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Conduct, which uses AI to let companies maintain, change, and modernize their legacy IT systems, raised a $60M Series A, bringing its total funding to $72M (Chris Metinko/Axios)

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Estonia says it will assign personal ID numbers to AI agents to give them "limited, controllable, and auditable authorizations" as they take actions for humans (Ott Tammik/Bloomberg)

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Twenty, which uses AI to help US military hackers penetrate adversary computer networks, raised a $100M Series B led by Accel at a $1B valuation (Colin Demarest/Axios)

Nasdaq Private Market sues Hiive, claiming Hiive stole trade secrets and infringed on its IP, poaching two employees in part to access confidential information (Yazhou Sun/Bloomberg)

OpenAI's Chief Strategy Officer messaged staff that OpenAI "strongly" told the US government that building AI "requires the best talent from around the world" (The Information)

The US government awards $500M under the CHIPS Act to SandboxAQ to use AI models to develop new chemicals and materials for domestic semiconductor manufacturing (Stephen Nellis/Reuters)

Uber says it will expand its premium robotaxi service from San Francisco to Houston by mid-2027, in partnership with EV maker Lucid and AV startup Nuro (Kirsten Korosec/TechCrunch)

Nauk Nauk, which runs an AI video app that turns photos of toys into short animated videos, raised $20M and is coming out of beta; it claims to have 1M+ users (Ina Fried/Axios)

Sources: Trump officials discussed how to structure government equity stakes in AI companies, with Commerce Secretary Lutnick preferring a sovereign wealth fund (Eleanor Mueller/Semafor)

Sources describe Huawei's efforts to rebuild its chip business seven years after the US cut Huawei off from advanced chips, as it bets on logic-stacking tech (Financial Times)

World models startup Odyssey raised $310M from Amazon and others at a $1.45B valuation and will use AWS as its preferred cloud partner, deploying Trainium chips (Financial Times)

A profile of Anthropic researcher Nicholas Carlini, who warned about Mythos in March and is now part of an Anthropic team briefing the White House on safeguards (Wall Street Journal)

Sources: Samsung is seeing a rise in advanced chip production requests from BYD, Google, AMD, and others as TSMC's capacity remains constrained by AI demand (Nikkei Asia)

India's Telegram ban until June 22 over exam paper leak concerns is a terrible look for the country, sets a precedent, and could happen again if unchallenged (Nikhil Pahwa/@nixxin)

Sources: a new AI lab founded by Junyang Lin, former lead of Alibaba's Qwen models, has raised several hundred million dollars at a ~$2B post-money valuation (The Information)

Dealogic: investors have poured $58B across 42 data center deals YTD; Oxford Economics says ~850 data centers worth some $7T are under construction globally (Financial Times)

Sources: Chinese social media app Xiaohongshu targets a Hong Kong IPO as early as year-end at a $70B+ valuation, up from $50B in recent private secondary trades (Wall Street Journal)

Kazakhstan signs accords with Firebird on Nvidia-related computing projects that could bring up to $10B in investment, as it seeks to build a Data Center Valley (Bloomberg)

Sources: Jeff Bezos is investing in Cambridge, UK-based CuspAI, which applies generative AI to material sciences, as part of a $400M round at a $2.6B valuation (Tim Bradshaw/Financial Times)

WordPress survey: 60% of US consumers say "AI" in a brand's messaging is a turnoff, 86% always or sometimes check the original source after seeing an AI summary (Sarah Perez/TechCrunch)

A look at Wyoming's Frontier Stable Token, which launched in January and currently has a market value of ~$1M, as other states explore "white labeling" the tech (David Voreacos/Bloomberg)

Databricks says annualized revenue rose 80%+ YoY to $6.9B, up from $5.4B in Q4; CEO Ali Ghodsi says higher AI agent usage is increasing costs, lowering margins (Jordan Novet/CNBC)

Sources: Meta decided to support KOSA after it was packaged with language preempting state AI laws and a bill requiring app stores to verify users' ages (Politico)

Kapwing: in tests, ~60% of the first 500 TikTok For You videos shown to a new account were AI slop, ~3x the slop shown to a new YouTube user via YouTube Shorts (Matt G. Southern/Search Engine Journal)

Sources: the US has held off adding DeepSeek, CXMT, and 100+ other flagged companies to its Entity List, last updated in October, the longest gap in 10+ years (Karen Freifeld/Reuters)

Sources: Amazon faces a possible FTC lawsuit alleging it misled advertisers; multiple state AGs are involved and the case could seek billions in civil penalties (Bloomberg)

Many US lawmakers said this week they had not been briefed on Trump's Fable 5 move, including Ted Cruz, whose commerce committee has jurisdiction over AI policy (Politico)

Illinois Governor JB Pritzker signs a state budget that levies taxes on social media giants, digital advertising, and prediction and crypto markets (Mitchell Armentrout/Chicago Sun Times)

Anthropic pauses its plan to move Claude Agent SDK to token-based billing from June 15, saying "Nothing changes for now", giving power users a pricing reprieve (Kyle Orland/Ars Technica)

SpaceX closed up 4.83% on Tuesday for a $2.65T market cap, just above Amazon's, after popping ~12% intraday and briefly overtaking Microsoft's $2.93T market cap (CNBC)

Sources: PayPal plans to close its 10-year-old PayPal Ventures arm amid new CEO Enrique Lores' shakeup and has hired Jefferies to explore selling some positions (Ben Weiss/Fortune)

Melbourne-based Everlab, which is building an AI-powered preventive healthcare platform, raised a AU$65M Series A led by Airtree Ventures (Tegan Jones/SmartCompany)

Sensor Tower: ChatGPT's market share fell to 46.4% at the end of May, as Gemini rose to 27.7% and Claude to 10.3%; Grok, Meta AI, and others have less than 5% (Ivan Mehta/TechCrunch)

Z.ai debuts GLM-5.2, saying the open-weights AI model brings improvements to agentic coding and long-horizon tasks, with a 1M context window and an MIT license (Z.ai)

Google launches Android 17 and Wear OS 7, available first on Pixel devices, with support for the latest AI models, a bubble bar UI, and live updates on Wear OS (Sarah Perez/TechCrunch)

Qualcomm announces Snapdragon Reality Elite, its new flagship XR chipset, and says it will debut in the compute puck of Xreal's Aura Android XR device this fall (David Heaney/UploadVR)

Letter: Hightouch, an ad tech startup valued at $2.75B in April, offers to buy LiveRamp's identity business from Publicis for $800M to $1.2B in cash and stock (Sara Fischer/Axios)

A look at Specs, which have a battery life of up to four hours and a case with four charges, and an interview with Snap CEO Evan Spiegel about the AR glasses (Harry McCracken/Fast Company)

Snap unveils $2,195 Specs, its first "fully standalone" AR glasses, which have a 51-degree field of view, set to ship "this fall" in the US, the UK, and France (Jay Peters/The Verge)

Microsoft is moving Copilot Cowork to usage-based pricing and is considering a Microsoft-hosted version of DeepSeek as a cheaper option (Ina Fried/Axios)

Sources: Apple's AirPods with cameras for AI are scheduled to launch in 2027 alongside the 20th anniversary pro iPhones and a second-generation foldable iPhone (Mark Gurman/Bloomberg)

Databricks agrees to acquire Panther Labs, its third cybersecurity acquisition; Panther was valued at $1.4B when it raised a $120M Series B in 2021 (Jeffrey Dastin/Reuters)

Bland, which uses proprietary, in-house-built voice models to process calls for 250+ enterprise clients, raised a $50M Series C led by Dell Technologies Capital (Lily Mae Lazarus/Fortune)

Hydra Host, a marketplace for developers and enterprises to procure GPUs pooled from data center operators, raised a $100M Series A led by Kindred Ventures (Mike Wheatley/SiliconANGLE)

Sources: the Trump administration won't allow G7 countries to regain access to Mythos 5 as doing so would be "completely illogical"; UK requested a "carve-out" (James Franey/New York Post)

Sources: Binance is set to lose permission to offer services to EU clients from the start of July as its application for a license is about to be turned down (Reuters)

Ent Security, which wants to build a new layer of workspace security that reads the intent behind what users and AI agents do, launches with $100M in funding (Duncan Riley/SiliconANGLE)

Limitless Labs, which is developing an AI platform to automate CNC manufacturing, raised a $20M Series A led by Dell Technologies Capital and Square Peg (Meir Orbach/CTech)

Microsoft upgrades Surface Pro and Surface Laptop with Qualcomm Snapdragon X2 chips; Pro starts at $1,499 and Laptop at $1,599, both $100 higher than last-gen (Antonio G. Di Benedetto/The Verge)

Copia, an industrial code management and recovery provider, raised $26M co-led by AE Ventures and Squadra Ventures, after previously raising $16.4M (Colin Campbell/Axios)