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Source: Ancestry.com pitches a risky $1.75B term loan at 4 to 4.25 percentage points above the benchmark to refinance debt from its 2020 Blackstone acquisition (Bloomberg)

Snap reaches a deal to settle the second case set for trial over social media harm to minors, following TikTok and YouTube, leaving Meta as the only defendant (Bloomberg)

X relaunches its Android app after a year-long rewrite from scratch; Nikita Bier calls it "one of the largest engineering projects" in the company's history (Sarah Perez/TechCrunch)

Taiwan indicts a former TSMC executive for allegedly stealing trade secrets, in what authorities say is the first National Security Act case involving China (Cheng Ting-Fang/Nikkei Asia)

Natural, which aims to help companies let their AI agents make autonomous payments, raised a $30M Series A led by Forerunner, bringing its total raised to $40M (Marina Temkin/TechCrunch)

OpenAI paused internal access to an unreleased model that disproved the Erdos unit distance conjecture after it repeatedly found ways to act outside its sandbox (OpenAI)

Anduril and Archer unveil an autonomous aircraft platform designed for commercial and military uses, along with an autonomous attack rotorcraft called Thunder (Reuters)

Cybersecurity companies say hackers are exploiting vulnerable WordPress versions to take over websites; WordPress patched two critical security flaws last week (Lorenzo Franceschi-Bicchierai/TechCrunch)

Source: Z.ai completed construction of a 1 GW data center housing only Chinese chips; Z.ai has built or operates several computing clusters each with 10K+ chips (Bloomberg)

Chicago-based Empirical Security, which uses AI to help companies predict threats by monitoring exploited vulnerabilities, raised a $25M Series A (Chris Metinko/Axios)

Levent Alpöge, a mathematician who works at Anthropic, says he was able to disprove the 87-year-old Jacobian conjecture with the help of Fable 5 (Matthew Sparkes/New Scientist)

Infinity, founded by Jeremy Nixon, the creator of hacker network community AGI House, to build an inference library that runs on all chips, raised a $15M seed (Dominic-Madori Davis/TechCrunch)

CAISI Director Chris Fall is resigning after taking over the federal AI testing institute in April; NIST Director Arvind Raman will serve as acting director (Maria Curi/Axios)

Source: Tencent is in talks to acquire Israeli game developer SuperPlay in a deal valuing SuperPlay at $1B-$1.5B; Playtika acquired SuperPlay in 2024 for $690M (Golan Hazani/CTech)

Billionaire-backed Building A Better California reserves $87M in TV ad time to oppose California's proposed one-time wealth tax; Sergey Brin put $82M into BABC (New York Times)

Chinese open models are proper competition that should be welcomed, not something to ban or treat as a danger, and open-sourcing is an old business strategy (Bill Gurley/Washington Post)

Sensor Tower: the number of new apps released in Apple's App Store doubled to ~560K in H1, vs. the ~600K added in all of 2025, as vibecoded apps flood the store (Kalley Huang/New York Times)

UK government data: ~35% of UK businesses with 10+ staff use AI, up from 12% in September 2023, and the average number of AI tools grew from 1.4 in 2023 to 1.6 (Delphine Strauss/Financial Times)

AMD plans to ship Helios, its first rack-scale AI system to rival Nvidia, later in 2026 to Microsoft, Meta, OpenAI, and others; Helios costs an estimated $5M+ (Katie Tarasov/CNBC)

Sources: Google is developing a specialized server chip, informally dubbed "Frozen v2", that integrates its Gemini AI model blueprint into the silicon, for 2028 (The Information)

How "synthetic insider" attacks raise the stakes for corporate cyber defense; a Verizon analysis of ~22K incidents found 12% were carried out by internal actors (Hannah Murphy/Financial Times)

Sources: parts of the Trump administration are reigniting efforts to implement de facto bans on foreign open-source models, as Chinese AI models gain momentum (Maria Curi/Axios)

Chinese open models like Kimi K3 and Qwen3.8 Max shift the industry's focus back to marginal costs and cost of goods sold, as inference costs scale with revenue (Ben Thompson/Stratechery)

An interview with Expedia CEO Ariane Gorin, who calls AI "a growth opportunity", as she prepares the online travel company to face potential disruption from AI (Stephanie Stacey/Financial Times)

How PayPal CEO Enrique Lores, appointed in February to revive the payments pioneer, may handle Stripe and Advent's takeover offer, based on his decades at HP (Wall Street Journal)

The EU fines Alibaba's online marketplace AliExpress €550M for failing to prevent the sale of illegal products on its platform, the largest DSA fine to date (Barbara Moens/Financial Times)

Sources: Chinese startup Moonshot AI is seeking formal approval from investors to start a Hong Kong IPO process, which could happen in as soon as six months (Juro Osawa/The Information)

A look at Israel's influence campaign in the US that's included millions of AI-driven texts and a $45M+ contract with ex-Trump campaign strategist Brad Parscale (Wall Street Journal)

Trial lawyers, with big liability litigation earnings, are among the most active lobbyists against autonomous vehicles, even as data shows clear safety benefits (Alex Tabarrok/Marginal Revolution)

How smart home devices have given abusive partners a new tool to remotely manipulate, intimidate, and disturb their victims, in a form of tech-assisted abuse (Financial Times)

Cambridge-based CuspAI raised a $450M Series B led by Kleiner Perkins and NEA, and launches a coalition for AI materials discovery for chip and other industries (Bloomberg)

Retail traders are shifting from Big Tech to stocks boosted by AI like SK Hynix and Marvell; five of the Magnificent Seven stocks trail the market this year (Hannah Erin Lang/Wall Street Journal)

LSEG: Morgan Stanley collected $2.3B in debt and equity capital market fees in H1 2026, up from $1.4B in H1 2025, driven by AI infrastructure financing deals (Financial Times)

Blackstone agrees to invest an undisclosed sum in South Korea-based Futronic, which makes actuators used in industrial robots, sources say at a ~$675M valuation (Manuel Baigorri/Bloomberg)

Sources detail Kalshi's and Polymarket's efforts to undermine each other, including lobbying regulators, trying to derail deals, and waging influence campaigns (New York Times)

Filing: Zhongji Innolight, China's leading optical transceiver maker, aims for an $8B Hong Kong IPO, the city's largest since Alibaba's $12.9B debut in 2019 (Dave Sebastian/Bloomberg)

Draft: the Trump admin plans to use the UN General Assembly to push a global "freedom of expression" declaration that EU lawmakers call an attack on tech rules (Eliza Gkritsi/Politico)

As memory stocks fall, investors worry capacity expansion could lead to oversupply, while others believe AI demand will break the industry's boom-and-bust cycle (Financial Times)

SK Group Chair Chey Tae-won says the memory shortage has prompted governments to intervene for domestic industries, and SK Hynix must expand capacity faster (Moon Joon-hyun/The Korea Herald)

Sources: the EU Parliament plans to roll out EPGenAI Hub to MEPs and staff as early as Sept., letting them access Meta, OpenAI, Anthropic, and Mistral models (Max Griera/Politico)

France's National Gambling Authority blocks access to Polymarket's website, citing concerns of exposing users to significant losses and manipulated trading (Sudip Kar-Gupta/Reuters)

TSMC CFO Wendell Huang says TSMC will use its new $100B US commitment, announced last week, to expand its Arizona capacity amid a "multi-year demand mega trend" (Jenny Lee/CNBC)

As companies stay private longer, VC firms, like Spark, Gigafund, and Greenoaks, are investing in companies later on and buying stakes without seeking influence (Wall Street Journal)

A look at the nonprofit Current AI, backed by $400M in commitments from many partners including $100M from France, that's funding open, public AI infrastructure (Kate Park/TechCrunch)

Hugging Face says it used the open-weight GLM-5.2 hosted on its own compute for breach forensics, after US frontier model safety guardrails blocked the requests (Edward Targett/The Stack)

Hugging Face says an agentic AI system hacked its data pipeline, accessing several internal clusters and credentials; its own AI-based triage caught the breach (Hugging Face)

Moonshot AI pauses new subscriptions, saying that over the past two days Kimi K3 demand nearly passed the limit of its capacity, and also reworks its plan tiers (@kimi_moonshot)

As many companies cut AI costs by using cheaper models, some, like Shopify, go all-in on frontier models, barring engineers from using anything else (Belle Lin/Wall Street Journal)

Kalshi and Polymarket bets on the FIFA World Cup final top $5.69B; Dune Analytics says total wagers on the platforms surpassed $50B for the first time in June (Lauren McCarthy/New York Times)

Sources: Apple is piloting a system in Apple Stores called Live Notes that lets Genius Bar staff make transcripts and summaries of conversations with customers (Mark Gurman/Bloomberg)