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Google unveils Operation Blue Skies, a £5M trial to re-route North Atlantic aircraft to reduce contrail-induced warming using Google's AI atmospheric forecasts (Madeleine Cuff/New Scientist)

Baidu reports Q2 revenue down 2% YoY to ~$4.62B, below ~$4.69B est. and its fifth straight quarterly decline, and net income of ~$341M, as it lags AI rivals (Bloomberg)

Apple's macOS Tahoe 26.7 RC has references to unreleased products: a Home Hub, home accessories, new Beats, AirPods Pro 4, Apple Intelligence in China, and more (Juli Clover/MacRumors)

In filings, Apple acknowledges App Store regulatory changes are weighing on its $100B+ services business; US App Store spend fell 6% YoY in Q2, per Sensor Tower (Michael Acton/Financial Times)

Rogue Studio, which calls itself a "playground for creative ethical mischief", launches Rogue 1.0, an AI video tool to make adult content of Hollywood quality (Jason Parham/Wired)

Sources: AI-drafted bills are swamping the US House's Legislative Counsel, which now spends more time fixing them than it would spend to draft them from scratch (Owen Dahlkamp/Politico)

Discord suspends livestreams in Brazil, after the country's data protection authority ordered it last week, saying Discord failed to protect children and teens (Associated Press)

Sources: Google has told suppliers it plans to move all Pixel phone, smartwatch, and wireless earbud manufacturing out of China in 2027 amid US-China tensions (Lauly Li/Nikkei Asia)

A short video in Apple's macOS Tahoe 26.7 release candidate appears to show a man demoing camera-equipped AirPods using Visual Intelligence and Siri (Juli Clover/MacRumors)

Sources: Situational Awareness offered part of its $5B Anthropic stake at a 20% discount as it scrambled for cash; word of its trouble left it "being hunted" (Wall Street Journal)

David Sacks says "Dario Amodei believes frontier AI is too powerful to distribute; we believe it is too powerful to centralize" after Amodei shared policy ideas (David Sacks/@davidsacks)

Pornhub parent company Aylo agrees to pay $120M to settle two 2021 class action lawsuits in California and Alabama alleging it profited from CSAM (Samantha Cole/404 Media)

Sources: Crusoe is in IPO talks with at least four Wall Street banks, including JPMorgan, which is advising on its $3B pre-IPO fundraise set to value it at $35B (Alan Neuhauser/Axios)

Opening arguments begin on Tuesday in the US state AGs' social media addiction lawsuit against Meta; New Mexico AG says the consequences could be "astronomical" (Jonathan Vanian/CNBC)

BNPL lenders like Flex, Zip, and Affirm are now pitching loans for basic household needs; Americans spent $160B through pay-later loans in 2025, up 2x from 2023 (Stacy Cowley/New York Times)

Sources: Anthropic's revenue run rate reached $65B by the end of July, up from $47B in May, $19B in March, $9B in December 2025, and $4B in July 2025 (Bloomberg)

African defense tech company Terra Industries, founded in 2024, raised a $52M seed from 8VC and others, and says it is on track to book $100M in contracts (Dominic-Madori Davis/TechCrunch)

Sources: the US DOJ has been investigating a16z for nearly a year over whether its partners are improperly serving on the boards of competing AI companies (Bloomberg)

Cursor says it is rolling out its code hosting service Origin in early beta on all paid plans, featuring support for repos, pull requests, GitHub sync, and more (Cursor)

YouTube will start counting a view as soon as a video starts to play, from August 24, lining up with the system used by Instagram, TikTok, and its Shorts videos (Emma Roth/The Verge)

Google wins a bankruptcy auction with a $10M bid to acquire deidentified business data, software code, and more from Spirit Airlines to improve its AI models (James Nani/Bloomberg Law)

Nvidia's $500B funding package announcement for AI infrastructure follows SEC's July guidance that confirmed looser restrictions for data center securitizations (Tobias Burns/CNBC)

Monzo Chair Gary Hoffman is leaving after some of Monzo's biggest shareholders called for his removal following the board removing TS Anil as CEO in December (Simon Foy/Financial Times)

A German regulator says Apple will make changes to ATT, after finding Apple gave its apps more favorable consent prompts than those of third-party developers (Reuters)

Microsoft says the outage affecting GitHub's API, Actions, Pull Requests, and other services has been mitigated, three hours after it first confirmed the outage (Mayank Parmar/BleepingComputer)

Filing: Nvidia agrees to spend up to $105B to support SB Energy's new Ohio data center campus OpenAI is set to lease; Nvidia agrees to invest $1.5B in SB Energy (Bloomberg)

Investigation: Amazon is buying huge quantities of rare books, scanning them for AI, and destroying them; a tracked Biblio order went to its Las Vegas facility (Emanuel Maiberg/404 Media)

ETH Zurich spinout Gravis Robotics raised a $200M Series A from SoftBank to scale Gravis Rack, an autonomous control appliance for retrofitting onto excavators (Mike Wheatley/SiliconANGLE)

Trump-backed WLF is working with Hong Kong-based AI platform WorldClaw; 43 of the 90 AI models on WorldClaw are from Chinese companies flagged as security risks (Lawrence Delevingne/Reuters)

Uber and Zipline partner to launch Uber Eats drone deliveries in Dallas and Houston by late 2026, aiming to scale nationwide and hit 1M daily deliveries in 2029 (Kelly Cloonan/Wall Street Journal)

Greg Brockman calls the OpenAI-Hugging Face incident "a watershed moment" and discusses how OpenAI and other organizations can use AI to improve cyber defenses (Greg Brockman)

OpenAI signs a 20-year, 10GW data center deal in Ohio with SoftBank's SB Energy; Nvidia agrees to backstop a portion of the value of the completed data center (Anissa Gardizy/Wall Street Journal)

Groq raised $350M led by Disruptive at a $3.5B valuation, down from $6.9B in September 2025 before Nvidia struck a licensing deal and hired much of its talent (Natasha Mascarenhas/Bloomberg)

Chip giants participated in startup funding rounds collectively valued at $250B+ YTD; Nvidia leads the sector with a record 59 known rounds, up from 53 in 2025 (Joanna Glasner/Crunchbase News)

Voice AI startup Wispr raised a $280M Series B led by Menlo Ventures at a $2B valuation, taking its total funding to $361M, and now has 100K business customers (Allie Garfinkle/Fortune)

Sources: Meta and BlackRock's $14B El Paso data center project is not insured against total loss, exposing lenders to credit risks and big potential liabilities (Financial Times)

Russian law enforcement docs: Binance provided Russia with IT specialist Yuri Belenkiy's transaction history and passport number, leading to terrorism charges (Anton Zverev/Reuters)

An analysis of 60 of the largest planned US data centers: they could together produce 101.5M tons of CO2 per year, or ~7% of US power sector emissions in 2025 (Financial Times)

Sources: Singapore-based Shein is aiming to hit a ~$25B valuation in its Hong Kong IPO, down from its $30B-$40B goal earlier in August after investor meetings (Reuters)

Analysis: nine top tech companies including Alphabet and Meta had ~$3T of AI-related off-balance-sheet commitments, far exceeding their ~$600B in reported capex (Wall Street Journal)

AI film startups are setting up studios in Hollywood, using US and Chinese AI models while touting lower production costs and a way around traditional financing (Robert Booth/The Guardian)

How US industrial companies like Caterpillar, Cummins, Eaton, and Ford are pivoting their businesses to feed a booming AI data-center market for power equipment (Bob Tita/Wall Street Journal)

Qwen 3.8 27B shows a 17GB open-weight general purpose model can have long context, effective tool calling, strong vision ability, and competent code generation (Simon Willison/Simon Willison's Weblog)

AI video generation startup Higgsfield raised $400M from DST, Goldman Sachs, Liberty Global, Intel, and others at a $5.4B valuation, up from $1.3B in January (James Fontanella-Khan/Financial Times)

Chainalysis sues the US government over ICE's $94.6M contract to buy forensic software and services from its competitor TRM Labs, calling the deal "arbitrary" (Ezra Reguerra/Cointelegraph)

Anthropic's text watermark alters word probabilities to embed a fingerprint, which could degrade Claude's writing, despite its claim of no impact on quality (John Gruber/Daring Fireball)

Singapore hopes access to advanced AI models will stem the flow of finance talent to Hong Kong, where financial firms struggle to access the latest US AI models (Financial Times)

A look at companies like Inception Point creating AI personas for media, fashion, film, and music industries that could host podcasts, model clothes, and more (Reggie Ugwu/New York Times)

How Anthropic's Claude made a math breakthrough during its unsuccessful 54-hour attempt to solve the Riemann hypothesis, aided by a staffer's encouragement (Ben Cohen/Wall Street Journal)

French PM Sebastien Lecornu plans to hold a crisis meeting on Monday over a June-July cyberattack on France's tax agency that compromised 678K accounts (Phil Serafino/Bloomberg)