Techmeme River
Sunday, June 22, 2025
10:20 AM
A look at Apple's conservative approach to M&A, which may need to change to catch up in AI by acquiring a startup like Perplexity, Cohere, Sierra AI, or Mistral
Bloomberg
9:35 AM
Purism's $1,999 security-focused Liberty Phone, assembled in the US with decade-old specs and some US-made parts, exposes the gaps in US phone manufacturing
Wall Street Journal
8:00 AM
A look at the US Army Reserve's Detachment 201, which lets tech executives, like Meta's Bosworth, give advice as senior officers while keeping their day jobs
Wired
5:00 AM
Inside the Vera C. Rubin Observatory, whose 3.2-gigapixel camera will produce 60PB of space image data over 10 years, to be analyzed using ML and deep learning
New York Times
2:00 AM
An interview with LinkedIn CEO Ryan Roslansky on how AI is affecting the jobs market, AI agents, dealing with fake AI-generated accounts, and more
Bloomberg
1:30 AM
London-based PhysicsX, which uses AI to design industrial parts such as engine and drone components, raised $135M, a source says at just under a $1B valuation
Financial Times
1:15 AM
Adobe Labs launches Project Indigo, a free computational photography app for iPhones that captures a burst of images and combines them into a high-quality photo
The Verge
1:05 AM
Slide, which develops data backup and disaster recovery tech for managed service providers serving SMBs, raised a $25M Series A led by Base10 Partners
Axios
12:05 AM
Fidelity: ~50% of UK investors trust social media, finfluencers, and AI tools for financial decisions; only ~33% used a qualified adviser in the past two years
Financial Times
Saturday, June 21, 2025
11:50 PM
Onebrief, which makes military workflow software, raised a $20M Series C extension led by Battery Ventures at a $1.1B valuation, taking the round total to $70M
Axios
9:35 PM
A look at DARPA's “Exponentiating Mathematics” program, which aims to speed up progress in pure mathematics by developing an AI “co-author” to conduct research
New York Times
7:55 PM
Experts say China's new national internet ID, currently voluntary, to sign in across social media apps and sites could further erode already limited freedoms
CNN
6:15 PM
An interview with computational linguist Emily Bender, who coined the term “stochastic parrot”, on her AI skepticism, co-writing the book The AI Con, and more
Financial Times
4:35 PM
Uncountable, which makes AI tools to let R&D teams accelerate development cycles, raised a $27M Series A led by Sageview, bringing its total funding to $32.5M
Axios
3:30 PM
A look at Temu, Shein, Meituan, and other Chinese companies' expansion plans in Brazil, as they face slowing domestic demand and hurdles in the US and Europe
New York Times
2:10 PM
Docs: the FCC is probing USCTM, launched by the Biden administration as a voluntary safety label for IoT devices, over its administrators' alleged ties to China
Fox News
1:00 PM
Sources: the WH rejected DOD's proposal for the head of NSA and US Cyber Command, extending the agencies' leadership vacuum; Trump fired NSA's head in April
Politico
12:10 PM
Hackers briefly exploited a front-end vulnerability in CoinMarketCap's rotating doodles feature to inject fake “Verify Wallet” phishing pop-ups
CoinDesk
11:30 AM
Experts say China-linked groups have repeatedly hacked Russian companies and government agencies in search of military secrets since the war in Ukraine began
New York Times
10:00 AM
A look at “Generative Engine Optimization” startups like Profound and Bluefish AI, which help businesses improve content to appear in AI search summaries
Forbes
8:40 AM
Kantar: the share of Indians consuming media exclusively on mobile phones grew to 23% in Q1 2025, up from 15% in Q1 2023, as TVs stay unaffordable for many
Bloomberg
5:35 AM
Microsoft suspending an ICC judge's email account raised alarms across EU about how dependent its governments, businesses, and citizens are on US tech companies
New York Times
2:30 AM
A profile of Scale AI co-founder Alexandr Wang, whose ties to influential people in the AI industry and the GOP could give Meta leverage over its competitors
Bloomberg
2:20 AM
How Huawei has remained resilient in the face of US sanctions; Mizuho: about 700,000 units of Huawei's Ascend 910 series are expected to ship in 2025
South China Morning Post
1:35 AM
BitcoinTreasuries.net: about 130 publicly-listed companies currently hold a combined ~$87B in bitcoin, about 3.2% of all the bitcoins that will ever exist
Financial Times
12:45 AM
Report: Vista Equity Partners and Blackstone buy out other investors in Assent for $400M, valuing the Ottawa-based supply chain software company at $1.3B
BetaKit
12:30 AM
Huawei unveils a beta version of HarmonyOS 6, making it available to developers, and announces the HarmonyOS Agent Framework to help developers create AI agents
South China Morning Post
12:10 AM
A UN survey of 21 countries finds that trust in AI is strongest in low-income and developing nations; 83% in China and 37.5% in the US said they trust AI
Bloomberg
12:00 AM
Browserbase, which develops headless browsers for AI agents and apps, raised a $40M Series B led by Notable Capital at a $300M valuation, up ~4x since September
Upstarts Media
Friday, June 20, 2025
11:35 PM
Canadian crypto companies are encountering regulatory challenges in introducing a local stablecoin, as the US advances stablecoin legislation
Bloomberg
10:50 PM
Corporate travel and expense management service Navan, formerly known as TripActions, confidentially files for a US IPO; it was valued at $9.2B in October 2022
Reuters
9:25 PM
Cloudflare says it mitigated a record-breaking 7.3Tbps DDoS attack in mid-May, which delivered 37.4TB of junk traffic to the target in just 45 seconds
Ars Technica
8:50 PM
Insurance giant Aflac says a cybercrime group breached its systems and may have stolen data; source: the attack bears the hallmarks of Scattered Spider
The Record
8:30 PM
Circle shares jumped over 20% on Friday as investors cheered the US Senate approval of the GENIUS Act, and have surged ~675% since the company's IPO on June 5
CNBC
7:45 PM
Sources: Mark Zuckerberg recently discussed buying Mira Murati's Thinking Machines Lab, but the talks didn't progress to the formal offer stage
The Verge
6:50 PM
Q&A with Yoshua Bengio on his nonprofit LawZero focusing on AI safety, its research direction, risks of increasingly capable and autonomous AI systems, and more
Vox
5:30 PM
Sources: Apple execs have held internal discussions about bidding for, or partnering with, Perplexity, seeking to address the need for more AI talent and tech
Bloomberg
5:25 PM
Cluely, which wants to help users “cheat on everything”, including job interviews and exams, raised a $15M Series A led by a16z, two months after a $5.3M seed
TechCrunch
4:25 PM
Amazon ends an experiment started in 2023 to make same-day deliveries with drivers in Kia Souls and will rely on Amazon Flex drivers who use their own cars
Bloomberg
4:05 PM
Anthropic's test of 16 top AI models from OpenAI and others found that, in some cases, they resorted to malicious behavior to avoid replacement or achieve goals
Axios
3:20 PM
NYC announces new minimum-pay rules for rideshare drivers, settling on a 5% increase after Uber and Lyft strongly opposed a proposed 6.1% pay hike
Bloomberg
3:05 PM
Sources: Mira Murati's Thinking Machines Lab raised $2B led by a16z at a $10B valuation; Murati will hold board voting rights that outweigh all other directors
Financial Times
2:20 PM
Uber expands its data-labeling platform Uber AI Solutions to 30 countries, and adds new offerings like tools for developing AI agents and ready-to-use datasets
Forbes
2:00 PM
Snap acquires Saturn, a calendar app for high school and college students, and says 80% of US high schoolers attend schools that support Saturn
Engadget
1:35 PM
Character.AI hires Karandeep Anand, former Meta VP of business products, as CEO, 10 months after Google hired away the startup's co-founder and CEO Noam Shazeer
TechCrunch
1:16 PM
Sources: Meta held talks with Perplexity about a possible takeover and tried to hire CEO Aravind Srinivas before moving ahead with its investment in Scale AI
Bloomberg
1:10 PM
Coinbase says it has secured a MiCA license from Luxembourg to offer crypto services across the EU, and will shift its European base from Ireland to Luxembourg
CNBC
12:35 PM
Sources: Reddit is exploring Tools for Humanity's World ID identity system to allow users to verify that they are unique individuals while remaining anonymous
Semafor
11:55 AM
Silicon Valley is pushing senators to follow the House in reviving a favorable tax benefit that disappeared because of a US tax law Section 174 change in 2017
Axios
11:00 AM
Sources: a US official told Samsung, SK Hynix, and TSMC that the US may revoke waivers that let them ship US chipmaking equipment to their factories in China
Wall Street Journal
10:25 AM
Developers criticize Google for its decision to hide raw reasoning tokens, essential for debugging complex AI workflows, of its flagship model Gemini 2.5 Pro
VentureBeat
9:17 AM
Meta unveils the $399+ Oakley Meta HSTN glasses, with Meta AI and the features of its Ray-Ban models, plus 3K video recording and double the battery life
The Verge
8:50 AM
Sources: Masayoshi Son is pitching Trump officials and TSMC on a Shenzhen-like $1T AI and robotics manufacturing hub in Arizona, codenamed Project Crystal Land
Bloomberg
7:55 AM
Sources: Foxconn and Nvidia are in talks to deploy humanoid robots at a new Foxconn factory in Houston by Q1 2026 to produce Nvidia AI servers
Reuters
6:45 AM
South Korea's SK Group and AWS will invest ~$5.1B including $4B from AWS to build a 100 MW AI data center in Ulsan by 2029, and plan to expand capacity to 1 GW
Reuters
6:41 AM
Israel urges its citizens to turn off their home cameras, saying Iran is tapping into security cameras in Israel to gather real-time intelligence for attacks
Bloomberg
5:26 AM
How JD.com is taking on China's food-delivery duopoly with viral stunts, no commissions, and deep discounts, prompting Meituan and Alibaba's Ele.me to respond
Bloomberg
2:25 AM
Cloudflare CEO Matthew Prince says Google's ratio of pages crawled per visitor sent to a publisher fell from 2:1 10 years ago to 18:1; for OpenAI, it's 1,500:1
Axios
12:40 AM
The BBC threatens Perplexity with legal action for allegedly training its “default AI model” using BBC content; Perplexity calls the BBC's claims “manipulative”
Financial Times
Thursday, June 19, 2025
10:45 PM
Sources: Foxconn plans to manufacture iPhone enclosures in India by establishing a new unit in Tamil Nadu; only Tata currently makes iPhone enclosures in India
The Economic Times
10:05 PM
Australia's government-backed tech trial finds checking a user's age is technologically possible, clearing the way for a social media ban for under-16s in 2025
Bloomberg
9:15 PM
Milan-based Jet HR, which provides all-in-one payroll and HR services to SMBs, raised €25M led by Base10 Partners, bringing its total funding to about €42M
Axios
8:00 PM
Sources: Meta tried to acquire Safe Superintelligence earlier in 2025; after Ilya Sutskever rebuffed the offer, Zuckerberg moved to recruit SSI CEO Daniel Gross
CNBC
6:50 PM
Miami-based Payabli, which offers vertical software companies an embedded payments platform, raised a $28M Series B led by Fika Ventures and QED Investors
Axios
3:45 PM
Miami-based Pelico, which offers a supply chain orchestration platform, raised a $40M Series B led by General Catalyst, bringing its total funding to $72M
Axios
2:55 PM
Tesla's robotaxi service will launch in Austin with just ~10 cars that are geofenced to avoid challenging intersections and monitored by backup teleoperators
Financial Times
1:50 PM
The Irish Data Protection Commission says Meta told it that WhatsApp ads won't launch in the EU “until 2026”; WhatsApp confirms that ads will arrive “gradually”
Politico
1:05 PM
Trump extends the TikTok ban deadline for a third time; there is no legal basis for the extensions, and it's unclear how many times the deadline can be extended
Associated Press
12:45 PM
European satellite company Eutelsat raised €1.35B, including €717M from France, to build out its satellite fleet to rival Starlink; France's stake is almost 30%
Bloomberg
12:20 PM
The EU says Apple and Meta will not face sanctions immediately after their 60-day DMA grace period ends on June 26, following €500M and €200M fines in April
Euronews
12:15 PM
Interviews with 45+ sources detail Mark Zuckerberg's transformation into “MAGA Mark”; sources say there were talks about Zuckerberg becoming a Trump advisor
Financial Times
12:00 PM
Sources: Google is using its expansive library of YouTube videos to train models like Gemini and Veo 3; Google says it only uses a subset of videos for training
CNBC
11:50 AM
Andrej Karpathy's talk on “Software 3.0”, with LLMs enabling programming via natural language, the decade of agents, LLMs as “fallible people spirits”, and more
Y Combinator on YouTube
11:15 AM
A look at Scale AI rival Surge AI, profitable since inception without raising outside capital, which told staff it had $1B+ in 2024 revenue, vs. Scale's $870M
The Information
10:25 AM
Commure, which provides ambient AI, revenue cycle management, and workflow automation tools for healthcare providers, raised $200M from General Catalyst
Axios
7:55 AM
Fleet, which offers open-source device management tools for OSes, various networks, VPNs, and more, raised a $27M Series B led by Ten Eleven Ventures
SiliconANGLE
7:45 AM
Luxembourg-based Tadaweb, which analyzes open-source intelligence, raised $20M led by Arsenal Growth and Forgepoint Capital, taking its total funding to $40M
Axios
7:05 AM
Q&A with Pavel Durov on his arrest in France, Macron, Russia, the FBI, the fight for Telegram, leaving his wealth to the 100+ children he has fathered, and more
Le Point
6:50 AM
Source: OpenAI is changing ChatGPT Enterprise's pricing structure from a fixed price to include a credits system, allowing more companies' workforces to use it
Wall Street Journal
6:35 AM
Study of 14 open-source LLMs: larger models use exponentially more energy, likely producing more emissions, and achieve higher accuracy, but only up to a point
New York Times
6:20 AM
China's 618 mid-year shopping festival, which ran from May 13 to June 18, ended without much fanfare despite deep discounts, as consumers have economic concerns
Reuters
6:05 AM
How Iranian and Israeli hacking groups spent years sparring online; the US State Department is offering $10M for info on members of Iran-linked CyberAv3ngers
Bloomberg
5:55 AM
MIT study of 54 people writing essays using ChatGPT, Google Search, or no tools: ChatGPT users had the lowest brain engagement and underperformed neurologically
Time
5:35 AM
A look at China's efforts to grow its “low-altitude economy”, or the airspace below 1,000 meters, by leveraging its domination in drone production and drone R&D
Financial Times
5:20 AM
A look at seven UX issues in the Fediverse's web experience, such as complex onboarding, no DM UI wrapper or public posting warning, and unusable user discovery
Tim Chambers
5:05 AM
The European Court of Justice's advocate-general says the EU fining Google €4.12B for using Android to squash rivals should be upheld, a major blow to Google
Financial Times
4:55 AM
An interview with Apple SVP Craig Federighi on the journey to iPadOS' windowing system and menu bar, the iPad's essence as a “magical piece of glass”, and more
MacStories
4:40 AM
MIT researchers unveil Self-Adapting LLMs, a framework that enables LLMs to keep improving by generating their own training data based on the input received
Wired
2:40 AM
A look at the tech industry's lack of consensus on what AGI or ASI is, whether LLMs are the best path, and what the tech might look like if or when it arrives
Financial Times
2:20 AM
Study: US kids who said social media, phone, or video game use was “addictive” were 2x to 3x as likely to have thoughts of suicide or harm themselves by age 14
New York Times
2:05 AM
Q&A with Hugging Face Chief Ethics Scientist Margaret Mitchell on aligning AI development with human needs, the “illusion of consensus” around AGI, and more
Financial Times
1:55 AM
SoftBank-backed Spotter, which fronts cash to YouTubers for a cut of revenue, is facing significant challenges due to YouTube's shift toward Shorts, and more
Bloomberg
1:40 AM
Korean media: Google switching from Samsung's foundry to TSMC for its upcoming Pixel 10 series' Tensor G5 chip was a “shock” and is a wake-up call for Samsung
9to5Google
1:20 AM
White House crypto and AI czar David Sacks says China has grown adept at evading US export controls and is at most two years behind US chip design capabilities
Bloomberg
12:50 AM
Scale AI emphasizes that it “remains an independent company” and won't give Meta access to its “internal systems or to our customers' confidential information”
Scale AI
12:45 AM
Scale AI rivals like Snorkel AI, Labelbox, and Turing report a surge in interest from clients worried about Scale's independence after Meta's $14.3B investment
Bloomberg
12:35 AM
Careem, Uber's ride-hailing MENA arm, will suspend its decade-old Pakistan service on July 18, citing economic challenges, competition, and capital constraints
Reuters
Wednesday, June 18, 2025
10:35 PM
OpenAI warns that its upcoming models could pose a higher risk of helping create bioweapons and is partnering to build diagnostics, countermeasures, and testing
Axios
9:51 PM
Multiplier, which acquires accounting services firms and scales them with AI, raised $27.5M across a seed led by Ribbit Capital and a Series A led by Lightspeed
TechCrunch
8:50 PM
Nobitex, Iran's largest crypto exchange, says it was hacked, and pro-Israel group Predatory Sparrow takes credit; Elliptic: the hackers stole and “burned” $90M+
TechCrunch
8:10 PM
Meta says it is adding support for passkeys to Facebook for iOS and Android “soon”, and will begin rolling out passkeys to Messenger “in the coming months”
The Verge
7:45 PM
Wix acquires Base44, which lets users build apps from text prompts, for $80M; Base44 was founded by a solo entrepreneur six months ago and employs six people
CTech
6:55 PM
The US State Department restarts student visa interviews and requires all applicants to make their social media accounts public for vetting by US embassies
Washington Post
5:30 PM
Midjourney launches V1, its first AI video generation model, letting subscribers animate images via its website; video tasks will cost ~8x more than image tasks
VentureBeat
5:05 PM
Source: Meta is in advanced talks to hire Nat Friedman and Daniel Gross to help lead its AI efforts and maybe partly buy out their VC fund, NFDG, worth billions
The Information
4:30 PM
Texas Instruments plans to spend $60B+ on US chip plants, including two new factories in Sherman, Texas, and says its long-term spending plan remains unchanged
Bloomberg
4:10 PM
Sources: Microsoft plans to announce thousands of job cuts, particularly in sales, in early July following its fiscal year end, after cutting 6,000 jobs in May
Bloomberg
4:00 PM
Sources: Microsoft is prepared to walk away from high-stakes OpenAI negotiations if they cannot agree on critical issues, such as the size of Microsoft's stake
Financial Times
3:51 PM
Klarna launches a $40/month unlimited mobile plan in the US via a partnership with telecom services startup Gigs, following similar offerings by Revolut and N26
CNBC
2:50 PM
The US DOJ seizes $225.3M in crypto linked to “pig butchering” scams of 400+ victims, marking “the largest cryptocurrency seizure in US Secret Service history”
CNBC
2:30 PM
OpenAI details why “emergent misalignment”, where training models on wrong answers in one area can lead to issues in many others, happens and how to mitigate it
TechCrunch
1:55 PM
TerraPower, which develops small modular nuclear reactors, raised $650M from investors like Nvidia's NVentures, TerraPower co-founder Bill Gates, and HD Hyundai
GeekWire
12:55 PM
Google rolls out Search Live, which supports voice conversations with AI Mode, available in the Google app via the Live button and can work in the background
TechCrunch
12:41 PM
Waymo applies for an NYC permit to test its cars with safety drivers and plans to start collecting mapping data with manually driven cars in Manhattan in July
The Verge
10:55 AM
OpenAI says it's phasing out its work with Scale AI, into which Meta invested $14.3B, and that Scale AI accounted for a small fraction of its overall data needs
Bloomberg
10:25 AM
Cannes Lions: YouTube CEO Neal Mohan says YouTube Shorts now averages 200B daily views, up 186% from the 70B average daily views YouTube reported in March 2024
The Wrap
10:20 AM
Observability and site reliability engineering startup Traversal emerges from stealth with $48M in seed and Series A funding led by Sequoia and Kleiner Perkins
Fortune
10:15 AM
Temu signed a US data storage deal with Oracle last week; Temu offered few details, but says the deal is part of an effort to localize more of its US operations
Wall Street Journal
10:05 AM
Intel names new engineering leadership, appointing Srinivasan Iyengar, Jean-Didier Allegrucci, and Shailendra Desai, as part of CEO Lip-Bu Tan's turnaround plan
Bloomberg
10:00 AM
Boston-based Maven, which builds autonomous AI agents for enterprises' customer support, raised a $50M Series B led by Dell, taking its total funding to $78M
Axios
9:50 AM
The Midas Project and The Tech Oversight Project release The OpenAI Files, a 50+ page analysis of OpenAI's governance, leadership, and organizational culture
The Verge
9:15 AM
Xreal One Pro review: the impressive $649 AR glasses resemble normal spectacles from a distance and excel as a virtual, HD external display for PCs and phones
Bloomberg
8:50 AM
At Cannes, YouTube CEO Neal Mohan says YouTube will integrate Veo 3 into Shorts later this summer and that AI tech “will push the limits of human creativity”
The Hollywood Reporter
8:35 AM
London- and Paris-based Animaj, a kids' media company that uses generative AI production tools to automate animation pipelines, raised $85M led by HarbourView
Variety
8:10 AM
NYC-based Tennr, which uses AI document parsing and workflow automation to cut patient waiting times, raised a $101M Series C led by IVP at a $605M valuation
Fortune
7:15 AM
Anduril partners with Germany-based Rheinmetall to build variants of Anduril's Barracuda and Fury drones, focused on enhancing Europe's sovereign capabilities
Financial Times
6:40 AM
UBS confirms data was stolen in a cyberattack on supplier Chain IQ, which said it and 19 other companies were targeted; Swiss media says it impacts 130K+ staff
Bloomberg
6:30 AM
An interview with Samsung SVP Dr. Hon Pak on the Galaxy Watch getting a first-ever blood analysis feature, AI health tools, and a potential monthly subscription
CNET
6:15 AM
A look at California's 52-page California Report on Frontier Policy, which proposes an AI regulatory framework based on transparency, risk assessments, and more
The Verge
6:00 AM
Hands-on with Apple's new Speech framework components in the macOS Tahoe beta: the APIs deliver transcription speeds significantly faster than OpenAI's Whisper
MacStories
5:45 AM
AWS says Anthropic's Claude Opus 4 launched on its Trainium2 GPUs, and Project Rainier, AWS' supercomputer built for Anthropic, uses 500K+ Trainium2 chips
CNBC
5:15 AM
Netflix signs a landmark deal with France's TF1 to show linear TV for the first time; TF1 will broadcast all five of its channels, showing live sports and more
Financial Times
4:55 AM
The European Commission accuses Chinese marketplace AliExpress of failing to tackle the spread of illegal products on its platform, in preliminary DSA findings
Bloomberg
2:40 AM
A look at embedded and immersion chip-cooling tech; industry sources indicate Nvidia is mulling 6,000W to 9,000W TDP for its next-gen GPUs, up from ~1,200W now
Tom's Hardware
2:30 AM
JD.com founder Richard Liu calls the past five years the company's “darkest period” and vows to speed up overseas expansion and challenge Meituan in new areas
Bloomberg
2:10 AM
Bitmain, Canaan, and MicroBT, which build 90%+ of crypto mining rigs, are setting up US manufacturing footholds as Trump's tariff war reshapes the supply chain
Reuters
1:20 AM
A look at the Catholic Church's decadelong dialogue with Silicon Valley on AI, as Pope Leo prepares to make AI's potential threat to humanity a signature issue
Wall Street Journal
1:00 AM
Sources: lobbyists for Amazon, Google, Microsoft, and Meta back a campaign for a 10-year US state AI regulation ban, a move dividing the AI industry and the GOP
Financial Times
12:05 AM
Investigation: health care exchanges in Nevada, Maine, Massachusetts, and Rhode Island share sensitive data with Google, LinkedIn, and Snap via web trackers
The Markup
Tuesday, June 17, 2025
11:15 PM
Google starts rolling out video upload and analysis via Gemini for Android and iOS across both free and paid accounts; the feature is not yet live on the web
9to5Google
10:05 PM
The NAACP plans to sue xAI over a lack of permits for its Memphis data center's gas turbines, which it claims pollute nearby predominantly Black neighborhoods
New York Times
9:05 PM
How Walmart plans to leverage its $2.3B Vizio acquisition to push users to buy items while watching TV; Walmart's ad business had just $4.4B in FY 2025 revenue
Bloomberg
7:55 PM
The Iranian government says it has restricted internet access in response to Israeli cyberattacks; some Western communication apps have reportedly been blocked
NBC News
7:20 PM
On a podcast, Sam Altman said Meta made “giant offers to a lot of people on our team ... like, $100M signing bonuses”, and “none of our best people” have accepted
TechCrunch
7:15 PM
A cyberattack claimed by pro-Israel hacktivist group Predatory Sparrow has reportedly disrupted services at Iran's state-owned Bank Sepah, including its website
CyberScoop
6:45 PM
Sources: Substack is pitching investors on a round between $50M and $100M that would value it above its prior ~$700M valuation, and is generating ~$45M in ARR
Newcomer
6:25 PM
President Trump plans to sign an executive order this week to grant TikTok a 90-day extension in enforcement of the sale-or-ban law, marking his third extension
CNN
6:10 PM
The US Senate confirms Olivia Trusty to the FCC, giving Republicans a 2-1 majority after Democrat Geoffrey Starks and Republican Nathan Simington departed
Deadline
6:00 PM
The US Senate passes the GENIUS Act, which establishes the first federal regulatory framework for dollar-pegged stablecoins; the bill now heads to the House
CNBC
5:55 PM
Apple's Journal app is coming to the iPad and Mac from iPadOS 26 and macOS Tahoe and will get features like multiple journals, map view, inline images, and more
9to5Mac
4:40 PM
Sources: xAI is burning through $1B per month, expects to burn through ~$13B in 2025, and projects its revenue to be just $500M in 2025, rising to $2B+ in 2026
Bloomberg
4:20 PM
X sues New York, claiming a law requiring social media companies to disclose how they deal with hate speech and disinformation violates the US Constitution
Bloomberg
3:50 PM
Mastodon updates its terms to prohibit AI model training
TechCrunch
3:45 PM
A US appeals court throws out a $300M jury verdict that found Apple infringed on Optis' wireless tech patents, sending the case back to Texas for a new trial
Reuters
3:25 PM
Amazon CEO Andy Jassy says the company expects that “in the next few years” AI use “will reduce our total corporate workforce as we get efficiency gains”
NBC News
2:55 PM
Microsoft and AMD announce “a strategic, multi-year partnership” to “co-engineer silicon across a portfolio of devices”, including next-generation Xbox consoles
Windows Central
2:45 PM
Sources: Meta and EssilorLuxottica plan to release AI smart glasses aimed at athletes under the Oakley and Prada brands; the Oakley version could cost ~$360
CNBC
2:15 PM
Meta renames Facebook's Videos tab as the Reels tab and says all videos on the platform will soon be shared as reels, regardless of their length or orientation
TechCrunch
2:10 PM
Sports data company Teamworks raised a $235M Series F led by Dragoneer at a $1B+ valuation; its tech is used by 6.5K+ sports teams including all NFL teams
Bloomberg
1:35 PM
Nabla, which offers an AI copilot for doctors and other medical staff, raised a $70M Series C led by HV Capital and says it now supports 85K+ clinicians
Crunchbase News
1:20 PM
Anysphere debuts a $200/month Ultra plan for Cursor with 20x more usage on AI models from OpenAI, Anthropic, Google DeepMind, and xAI vs. its $20/month Pro plan
TechCrunch
1:05 PM
Threads launches a fediverse feed and a way to search for fediverse users, with support for Mastodon and others, for users who turned on fediverse sharing
The Verge
12:45 PM
Waymo expands its coverage area in San Francisco and Los Angeles by 80 square miles each, bringing its total coverage area in California to 250 square miles
The Verge
12:06 PM
Google makes Gemini 2.5 Flash and Pro generally available and introduces 2.5 Flash-Lite, which it says is its most cost-efficient and fastest 2.5 model yet
The Keyword
11:30 AM
Salesforce says it will increase prices on many products in August, including Slack; major product lines will see a 6% increase on average
Bloomberg
11:25 AM
Eigen Labs raised $70M via a token purchase by a16z and launched EigenCloud, which helps developers cryptographically prove what happens in off-chain apps
Forbes