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An NYC bill, backed by Mayor Zohran Mamdani, calls for Amazon, FedEx, and others to directly employ thousands of delivery workers; the bill could pass this fall (Bloomberg)

xAI co-founder Igor Babuschkin's River AI raised $1B led by General Catalyst to build home or small business computer servers capable of running AI locally (Cade Metz/New York Times)

How India's IT services sector, which employs 6M people, contributes ~7% of GDP, and generates $300B+ annually, is shedding jobs as AI automates formulaic tasks (Financial Times)

OpenAI is hiring a power-trading lead to execute commodity hedging across its data center power portfolio, as tech companies seek a steady supply of electricity (Julian Hast/Bloomberg)

How a wave of disinformation on Facebook, WhatsApp, TikTok, Instagram, and Telegram contributed to a surge of migrants from Morocco to Spain's Ceuta enclave (New York Times)

A look at London-based AI startup Cosine, which is building a frontier model with UK government backing, as some question if it has the talent and resources (Financial Times)

Intel raised $20B in an upsized share sale, up from the $15B it was targeting on Monday; sources say the sale drew $100B+ in demand; INTC is up 145%+ YTD (Bloomberg)

A look at Western Australian police's first live facial recognition trial, which has scanned 130,000+ people since June, raising accuracy and privacy concerns (ABC)

PatronView's owner details a year of fighting scrapers: 214:1 bot-to-human page loads, 35,000 Claude crawls per referred user, and Amazon's bot referred none (Nick Gray/PatronView)

Singapore raises its 2026 GDP growth forecast to 4.5%-5.5% from 2%-4%, citing stronger-than-expected global AI investment and improved external demand (Bloomberg)

Anthropic says new Claude models will embed watermarks in generated text and C2PA metadata in files to comply with the EU AI Act, and it will update past models (Thomas Claburn/The Register)

Sources: Anthropic is courting investors for what could be the biggest IPO ever, touting rapid growth and plans to address mounting public backlash against AI (Wall Street Journal)

Sources: investor interest in Situational Awareness surged after it nearly blew up on leveraged positions; the fund says it's not accepting new capital for now (Matt Levine/Bloomberg)

Sources: Anthropic agreed to a 20-year compute deal worth $9.1B with Riot Platforms for 191 MW of capacity at Riot's Rockdale, Texas campus; RIOT jumps ~25% (Shirin Ghaffary/Bloomberg)

How a clause in Elon Musk's Tesla pay package, worth up to ~$1T, could provide him a shortcut around lofty performance targets if Tesla merged with SpaceX (Wall Street Journal)

Sources: Apple remains on track to launch a glass-centric design overhaul of the iPhone Pro line in 2027, countering rumors that led Jefferies to downgrade AAPL (Mark Gurman/Bloomberg)

Trump Media reports a Q2 net loss of $238.1M, up from a net loss of $20M in Q2 2025, and says 10+ clients are paying up to $100K per month for its Truth API (Steve Kopack/NBC News)

SpaceX's earnings show X's Q2 ad revenue at $367M, down from Twitter's $1.08B in Q2 2022; Elon Musk said he would take X's annual ad revenue to $12B in 2027 (Mike Masnick/Techdirt)

Source: OpenAI's AI Ethics Lead Chloé Bakalar departs after less than a year, following exits by the head of safety systems and an ex-head of mission alignment (Financial Times)

Anthropic makes Claude Sonnet 5's introductory pricing permanent at $2/1M input tokens and $10/1M output tokens, canceling a planned September 1 increase (Claude/@claudeai)

With his long essay, Zuckerberg returns to his "open" AI arguments at an opportune time, as Chinese open models narrow the performance gap at a much lower cost (M.G. Siegler/Spyglass)

Sources: OpenAI bought back ~$7B in shares from current and former employees in a tender offer valuing it at $852B, unchanged from its most recent funding round (Bloomberg)

Source: Applied Compute, which helps companies customize models with their data, is in talks to raise "hundreds of millions" led by Elad Gil at a ~$3B valuation (The Information)

Filing: Sergey Brin donated an additional $20M to Building a Better California, which fights California's wealth tax, bringing his total contributions to $102M (Alicia Clanton/Bloomberg)

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)