by a16z and others (New York Times)

Two former executives who ran the CHIPS Program Office say the US-Intel deal won't solve Intel's real issue: a lack of external customers for its foundry unit (Wall Street Journal)

Researchers detail an indirect prompt injection flaw in Perplexity's Comet AI browser, letting attackers manipulate it into performing unauthorized actions (Brave)

How Spotify's Discovery Mode has become the new normal in music marketing, five years after its 2020 launch when it faced a backlash and "payola" accusations (Ashley Carman/Bloomberg)

xAI releases Grok 2's weights on Hugging Face under the Grok 2 Community License Agreement; Elon Musk says Grok 3 "will be made open source in about 6 months" (Anthony Ha/TechCrunch)

A look at Apple's three-year iPhone redesign plan, starting with iPhone Air this fall, foldable with Touch ID in 2026, and a curved-glass "iPhone 20" in 2027 (Mark Gurman/Bloomberg)

An interview with Nick Clegg about Silicon Valley's "cloying conformity" and "combination of machismo and self-pity", Zuckerberg's "masculine energy", and more (Gaby Hinsliff/The Guardian)

How Raya, a privately held dating app with a waitlist of 2.5M people, found success through its rigorous user selection process and Fight Club-style rules (Lane Florsheim/Wall Street Journal)