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Foundational Industries, which aims to build AI-run factories for physical products, starting with custom data center rack enclosures, raised a $25M seed (Lily Mae Lazarus/Fortune)

ProphetX, a CFTC-designated sports prediction market that is also building a B2B business to sell its exchange infrastructure to other companies, raised $35M (Ryan Lawler/Axios)

ThreatLocker raised a $190M Series F led by Elephant as it looks to extend its zero-trust enterprise security platform to protect against AI-related risks (Kyle Alspach/CRN)

Sources detail how OpenAI fell behind Anthropic in revenue growth and valuation after prioritizing consumer chatbots and flashy side projects over coding tools (Berber Jin/Wall Street Journal)

A US judge largely denies Perplexity and three data scraper firms' bid to dismiss Reddit's lawsuit over claims of copyright law violations under DMCA (Ashley Belanger/Ars Technica)

Sensor Tower: India's mobile app market generated a record $345M in consumer spending in Q2, up 35% YoY; ChatGPT ranked No. 1 by downloads and No. 2 by revenue (Jagmeet Singh/TechCrunch)

Cybersecurity experts fault Anthropic and OpenAI for sloppy safeguards and inadequate human oversight after their models broke into outside organizations (Bloomberg)

The FTC clears quantum computing company IonQ's $1.8B acquisition of chipmaker SkyWater after the FTC's two members disagreed at first on imposing conditions (Jody Godoy/Reuters)

Sources: OpenAI demoed a new "Astra" AI model family to US policymakers and regulators this week, touting its improved abilities to complete long-running tasks (The Information)

Filing: Amazon has completed its $50B investment in OpenAI; source: OpenAI received the final tranche this week, taking Amazon's position to roughly 5% (Financial Times)

Amazon shares closed up 15.32% on Friday, the biggest one-day jump since April 2012, after the company reported accelerating AWS revenue (Spencer Soper/Bloomberg)

Roblox shares close down ~27%, its worst-ever daily percentage decline, after forecasting falling bookings and slowing revenue growth; RBLX is down 40%+ YTD (Kit Norton/Barron's Online)

Sources: OpenAI has discovered other instances where AI agents escaped containment; none of the agents were thought to have left OpenAI's network (Reuters)

FBI and EPA say water and wastewater utilities in at least seven states reported cyberattacks this week, with some causing flooding and other operational issues (James Rundle/Wall Street Journal)

Illinois Governor JB Pritzker signs the Children's Social Media Safety Act, a bill designed to limit children's access to "addictive" social media algorithms (Ben Szalinski/Capitol News Illinois)

An in-depth account of the past two days inside Situational Awareness, as Aschenbrenner assured investors he would focus on changes to his portfolio management (Wall Street Journal)

Google rolls back an image generation tool in Google Earth to add "stronger guardrails" after concerns arose it can be used to create deepfake satellite imagery (Geoff Brumfiel/NPR)

Index Ventures has raised $2B in new capital: a $900M venture vehicle, $400M for seed financing, and an addition of $700M to a 2024 $1.5B growth fund (Mark Bergen/Bloomberg)

Snap says its recommendation systems will be adjusted so only videos created by real people, not AI-generated ones, are eligible for Spotlight recommendations (Lauren Forristal/TechCrunch)

Sources: NXP is in talks to buy Ambarella, which has a market cap of ~$3.3B and makes image-processing chips for security cameras and self-driving cars (Oliver Barnes/Financial Times)

OpenAI says its models now have more than 1B active users and are used by more than 2M businesses (Katherine Hamilton/Wall Street Journal)

Trump says he does not think Iran is behind a cyberattack on Minnesota water systems: "I think I blame it on Minnesota because they're grossly incompetent" (Reuters)

Filing: Microsoft's product R&D roles declined for the second straight year as the company's total FY2026 headcount fell for the first time since 2016 (Todd Bishop/GeekWire)

SpaceXAI says it will remove 69 gas turbines used to power the Colossus data centers near Memphis by July 2027, as it moves to a 1.2 GW natural gas power plant (Tim De Chant/TechCrunch)

South Korea plans to inject ~$14B into its sovereign wealth fund for strategic investments in AI, data centers, and infrastructure, after a rout in tech stocks (Haram Lim/Bloomberg)

MediaTek says its board has approved a discretionary $5B financing budget to support long-term growth, including its expansion into AI chips for data centers (Wen-Yee Lee/Reuters)

DeepSeek V4 Flash scores 50 on the Artificial Analysis Intelligence Index, matching Gemini 3.6 Flash and up 10 points from the preview launch in April (Artificial Analysis)

Google starts rolling out access to Gemini Spark for Google AI Pro subscribers to over 160 countries and adds a Chrome auto browse integration on desktop (Abner Li/9to5Google)

Sources: Moonshot has a computing power agreement with Alibaba for the use of ~20K Nvidia chips; some say the deal is for H200 chips, which Alibaba denies (Mackenzie Hawkins/Bloomberg)

AI-generated images, video, audio, and text on matters of public interest designed to look authentic must be labeled in the EU under the AI Act from August 2 (Jennifer Rankin/The Guardian)

A German court rules that Suno has violated copyrights and must disclose illicit revenue after Germany's state-mandated licensing agency GEMA sued in 2025 (Elizabeth Grenier/Deutsche Welle)

Eric Trump-backed Space-Eyes, which develops AI-powered defense tech for the public sector, agrees to go public via a SPAC merger at a $638M valuation (Reuters)

Sources: the Trump admin is weighing a $100K fee for foreign students seeking to work in the US after graduation; a judge blocked Trump's $100K H-1B fee in June (Michelle Hackman/Wall Street Journal)

Counterpoint: Q2 global smartphone revenue rose 7% YoY, and average device selling price rose 17% to $400; Apple took 49% of global revenue, and Samsung 16% (Vlad Savov/Bloomberg)

The EU Commission charges Temu with failing to cooperate during a December 2025 raid on its Dublin HQ as part of a probe into the company's foreign subsidies (Inti Landauro/Reuters)

Letter: Situational Awareness is down ~67% in July, but remains up ~80% in 2026; sources say it planned to sell $3.5B of its Anthropic stake but backed out (Wall Street Journal)

Chinese state media: Xi Jinping called for more defense applications using autonomous and AI technologies, as he pushes to build an advanced fighting force (Josh Xiao/Bloomberg)

DeepSeek rolls out the official V4 Flash API in public beta, touting enhanced agent capabilities and benchmark scores "far surpassing" V4 Pro Preview (Newley Purnell/Bloomberg)

New York sues Kalshi for alleged violations of its gambling laws; the CFTC files an emergency motion to stop the state's enforcement, calling it an "overreach" (Jonathan Stempel/Reuters)

Australia's online safety regulator says social media use among under-16s fell to 81.5% in March 2026, compared to 85.9% before ban took effect in December 2025 (Angus Whitley/Bloomberg)

Google Earth's Nano Banana 2 feature allows users to create fake satellite images, such as a nuclear plant in Iran; Google says the images have AI watermarks (Henk van Ess/Digital Digging)

Papers and patents: Chinese military researchers distilled OpenAI and Anthropic models to train domestic AI systems and advance China's defense capabilities (Eduardo Baptista/Reuters)

An interview with Granola CEO Chris Pedregal on making the AI note taker invisible and work across apps, and why he rejects executives seeking employees' notes (Casey Newton/Platformer)

Sony reports Q1 PS5 sales of 1.38M units, down from 1.56M a year ago, taking total sales of the console to 95.3M units, and 125M PlayStation MAUs, up 2M YoY (Ethan Gach/Kotaku)

Sony reports Q1 operating profit up 40% YoY to ~$2.92B, raises FY profit forecast by 8% to ~$10.56B, and says it secured enough memory chip supply for the FY (Sam Nussey/Reuters)

MiniMax releases H3, a video model that generates up to 15-second clips in 2K resolution with native stereo sound, and plans to release its weights within days (Eduardo Baptista/Reuters)

Google, Amazon, Microsoft, and Meta spent a combined $1.1T in capex from the start of the AI boom in 2023 through June 2026 and plan to spend $745B this year (Financial Times)

A leaked memo, issued by the water utilities information sharing group WaterISAC, links dozens of cyberattacks against Minnesota water utilities to Iran (Andy Greenberg/Wired)

Sources: SoftBank gave $50M to Trump's library; Apple, Microsoft, and Amazon gave $25M, $10M, and $5M to his WH ballroom; Meta gave $10M to a pro-Trump group (Wall Street Journal)

Apple forecasts Q4 revenue growth of 9% to 11% YoY, below a 12%+ estimate, citing supply constraints and currency fluctuations; AAPL drops 7%+ pre-market (Mark Gurman/Bloomberg)