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Seattle-based Brinc Drones, which makes 911 response drones, raised $125M led by Motorola Solutions, bringing its total funding to more than $280M (Todd Bishop/GeekWire)

Flex, which offers AI-based payment tools, credit, and more to mid-sized companies, raised a $70M Series B1 led by Halo Fund, a source says at a $1.2B valuation (Aditya Soni/Reuters)

Analysis: xAI has installed far more gas turbines without US permits at Colossus 2 than it has publicly acknowledged, impacting Black neighborhoods the hardest (Reuters)

Discount airline Frontier partners with SpaceX to offer Wi-Fi for the first time from early 2027, as it targets customers willing to pay more for premium travel (Alison Sider/Wall Street Journal)

Custom AI chip design startup TYLsemi raised $43M in early-stage funding led by Matter Venture Partners to build modular chips thanks to packaging tech advances (Mike Wheatley/SiliconANGLE)

Sources and telecom data: a coordinated campaign of SS7 pings was used to track the locations of US personnel during the US-led strikes on Iran in late February (Financial Times)

AI drug design startup Chai Discovery raised $400M led by Index at a $3.8B valuation, as it pitches its models as AI infrastructure for pharmaceutical companies (Michael J. de la Merced/New York Times)

The European Commission approves €659M in German state aid to support four first-of-a-kind chip facilities in Germany, saying they will strengthen EU autonomy (Kirsti Knolle/Reuters)

IBM reports preliminary Q2 revenue up 1% YoY to $17.2B, below $17.9B est., as CEO Arvind Krishna says customers are shifting spending to chips; IBM falls 20%+ (Amy Thomson/Bloomberg)

New York Governor Kathy Hochul signs a moratorium blocking new environmental permits for data centers over 50MW for up to one year, the first state to do so (Lauren Feiner/The Verge)

Survey: 57% of US women and 47% of men ages 18 to 29 say they get health and wellness information from influencers; women say they see such content more often (Aaron Smith/Pew Research Center)

Nikita Bier says X made a "tweak to boost visibility of your posts to your mutuals", or those who users follow back, to avoid replies becoming a "battleground" (Lucas Ropek/TechCrunch)

Demis Hassabis proposes a US-based Standards Body for "Frontier-class" AI, modeled after FINRA; labs would share models for review up to 30 days before release (Demis Hassabis/@demishassabis)

Sources: DeepSeek is in preliminary talks with new investors about raising funds at a ~$71B valuation, after raising ~$7B at a ~$52B valuation at the end of May (Zijing Wu/Financial Times)

A look at AI world models, including how they work, what they can do, and what's still unsettled, as startups led by tech leaders like Yann LeCun raise billions (Samuel Axon/Ars Technica)

China's smartphone shipments fell 4.3% YoY to 66M units in Q2, the fifth consecutive quarter of decline, amid a memory shortage; Huawei and Apple grew shipments (Kiranjeet Kaur/IDC)

eMarketer: chatbots like ChatGPT and Google AI Mode will make <$1B in ad revenue in 2026; OpenAI projected $2.5B in ChatGPT ad revenue in 2026 and $100B by 2030 (Trishla Ostwal/Adweek)

Google agrees to buy 100% of the initial output from the Steel River Energy Center's 1.6GW solar project in Arkansas when it becomes operational in 2029 (Martha Muir/Financial Times)

Researchers detail "context bombing", where defenders use prompt injections to trigger guardrails of attackers' LLMs, cutting AI hacking success rates by ~90% (Dan Goodin/Ars Technica)

Sources: Nvidia intensified due diligence and cut its authorized AI chip customers in Singapore, Malaysia, and Japan by 50%+ to prevent China diversions (Zijing Wu/Financial Times)

In the wake of China's "embodied AI" push, there's an urgency among China's 100+ humanoid startups to launch IPOs; LimX Dynamics raises $200M in a pre-IPO round (Evelyn Cheng/CNBC)

Singapore-based and Alibaba-backed video generation startup PixVerse says it closed a Series C extension to raise $439M total for the round, valuing it at $2B+ (Ivan Mehta/TechCrunch)

Anthropic research based on ~310K anonymized Claude conversations shows how Claude's expressed values and behaviors vary across models and languages (Jason Nelson/Decrypt)

Sources: Nous Research, the startup behind Hermes, an open-source agent and OpenClaw rival, is raising $75M+ at a $1.5B valuation led by Robot Ventures (TechCrunch)

Sources: the Trump admin and industry groups discuss streamlining the releases of US open models of equal or lesser capability than leading Chinese open models (Benjamin Guggenheim/Washington Post)

Apple releases the first public betas of iOS 27, iPadOS 27, macOS 27 Golden Gate, watchOS 27, and tvOS 27, marking the new Siri AI's first public launch (Will Shanklin/Engadget)

Microsoft announces a Windows 11 search overhaul that prioritizes local results, removes promotional web content, and more, rolling out to Windows Insiders (Zac Bowden/Windows Central)

Q&A with Xinzhou Wu, head of automotive at Nvidia, on Nvidia's chips and AI models for autonomous driving, lidar's usefulness for Level 4 autonomy, and more (Nilay Patel/The Verge)

Doc: DHS analysts twice dismissed signs of intruders inside the DHS' network, first detected in May, as harmless activity before confirming a breach in June (David DiMolfetta/Nextgov/FCW)

A coalition of 12 US states led by California files an antitrust lawsuit to block Paramount's WBD merger, alleging it lessens competition in three markets (Gene Maddaus/Variety)

London-based Valarian, which allows companies to use US cloud providers for AI workloads but retain control of their data, raised a $50M Series A led by NEA (Lily Mae Lazarus/Fortune)

Seattle-based Augmodo, whose AI-powered "Smartbadges" worn by employees track shelf inventory, raised $21M led by TQ Ventures at a $350M valuation (Kurt Schlosser/GeekWire)

Gauntlet, which helps institutions and crypto companies allocate their digital assets, raised a $125M Series C from Japanese financial conglomerate SBI Holdings (Ben Weiss/Fortune)

Global smartphone shipments fell 11% YoY in Q2 to the lowest Q2 levels since 2013 amid the DRAM and NAND shortage; Samsung returns to #1 with a 24% market share (Shilpi Jain/Counterpoint Research)

Apple's stock is up 16% since June 25, adding ~$650B in market value and pushing shares back to record territory, as investors flee an AI stock selloff to Apple (Ryan Vlastelica/Bloomberg)

Sources: US officials estimate unauthorized distillation costs US AI labs up to $6B/year; US AI labs told the White House it could become an existential threat (Maggie Eastland/Bloomberg)

Source: OpenAI still believes it is on track to unveil its first device in 2026 and release it in 2027; Apple's lawsuit may complicate hiring and supply chains (Mark Gurman/Bloomberg)

Anthropic hires Tom Blomfield, a Monzo co-founder and one of the biggest names in UK tech, to join its compute team; he is taking a leave of absence from YC (Robert Scammell/Business Insider)

Intel plans to invest €5B to expand chip manufacturing at its Leixlip facility in Ireland; in 2025, Intel canceled a planned €30B factory in Magdeburg, Germany (Financial Times)

Nearly 200 economists, including 15 Nobel laureates and Anthropic's Jack Clark, sign a letter titled We Must Act Now, warning of rapid AI-led job displacement (Ben Casselman/New York Times)

Samsung says it now aims to begin operations at its first chipmaking plant in South Korea's Yongin by 2029, bringing the timeline forward from 2030 or 2031 (Henry Siu/The Information)

Meta says it will spend an extra $40B on its nearly 4,000-acre data center campus in Louisiana, aiming for 5GW+ of compute, pushing its total spend beyond $250B (Riley Griffin/Bloomberg)

The EU blacklists Russian intelligence group members it says were responsible for spying on and hacking targets across the EU and Ukraine from as early as 2010 (Politico)

China says President Xi will deliver a keynote speech at the opening ceremony of the three-day World AI Conference in Shanghai on Friday, his first appearance (Bloomberg)

SK Hynix's stock falls 15%+ in Seoul, its largest-ever decline, after a strong Nasdaq debut, as investors book profits amid its US stock valuation uncertainty (Lee Ying Shan/CNBC)

Investigation: Western intelligence officials identify a Russian military intelligence unit in Tokyo that smuggles high-tech components for the war in Ukraine (New York Times)

European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen says after the summer the bloc is set to propose a "social media start date for minors" with "gradual access" (Barbara Moens/Financial Times)

Sources: Shein is targeting a $40B+ valuation after winning Beijing's approval for a Hong Kong IPO, set for as early as Q3; Shein canceled its US IPO in 2024 (Wall Street Journal)

A Denmark-based research team is using quantum computers to accelerate AI for predicting proteins, showing a near-term commercial application for quantum tech (Isabella Ward/Wired)

A look back at the 2007 heist of a Verizon data center in London, highlighting the role of physical data security as cyber defenses grow more sophisticated (Nathaniel Rich/New York Times)