Apple’s 800M-Visitor Gate Has a Second Price
Apple’s App Store is becoming an AI-abuse enforcement layer as well as a distribution market. San Francisco demanded removal of 13 nudification apps, while Apple reports more than 800 million weekly visitors.
The Truth API’s $100,000 Head Start
Trump Media plans to launch the Truth API on August 1 for news and trading firms, and has reportedly floated up to $100,000 a month for fast access to Trump’s posts. Beside X’s former $5,000 top tier, the proposal prices time-to-access rather than feed volume.
Trump Media’s $100,000 First Read
Trump Media is testing political speech as market-data infrastructure. It plans a real-time Truth API after sources say the company pitched fast access to Donald Trump’s posts at up to $100,000 a month.
Nvidia’s 70% HBM4 Allocation to SK Hynix
Nvidia reportedly assigned about 70% of its 2026 HBM4 demand to SK Hynix as 2026 production slots neared sellout. Micron’s Hiroshima expansion will not ship HBM until summer 2028.
DeepSeek’s Reported $7.4B Control Room
DeepSeek’s reported $7.4B round gave China’s national AI fund voting rights while Tencent and JD received none. Its rising financing needs now sit beside an infrastructure buildout and a reported in-house inference-chip effort.
Xbox’s $29.99 Retreat Puts Players Before Boxes
Microsoft expanded PC Game Pass to 86 countries and Xbox Cloud Gaming beyond Ultimate, then cut Game Pass Ultimate from $29.99 to $22.99. The retreat reveals the limits of funding blockbusters through an all-you-can-play bundle.
The Recording Is Now a Record
Loom had logged 1.5 billion recorded minutes across 1.8 million workplaces when Atlassian agreed to acquire it. Bending Spoons’ $1.38 billion Vimeo deal now tests whether a mature video library can become governed AI memory.
Apple’s 2.5B-Device Ecosystem, Many Tollbooths
Apple grew quarterly Services revenue from $23.1B to $30B as its active-device base rose from 2.2B to 2.5B. An 11% iPhone price increase in Japan and a $1 Apple Music increase show why that global scale now requires local economics.
AI Compute’s $19 Billion Capacity Promise
Anthropic’s reported 20-year, roughly $19 billion data-center lease and a potential two-year, roughly $10 billion Meta rental are turning AI compute into long-term offtake. The contracts let investors finance powered capacity separately from the labs that use it.
Helldivers 2 Puts PlayStation Exclusivity on the Ledger
Sony’s Helldivers 2 became the first PlayStation-published title on Xbox as Unity reported 40% more multiplatform games in 2024 than in 2021.
Analysis: recent open weight models lag frontier closed models' cyber capabilities by 4 to 7 months, a narrower gap than the 6 to 10 months through most of 2025
AISI has tracked the cyber capabilities of frontier AI models since 2023. On our evaluations, the most capable models …
Sources: Meta is in talks to rent computing power from its data centers to Anthropic in a deal that could be worth ~$10B over two years
A deal would underline how scarce computing power is for artificial intelligence development, and could create a new business for Meta.
Anthropic says Claude Fable 5 will be included in Max and Team Premium plans at 50% of limits from July 20 and via usage credits for Pro and Team Standard users
Beginning July 20, Claude Fable 5 will be included in all Max and Team Premium plans, at 50% of limits. Pro and Team Standard users will continue to have access to Fable via usage credits, and will re...
Memo: the DOJ says federal employees can now download TikTok on government devices, citing TikTok US' transfer of control, lifting a 2022 congressional ban
The U.S. Justice Department said on Friday that federal employees can now download the short-video app TikTok on government devices.
The Philadelphia Semiconductor Index sank ~10% for the week, its largest weekly fall in over a year, and is now down ~20% from its late-June all-time high
A brutal week for chip stocks — the same names that fueled this year's blistering market rally — has left investors from Seoul …
Sources: Trump Media pitched a monthly fee of as much as $100K for the Truth API, with fast access to Trump's posts, for banks, algorithmic traders, and others
Donald Trump's social media company has discussed charging Wall Street traders and investment firms as much as $100,000 a month …
UK's incoming PM Andy Burnham is expected to scrap Keir Starmer's plans for digital ID cards; last year a petition opposing the cards attracted ~3M signatures
Incoming PM will reallocate unspecified resources from unpopular plan to helping with cost of living
The grassroots group HumansFirst is organizing protests against the “unaccountable” buildout of data centers across 125 US locations on July 18
Opponents of the rapid buildout of data centers plan to hold protests on Saturday in at least 125 locations across the United States …
SEC filing: GameStop says it owns 9.8% of eBay, signaling its intent to press ahead with a bid for the company after its unsolicited $56B offer was rejected
Videogame retailer GameStop (GME.N) owns nearly 10% of e-commerce company eBay, the company said in a regulatory filing late on Friday …
Prediction market political betting on insider info spreads in DC; sources: WH lawyers raised alarms over anonymous Polymarket bets on the Iran ceasefire timing
White House officials are grappling with how deeply political betting has worked itself into fabric of government
A review of Microsoft's 13-inch Surface Laptop shows 8GB of RAM is not enough for a good Windows 11 experience; PC makers have unveiled upcoming 8GB laptops
Last year, Microsoft's 13-inch Surface Laptop quickly became one of my favorite thin-and-light Windows notebooks.
Sources: the Trump administration is considering plans for an independent regulator to vet the safety of AI models; the regulator would report to the SEC
The Trump administration is considering plans for an independent regulator to vet the safety of artificial intelligence models with industry input …
Sources: China's National AI Industry Investment Fund gained voting rights in DeepSeek by joining its $7.4B round; other investors like Tencent and JD got none
On a video conference call from Hangzhou earlier this year, one of China's hottest startups held a four-hour pitch meeting …
London-based Risk Ledger, which helps organizations manage supply chain cyber risks, raised a £24M Series B led by Axiom Equity, taking total funding to £33.8M
The British firm has built a collaborative platform to help organizations address supply chain security risks.
Feathery, which develops an AI operating and decisioning system for financial services, raised $30M in total funding, including a recently completed Series A
Feathery, an AI operating and decisioning platform for financial services firms, has secured $30m in funding as it expands …
Japan plans to buy 27,500 Nvidia Rubin chips to develop a domestic AI foundation model for robots, in a Noetra-led effort that includes SoftBank, Sony, and NEC
Japan is planning to buy 27,500 next-generation Rubin chips from Nvidia Corp. to build a homegrown foundational AI model for robots.
Data infrastructure startup Cribl acquires CardinalOps, which offers AI-powered threat detection tools and had raised $40M, sources say for around $100M
The U.S. telemetry company will establish a Tel Aviv office after buying the AI-powered detection engineering startup.
Apple raises iPhone prices in Japan by up to 11%, likely due to the Japanese yen's depreciation against the US dollar over the past year
Apple raises the price of Apple Music, with the individual plan up by $1 to $11.99, and some Apple One bundles, citing rising licensing costs
Kimi K3 takes #1 on the Frontend Code Arena benchmark, surpassing Claude Fable 5, and scores 88.3 on Terminal Bench 2.1, trailing only GPT-5.6 Sol's 88.8
and rival AI stocks plungedJuro Osawa /The Information:Moonshot AI's New Kimi K3 Challenges U.S. Frontier ModelsLaurie Chen /Reuters:China's Moonshot unveils world's largest open AI model, closing in ...
Thira, an AI startup founded by Apptio co-founders to develop AI agents that handle back-office tasks such as IT support, raised a $21M seed led by Madrona
How the Trump administration shifted from a “light-touch” approach to AI policy to an interventionist stance that led to restrictions on top AI models in the US
In January 2025, just three days after entering office for his second term, President Donald Trump signed …
Amazon apologizes after some AWS users received bills as high as $1.5T due to “an issue with unit pricing within the estimated billing computation subsystem”
Permit hurdles push up costs for AI data centers; Oracle pivoted from gas turbines to costlier fuel cells for its Project Jupiter in NM, costing billions more
Building an AI supercampus increasingly means paying more than you bargained for. Oracle's attempt to salvage a proposed $165 billion project …
Kimi K3 hype shouldn't alarm the US about “losing the AI race” to China; K3 is a good model but not frontier-level and likely lacks dangerous cyber capabilities
and Washington — quakingNew York Times:China's Moonshot AI Unveils Kimi Model, Threatening America's LeadCNBC:Chinese AI has leveled up, and brought renewed focus on the open weight model shiftDow Jon...
Sources: AI inference chip startup Etched is raising funds at a ~$20B valuation and is raising capital at a $10B valuation in a separate round led by Sequoia
Filings: a group of major music publishers has agreed to end a copyright infringement dispute with X over the use of their music on the social media platform
China's National Data Administration says the country's daily AI token consumption hit 140T in March 2026, up from 100T in December 2025 and 100B in early 2024
Every month, a Beijing-based ByteDance employee says he burns through close to a billion units of a new corporate currency - one that cannot buy a coffee or pay rent.
Sources: Apple and the DOJ are in early discussions about settling a 2024 antitrust lawsuit alleging that Apple violated antitrust laws
China's BrainCo unveils what it says is the world's first integrated “brain-to-robot” platform that lets users control robots using an EEG headset
Models like Kimi K3, Grok 4.5, and Muse 1.1 may prevent the dominance of 2-3 frontier labs with 90% inference margins from hurting other AI ecosystem layers
Will It Challenge OpenAI And Anthropic?