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Microsoft President Brad Smith says the US now has AI "regulation without transparent or complete rules", and adds that "without rules, businesses can't plan" (Beatrice Nolan/Fortune)

Kraken Technology, which designs and builds autonomous maritime platforms, such as uncrewed subsurface vessels, raised a $175M Series B at a $1B valuation (John Reynolds/Tech.eu)

Bun's creator says he rewrote Bun from Zig to Rust using a Claude Fable 5 prerelease version in 11 days, noting it would've taken three engineers "about a year" (Jarred Sumner/bun.com)

Character.AI launches three human-written, AI-generated microdramas, whose characters users can chat with, and aims to eventually let users make their own shows (Ivan Mehta/TechCrunch)

Meta prices Muse Spark 1.1 at $1.25/1M input tokens and $4.25/1M output tokens; Alexandr Wang says improving coding and agentic performance was a key focus (Ina Fried/Axios)

Meta launches a Meta Model API, which Mark Zuckerberg says will have "aggressive and attractive" pricing at ~25% of the cost of OpenAI's and Anthropic's models (Kurt Wagner/Bloomberg)

Meta releases Muse Spark 1.1, capable of more advanced coding and a "step-change" from the first generation, available to US developers via a public API preview (Dominic Preston/The Verge)

European startups raised $24B in Q2, up 66% YoY and the strongest quarter in four years; UK startups raised $10.4B, above Germany's $3.2B, and France's $2.4B (Gené Teare/Crunchbase News)

Anthropic debuts a "reflection" dashboard in beta for Free, Pro, and Max users with memory turned on, to track their Claude activity over 1, 3, 6, or 12 months (Anthropic)

Databento, which sells financial data feeds, raised a $97M Series B led by NEA, taking its total funding to $127M, and says it is "profitable every month" (Lily Mae Lazarus/Fortune)

Micron raises its US capex commitment to $250B through 2035, adding $50B for New York, Idaho, Virginia, and other projects, and invests $500M in GlobalWafers (Maggie Eastland/Bloomberg)

Ollama, which helps developers run open-weight AI models locally, raised a $65M Series B led by Theory Venture, following a $15M Series A led by Benchmark (Julie Bort/TechCrunch)

PrismML shrunk Qwen 3.6 to 27B parameters and ran it on an iPhone 17 Pro, bigger than any prior mobile model; sources: Apple talked with PrismML about its tech (Aaron Tilley/The Information)

Memo: Meta plans to start manufacturing its in-house AI chip, codenamed Iris, from September, as part of its plan to boost its computing power to 14GW in 2027 (Reuters)

India scraps import duties on some parts used to make devices like phones until March 31, 2029, removing 7.5% and 5% levies, which might help Apple and Xiaomi (Nikunj Ohri/Reuters)

Apple supplier Luxshare fell in its Hong Kong trading debut, closing down 1.6%, after raising ~$3.1B in the city's biggest listing in 2026 so far (Bloomberg)

Enterprise AI agent startup Lyzr is raising a $100M Series B at a ~$500M valuation, up from $250M in a Series A in 2026, and says agents wrote investment memos (Saritha Rai/Bloomberg)

Internal DOJ memo: attorneys on crypto cases should expect less cooperation from Binance, which is adding asset freeze requirements; Binance denies any changes (Leo Schwartz/The Information)

US cybersecurity and data resilience company Rubrik plans to invest $500M+ in the UK over the next five years and establish its European headquarters in London (Paul Sandle/Reuters)

Interpol and law enforcement agencies arrest 5,811 suspects and seize $293M in an operation combating social engineering scams and fraud across 97 countries (Sergiu Gatlan/BleepingComputer)

Leaked renders via Android Headlines show the Samsung Galaxy Z Flip 8, Z Fold 8, Watch 9, and Watch Ultra 2; the Galaxy Z Fold 8 is likely the new wide foldable (Lawrence Bonk/Engadget)

Sources: Sonos' layoffs include some top design and product executives, like VP of Design Dana Krieger; CEO Tom Conrad says the changes reduce management layers (Chris Welch/Bloomberg)

The AI data center boom has led to surging demand for power transformers, with average lead times for orders, once measured in months, now stretching into years (Financial Times)

A Brown University professor suspected his class used AI to cheat after a take-home midterm averaged 96%, prompting an in-person final, which averaged 48.6% (Emma Whitford/Inside Higher Ed)

Companies are mobilizing internal groups of "AI champions" to drive adoption; BCG says 74% of front-line employees now use AI regularly, up from 51% in 2025 (Isabelle Bousquette/Wall Street Journal)

Shanghai-based GPU maker Iluvatar CoreX raised ~$902M in a Hong Kong share sale; the company's stock has soared 257% since its January IPO, which raised ~$473M (Bloomberg)

Filings: Grubhub parent Wonder is raising hundreds of millions of dollars at a $9B valuation; a source says founder Marc Lore indicated he will contribute $200M (The Information)

Cognition releases SWE-1.7, trained from Kimi K2.7 and available in Devin at 1,000 tokens/second, claiming it nears frontier-level intelligence at a lower cost (Cognition)

Block agrees to pay $45M and offer live customer support for Cash App to settle claims by 46 US states that the company failed to protect users from fraud (Daniel Wiessner/Reuters)

Sources: Reno-based AI chip startup Positron is in talks to raise ~$750M in two phases, at valuations of $3.5B in the first tranche and ~$5B in the second (Bloomberg)

The FTC settles with John Deere over a 2025 right-to-repair lawsuit, requiring the company to provide farmers and shops with equipment and software for 10 years (Boone Ashworth/Wired)

OpenAI says it found widespread task issues in SWE-Bench Pro, estimates ~30% of tasks are broken, and retracts its earlier recommendation to adopt the benchmark (OpenAI)

Meta announces its first data center in Canada, a 1GW facility in Alberta that will cost the company about $9B and take two to three years to construct (Jonathan Vanian/CNBC)

Grok 4.5 is available in Grok Build, in Cursor, and from the SpaceXAI console, but not in the EU; it costs $2 per 1M input tokens and $6 per 1M output tokens (Axios)

SpaceXAI launches Grok 4.5, its first model built in partnership with Cursor, designed to "handle difficult, long-running" legal, finance, and coding tasks (Carmen Arroyo/Bloomberg)

OpenAI rolls out two versions of GPT-Live: GPT-Live-1, powering ChatGPT Voice for Go, Plus, and Pro users, and GPT-Live-1 mini, the default for free users (Sabrina Ortiz/The Deep View)

OpenAI launches GPT-Live, a new generation of voice models built on a full-duplex architecture, meaning they can listen and speak at the same time (OpenAI)

Prime Intellect, which helps companies build their own AI agents by offering computing power and specialized tools, raised a $130M Series A at a $1B valuation (Marina Temkin/TechCrunch)

Arkenstone Defense, which is building software to handle back-office work for defense tech startups, emerges from stealth with a $35M seed led by J2 Ventures (Barratt Dewey/Tectonic Defense)

China's Nexchip Semiconductor says it aims to raise around $890.37M in its Hong Kong share sale by offering 216.2M shares at ~$4.12/share, the top of its range (Rajasik Mukherjee/Reuters)

Israeli startup Alta, which develops an AI agent platform for marketing, sales, and business development teams, raised a $25M Series A led by IN Venture (Meir Orbach/CTech)

GM-backed Chinese autonomous driving company Momenta saw a muted trading debut in its Hong Kong IPO, up 2.8% to value the company at ~$9B, after raising $751M (Jiahui Huang/Wall Street Journal)

Sources: China plans to let some of its biggest AI companies buy a small number of Nvidia's H200 chips to offset a domestic computing shortage in recent months (Qianer Liu/The Information)

Mistral launches Robostral Navigate, a hardware-agnostic robotics navigation model trained via simulation that uses a single camera and basic language prompts (Benoit Berthelot/Bloomberg)

Crypto VC firm Paradigm raised $1.2B, its fourth fund, to invest in areas outside of crypto, like AI and robotics; Paradigm had $11.9B in AUM at the end of 2025 (Rebecca Torrence/Bloomberg)

Nvidia lost ~$1T in market value in less than two months, dropping 16% from its May all-time-high, trading at 18x forward earnings, its lowest level since 2019 (Bloomberg)

The OpenAI Deployment Company agrees to acquire Northslope, an applied AI company founded by ex-Palantir employees, its second acquisition after buying Tomoro (Madison Mills/Axios)

Kaon AI, which builds personalized story worlds using its AI-based FlowGPT and Emochi tools, raised $60M from B Capital and others, and says Emochi has 2M DAUs (Corbin Bolies/Variety)

Former GitHub CEO Thomas Dohmke's Entire launches a decentralized Git network to handle high coding agent traffic, with servers in the US, the EU, and Australia (Radhika Rajkumar/ZDNET)

SK Hynix's IPO prospectus analysis, as it seeks to raise ~$28B on the Nasdaq: highly leveraged to HBM, deep and broad China ties, and health and safety concerns (Tim Culpan/Culpium)