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Anthropic details an unreleased Claude model's attempt to solve the Riemann hypothesis; it didn't solve it but "unexpectedly" made strides on a related problem (Anthropic)

The Ninth Circuit dismisses Meta's bid to pause a landmark trial by state AGs alleging its products addict children and have caused a youth mental health crisis (Isaiah Poritz/Bloomberg)

YouTube says new creators will need double, or 8,000+, watch hours over the past year or 20M Shorts views in the last 90 days to start earning money from Feb. 1 (Aisha Malik/TechCrunch)

Nvidia partners with Apollo, BlackRock, Blackstone, Brookfield, Goldman Sachs, and KKR on a $500B funding package for AI infrastructure development (Financial Times)

OpenAI unveils two Daybreak tiers: Daybreak Blue, which provides access to frontier models, and Daybreak Red, which offers purpose-trained cybersecurity models (OpenAI)

OpenAI releases GPT-5.6-Cyber, a more cyber-permissive version of GPT-5.6 Sol, to some partners and expands its Daybreak cybersecurity initiative (Sam Sabin/Axios)

Google adds third-party games store Aptoide to the Play Store for Android users in the US, following a judge's orders in the antitrust lawsuit with Epic (Ryan Whitwam/Ars Technica)

A US appeals court allows ~2,400 federal lawsuits against social media companies to proceed over claims their products were designed to addict young users (Diana Novak Jones/Reuters)

Sources: officials say OpenAI risks its White House relationship by hiring Dean Ball, who has criticized Trump's AI strategy after leaving the administration (Thomas Barrabi/New York Post)

Sources: AI cloud computing provider Lambda is selling a $917M leveraged loan to finance the purchase of GPUs as part of a contract with Nvidia (Bloomberg)

Tel Aviv- and San Francisco-based Corma, which develops AI models for defensive cybersecurity, emerges from stealth with a $60M seed led by Sequoia Capital (Emily Forlini/Fortune)

As Waymo expands its fleet from 700 in 2025 to nearly 4,000 now, recalls and edge-case failures like flooded roadways and a San Francisco power outage mount (Emmy Martin/New York Times)

Online course cheating has accelerated from chatbot-written essays to agents executing commands like "log in and complete my quiz"; major AI tools didn't refuse (New York Times)

Sources: Microsoft plans to unveil its next-gen AI chip, the Maia 300, potentially as soon as September, and is in talks with TSMC to make 300K+ chips for 2027 (The Information)

Analysis: the 256GB iPhone 18 Pro is set to have a bill of materials cost ~38% higher than the iPhone 17 Pro due to memory prices; memory's BOM share hits 34% (TrendForce)

Anthropic, Macquarie, and Singapore's GIC form Theseus Infrastructure to develop AI computing sites; Anthropic commits to cover consumer electricity price hikes (Mark Bergen/Bloomberg)

Google adds Venmo as a payment option on Google Play for games, apps, add-ons, subscriptions, and more in the US, expanding support beyond PayPal and Cash App (Ivan Mehta/TechCrunch)

Intel announces a $15B common stock offering, with proceeds going to general corporate purposes, like "maintaining a strong balance sheet"; INTC falls 3%+ (Ian King/Bloomberg)

South Korea plans to launch a ~$3.5B chip fund for promising materials, parts, equipment, and fabless companies, and speed the development of domestic chip hubs (Reuters)

Sources: Palmer Luckey's Erebor, which aims to fill the gap left by Silicon Valley Bank's collapse, is in advanced talks to raise ~$1.5B at an $8B valuation (Financial Times)

Sources: the AI-driven memory chip shortage has kicked off a rush of DC lobbying; many US officials appear unsympathetic to Apple's desire to buy Chinese chips (New York Times)

As AI salaries collide with lack of San Francisco housing supply, CoStar says the average asking rent is up 18% in under two years to $3,728/month, passing NYC (Wall Street Journal)

Q&A with Kalshi CEO Tarek Mansour on his vision to "financialize everything", sports betting, Kalshi's "philosophical misalignment" with Polymarket, and more (Jordyn Holman/New York Times)

The UK's Report Remove service receives 420 reports from under-18s of explicit images digitally faked or manipulated to depict them in H1, exceeding 2025's 397 (Dan Milmo/The Guardian)

Meta says Muse Glimmer has 30B parameters and is "small enough" to need only one GPU; Meta plans a $1B fund to invest in US communities near its data centers (Vlad Savov/Bloomberg)

Mark Zuckerberg criticizes "closed" AI model makers, says AI labs are espousing a "discourse ... so filled with doom", and defends distillation as a principle (Jamie John/Financial Times)

Meta releases Muse Glimmer, an open-weight model, and plans to launch an open-weight version of its most advanced model, Muse Spark 1.2, in the coming weeks (Meghan Bobrowsky/Wall Street Journal)

Mark Zuckerberg proposes a positive AI philosophy centered on individual empowerment, predicts personal superintelligence could increase employment, and more (Mark Zuckerberg/Meta)

Smart Analytics: Chinese humanoid robot makers were 97%+ of global shipments in H1 2026, reaching ~19,100 unit shipments globally, up from 5,100 in H1 2025 (Saritha Rai/Bloomberg)

Sources: the UK FCA is consulting industry participants, including major banks, on a regulatory framework for tokenized gold; London dominates the global market (Financial Times)

Sources: Nvidia chips remain the norm for Chinese AI labs training LLMs, as switching from its CUDA platform to Huawei's CANN requires major code rewriting (South China Morning Post)

Q&A with historian Jill Lepore on her new book The Rise and Fall of the Artificial State, tech leaders misreading science fiction warnings as manuals, and more (Anthony Ha/TechCrunch)

A profile of Founders Pledge, which has recorded $4B in pledges from founders so far in 2026, as the AI industry now accounts for a third of its lifetime total (Joel Khalili/Wired)

Revelio Labs: short-term AI training programs made up ~33% of the professional certificate market in 2026, up from just 2% in 2022 before ChatGPT launched (Liam Knox/Bloomberg)

How credit card issuers and reservation apps like OpenTable and Amex-owned Resy fragment restaurant reservations, wiring the best tables into premium card perks (Wall Street Journal)

A look at London's King's Cross, which transformed from a seedy area into an AI hub after DeepMind arrived in 2016, and now hosts OpenAI, Meta, Wayve, and more (Dominic-Madori Davis/TechCrunch)

Chinese AI labs account for nine of Artificial Analysis' top 10 text-to-video models, gaining global adoption and potentially an edge in building world models (Catherine Thorbecke/Bloomberg)

Sources: the UK Royal Navy removed internet connectivity from its drones' cameras, after finding they sent "heartbeat communications" to an IP address in China (Richard Holmes/Telegraph)

Sources: Sony and TSMC plan a $6.3B JV, owned ~60% by Sony and ~40% by TSMC, to mass produce next-gen image sensor chips in Japan's Kumamoto as early as 2029 (Nikkei Asia)

Sources: as Spotify tests a skip ahead button that lets some Premium users skip publisher-sold podcast ads and filler content, audio networks raise concerns (Max Tani/Semafor)

Sources: Chinese regulators have told banks to back tech companies, but lenders still prefer stable cash flows and profitability over loss-making tech startups (Bloomberg)

Moore Threads reports H1 revenue up 147% YoY to ~$258M, a net loss of $1.72M, and plans a Hong Kong listing, after its stock rose 420%+ since its Shanghai IPO (Bloomberg)

Tel Aviv-based QuantHealth, a provider of AI clinical trial simulation software, raised a $45M Series B led by Qumra Capital, taking its total funding to ~$70M (Cailey Gleeson/Fierce Healthcare)

An Australian user's OpenClaw agent running Claude exploited a gym API flaw and kicked another member off, after the user asked it to move him up the waitlist (ABC)

After New York and Texas added statewide data center restrictions, 500+ US towns and counties have passed bans or restrictions, up from 300+ in late June (Shane Burke/The Information)

A look at Chinese state-owned investment bank CICC, which sponsored multibillion-dollar listings of China's tech champions, including CXMT and Zhongji Innolight (Financial Times)

Sources: Apple is testing CXMT's RAM chips, but needs to share technical details with CXMT to make custom versions, which is blocked by US tech transfer rules (Wall Street Journal)

An in-depth look at OpenAI's model training, dangerous decisions, and cluelessness before the Hugging Face hack; despite delaying Astra, OpenAI doesn't get it (Zvi Mowshowitz/Don't Worry About the Vase)

A look back at "Move 37", a watershed AI moment from AlphaGo's 2016 Go victory, as math witnesses similar breakthroughs where AI makes surprising discoveries (Ben Cohen/Wall Street Journal)

Google's AI shakeup suggests it may be prioritizing AI diffusion over frontier-model leadership, betting on AI compute as a bigger economic opportunity (Tim O'Reilly/Asimov's Addendum)