The Model Has Become a Border
Across roughly 15 months, Anthropic’s safety commitments became access controls, military-use boundaries, and IPO preparation. A $500 million Scale AI defense contract shows the Pentagon still wants commercial AI; the dispute is over terms.
Instagram has been running ads promoting child sexual abuse material in India, with terms like “rape video” and “child video” and linking to Telegram channels
Warning: This story contains descriptions of abuse — Instagram has been running paid adverts promoting …
Sources: Alexandr Wang said Meta's model currently in training, codenamed Watermelon, matches GPT-5.5 and uses an “order of magnitude more compute than Avocado”
Meta is making significant progress in the AI model race, its superintelligence chief Alexandr Wang told employees today.
Spotify removed 500K+ streams of Malcolm Todd's Earrings after a 70% surge in 24 hours sent it to #1 on Spotify USA and coincided with suspicious Kalshi wagers
Platform removes more than 500,000 streams of Malcolm Todd track ‘Earrings’ on concern traders propelled it to number 1
A look back at BitTorrent, launched by Bram Cohen 25 years ago, and how media piracy fueled its growth while its architecture shielded it from legal liability
Cath Virginia / The Verge … Twenty-five years ago today, a young, little-known programmer by the name of Bram Cohen fired off …
Sources: Alibaba banned Claude Code internally and asked its employees to remove all Claude models from their work computers due to Anthropic security concerns
Alibaba Group has banned employees from using Anthropic's Claude Code, and asked them to remove all Claude models from their work computers …
Blackstone's QTS abandons plans to build its portion of a 2,100-acre data center campus in Virginia, after years of organized opposition and legal challenges
Blackstone Inc.'s QTS is walking away from plans to build its portion of a 2,100-acre data center campus in Virginia …
Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton opens an investigation into StubHub following complaints of last-minute ticket cancellations for FIFA World Cup 2026 matches
Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton has opened an investigation into StubHub following reports that some fans who bought World Cup tickets through …
Finnish quantum computing company IQM closed up 2.12% in its Nasdaq debut on July 2 after going public via a SPAC merger at a ~$1.9B valuation
IQM, a full-stack quantum company out of Finland, went public on the Nasdaq Thursday via a SPAC merger at a valuation of about $1.9 billion.
Emails disclosed in a court filing detail the uneasy back-and-forth between Dario Amodei and the DOD's Emil Michael and how Anthropic's DOD relationship soured
Undersecretary Emil Michael and CEO Dario Amodei went back and forth for months over safety guardrails
Pitch document: Chris Larsen, Palmer Luckey, and others invested undisclosed amounts in APEC, a derivatives exchange founded by Senator Kirsten Gillibrand's son
Democratic megadonor Chris Larsen has backed Sen. Kirsten Gillibrand's political campaigns several times over the years.
Microsoft invests $2.5B and forms the Microsoft Frontier Company to embed 6,000 forward-deployed engineers with customers to help deploy AI systems
Sources: ElevenLabs held early talks with investors on a secondary share sale for staff that would value the startup at ~$22B; it was valued at $11B in February
ElevenLabs has held early talks with investors to let employees sell shares in a secondary offering that would value …
Meta getting into the cloud business has been inevitable for a long time, as it seeks to diversify beyond ad revenue and monetize its AI buildout
Their need to diversify the business meets the AI build out concerns... Meta has a problem. Well, two of them, actually.
UK-based StirlingX, which develops secure data intelligence systems for defense and critical infrastructure, raised a $20M Series A, following a $11M seed
The UK company, which develops secure data intelligence systems for defence and critical infrastructure, will use the funding …
How Jeff Bezos' changing relationship with President Trump has helped Amazon and Blue Origin, such as more federal contracts awarded during Trump's second term
Space company has booked rapid growth under this administration, after founder spent president's first term being ‘hated’
A look at the quant fund frenzy in China, as assets under management have more than doubled to ~$384B in less than a year amid rapid AI adoption
Quant funds in China have become so popular that they are being deluged with investors' money. — Ubiquant, one of the top players …LinkedIn:Chris ZhangLinkedIn:Chris Zhang:The success of quantitativ...
Memo: Tesla plans to impose a $200-per-week limit for its staff's AI spending from July 6, excluding beta xAI products, and require a sign-off to spend more
Tesla told employees last month it would impose a $200 per week limit for staff's AI spending beginning July 6, according to an internal memo …
An interview with Sriram Krishnan, who says “there will not be an FDA for AI” under Trump, blames the AI backlash on the industry's “doomer” messaging, and more
Sriram Krishnan tells the FT the president is against a centralised regulator as AI backlash grows
Sources: Anthropic moves to close loopholes that let Chinese companies like Ant use its models via workarounds such as cloud providers and overseas subsidiaries
Engineers are still finding ways to use AI models despite stringent restrictions. Anthropic is moving to shut loopholes …
Letter to Scott Bessent: chip group SEMI, which includes Micron and Samsung, warns that US intervention in chip pricing or capacity would worsen chip shortages
Government attempts to address the global memory chip shortage by influencing prices or production capacity would worsen …
Sources: Anthropic has initiated early-stage development of a custom AI server chip and held preliminary discussions with Samsung about manufacturing the chip
Sources: OpenAI has discussed giving a 5% stake to the US government, seeking to clear political obstacles by securing buy-in from the Trump administration
The European Court of Justice rules that Google's earlier defeat against a €4.1B European Commission penalty over abusing Android's market power should stand
India's IT secretary said the country is investigating a data breach at Apple supplier Tata, which exposed files that included photos of iPhone 18 Pro models
India is investigating a data breach at Tata Electronics that exposed documents linked to Apple's (AAPL.O) unreleased iPhone 18 Pro …
Sources: Palmer Luckey's Erebor Bank is in talks to raise money at an $8B+ valuation, up from $4.35B in 2025; its deposits are up from $1.1B in March to $4.05B
Erebor Bank is in talks to raise money at a valuation of at least $8 billion, as deposits grow rapidly at the politically connected startup …
Source: crypto payments network startup Mesh is raising funding led by Binance at an up to $2B valuation, after raising $75M at a $1B valuation in January
Binance is set to lead Mesh's funding round that will value the crypto payments and settlement company at up to $2 billion, Axios Pro has learned.
Filing: GoDaddy challenges a New Delhi court ruling requiring domain sellers to stop offering privacy by default, saying it could expose website owners globally
The world's biggest internet domain seller, GoDaddy, has warned that India's crackdown on fake websites impersonating famous brands …
The US DOJ says Peter Stokes, a 19-year-old dual US-Estonian citizen, was extradited from Finland to face charges of participating in Scattered Spider hacks
Travel app Hopper agrees to a $35M settlement with the FTC over allegations the company misled users by imposing hidden fees and misrepresenting the total costs
Sources: Anthropic's bankers have hired UK law firm Freshfields to advise on its IPO; it also advised on Google's acquisition of Wiz and ServiceNow's Armis deal
A British law firm has scored a big win: a role in the Anthropic initial public offering, expected to raise tens of billions at a valuation of more than $1 trillion.
Sam Altman proposes a “US-led international forum” to establish AI standards, provide analysis of capabilities and risks, and make AI models available to allies
Amazon's emissions rose 16% YoY in 2025, driven by data center construction and delivery fuel, while Google's “ambition-based” emissions jumped 18% YoY in 2025
Sources: Crusoe is in active talks to raise ~$3B in a funding round expected to value the startup within the ~$30B range, up from a ~$10B valuation in October
Crusoe, the data center upstart with contracts to supply AI computing power for the likes of Meta Platforms Inc. and Oracle Corp. …
Kling AI, the Kuaishou AI video generator spin-off, raised $2B at a $15B pre-money valuation and says the round could extend to as much as $3B
Amazon says Leo now has 396 satellites in low-Earth orbit, following a July 1 launch, which is “enough to support continuous service across initial latitudes”
Memo: Microsoft is merging its consumer and enterprise Copilot versions into a single app featuring coding tools and AI agents dubbed AutoPilot that cost extra
Z.ai launches ZCode, an “Agentic Development Environment” purpose-built for its GLM-5.2 model; Z.ai's GLM Coding Plan tiers range from $16.20 to $144 per month
At a town hall, Mark Zuckerberg said Meta's reorganization was not as “clean” as it could have been and its AI agent development has not accelerated as expected
Meta (META.O) Chief Executive Mark Zuckerberg told an internal town hall on Thursday that AI agent development …
Tripo AI, which is developing 3D foundation models and world models for use in games, raised $150M, a month after it said it raised $200M
SoftBank and its telecom unit launch SB Neo to offer AI chips and cloud services to big companies, aiming to provide 10GW of capacity in the US by around 2030
Nvidia promises to financially backstop young cloud providers, like Firmus and Sharon AI, by renting back unused GPUs, in exchange for a share of their revenues
Global VC funding hit a record $510B in H1 2026, with OpenAI and Anthropic accounting for $217B, or 43% of the total; in Q2, VCs put $205B into 5,000+ startups
Meta could use its compute for its own models, ad scaling, SpaceX-like neocloud deals, and hosting 3rd-party models; it may be close to an Anthropic deal
Zuck Takes Plan B? SpaceX 2.0, Bedrock 2.0, MSL Isn't Giving Up, Scaling RecSys by 10x... ClusterMAX ranking coming soon?