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Federal lobbying disclosures: Anthropic spent $1.97M in Q2, up 26% QoQ, and OpenAI spent $1.2M, up 18%; Meta remained the largest spender at $5.99M, down 15% (Luke Fountain/CNBC)

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Meta adds the Xbox Game Pass starter edition to its Horizon Plus plan, which costs $60/year or $8/month; the pass only allows 10 hours of Xbox gaming per month (Scott Stein/CNET)

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Analysis: every frontier AI model tested in cybersecurity evaluations attempted to "cheat", led by GPT-5.4 at 14.1% of tasks; Mythos cheated the least, at 7.8% (AI Security Institute)

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Apple says it fixed a vulnerability in its Hide My Email tool that let anyone see a user's real email address; researchers first reported the issue in June 2025 (Joseph Cox/404 Media)

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Meta quietly releases StoryKit, a new mobile app that uses AI to create personalized children's stories, including illustrations and original music, in Mexico (Zac Hall/9to5Mac)

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University of Tennessee Research Foundation sues Anthropic in Delaware for allegedly infringing neural network patents, the first such case against Anthropic (Blake Brittain/Reuters)

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OpenAI executive Chris Lehane says Sam Altman plans to brief the Trump administration and US lawmakers next week on the company's upcoming generation of models (Maggie Eastland/Bloomberg)

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Google says Gemini 3.6 Flash improves coding, multimodal, and knowledge work performance and uses up to 17% fewer tokens and costs less per token vs. 3.5 Flash (MacKenzie Sigalos/CNBC)

Google launches Gemini 3.6 Flash, 3.5 Flash-Lite, and 3.5 Flash Cyber, and says it has started its "most ambitious pre-training run yet" for Gemini 4 (Tulsee Doshi/Google)

Nvidia details its Vera CPU for data centers, its first CPU with a custom core design, featuring 88 cores and 176 threads, set for general release in H2 2026 (Jake Roach/Tom's Hardware)

Sources: Apple plans to launch Apple Upgrade, a leasing program for iPhone, iPad, Mac, and Apple Watch, in partnership with Klarna in the US next week (Mark Gurman/Bloomberg)

Google says Gemini 3.5 Flash Cyber is a "cost-efficient and highly capable alternative" to models like Mythos, available first to governments and some partners (Emma Roth/The Verge)

Google prices Gemini 3.6 Flash lower than 3.5 Flash, at $1.50/1M input tokens and $7.50/1M output tokens; Gemini 3.5 Flash-Lite is priced at $0.30 and $2.50 (Abner Li/9to5Google)

Augustus, which is building a federally chartered "AI-native" clearing bank designed around stablecoins, raised $180M led by Tiger Global at a $1B valuation (Krisztian Sandor/CoinDesk)

Sources: after it closes a round at a $31.5B valuation, Moonshot plans a final raise at a $50B valuation to capitalize on Kimi K3 buzz before a Hong Kong IPO (Pei Li/Bloomberg)

Docs: AI data startup Mercor had $614M in gross revenue in H1 2026, up 70% from all of 2025, with ~91% from foundation model makers like OpenAI and Anthropic (The Information)

US Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent says the Trump administration is looking into Chinese AI models over distillation claims and it could "sanction them" (Ashley Capoot/CNBC)

Intel and Fortinet partner to co-develop the Fortinet Security Processor 6, making Fortinet the first named external customer for the Intel 4 process node (Luke James/Tom's Hardware)

Garmin launches the Cirqa Smart Band, a $200 screenless fitness tracker that monitors 80+ activities with an up to 10 day battery life, to compete with Whoop (Dana Wollman/Bloomberg)

OpenAI says it now has 10M people using Codex and ChatGPT Work, nearly doubling usage from earlier this month when the company announced ChatGPT Work (Shirin Ghaffary/Bloomberg)

Databricks co-founder Ion Stoica's GPU orchestration startup SkyPilot, which aims to be neutral across hardware and cloud vendors, raised a $20M seed led by Lux (Lily Mae Lazarus/Fortune)

Microsoft and Mistral sign a multibillion-dollar deal to build European data centers and integrate Mistral models into Foundry, Copilot Studio, and Azure Local (Belle Lin/Wall Street Journal)

Samsung plans to launch its AI-powered Samsung Health Assistant and new heart metrics tools like Vitals for overnight metric tracking in beta in August (Samantha Kelly/Bloomberg)

Iran's IRGC claims it targeted and "destroyed" Amazon's central data infrastructure in Bahrain using several cruise missiles; Amazon has not acknowledged it (Babak Kamiar/Euronews)

Gritt, which is developing an AI system that helps build infrastructure like solar panels, emerges from stealth with a $26M Series A and $34M in total funding (Tim Fernholz/TechCrunch)

UK PM Andy Burnham abolishes the Department for Science, Innovation, and Tech and elevates UK AI Minister Kanishka Narayan, who oversees AISI, to attend cabinet (Philippa Wain/BBC)

Kimi K3 marks the arrival of frontier open-weight models; the core Kimi team has incredible culture and a freedom to express it within a GPU-limited environment (Nathan Lambert/Interconnects AI)

Sources: the US and China plan to hold AI talks in September, likely before President Xi's visit to the US, a significant outcome of the Trump-Xi summit in May (Laurie Chen/Reuters)

Memo: the Army CIO reinstates limits on Army members' AI token usage; docs show the DOD's Ask Sage tool can access 100M tokens via an annual "enterprise pack" (Vittoria Elliott/Wired)

Sources: BlackRock leads a $12B+ debt sale for Meta's new El Paso data center, as Meta signs a lease for a BlackRock-backed data-center project in Pennsylvania (Wall Street Journal)

A Washington judge grants a request to temporarily block Kalshi from offering sports-related bets in the state, citing a breach of the state gambling law (Timmy Shen/The Block)

Sources: China is weighing tightening AI and chip export controls and is consulting leading domestic AI companies, in a bid to slow advanced tech acquisitions (Financial Times)

Sources: TSMC plans to hike advanced and mature node prices 5% to 10% in 2027, plus a 10% to 15% premium for advanced chip orders exceeding customers' forecasts (Cheng Ting-Fang/Nikkei Asia)

A profile of Sarah Guo, Greylock's youngest GP before she founded Conviction in 2022, which has since backed six of the 21 AI-native companies now worth $10B+ (Dom Cooke/Colossus)

GitHub says individuals and orgs have invested $100M+ in open source maintainers and projects via GitHub Sponsors since 2019, with $10M in the past five months (Stephanie Lincoln/The GitHub Blog)

Sony Music files a second copyright suit against Udio, alleging the AI music company copied 30,117 recordings without permission to train its AI models (Murray Stassen/Music Business Worldwide)

Singapore-based Ant International, a payments company which spun out of Ant Group in 2024, raised $1.2B from investors including Ant Group and Alibaba (Reuters)

Study: off-balance sheet debt at Alphabet, Microsoft, Amazon, Meta, and Oracle grew an estimated ~8x since 2022 to ~$1.65T, above ~$1.35T in balance sheet debt (Kohei Yamada/Nikkei Asia)

South Korean customs data: for the first 20 days of July, the country's chip exports rose 180% YoY to $22.1B, and computer-related product shipments rose ~232% (Heesu Lee/Bloomberg)

How Google's AI Search is endangering the open web; Cloudflare says that between June 2025 and April 2026 human traffic to many businesses' websites fell ~40% (Kate Conger/New York Times)

Researchers found sandbox escapes or boundary bypasses in Cursor, Codex, Gemini CLI, and Antigravity by writing files trusted tools later use; most are patched (Ax Sharma/BleepingComputer)

Samsung debuts Samsung Galaxy Card, a Visa from Barclays that offers 5% cash rewards for purchases directly from Samsung, its first US credit card (John Velasco/Tom's Guide)

A judge approves Anthropic's $1.5B settlement with authors, the first major US case of its kind to settle; some authors opted out and have other ongoing suits (Blake Brittain/Reuters)

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)