OpenAI’s Agents Need a Fence
Ten years after Gym standardized public AI experiments, OpenAI says Codex and ChatGPT Work serve 10 million users, nearly double the level reported earlier in July. The scarce layer has shifted toward context, permissions, monitoring, and recovery.
The Estimated $1.65T Beyond Big Tech’s Balance Sheets
Alphabet, Amazon, Meta, Microsoft, and Oracle carry an estimated $1.65T of off-balance-sheet debt versus $1.35T on their balance sheets. They are financing AI capacity through leases, SPVs, joint ventures, and project debt.
Mistral’s €1.2B Build Puts Sovereignty Below the Model
Mistral released ten open-weight models, bought deployment operator Koyeb, and committed €1.2 billion to Swedish infrastructure due in 2027. Europe’s AI sovereignty is shifting from lab ownership to control over how models run.
Google’s 18-to-1 Search Tollbooth
Among roughly 69,000 searches, users clicked links in 8% of results with an AI Overview, versus 15% without one. Cloudflare says human traffic to many businesses’ sites fell nearly 40% from June 2025 to April 2026.
Washington’s $36B Intel Feedback Loop
Washington’s Intel stake rose from $8.9 billion to roughly $36 billion in eight months as the shares climbed more than 520% year over year. Reports of White House pressure on prospective fab customers make independent capacity and customer choice the harder test.
Cerebras Grew 94%—and Margin Got Harder
Cerebras grew Q1 revenue 94% to $193.4M even as it forecast a lower core gross margin. AWS’s plan to place its wafer-scale engine beside cheaper Trainium capacity shows why inference value is moving into the stack.
10 Million Users Make Permissions the New Perimeter
OpenAI says Codex and ChatGPT Work reached 10 million users after nearly doubling in July, as researchers reported sandbox boundary weaknesses across Cursor, Codex, Gemini CLI, and Antigravity. The relevant security unit is now the authorized workflow.
Chinese open models are proper competition that should be welcomed, not something to ban or treat as a danger, and open-sourcing is an old business strategy
They aren't a security threat — they're what competition looks like. — Bill Gurley is the president and founder of the P3 Institute, and a former venture capitalist.
Levent Alpöge, a mathematician who works at Anthropic, says he was able to disprove the 87-year-old Jacobian conjecture with the help of Fable 5
Levent Alpöge announced the solution on X A mathematician has cracked an 87-year-old conundrum with the help of AI and announced the solution unceremoniously in a tweet.
Kimi K3 marks the arrival of frontier open-weight models; the core Kimi team has incredible culture and a freedom to express it within a GPU-limited environment
The global implications on the AI ecosystem. … Audio playback is not supported on your browser. Please upgrade.
Google launches Gemini 3.6 Flash, 3.5 Flash-Lite, and 3.5 Flash Cyber, and says it has started its “most ambitious pre-training run yet” for Gemini 4
Our newest Gemini models deliver the efficiency, latency, and reliability to build AI agents at scale.
Samsung debuts the Samsung Galaxy Card, a Visa card issued by Barclays that offers 5% cash rewards for purchases directly from Samsung, its first US credit card
You get 5% rewards when you buy stuff directly from Samsung — With Galaxy Unpacked 2026 set to kick off in a matter of days …
CAISI Director Chris Fall is resigning after taking over the federal AI testing institute in April; NIST Director Arvind Raman will serve as the acting director
Chris Fall, the director of the Center for AI Standards and Innovation, is resigning just three months after taking …
Sources: China is weighing tightening AI and chip export controls and is consulting leading domestic AI companies, in a bid to slow advanced tech acquisitions
Chinese regulators are considering tightening export controls on artificial intelligence and semiconductor technologies …
How Google's AI Search is endangering the open web; Cloudflare says that from June 2025 to April 2026 human traffic to many businesses' websites fell nearly 40%
When Google prepared to go public in 2004, Larry Page, a co-founder of the company, wrote a letter to shareholders describing …
UK PM Andy Burnham abolishes the Department for Science, Innovation, and Tech and elevates UK AI Minister Kanishka Narayan, who oversees AISI, to attend cabinet
The AI Minister, Kanishka Narayan, will be given a seat at the top table of government but the Department for Science, Innovation and Technology (DSIT) has been scrapped.
OpenAI paused internal access to an unreleased model that disproved the Erdős unit distance conjecture after it repeatedly found ways to act outside its sandbox
What internal use of a long-running model taught us about safety. — Summary — Long-running models can solve difficult …
Cybersecurity companies say hackers are exploiting vulnerable WordPress versions to take over websites; WordPress patched two critical security flaws last week
Hackers are breaking into websites that run vulnerable versions of the popular blogging software WordPress, according to several cybersecurity firms.
Anduril and Archer unveil an autonomous aircraft platform designed for commercial and military uses, along with an autonomous attack rotorcraft called Thunder
Archer Aviation (ACHR.N) and defense technology company Anduril unveiled a co-developed autonomous aircraft platform on Monday …
Source: Z.ai completed construction of a 1GW data center that houses only Chinese chips; Z.ai built or operates several computing clusters, each with 10K+ chips
Z.AI has completed construction of a giant data center that houses only Chinese-made chips, a big step in Beijing's efforts …
Sources: Apple plans to launch Apple Upgrade, a leasing program for most iPhone, Mac, iPad, and Apple Watch models, with partner Klarna in the US next week
Apple Inc. is preparing to introduce Apple Upgrade, a leasing program that will mark one of the biggest-ever changes to how the company sells devices.
Researchers found sandbox escapes or boundary bypasses in Cursor, Codex, Gemini CLI, and Antigravity by writing files that trusted tools use; most are patched
Security researchers broke out of the sandboxes in four widely used AI coding agents, including Cursor, OpenAI's Codex …
Sony Music files a second copyright suit against Udio, alleging the AI music company copied 30,117 recordings without permission to train its AI models
Sony Music Entertainment has filed a second copyright infringement lawsuit against Udio, asserting 30,117 sound recordings …
Cisco releases Antares-350M and Antares-1B, two open-weight AI models to find known vulnerabilities within a codebase, and plans to release Antares-3B soon
- Cisco says the models performed similarly to much larger models, including OpenAI's GPT-5.5 and Z.ai's GLM-5.2 …
A judge approves Anthropic's $1.5B settlement with authors, the first major US case of its kind to settle; some authors opted out and have other ongoing suits
Meta adds the Xbox Game Pass starter edition to its Horizon Plus plan, which costs $60/year or $8/month; the pass only allows 10 hours of Xbox gaming per month
Meta's throwing Xbox cloud gaming Into Its Horizon Plus Quest subscription, and converting its controllers to work with it. — Editor at Large
Block launches Buzz, an open source collaboration workspace on Nostr protocol for humans and AI agents to share messages, code repositories, workflows, and more
Open Source, Decentralized Technology, Developers, AI, Technology — TODAY WE'RE RELEASING Buzz, A FREE …
Study: off-balance-sheet debt at Alphabet, Microsoft, Amazon, Meta, and Oracle grew an estimated ~8x since 2022 to ~$1.65T, above ~$1.35T in balance-sheet debt
PALO ALTO, California — Hidden debt at U.S. tech giants swelled eightfold in roughly four years to an estimated $1.65 trillion …
GitHub says individuals and orgs have invested $100M+ in open source maintainers and projects via GitHub Sponsors since 2019, with $10M in the past five months
Celebrating $100 million contributed by the community to the people who build and sustain open source every day.
X relaunches its Android app after a year-long rewrite from scratch; Nikita Bier calls it “one of the largest engineering projects” in the company's history
South Korean customs data: for the first 20 days of July, the country's chip exports rose 180% YoY to $22.1B, and computer-related product shipments rose ~232%
Sources: BlackRock leads a $12B+ debt sale for Meta's new El Paso data center, as Meta signs a lease for a BlackRock-backed data-center project in Pennsylvania
Meta also signs lease for a BlackRock-backed data-center project in Pennsylvania — BlackRock is leading a debt sale targeting …
France becomes the first European country to pass a law banning social media access for users under 15, potentially going into effect as soon as September 1
Its new law, the first of its kind enacted by a European country, will ban access to some accounts for anyone under 15.
NJ Governor says a software error at DMV led to the improper voter registration of ~6,600 noncitizens between June 2023 and June 2024; 400 of those cast ballots
A software glitch in 2023 at the New Jersey Department of Motor Vehicles led to roughly 6,600 noncitizens being registered to vote …
London-based robotics startup Humanoid raised a $152M Series A led by Prime Movers Lab at a $1.35B post-money valuation, bringing its total funding to $270M
Europe has a new billion-dollar startup, and it's Humanoid, a two-year-old company headquartered in London that developed its humanoid robot, HMND 01, in near-record time.
Singapore-based Ant International, a payments company which spun out of Ant Group in 2024, raised $1.2B from investors including Ant Group and Alibaba
Ant International, an overseas affiliate of the Jack Ma-founded Chinese fintech firm Ant Group, has raised $1.2 billion in its latest equity fundraising as it seeks to expand.
Apple says it fixed a vulnerability in its Hide My Email tool that let anyone see a user's real email address; researchers first reported the issue in June 2025
For a year, Apple knew that an issue in its Hide My Email feature was exposing customers' real email addresses.
Chinese open models like Kimi K3 and Qwen3.8 Max shift the industry's focus back to marginal costs and cost of goods sold, as inference costs scale with revenue
and they are losing.@deepdishenjoyer:lmao openai admits it does not want fully automated luxury space communism, they are openly admitting they want technofeudalism where they own everything [image]Da...
Natural, which aims to help companies let their AI agents make autonomous payments, raised a $30M Series A led by Forerunner, bringing its total raised to $40M
AI agents are starting to execute more sophisticated tasks, such as identifying vendors that can deliver freight, comparing prices …
A profile of Sarah Guo, Greylock's youngest GP before she founded Conviction in 2022, which has since backed six of the 21 AI-native companies now worth $10B+
The investor closest to the AI frontier is betting against the ambitions of its biggest companies
Sources: parts of the Trump administration are reigniting efforts to implement de facto bans on foreign open-source models, as Chinese AI models gain momentum
Maria Curi /Axios:
Garmin launches the Cirqa Smart Band, a $200 screenless fitness tracker that monitors 80+ activities with an up to 10 day battery life, to compete with Whoop
Garmin Ltd. introduced a $200 screenless fitness tracker, becoming the latest company to enter a segment popularized by Whoop Inc.
Sources: TSMC plans to hike advanced and mature node prices 5% to 10% in 2027, plus a 10% to 15% premium for advanced chip orders exceeding customers' forecasts
TAIPEI — TSMC is set to raise prices for both advanced and mature chip production services by up to 10% in 2027 to reflect rising costs …
Intel and Fortinet partner to co-develop the Fortinet Security Processor 6, making Fortinet the first named external customer for the Intel 4 process node
The agreement makes Fortinet the first cybersecurity vendor on Intel's manufacturing customer list.
Nvidia details its Vera CPU for data centers, its first CPU with a custom core design, featuring 88 cores and 176 threads, set for general release in H2 2026
Nvidia's Vera CPU is its first bid to become a key player in the data center CPU market. Although Grace has seen some success …
Meta quietly releases StoryKit, a new mobile app that uses AI to create personalized children's stories, including illustrations and original music, in Mexico
Meta has quietly released a new iPhone app that uses AI to create personalized children's stories, complete with illustrations, narration, and original music.
University of Tennessee Research Foundation sues Anthropic in Delaware for allegedly infringing neural network patents, the first such case against Anthropic
The research arm of the University of Tennessee has sued artificial-intelligence giant Anthropic in Delaware federal court …
A Washington judge grants a request to temporarily block Kalshi from offering sports-related bets in the state, saying the contracts violate state gambling laws
Microsoft and Mistral sign a multibillion-dollar deal to build European data centers and integrate Mistral models into Foundry, Copilot Studio, and Azure Local
‘Multibillion-dollar’ pact will support Mistral data centers in Europe, helping the French company sell its AI models, and Microsoft its cloud and AI services
AMD plans to ship Helios, its first rack-scale AI system to rival Nvidia, later in 2026 to Microsoft, Meta, OpenAI, and others; Helios costs an estimated $5M+
Taiwan indicts a former TSMC executive for allegedly stealing trade secrets, in what authorities say is the first National Security Act case involving China
Samsung plans to launch its AI-powered Samsung Health Assistant and new heart metrics tools like Vitals for overnight metric tracking in beta in August
Samsung Electronics Co. is rolling out a new AI-powered assistant that acts as a virtual health companion, joining a growing number …
Substack partners with AI-detection tool Pangram, allowing users to scan text longer than 100 words for an estimate of how much was written with AI assistance
Building trust in the AI age — It's getting harder to tell what's real on the internet. — This is less true on Substack, and we aim to keep it that way.
OpenAI says it now has 10M people using Codex and ChatGPT Work, nearly doubling usage from earlier this month when the company announced ChatGPT Work
OpenAI has seen a sharp uptick in demand for its artificial intelligence agents since its recent release of ChatGPT Work …
Iran's IRGC claims it targeted and “destroyed” Amazon's central data infrastructure in Bahrain using cruise missiles; Amazon has not responded to the claim
Amazon says its business sales unit, Amazon Business, reached $60B in annualized gross sales in Q2, up ~71% from 2023, and serves 11M+ organizations worldwide
Amazon.com Inc.'s business sales unit was recently on track to sell $60 billion of merchandise over the course of a full year …
Memo: the Army CIO reinstates limits on Army members' AI token usage; docs show the DOD's Ask Sage tool can access 100M tokens via an annual “enterprise pack”
Members of the Army received an email informing them that they were rapidly depleting their AI tokens, and needed to limit use.
Sources: Google is developing a specialized server chip, informally dubbed “Frozen v2”, that integrates its Gemini AI model blueprint into the silicon, for 2028
Databricks co-founder Ion Stoica's GPU orchestration startup SkyPilot, which aims to be neutral across hardware and cloud vendors, raised a $20M seed led by Lux
Databricks cofounder Ion Stoica can explain what his latest startup does to a kindergartner on the fly.
Snap reaches a deal to settle the second case set for trial over social media harm to minors, following TikTok and YouTube, leaving Meta as the only defendant
Augustus, which is building a federally chartered “AI-native” clearing bank designed around stablecoins, raised $180M led by Tiger Global at a $1B valuation
Augustus, a startup building a federally chartered clearing bank for fintechs and financial institutions …
Sources: after it closes a round at a $31.5B valuation, Moonshot plans a final raise at a $50B valuation to capitalize on Kimi K3 buzz before a Hong Kong IPO
Moonshot AI is preparing to begin discussions in August on a final round of fundraising before listing in Hong Kong …
OpenAI says its models chained vulnerabilities across its research environment and Hugging Face's infrastructure to find solutions for the ExploitGym benchmark
Last week, Hugging Face disclosed a new kind of security incident(opens in a new window) after they detected and contained …
Super Micro says Q4 orders have topped $60B and expects gross margins of 15% to 17%, up from its prior forecast of 8.2% to 8.4%; SMCI jumps 13%+ after hours
Super Micro Computer (SMCI.O) said on Tuesday it has received orders in excess of $60 billion in the fourth quarter …
Source: Ancestry.com pitches a risky $1.75B term loan at 4 to 4.25 percentage points above the benchmark to refinance debt from its 2020 Blackstone acquisition
OpenAI adds Nubank founder and CEO David Vélez and BNY CEO Robin Vince to its board of directors, as the company moves toward a public listing
Infinity, founded by Jeremy Nixon, the creator of hacker network community AGI House, to build an inference library that runs on all chips, raised a $15M seed
Poolside launches Laguna S 2.1, an 118B open-weight model built for agentic coding and long-horizon work, that it says competes with larger open models
OpenAI executive Chris Lehane says Sam Altman plans to brief the Trump administration and US lawmakers next week on the company's upcoming generation of models
OpenAI Chief Executive Officer Sam Altman plans to brief the Trump administration and US lawmakers next week on the upcoming generation …
Sensor Tower: the number of new apps released in Apple's App Store doubled to ~560K in H1, vs. the ~600K added in all of 2025, as vibecoded apps flood the store
Analysis: every frontier AI model tested in cybersecurity evaluations attempted to “cheat”, led by GPT-5.4 at 14.1% of tasks; Mythos cheated the least, at 7.8%
Chicago-based Empirical Security, which uses AI to help companies predict threats by monitoring exploited vulnerabilities, raised a $25M Series A
OpenAI says its models, including GPT-5.6 Sol and “an even more capable pre-release model”, breached Hugging Face while OpenAI tested their cyber capabilities
Google says Gemini 3.5 Flash Cyber is a “cost-efficient and highly capable alternative” to models like Mythos, available first to governments and some partners
Gemini 3.5 Flash integrates into CodeMender, allowing it to identify and patch vulnerabilities.
Docs: AI data startup Mercor had $614M in gross revenue in H1 2026, up 70% from all of 2025, with ~91% from foundation model makers like OpenAI and Anthropic
Mercor, a three-year-old data startup whose army of contractors teaches AI to give better answers, is growing fast but relies heavily …
Source: Tencent is in talks to acquire Israeli game developer SuperPlay in a deal valuing SuperPlay at $1B-$1.5B; Playtika acquired SuperPlay in 2024 for $690M
Gritt, which is developing an AI system that helps build infrastructure like solar panels, emerges from stealth with a $26M Series A and $34M in total funding
Google prices Gemini 3.6 Flash lower than 3.5 Flash, at $1.50/1M input tokens and $7.50/1M output tokens, and Gemini 3.5 Flash-Lite at $0.30/1M and $2.50/1M
As we wait for 3.5 Pro, Google today announced Gemini 3.6 Flash and 3.5 Flash-Lite, while providing updates on what comes next.
Google says Gemini 3.6 Flash improves coding, multimodal, and knowledge work performance and uses up to 17% fewer tokens and costs less per token vs. 3.5 Flash
Alphabet is releasing three new Gemini models on Tuesday, including its clearest answer yet to Anthropic's lead in cybersecurity …
OpenAI renews its investment in the American Journalism Project by committing an additional $5M in funding and $3M in tech credits over the next two years
OpenAI is renewing its investment in the American Journalism Project by committing an additional $5 million in funding and $3 million …See also Mediagazer
Billionaire-backed Building A Better California reserves $87M in TV ad time to oppose California's proposed one-time wealth tax; Sergey Brin put $82M into BABC
UK-based CuspAI, which uses AI to cut rare metal use in chipmaking, raised a $450M Series B at a $2.6B valuation, and hires ex-Apple exec John Giannandrea
Federal lobbying disclosures: Anthropic spent $1.97M in Q2, up 26% QoQ, and OpenAI spent $1.2M, up 18%; Meta remained the largest spender at $5.99M, down 15%
Some Instagram and Facebook users say Meta's AI moderation deleted their accounts; Meta says AI makes 13% fewer errors and finds 10% more violations than humans
US Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent says the Trump administration will look into whether Chinese AI models were distilled from US models and may “sanction them”
Ashley Capoot /CNBC:NEW
UK government data: ~35% of UK businesses with 10+ staff use AI, up from 12% in September 2023, and the average number of AI tools grew from 1.4 in 2023 to 1.6
Sources: the US and China plan to hold AI talks in September, likely before President Xi's visit to the US, a significant outcome of the Trump-Xi summit in May
The United States and China are planning to hold talks over AI in September, five sources familiar with the matter told Reuters …