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US political campaign managers and consultants are using AI to analyze voter data, create campaign materials, and more; survey: 87% of campaigners use AI daily (Stuart A. Thompson/New York Times)

Five Chinese tech and advanced manufacturing companies launch Hong Kong listings, seeking to raise up to $5.6B, led by Apple supplier Luxshare's $3.15B offering (Reuters)

Sources: Chinese smartphone makers like Xiaomi, Oppo, and Vivo told suppliers they will again cut 2026 shipment targets, with Xiaomi cutting 30% to ~95M units (Nikkei Asia)

Source: the Trump administration has talked with SpaceX about donating shares to Trump Accounts, which provide children with tax-advantaged savings accounts (Semafor)

Nebex, a fintech startup aiming to act as a broker platform connecting US space tech suppliers, foreign governments, and investors, raised a $30M seed led by GV (Bloomberg)

Australia's ACCC sues Amazon for allegedly introducing ads to Prime Video under unfair contract terms and forcing existing subscribers to pay more to avoid them (Peter Vercoe/Bloomberg)

OpenAI teases a device it is launching in partnership with keyboard maker Work Louder on July 15, saying "Your favorite Codex shortcuts are getting an upgrade" (Emma Roth/The Verge)

Sources: AI video startup Higgsfield is in talks to raise $300M to $500M at a $5B pre-money valuation, more than 4x its valuation in a January 2026 round (The Information)

The UK FCA unveils the updated version of its crypto regulatory framework, after softening proposed rules that critics said risked holding the UK back (Financial Times)

AI coding startup 8090 raised a $135M Series A led by Salesforce Ventures; founder Chamath Palihapitiya announces that he will lead the company as CEO (Julie Bort/TechCrunch)

The US DOD appoints Marc Andreessen to its Defense Policy Board, a committee that gives strategic advice to the US defense secretary and other top officials (Nick Wadhams/Bloomberg)

AI leaderboard provider Arena says it hit $100M in annualized run-rate revenue eight months after launching AI Evaluations, which offers performance analytics (Marina Temkin/TechCrunch)

Google says the Gemini app now offers personalized Nano Banana image generation, previously limited to Plus, Pro, and Ultra users, to eligible US users for free (Lauren Forristal/TechCrunch)

Sources: hundreds of Meta contractors posed as minors to probe how competitor chatbots responded to prompts involving suicide, sex, and other high-risk subjects (Wired)

Tidal adopts an AI policy that blocks wholly AI-generated music from earning royalties and removes AI-generated music that impersonates artists (Murray Stassen/Music Business Worldwide)

Digital Realty says it plans to acquire a majority stake in three fully leased Northern Virginia data centers from Blackstone-managed funds in a $7.8B deal (Jaspreet Singh/Reuters)

Source: Taiwanese authorities raided Super Micro's Taiwan office as part of a probe into the alleged smuggling of Nvidia chips to China; SMCI closed down 8.1% (Debby Wu/Bloomberg)

As a new law bars DOD from working with companies whose lobbyists also represent blacklisted entities, DC lobbying firms drop companies like Alibaba and Tencent (Bloomberg)

Waymo and Uber quietly ended their partnership in Phoenix in May; Uber says it is readying the launch of a separate autonomous vehicle partnership in the city (Sean O'Kane/TechCrunch)

Sources: component and supplier lists, and photos of iPhone 18 Pro models, are among files a ransomware group stole from Apple's Indian supplier Tata (Reuters)

Baz releases Baz Planner, which uses four specialized AI agents to analyze code at the planning stage, and extends its seed funding by $9M to $17M (Mike Wheatley/SiliconANGLE)

California strikes a deal with Anthropic to expand the use of Claude products across state agencies and local governments at a 50% discount (Christine Mui/Politico)

In Q2, there were thirteen $1B+ US venture-backed startup exits, either through acquisition or IPO, the most exits since the 2021 market peak (Joanna Glasner/Crunchbase News)

Quantifind, whose AI products help banks combat financial crimes such as money laundering, raised $200M led by Summit Partners (Laura Kreutzer/Wall Street Journal)

Sources: Amazon is weighing using OpenAI's and its own Nova models to cut costs after Anthropic raised prices for using its models in Amazon products (Catherine Perloff/The Information)

SCOTUS limits the law enforcement use of "geofence" warrants, saying people have "a reasonable expectation of privacy" in their cell-phone location data (TechCrunch)

WhatsApp rolls out username reservations globally, allowing users to claim a unique name before the privacy-focused feature launches later this year (Marcus Mendes/9to5Mac)

Changpeng Zhao says Binance's MiCA application in Greece was fully compliant and close to approval by at least one EU regulator, but "other forces" opposed it (Naga Avan-Nomayo/The Block)

Straiker, which develops tech for securing enterprise AI agents, raised a $64M Series A, bringing its total funding to $85M (Chris Metinko/Axios)

SCOTUS finds that Trump's 2025 firing of FTC Commissioner Rebecca Kelly Slaughter without cause was lawful, placing independence of several agencies in doubt (NPR)

Rocket Lab plans to acquire Iridium for $8B and combine Rocket Lab's launch services with Iridium's satellite-based communications network to rival SpaceX (Emma Roth/The Verge)

Filing: Strategy paused its bitcoin acquisitions last week, instead topping up its USD reserve to $2.55B and announcing a $1B digital credit buyback program (James Hunt/The Block)

Internal documents: Meta is placing strict limits on how engineers in its applied AI division can use Claude Code and Codex, fearing inadvertent distillation (Jyoti Mann/The Information)

Japanese prediction market startups Miraima and Poyp are utilizing a "point-to-voucher" system to bypass strict anti-gambling laws, in a bid to rival Polymarket (Bloomberg)

The US DOJ seizes nearly 400 domains for illegally streaming 2026 FIFA World Cup matches; last week, ACE, UEFA, and more shut down 44 domains linked to PirloTV (Sergiu Gatlan/BleepingComputer)

Chinese robotics startup AI² Robotics raised ~$736M at a ~$2.9B valuation; Alibaba-backed X Square Robot raised an undisclosed amount at a ~$2.9B valuation (Bloomberg)

Google VP of Security Engineering Heather Adkins warns the EU's DMA proposals to open Android and Search could lead to a significant rise in fraud within weeks (Matt Burgess/Wired)

Adobe: online spending across all retailers in the US hit $26.4B during Amazon's four-day Prime Day event, up 9.3% YoY; Walmart and Target also hosted sales (Spencer Soper/Bloomberg)

How a Polymarket dispute over a single syllable ignited a bitter debate; Polymarket uses Risk Labs' Optimistic Oracle to decide ~200K tough call bets per month (David Segal/New York Times)

Verizon and the UK's BT agree to create a joint venture for their international businesses with ~$4B in combined yearly revenue; Verizon will pay $625M to BT (Bloomberg)

How the UK is betting on IT and AI to combat slow economic and productivity growth, including moving beyond the Golden Triangle of London, Oxford, and Cambridge (Sam Fleming/Financial Times)

Sources: CXMT and Tencent sign a ~$3B, three-year DRAM supply agreement for servers ahead of CXMT's IPO; CXMT is in talks with other major Chinese companies (Reuters)

An interview with Axon CEO Rick Smith, who transformed the Taser maker into a policing software company, as its revenue from AI policing tools rises 700%+ YoY (Victoria Albert/Wall Street Journal)

Academic papers and conference materials offer a deep dive into China's all-CPU LineShine, which pairs custom 304-core Arm CPUs with HBM to top the Top500 (Timothy Prickett Morgan/The Next Platform)

Sources: disconnected US military databases may have led to the February 28 strike on an Iranian school; some see AI as a fix, others fear it amplifies errors (Katrina Manson/Los Angeles Times)

A look at security flaws, police misuse, and other concerns over the 100K+ AI-enabled automated license plate readers installed across the US, mostly from Flock (Max Miller/Engadget)

AI is forcing consulting firms to shift from hourly billing to fixed-fee or outcome-based pricing, a transition proving slow and difficult for the industry (Mark Maurer/Wall Street Journal)

South Korea, Samsung, and SK Hynix say they plan to invest ~$590B to build a new chip complex, including four chipmaking plants and a chip packaging cluster (Song Jung-a/Financial Times)

South Korea unveils plans for new AI data centers backed by ~$357.5B from SK Group, GS Group, and Naver, targeting 8.4GW initially and 18.4GW by 2035 (Yi Whan-woo/The Korea Times)

Kuo: the memory supply-demand gap will widen through 2027, with an estimated 15%-20% of 2026 consumer electronics capacity shifting to data centers in 2027 (Ming-Chi Kuo)