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US tech giants have shifted their stance to publicly backing open AI models, with Anthropic and Amazon remaining notable holdouts alongside the US government (M.G. Siegler/Spyglass)

CXMT's stock closed up 466% in its Shanghai debut, giving the Hefei-based memory chipmaker a ~$487B market cap, making it the most valuable China-listed company (Jenny Lee/CNBC)

US companies have flipped from "tokenmaxxing" to "thrift-maxxing", mixing cheaper Chinese models with OpenAI's and Anthropic's, threatening the labs' valuations (Wall Street Journal)

Dealroom: defense giants such as Lockheed Martin have participated in a record $4.1B worth of VC rounds YTD, as drones and autonomous systems transform warfare (Financial Times)

Sources: Nvidia is in talks to provide a ~$250B backstop for OpenAI as part of a 10 GW data center project that SoftBank's energy subsidiary is building in Ohio (Wall Street Journal)

How AI companies are targeting the education market, including making free or cut-price tailored learning tools in partnership with schools and edtech startups (Jamie John/Financial Times)

India eases foreign investment rules for e-commerce companies, a win for Amazon, which lobbied to buy goods directly from Indian sellers and sell them overseas (Aditya Kalra/Reuters)

Once hailed as an AI visionary, Satya Nadella faces pressure as a compute crunch forces Microsoft to prioritize its own AI products over Azure cloud customers (Ashley Stewart/Business Insider)

Shein's IPO prospectus shows Q1 revenue of $9.05B, up 1% YoY, as it swings from $395M profit in Q1 2025 to $99M loss partly due to US' "de minimis" rule removal (Reuters)

Sources: Apple may have delayed AI glasses launch partly over privacy concerns that Meta's glasses created for the category, as it works to address the issues (Mark Gurman/Bloomberg)

Crypto exchanges like tradeXYZ are giving global investors exposure to Chinese AI-linked stocks like CXMT, bypassing Beijing's control on foreign capital access (William Sandlund/Financial Times)

Sources including AI lab staff say users have been persuading chatbots to accurately answer prompts about planning mass-casualty attacks and making bio-weapons (Wall Street Journal)

CXMT, which raised $9.8B in a hugely oversubscribed Shanghai IPO, is poised for a debut pop that could lift its market cap several times above its initial ~$85B (Bloomberg)

Elio, which is developing a new type of image sensor designed for AI rather than human vision, raised a $21M Series A led by Innovation Endeavors and Xora (Meir Orbach/CTech)

A look at China's bid to build an alternative global order in AI by making open models widely available and training people in developing countries to use them (Financial Times)

China's market regulator says it had fined and confiscated ~$770M from Trip.com for abusing its dominant position in the domestic online hotel-booking market (Reuters)

Several universities including Yale, Johns Hopkins, and the University of Waterloo have restricted or disabled their use of AI detectors over accuracy concerns (Ima Jackson-Obot/Financial Times)

Sources: DeepSeek told investors it is suspending its second funding round after remarks attributed to Liang Wenfeng on US-China AI competition went viral (Pei Li/Bloomberg)

Sources: OpenAI and Anthropic quietly lobby Washington regulators to restrict open-source AI models, even as Sam Altman publicly says he supports open source AI (New York Times)

SK Group Chair Chey Tae Won says Anthropic has asked SK Hynix for supplies to make its own chips, calling it remarkable that an AI developer has chip ambitions (Ian King/Bloomberg)

As student protests spread across India, Narendra Modi turns to Reels, swapping his trademark cinematic videos for self-recorded messages aimed at Gen Z (Akriti Sharma/Bloomberg)

A profile of Hangzhou-based Unitree, which shipped 5,500 humanoid robots in 2025, accounting for 25%+ of the global market, as it prepares for a Shanghai IPO (Charlie Campbell/Time)

Samsung announces a $200B+ contract to make chips for Broadcom through 2030, focusing on its 2nm and below process technologies for Broadcom's products (Hooyeon Kim/Bloomberg)

A profile of Yang Zhilin, founder of Moonshot AI, which faced early doubts over revenue and model capabilities before its Kimi K3 delivered a "DeepSeek moment" (Financial Times)

Candid Health, which develops tech and AI agents to automate medical billing and claims processing workflows, raised a $120M Series D led by Sixth Street Growth (Lily Mae Lazarus/Fortune)

Verizon CEO Dan Schulman says Verizon will provide dark-fiber connectivity for Google's data centers in a $1B+ deal, with more such deals in the pipeline (Jaspreet Singh/Reuters)

Meshy, whose AI-powered tech lets users generate 3D assets from text and image prompts, raised a ~$400M Series B at a $1.5B valuation (Abhinaya Prabhu/Tech Funding News)

Analysis: US tech companies have cut ~140K jobs YTD, or more than 33% of announced US layoffs in 2026, with ~50K cuts from Amazon, Oracle, Meta, and Microsoft (Financial Times)

Progress Software agrees to acquire Domo's AI and data platform business for $400M; Domo will remain publicly listed and change its name after the deal closes (Larry Dignan/Constellation Research)

Neocloud Fluidstack, which has partnered with Anthropic, announces that it raised an $830M Series A led by Situational Awareness at a $7.5B valuation in January (Maria Deutscher/SiliconANGLE)

Sources: CXMT expelled Huawei-linked SiCarrier staff from its R&D zone amid a pricing dispute, as Chinese memory makers flex their newfound clout to hike prices (Reuters)

Sources: Apple has pitched Trump on using Chinese memory chips in its products sold outside the US; Micron warned such a plan could destroy the US chip industry (Wall Street Journal)

After a backlash, Meta pauses its plan to "rate limit" Conversation Focus, an accessibility feature for its glasses that runs on-device (Sean Hollister/The Verge)

Nvidia and SK Group unveil a $500B+ AI initiative that includes an SK Hynix partnership to secure next-gen memory supply for Nvidia and joint development of HBM (Reuters)

Nvidia plans to invest $1B in Naver to help finance an AI data center in South Korea, and partners with SK Group to build more than 2 GW of AI data centers (Ian King/Bloomberg)

A joint preliminary evaluation by the UK's AISI and the US' CAISI finds Kimi K3 trails leading US frontier closed weight models on cyber capability (AI Security Institute)

The US, China, and other APEC economies release a statement supporting open models, while emphasizing respect for security, data protection, and IP rights (Evelyn Cheng/CNBC)

Sources: OpenAI's models breached Hugging Face from July 11 to 13 and OpenAI realized their models were behind the hack several days later (Reuters)

Sources: Prentis, which develops computer use models and is co-founded by Reid Hoffman and Marc Pincus, is in talks to raise $100M at a $1B valuation (Marina Temkin/TechCrunch)

An appeals court narrowly blocks Texas from enforcing a monitoring and filtering requirement under its children's online safety law, over Section 230 preemption (Jonathan Stempel/Reuters)

Google says it appreciates the engagement by the Trump administration and US government on the EU's $1B fine; Trump called the fine "illegal" (Rocio Fabbro/Bloomberg Law)

An OpenAI staffer says the Hugging Face breach is "a big warning shot" externally but internally "related incidents have been happening for a while" (Harry Booth/Time)

Cognition acquires the makers of Poke, an AI assistant that users can access via messaging services, in a deal valuing Poke's parent in the "low nine figures" (Sarah Perez/TechCrunch)

Sources: Waymo is exploring exiting its Uber partnership, with their relationship souring amid an intense lobbying battle over the future of robotaxis (Rafe Rosner-Uddin/Financial Times)

Paper, which allows designers to connect directly with production code and the AI agents that create it, raised a $34M Series A led by Accel and ICONIQ (Chris Metinko/Axios)

The DOJ is prosecuting a Cop City protester for allegedly providing CBP with a "duress" passcode that wiped the contents of his GrapheneOS phone (Timothy Pratt/The Guardian)

Trump says the US will initiate a probe into the EU's practice of "robbing" US tech giants with fines, threatening the bloc with "substantial" tariffs (Kevin Breuninger/CNBC)

Letter: Qualcomm tells customers it plans to raise prices by double digit percentage points, after exhausting its ability to absorb higher costs from suppliers (Ian King/Bloomberg)

Anthropic expects Opus 5 "classifiers to intervene around 85% less often than they do for Fable 5"; Opus 5 is not included in its 30-day data retention policy (Igor Bonifacic/Engadget)

Anthropic says Opus 5 is the company's "most aligned model to date"; it is Anthropic's fourth model release in less than two months (Madison Mills/Axios)