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Elon Musk now regularly posts AI images and videos of scantily clad women generated by Grok's Imagine tool on X, including avatar Ani dancing in her underwear (Miles Klee/Rolling Stone)

Sources: two AI researchers hired by Meta for its Superintelligence Labs returned to OpenAI after less than one-month stints; a third researcher also left Meta (Wired)

Court filing: Elon Musk's lawyers ask a US judge to block OpenAI from obtaining documents from Meta related to a previous $97.4B bid for OpenAI's assets (Shubham Kalia/Reuters)

A look at Xiaomi's evolution from a tech assembler to a high-tech manufacturer, as it applies its smartphone manufacturing strategy to developing EVs and chips (Financial Times)

US Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick says the US plans to publish GDP and economic data on the blockchain, but gave no details on the blockchain or timeline (Danny Park/The Block)

Tussell: UK government contracts for AI-related projects have reached £573M in 2025 to July 15, up from £468M for the whole of 2024, as it seeks efficiency (Josh Gabert-Doyon/Financial Times)

Q&A with Francis Dufay, CEO of Jumia, Africa's largest e-commerce platform, on Temu and other rivals, adding Chinese sellers to stay competitive, AI, and more (Damilare Dosunmu/Rest of World)

Q&A with General Catalyst's Hemant Taneja on the VC firm's "AI roll-up" strategy to buy service businesses and inject them with AI, investment bubbles, and more (George Hammond/Financial Times)

Inside India's growing ~$1.5B e-waste recycling industry: about 95% of workers are employed informally, doing dangerous, toxic, and lawless work for meager pay (Yashraj Sharma/Rest of World)

AI avatars of the deceased, or "Deadbots", are used for advocacy and emotional connection, but their potential commercial use raises ethical and legal concerns (Chloe Veltman/NPR)

A profile of Egune AI, a startup building LLMs for the Mongolian language, as it navigates geopolitics, a lack of resources, and the nascent local tech scene (Viola Zhou/Rest of World)

UK-based Yoto, whose screen-free speakers for kids play audiobooks and music, reports 2024 revenue up 86% YoY to £94.8M and expects to turn a profit in 2025 (Tim Bradshaw/Financial Times)

Salesloft says hackers stole OAuth tokens from its Drift chat agent integration to conduct a Salesforce data theft campaign between August 8 and August 18 (Lawrence Abrams/BleepingComputer)

Sources: OpenAI's restructuring may slip into 2026 as it negotiates with Microsoft; failure to reach a deal in 2025 would let SoftBank withhold its $10B funding (Financial Times)

Malaysian chip designer SkyeChip unveils the MARS1000, the country's first edge AI processor, as Malaysia seeks to climb the global semiconductor value chain (Bloomberg)

Microsoft President Brad Smith addressed protests over Israel contracts after seven protesters, including two current Microsoft employees, occupied his office (Todd Bishop/GeekWire)

A look at the possible remedies a US court might impose on Google after its antitrust loss last year, including a breakup, with a decision expected this week (Tim Wu/New York Times)

AI firms are striking partnerships and giving some users in Asia free access to AI tools, in pursuit of larger sources of real-world consumer data for training (Itika Sharma Punit/Rest of World)

Memo: Verily, Alphabet's life sciences unit, lays off staff and ends its medical devices program, shifting its focus instead to precision health, data, and AI (Hugh Langley/Business Insider)

Chinese AI chip designer Cambricon reports H1 2025 revenue up 44x YoY to $405.2M and a ~$144M profit, after Beijing encouraged companies to use homegrown tech (Rachel Yeo/Bloomberg)

Sources: HongShan, formerly Sequoia China, has invested only a quarter of the ~$9B it raised in 2022 and has been increasingly looking beyond China for deals (The Information)

Internal memo: Indian IT services giant TCS forms a new unit for AI-based operations and names Amit Kapur, who led TCS' UK and Ireland business, as its chief (Sai Ishwarbharath B/Reuters)

Microsoft temporarily locked down a building at its HQ after protesters got inside Brad Smith's office, demanding that it cut ties with the Israeli government (Tom Warren/The Verge)

Okta reports Q2 revenue up 13% YoY to $728M, vs. $711.8M est., net income up 131% to $67M, and increases its fiscal 2026 forecast; OKTA jumps 6%+ after hours (Jordan Novet/CNBC)

OpenAI plans to update ChatGPT to better respond to mental distress cues, provide parental controls, and bolster safeguards around conversations about suicide (Rachel Metz/Bloomberg)

MongoDB reports Q2 revenue up 24% YoY to $591.4M, vs. $553.9M est., net loss down 14% to $47M, and increases its full-year guidance; MDB jumps 28%+ after hours (Katherine Hamilton/Wall Street Journal)

Anthropic releases Claude for Chrome, which lets Claude take actions on the user's behalf within the browser, as a research preview for 1,000 Max subscribers (Maxwell Zeff/TechCrunch)

Trump says Meta plans to spend $50B on its "Hyperion" data center under construction in Louisiana; earlier, Meta said that its investment would exceed $10B (Riley Griffin/Bloomberg)

Blue Water Autonomy, which is building autonomous, unmanned ships for the US Navy, raised a $50M Series A led by GV, bringing its total funding to $64M (Allie Garfinkle/Fortune)

Google DeepMind's Weather Lab, launched in June, showed superior accuracy in forecasting Hurricane Erin's path up to 72 hours ahead, beating traditional models (Eric Berger/Ars Technica)

Filing: Anthropic reached a settlement in a copyright class action brought by authors whose works were included in two pirate databases Anthropic downloaded (Annelise Levy/Bloomberg Law)

Intel has partnerships with multiple Chinese surveillance companies sanctioned by the US for enabling human rights abuses, including Uniview and Hikvision (Emily Baker-White/Forbes)

Meta plans to spend tens of millions to launch a super PAC that will back candidates for California state offices with a light-touch approach to AI regulation (Politico)

The family of a teen who died by suicide sues OpenAI, alleging that ChatGPT gave him info about suicide methods and at times deterred him from seeking help (Kashmir Hill/New York Times)

London-based Attio, which offers a CRM service where AI agents and humans work together, raised a $52M Series B led by GV, bringing its total funding to $116M (Lucy Adams/Tech.eu)

Polymarket raised "double-digit millions" from 1789 Capital, which Donald Trump Jr. joined as a partner in 2024; Trump Jr. will join Polymarket's advisory board (Dan Primack/Axios)

Google pilots a new language practice feature on Google Translate with tailored listening and practicing sessions, and also adds AI-powered live conversations (Steve Dent/Engadget)

Apple announces an "Awe dropping" event on September 9 at 10AM PT at Apple Park, where the iPhone 17 lineup, new Apple Watch models, and more are expected (Juli Clover/MacRumors)

YouTube rolls out Hype, which lets users boost creators with under 500K subscribers via a hype button that gives videos points, in the US and 38 other countries (Sarah Perez/TechCrunch)

Framework unveils a second-generation Framework Laptop 16 with a swappable Nvidia RTX 5070 GPU, an industry first, shipping in November 2025 for $2,199+ (Sean Hollister/The Verge)

SSA's chief data officer files a whistleblower complaint that DOGE uploaded a database with every Social Security number ever issued to an insecure cloud server (Nicholas Nehamas/New York Times)

Melania Trump says she hopes to become the "First Lady of Technology" as she leads the Presidential AI Challenge to inspire children and teachers to embrace AI (Miranda Devine/New York Post)

Sources: Apple executives have discussed acquiring Mistral AI and Perplexity, with Eddy Cue as the most vocal champion within the company for such AI deals (The Information)

Google says it is behind the viral "nano-banana" image model and launches it as Gemini 2.5 Flash Image with finer edit controls in the Gemini app, API, and more (Maxwell Zeff/TechCrunch)

Trump Media and Crypto.com sign a deal to integrate Crypto.com's wallet and adopt the CRO token for Truth Social's rewards; Trump Media will buy $105M in CRO (Oliver Knight/CoinDesk)

French prosecutors open an investigation into Australian video platform Kick over the death of a content creator who was violently abused during livestreams (Graham Fraser/BBC)

Sources and docs: Microsoft worked with the FBI to track anti-Israel protests, flagged internal emails with words like "Gaza", deleted posts, and fired staff (Bloomberg)

Sources: Klarna seeks a $13B to $14B valuation in its IPO next month, selling shares for $34-$36 as early as this week; Klarna sought a ~$50B valuation in 2021 (Reuters)

Sources: Temu resumes shipping goods from China directly to US consumers and increases its US ad spending, after a trade truce between Washington and Beijing (Financial Times)

AT&T agrees to buy spectrum licenses from EchoStar for ~$23B in cash, adding ~50MHz of spectrum, expected to close by mid-2026, pending regulatory approval (Bloomberg)