When the Catalog Becomes Inventory
Microsoft built Xbox around recurring access to premium games; now it plans to cut roughly 20% of Xbox jobs by fiscal 2027. Game Pass reportedly has 30 million subscribers against an internal 2026 projection of 77 million.
The Catalog Becomes the Console
An internal projection called for 77 million Game Pass subscriptions in 2026; a source now puts the base near 30 million. Microsoft is widening cloud access while preparing to cut roughly one-fifth of Xbox jobs.
Analysis: nearly 1M $TRUMP retail buyers lost a combined $3.81B, while <500K mostly early wallets captured $4B in gains, a textbook memecoin wealth transfer
A report from a cryptocurrency analytics firm details how those who bought the Trump memecoin have fared, with most retail investors having lost money …
Researchers document JadePuffer, the first known “agentic ransomware”, which adapts in real time by retrying steps to execute an end-to-end extortion operation
Researchers identified what they believe is the first documented case of a ransomware operation, JadePuffer …
Microsoft's Xbox unit plans to cut 3,200 jobs over the next year, including 1,600 on Monday, and divest up to five studios, including Ninja Theory, in a “reset”
Compulsion and Double Fine studios will become independent; Undead Labs and Ninja Theory will be sold.
Kuo: Apple suppliers plan to ship <1M foldable iPhones in Q3 2026, which may push the start of device preorders and sales to Q4, with weeks of delivery delays
My latest industry survey indicates that assembly shipments for the foldable iPhone in 2H26 will be roughly 7-8 million units …
Anthropic researchers detail J-space, a small set of neural patterns in Claude that reveals internal thoughts that don't appear in the model's output
As you read this sentence, circuits in your brain are adjusting your posture, controlling your breathing, and transforming lines and curves on the screen into recognizable words.
Claude Opus 4.8 and Sonnet 5 seem worse at tool calling than older models, likely as post-training optimized them primarily for Claude Code-like environments
A very strange Pi issue sent me down a rabbit hole over the last two days. The short version is that newer Claude models sometimes call Pi's edit tool …
SemiAnalysis: Nvidia delays its next-gen AI rack system Kyber NVL144 by 12+ months to 2028 due to PCB manufacturing issues, and cancels its NVL72x2 architecture
NVIDIA's next marquee product — the Kyber rack-scale architecture designed to house its 2027 Rubin Ultra chips …
A look at Threads and an interview with Head of Threads Connor Hayes, as the platform passes 500M MAUs and increasingly resembles Reddit with a community focus
Meta's office in San Francisco. Threads aims to reach one billion users.Ian C. Bates for The New York Times
Ripple secures CASP authorization from Luxembourg's financial regulator, making it fully MiCA-compliant to offer crypto services across 30 EEA countries
Quick Take — Ripple said it received CASP authorization from Luxembourg's CSSF, making it fully MiCA-compliant to offer crypto services across 30 EEA countries.
AWS says Mechanical Turk will no longer accept new customers and that it is placing the crowdsourcing service in maintenance, signaling its future retirement
Workers who use OG crowdsourcing platform say AWS is closing accounts — Amazon Web Services will stop accepting new customers …
Chainalysis: addresses linked to Iran, Russia, North Korea, and other US-sanctioned entities received $100B+ in crypto in 2025, almost 8x the amount in 2024
Blacklisted entities handled $100 billion in crypto in 2025, financing terrorism and weapons — Iran, Russia, North Korea …
BonkDAO, which oversees the Bonk memecoin, says it was the target of a “malicious governance proposal” that resulted in a loss of $20M worth of Bonk tokens
Quick Take — BonkDAO was hit with a governance attack that appears to have drained approximately $20 million worth of BONK tokens …
Filing: Strategy sold 3,588 bitcoin for ~$216M between June 29 and July 5 to replenish its USD reserve; its holdings have an $11.4B paper loss at current prices
Quick Take — Strategy has sold 3,588 BTC for approximately $216 million, reducing its total holdings to 843,775 BTC.
SK Hynix launches a US share sale on the Nasdaq to raise ~$28B, selling 17.79M new shares; the final listing price is due Thursday before trading starts Friday
South Korean chipmaker SK Hynix (000660.KS) on Monday launched a U.S. share sale to raise 43 trillion won ($28.07 billion) …
A US federal judge orders the DOD to shield Alibaba from a law that caused its lobbyists to drop it as a client while she weighs the measure's constitutionality
A federal judge ordered the Pentagon to give Alibaba Group Holding Ltd. a reprieve from a law that caused all of its lobbyists to drop …
Tencent releases Hy3, a 295B-parameter model that it says is competitive with GLM-5.1 and 5.2, under the Apache 2.0 license, following a preview launch in April
For the past year, the awkward secret of the open-weight model boom has been that many of the strongest Chinese releases …
ByteDance's Doubao and Alibaba's Qwen will disable humanlike and user-created agents before July 15, as China's anthropomorphic AI interaction rules take effect
Two of China's major consumer-facing artificial intelligence apps, ByteDance's Doubao and Alibaba Group Holding's Qwen …
NY-based LinqAlpha, which provides AI-powered market research tools for hedge funds, raised a $22M Series A co-led by AVP, Atinum Investment, and GFT Ventures
Anthropic signs a 20-year, ~$19B lease to use a TeraWulf data center in Kentucky, set to have a ~400MW capacity and to start delivering power in H2 2027
WULF year to date — Choose CNBC as your preferred source on Google and never miss a moment from the most trusted name in business news.
A profile of Kaley Glenn-Mills, the plaintiff in K.G.M. v. Meta et al., who was awarded $6M in damages in a landmark LA jury trial over social media addiction
India issues a notice to Telegram, asking it to curb the spread of pirated films and other copyrighted content, and seeks an action-taken report within 15 days
Tesla rolls out its Robotaxi service without a human safety monitor in Miami, its fifth city, as it aims to expand to a dozen US states by the end of 2026
Tesla said it rolled out its Robotaxi service in Miami on Friday, according to a post from its social media account on X.
Nintendo plans to stop selling the original Switch, Lite, and OLED in Europe from mid-February 2027 and update the Switch 2 to comply with new EU battery rules
A profile of Samsung union leader Choi Seung-ho, who helped win a ~$26B bonus package for chip employees, as he tries to resolve the rift over bonus gaps
Avoiding old-school labor ideology, a new generation of tech workers finds itself divided by the AI boom. — As recently as late May, Choi Seung-ho was hailed as a hero.
Illinois Governor JB Pritzker signs SB 315, a bill requiring annual third-party safety audits of leading AI companies; OpenAI and Anthropic backed the bill
SCOTUS declines to block a Texas law requiring app stores and developers to verify the age of mobile device users, and for minors to obtain parental consent
Nvidia, Neura Robotics, and others are building safety systems for humanoid robots to minimize risks, like the consequences of a bipedal robot losing stability
Companies say electronics, sensors and engineering will allow the robots to work alongside people — Humanoid robots marched through …
Source calls UK- and OpenAI-touted plans in 2025 for Stargate's ~£20B Cobalt site a PR stunt; OpenAI and Nscale failed to visit Cobalt or lodge planning forms
Bending Spoons' Nasdaq IPO caps its ~50 deals across 10+ years that transformed the Italian startup into a highly leveraged internet company with ~$4.4B in debt
Nasdaq listing caps more than a decade of deals that transformed an Italian start-up into a global internet company
Some US voters are using AI tools as nonpartisan researchers, seeing them as a viable alternative to traditional news coverage, voter guides, and social media
It takes effort to be an informed citizen. Artificial intelligence tools offer an alluring shortcut — but they're not without risk.
Data centers offer the US a chance to get ahead in the next key technologies and build domestic supply chains based on demand rather than subsidies and tariffs
Broadcom agrees to expand its Apple partnership through 2031 to develop and supply custom chips; in 2023, the companies announced a multibillion-dollar 5G deal
Broadcom (AVGO.O) said on Monday it has agreed to expand its partnership with Apple (AAPL.O) through 2031 to develop and supply …
xAI rebrands to SpaceXAI and debuts a new logo
- xAI has officially been rebranded to SpaceXAI. — The change follows SpaceX's historic IPO and acquisition of xAI earlier this year. — Elon Musk previously said xAI would be dissolved and folded in...
Shanghai-based AI chipmaker Biren raises ~$892.5M in a new share sale to boost GPU production; Biren's stock is up nearly 150% since its January Hong Kong IPO
Chinese artificial intelligence chipmaking champion Shanghai Biren Technology is raising HK$7 billion (US$892.5 million) …
Shenzhen-based Even Realities, which makes smart glasses without cameras, raised a $150M pre-Series B led by Meituan and Tencent
Meta and Snap rolled out new smart glasses last month, the latest sign that the industry is racing to put a camera and an AI assistant onto users' faces.
Doc: a draft US Treasury Department report is set to warn about the AI market's risks, likening key aspects to the dotcom bubble bursting in the early 2000s
Publicly, the Trump administration is bullish about AI. Privately, some of its analysts are weighing AI against the dotcom bust.
Reddit says its AI-powered content moderation systems caught 25K “spammy posts and comments” per day in Q1, reducing users' exposure to such content by 20% YoY
Reddit Inc. is battling a new kind of spam: stealth marketing content created by brands that want to get mentioned …
Filing: Brookfield-backed data center company Csquare seeks to raise up to $1.35B in an IPO, selling 50M shares at $23 to $27 each for an up to $4.18B valuation
Csquare Inc., a data center company backed by Brookfield Corp., is seeking to raise as much as $1.35 billion in a US initial public offering.
Sources: Uber halts plans to launch food delivery in five of the seven European countries it had targeted for expansion as it pursues a Delivery Hero takeover
Source: Mercor hit over $2B in gross revenue run rate in June, double its pace in April, and is profitable on a free cash flow basis
AI agent training platform Bespoke Labs raised $40M across a seed led by 8VC and a Series A led by Wing, saying the funding gives it almost two years of runway
Bespoke Labs, an AI agent training platform, raised $40 million across seed and Series A funding, CEO Mahesh Sathiamoorthy tells Axios exclusively.
How Masayoshi Son is remaking SoftBank in his own image, betting on AI; SoftBank trades at a ~50% discount to its net asset value, as some question his strategy
The veteran investor has put himself at the centre of the global AI boom. Some think he now has too much control
Sources: the US considers housing the Strategic Bitcoin Reserve at Commerce instead of Treasury amid concerns over Treasury's legal authority to manage it
AI-driven drops in labor income and gains in capital income could hit Ireland's tax base, with 6%+ of its workforce in tech and heavy exposure to US companies
An interview with Agility Robotics CEO Peggy Johnson on why the startup is going public via a SPAC, the physical layer as its core advantage, safety, and more
The humanoid robotics market is awash in money right now. Last week, AI2 Robotics, a Shenzhen-based startup that makes wheeled humanoid robots …
A term sheet shows Tencent is seeking to raise as much as $1.55B in a selldown of part of its stake in short-video app operator Kuaishou through a block trade
Source: Thrive Capital spinoff Thrive Holdings seeks to raise around $2B from SoftBank, Altimeter, D1, and others, after previously raising $1B
Some of the biggest backers of OpenAI and its rivals are pooling their money in an offshoot of Thrive Capital that buys controlling stakes …
Microsoft is laying off ~4,800 employees, or ~2.1% of its workforce; most are in sales or Xbox, where ~20% of jobs are set to be cut by the end of FY 2027
Most of the job losses are in Microsoft's Xbox and commercial sales organizations. … A year after cutting around 9,100 employees …
Sources: CISA's Attack Surface Evaluation team is using Mythos to audit government code repositories and has already uncovered a large number of vulnerabilities
The U.S. cyber defense agency CISA is using Anthropic's AI model Mythos to audit government software, three people familiar …
Sources: Vista Equity and Quinti made a takeover bid for Criteo that values the French ad tech company at a 50%+ premium to its stock price in recent weeks
Vista Equity Partners and the investment firm Quinti Capital have teamed up on a takeover offer for French advertising-technology company Criteo SA …
Source: Xbox Game Pass currently has about 30M subscriptions; document: Microsoft had projected Game Pass subscriptions would reach around 77M this year
put your money where your mouth isDean Takahashi /GamesBeat:The fate of Xbox's vulnerable game studiosTyler Durden /ZeroHedge News:Xbox Hit With 3,000 Layoffs After CEO Warns Business Is “Not Healthy”...
Xbox appoints Helen Chiang as its first COO; Chiang was previously corporate vice president for the Minecraft Franchise and the studio head of Minecraft
Sam Smith /GamesBeat: