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China revises its regulations to tighten protection of chip layout designs, including punitive damages for serious infringement, taking effect from October 15 (Eduardo Baptista/Reuters)

Valar, which is making small modular nuclear reactors to power data centers, raised a $1B Series B led by Sequoia at a $6B post-money valuation (Bloomberg)

Mariana Minerals, which builds and operates mines using its MarianaOS software platform, raised a $310M Series B, bringing its total funding to $400M (Allie Garfinkle/Fortune)

India proposes extending tax exemptions until 2041 for foreign companies that provide machinery to contract manufacturers, changes that Apple had lobbied for (Reuters)

Sources: the Trump administration invites staffers from OpenAI, Google, Anthropic, and others to the White House on Tuesday to review the AI oversight framework (The Information)

UK court filing: in July, Apple launched a new legal challenge against the UK government's attempt to create a "backdoor" to access encrypted customer data (Tim Bradshaw/Financial Times)

Zenity, which develops a platform for securing AI agents, raised a $125M Series C led by Norwest Venture Partners, taking its total funding to ~$185M (Meir Orbach/CTech)

Visa plans to acquire Israeli company BioCatch, which uses AI to detect fraud and distinguish legitimate users from attackers in real time, for $2.4B in cash (Katherine Hamilton/Wall Street Journal)

Horizon3, whose AI penetration testing platform NodeZero helps find and exploit attack paths in production systems, raised a $250M Series E at a $2B valuation (Kate Park/TechCrunch)

Michael Saylor's Strategy sold 1,638 bitcoin for ~$104.7M from July 27 to August 2, reducing its holdings to 842,138, with a $10.9B paper loss at current prices (James Hunt/The Block)

June, which aims to help enterprise AI deployment by finding bottlenecks and building agents, emerges from stealth with $20M led by Marc Benioff's Time Ventures (Tim Fernholz/TechCrunch)

The EU's AI Act enforcement powers take effect, letting it evaluate AI models before regional release, restrict EU market access, fine model providers, and more (Kai Nicol-Schwarz/CNBC)

Source: Dario Amodei expressed concern about staff coming to Anthropic for the money rather than the mission, as Anthropic, OpenAI, and others battle for talent (Axios)

Sources: South Korean AI chip designer DeepX raised a ~$29M Series D at a ~$2.2B valuation, and is in talks to raise ~$209M at a ~$2.4B valuation by September (Yoolim Lee/Bloomberg)

Alibaba prices Qwen3.8-Max at $2 per 1M input tokens and $6 per 1M output tokens via its API, below Kimi K3's $3/1M input tokens and $15/1M output tokens (Henry Siu/The Information)

Artificial Analysis: DeepSeek's V4-Flash costs $0.14/1M input and $0.28/1M output tokens, or $0.03 per test, far below Kimi K3's $0.86 and GPT-5.6 Sol's $1.86 (Eduardo Baptista/Reuters)

Ofcom Chair Ian Cheshire says he is overseeing a "wide-ranging" review aimed at refitting the regulator to new duties overseeing Big Tech and enforcing the OSA (Daniel Thomas/Financial Times)

YouTuber Hank Green faces online criticism after using ChatGPT to help research a script, and says his LLM usage "is not healthy for me or good for the world" (Anthony Ha/TechCrunch)

London-based AI chip startup Olix raised $312M led by Fundomo, with participation from Arm, at a $3.3B valuation, up from $1B+ after raising $220M in February (Tim Bradshaw/Financial Times)

A profile of Nanit, a maker of AI-equipped baby cameras for hyper-detailed tracking, which says it has 1M daily users and $100M+ in annual revenue (Sapna Maheshwari/New York Times)

An analysis of US police and court records finds 50+ officers were charged or accused of misusing license-plate readers like Flock's, including for stalking (Washington Post)

A look at the growing tensions over AI data centers in London, Europe's biggest data center hub, as housing, power, and water come under increasing strain (Francesca Perry/Financial Times)

Indeed: UK employers are creating jobs for senior staff in software engineering and IT, where AI enhances the value of experience, while cutting back elsewhere (Irina Anghel/Bloomberg)

Japanese startups are racing to enter defense drone production, as Tokyo seeks to cut reliance on Chinese industrial drones, which control 91% of Japan's market (Mitsuru Obe/Nikkei Asia)

A detailed recap of the real-world target hacks by OpenAI and Anthropic models, exposing failures in AI alignment training and lack of meaningful supervision (Zvi Mowshowitz/Don't Worry About the Vase)

An unsecured police dashboard exposed China's extensive tracking of foreigners, aggregating data from surveillance cameras, facial recognition tools, and more (New York Times)

A look at Central Asia's emerging data center race, led by Uzbekistan's 6MW TAS-1 due by year-end and Kazakhstan's 125MW facility with 100K Nvidia chips by 2027 (Yevgeniya Mikhailidi/Nikkei Asia)

Alibaba says its 2.4T-parameter Qwen3.8-Max tops Moonshot's Kimi K3 on some benchmarks, and it plans to release Qwen3.8-Max and Qwen3.8-27B's weights next week (Luz Ding/Bloomberg)

Two independent teams used GPT-5.6 Sol Ultra on the same quantum cryptography problem, filing papers three hours apart, raising questions over scientific credit (Peter Hall/Scientific American)

A look at the US open-weight AI model ecosystem, as VCs question the revenue potential of open-weight startups like Arcee, Reflection AI, and Poolside (Wall Street Journal)

Robinhood says Q2 prediction markets revenue rose 10x+ YoY to $156M, topping stock and crypto for the first time, as speculators shift to real-world event bets (Yueqi Yang/The Information)

Four US states rolled back or paused data center tax incentives, and nine others are weighing repeal measures, potentially adding 7% or more to equipment costs (Ann Davis Vaughan/The Information)

Sources detail the troubled development of Tencent's ambitious, GTA-like game Last Sentinel, which has burned hundreds of millions of dollars over six years (Jason Schreier/Bloomberg)

LLMs are moving from generating artifacts to creating hyper-custom worlds on demand, but still lack the ability to natively perceive and audit what they create (Andrej Karpathy/@karpathy)

Researchers used AI-assisted code to undetectably tamper with data from computerized scans of physical DNA evidence produced by widely used crime-lab machines (Mariah Timms/Wall Street Journal)

Experts say US law is unprepared for rogue AI agents and models, as recent OpenAI and Anthropic incidents raise questions over legal liability and repercussions (Lily Hay Newman/Wired)

Thoughts on Apple Upgrade; sources: MacBook Air is now facing shortages too; Apple wants to turn its future glasses and headsets into health and fitness devices (Mark Gurman/Bloomberg)

As Taiwanese server makers expand in Mexico, the country has become the second-largest supplier of servers to the US, behind Taiwan, with $46.9B in YTD sales (Financial Times)

A profile of Jacob Tsimerman, who won the Fields Medal last week and is taking a leave from the University of Toronto to join OpenAI and work on AI safety (Ben Cohen/Wall Street Journal)

Chinese VC firms are rushing to raise new funds after three years of record-low fundraising, amid renewed enthusiasm for China's tech, AI, and robotics sectors (Eleanor Olcott/Financial Times)

LemonEdge, a fund accounting and operations software provider for the private markets sector, raised a $21M Series A led by Blackstone Innovations Investments (FinTech Global)

Malaysia shuts down Network School, Balaji Srinivasan's techno-utopian project, over licensing issues; Srinivasan says he is opening a new campus in Kazakhstan (Wall Street Journal)

Apple introduced a cap and a 30-day cool-off period on bug report submissions, citing a deluge of AI-assisted reports; researchers can request higher quotas (Financial Times)

An investigation reveals Dubai-based unlicensed crypto exchange Shelbit has processed at least $4B as part of Iran's sanctions-evasion operation since May 2024 (Reuters)

US judge refuses xAI's request to stop a Minnesota law banning "nudify" apps, noting the request came only three days before the law was to take effect (NBC News)

Bitcoin hardware wallet Coldcard shipped a faulty firmware build, and hackers are now draining wallets; Galaxy Research estimates $70M+ stolen (Shaurya Malwa/CoinDesk)

Trump Media's new paid data API launches, for "a direct, licensed, real-time feed of the platform's most market-moving Truths"; Dem. senators asked SEC to probe (CJ Haddad/CNBC)

Officials: the scope of cyberattacks on US water systems now includes at least seven states and may be far wider; MN was just the first to publicly report them (New York Times)

A look at the deluge of AI computing power set to come online in the coming years; Epoch AI expects the number of AI chips in use to double every nine months (New York Times)

OpenAI says an internal version of Astra, its next big model, produced results for 10 problems in math, quantum complexity, and theoretical computer science (OpenAI)