DeepSeek’s 4.7× Price Jump Exposes the Token Meter
In August 2026, DeepSeek raised V4-Flash output pricing 4.7-fold at peak hours, from $0.28 to $1.32 per million tokens. Buyers still bear retries, tool failures and review, making verified-task cost the practical procurement unit.
China Approved 300+ AI Models—But Held Up Apple
From Baidu talks in 2024 to a China-specific model reportedly trained with Alibaba’s support in 2026, Apple is preserving a global iPhone interface while China makes models, services and approval local.
Anduril’s $1B Factory Is Thunder’s Real Test
Anduril and Archer spent two years developing Thunder, while the planned $1 billion Arsenal-1 factory targets tens of thousands of autonomous systems and weapons a year. A 10-year Army agreement worth up to $20 billion puts software, hardware, and services inside one procurement vehicle.
Canva’s $34.9B Valuation Tests Its AI Advantage
Blackbird and Airtree marked Canva at $34.9B after $42B in 2025, while its internal valuation fell from $38.9B to $31B—even as AI made its designs easier to create and edit.
Google unveils Gemini 3.7 Flash, its “most intelligent workhorse model” for coding and agents, priced at $0.75/1M input and $3.75/1M output tokens through 2026
Our most intelligent workhorse model yet for coding and agents. — Senior Director, Product Management, on behalf of the Gemini team
OpenAI previews Ultrafast, an API tier powered by Cerebras that runs GPT-5.6 Sol up to 14× faster and generates up to 750 output tokens per second
OpenAI is previewing a new way to run its most capable GPT-5.6 model at dramatically higher speeds. The company says its new Ultrafast …
OpenAI launches Computer History, an opt-in feature that turns day-to-day computer activity on macOS into memories and a timeline that ChatGPT and Codex can use
OpenAI's opt-in Computer History captures a local timeline of Mac activity so ChatGPT Work can recover context across selected apps and sites.
OpenAI hires Dali Rajic, COO of Alphabet's Wiz, as chief revenue officer, replacing ex-Slack CEO Denise Dresser, who was hired in December 2025 and will leave
OpenAI is naming its second new chief revenue officer in less than a year, a sign of efforts to bolster sales growth ahead of a highly anticipated Wall Street debut.
Netflix closes game studios Los Angeles-based Night School Studio, which it acquired in 2021, and Helsinki-based Moonloot, founded in 2022, and cuts games jobs
Oxenfree Night School and Moonloot closing, as streaming giant continues to shrink internal game studio operation
Z.ai debuts GLM-5.3, which uses the same base model as GLM-5.2 with scaled post-training for stronger coding skills, and says it'll release weights in two weeks
With GLM-5.2 we built the stack: IndexShare for efficient long-context processing, SAO for RL on long-horizon tasks …
DeepSeek debuts DeepSeek Harness under the MIT license in developer preview, touting a design where “everything is a plugin” that can be swapped out
DeepSeek is expanding beyond the model layer and deeper into the software developers use to put AI agents to work.
Epic v. Apple: Apple offers 15% commissions on US linked-out purchases for standard apps, 10% for partner programs and renewals, and 5% for Small Business apps
Apple has submitted its proposal for the fees it should be allowed to charge for purchases made outside of the App Store system in the Epic Games case.
The White House puts tariffs on drones and their components, including a 100% levy on “particularly sensitive” models, aiming to cut US reliance on Chinese tech
US to impose up to 100% levies on unmanned aircraft and their components — President Donald Trump has imposed sweeping …
Anthropic details multiagent experiments showing Claude agents can wage a “turf war” over incompatible goals, fail to coordinate, collude on prices, and more
What happens when you pit AI agents against each other? According to Anthropic's testing, things get messy fast.
Source: OpenAI CFO told investors that enterprise business now generates more revenue than ChatGPT-led consumer business; enterprise customers grew 32% in July
At the end of a week of turmoil in OpenAI's C-suite, finance chief Sarah Friar held a meeting with investors on Friday …
DeepSeek raises V4 model prices, adding dynamic pricing from August 16; V4-Flash output tokens go from $0.28/1M to $1.32 during peak hours and $0.66 in off-peak
DeepSeek is steeply raising the prices for its flagship V4 models ahead of a potential initial public offering …
Alibaba releases weights for Qwen3.8 models under Apache 2.0 license, including Qwen3.8-27B, which it says beats Qwen3.7-Plus and excels in real-world coding
We promised open weights for Qwen3.8. Now, time to meet them! 🎉 ⚡ Qwen3.8-27B: - A native multimodal dense model. With just 27B parameters, it outperforms Qwen3.7-Plus overall and shines in real-world...
A profile of Camilla Clark, quiet adviser to husband Dario Amodei and behind-the-scenes player at Anthropic; she once pitched a porn startup to Jeffrey Epstein
Eric Schmidt had plenty of reasons to toast the success of Dario Amodei and Anthropic at a private event the former Google CEO hosted recently.
Sources: Private equity firm Silver Lake is in talks to acquire HR and financial management software maker Workday; WDAY jumped 15%+ to hit a ~$50B market cap
Private equity firm Silver Lake is in talks to acquire Workday (WDAY.O), which has a market value of about $43 billion …
A look at Quincy, a rural Washington farming town of 8,500 that benefited from a data center boom as its poverty rate fell from 29.4% in 2012 to 6.2% in 2024
A $15 million aquatic center with a six-lane pool, waterslides and a lazy river opened in Quincy, Washington, a few weeks ago.
Google adds a toggle in Gemini and Flow to remove visible watermarks from AI-generated images, videos, and music; SynthID watermarks and C2PA metadata remain
Google will still embed invisible SynthID and C2PA watermarks into AI-generated images, videos, and music.
In Q2, “other income”, mostly from investment gains, at Amazon and Alphabet totaled ~$121B after taxes and made up 66% and 71%, respectively, of profits
Gains on investments in companies like Anthropic are boosting earnings at some of the biggest technology companies
A judge orders Kalshi to stop offering most of its prediction market contracts in Washington state, after finding it likely violated state gambling-related laws
Kalshi was told by a judge to stop offering most of its prediction market contracts in Washington state, after regulators …
Sources: Apple trained a China-specific LLM with Alibaba's support, which would make Apple the first foreign company to offer a proprietary AI model in China
Apple (AAPL.O) has trained a large language model specifically for the China market, three people familiar with the matter said …
Reddit will join the S&P 500 on August 18, replacing AvalonBay and becoming the second pure-play social media company in the index, after Meta; RDDT jumps 10%+
Reddit shares rose 11% in extended trading on Thursday on the social media company's inclusion in the S&P 500.
Applied Materials reports Q3 revenue up 25% YoY to $9.12B, vs. $8.99B est., net income up 43% YoY to $2.54B, and forecasts Q4 revenue above est.; AMAT drops 4%+
The company is looking to ramp up its manufacturing capacity to meet continued semiconductor solutions demand
Apple officially opens ad bookings for businesses on Apple Maps ahead of an upcoming full rollout across the US and Canada
Ads are coming to Apple Maps soon in the US and Canada, and today businesses can start booking their own ads. Here are the details, including a limited-time promotional offer for businesses.
France's top court blocks a bill banning social media for under-15s, saying it infringed upon freedom of expression; Macron orders the PM to rework the bill
France's top court on Friday blocked a bill banning social media access for under-15s, saying it infringed upon freedom of expression …
Sources: stablecoin payments company RedotPay has delayed its plans for a US IPO to 2027 or later, as it seeks regulatory approvals and deals with legal issues
RedotPay has delayed plans for an initial public offering in the US as the stablecoin payments company seeks regulatory approvals and deals …
President Trump signs a memo letting the US government partner with private companies to conduct cyberattacks abroad against criminal groups targeting Americans
Pony AI plans to deploy 2,000+ robotaxis across Europe in partnership with Uber, add four more European cities after Zagreb, and expand to the Middle East later
Pony AI Inc. said it plans to deploy more than 2,000 robotaxis across Europe in partnership with Uber Technologies Inc. …
A profile of Amy Kremer, a pro-Trump activist who helped organize the January 6 rally and currently chairs the grassroots anti-data center group Humans First
Amy Kremer's resume makes her loyalty to Trump impossible to question. Humans First is banking that will help mobilize the right
Risk report: Anthropic raises misalignment risk estimate from very low to low and says it doesn't plan to release a stronger internal model called “Model 2”
Anthropic does not plan to release an internal model that appears to be more powerful than top-of-the-line Mythos …
Tether says KPMG completed Tether's first full audit and found its 2025 financial statements fairly presented its financial position in all material respects
Investor letter: Thrive's 2022 early-stage $516M fund that invested in OpenAI and SpaceX was worth $3.7B+ as of the end of June, net of fees and other charges
Epic v. Google: in a compliance hearing, a judge orders Google to remove “anticompetitive friction” for installing third-party app stores from its Play Store
Judge Donato was not having Google's ‘anticompetitive friction.’ — One month after Epic Games and Google seemingly stopped fighting …
Nevada granted Tesla a robotaxi permit, but capped the fleet at 10 vehicles, not 5,000 that Tesla sought, banned airport pickups, and ordered other restrictions
Tesla applied for a permit to deploy up to 5,000 robotaxis in Clark County, Nevada, but got approval from the state for just 10.
Sources: JPMorgan Chase terminated its banking relationship with Polymarket in 2025 over regulatory concerns, though it still maintains some ties to the company
Largest US bank has continued to cultivate ties with prediction platform as it seeks $20bn valuation
Sources: the CFTC has launched a probe into prediction markets' “mention markets”, prompting Kalshi to remove bets on word choices from sports-related offerings
Blackbird and Airtree revalue Canva at $34.9B, down from $42B in 2025, as it struggles in the AI era; Canva's internal valuation falls to $31B, down from $38.9B
Canva and two of its longest-standing Australian backers have wiped over $10 billion ($US7.1 billion) off the design software giant's valuation …
SMIC co-CEO Zhao Haijun says the company raised its prices following negotiations with customers in Q1, and that it will charge more for wafers processed in Q3
China's top foundry, Semiconductor Manufacturing International Corp (0981.HK), said on Friday that AI-related demand would continue …
Flock says it will now require US law enforcement to label every license plate search with a criminal case number, after a WaPo investigation into police misuse
The US OCC conditionally approves a bank charter application for Trump family's World Liberty Financial, allowing it to directly issue its USD1 stablecoin
A national U.S. bank regulator on Friday conditionally approved a bank charter application linked to President Donald Trump …
Chip equipment maker Lam Research plans to invest $3B+ over five years to expand its global R&D network, as it seeks to increase its experiment capacity by 50%+
Lam Research (LRCX.O) said on Thursday it intends to invest more than $3 billion in the next five years to expand its global research …
Amazon adds a clause in its user agreement that seeks to prevent shoppers from filing class-action lawsuits against it, after removing a similar clause in 2021
Amazon.com Inc. reintroduced a clause in its user agreement that seeks to prevent shoppers from filing class-action lawsuits …
Filing: Nvidia has a nearly $21B stake in SpaceX and a $30B stake in Intel; Nvidia invested as much as $2B in xAI in 2025 and $5B in Intel
Nvidia Corp. on Friday disclosed a nearly $21 billion stake in Elon Musk's SpaceX and a $30 billion one in Intel Corp.
X releases its For You algorithm's and core ranking engine's source code on GitHub and adds tools that let users see if X's ranking systems “shadowbanned” them
Docs: Anthropic told investors it generated $11.5B+ in revenue, with positive adjusted operating income, in Q2, up from $787M in Q2 2025 and $4.73B in Q1 2026
Anthropic PBC is telling prospective investors its second-quarter revenue jumped at least 14-fold versus the same period a year ago …
DeepSeek launches V4-Pro, its most advanced model that rivals Kimi K3 on some benchmarks but is priced much lower, at $0.435/1M input and $0.87/1M output tokens
DeepSeek Harness (dsh) is an open-source agent harness developed by DeepSeek AI.Hugging Face:DeepSeek-V4-Pro-0813 — DeepSeek-V4-Pro-0813 is the official release of DeepSeek-V4-Pro …Blockchain.News:S...
Charter receives final state approval to buy Cox for $21.9B after making concessions to California regulators, including affordable internet for some households
Sources: PayPal is in talks to sell itself to a group including Stripe and Advent, which proposed paying $60.50/share in July; PayPal is seeking a higher price
The fintech startup and private-equity firm Advent offered to buy the struggling payments company in July
Current and former OpenAI employees say pressure to quickly ship new AI models and products cut into safety time, leading to incidents like the rogue agent hack
Databricks closed a $5B funding round at a $190B valuation, six months after raising $5B at a $134B valuation, and says it has crossed $7B in revenue run rate
Microsoft begins merging its consumer and commercial Copilot apps into a single app, with a mobile and web rollout in mid-August and desktop in mid-September
Z.ai says GLM-5.3 scores 84.5% on CyberGym, vs. Mythos 5's 83.8%, and its most sensitive cybersecurity functions will only be available to verified users
I'm coming down from spending a few days at Usenix Security …Tomoko Wakasugi /Nikkei Asia:China's Z.ai launches model it says rivals Anthropic's MythosSam Sabin /Axios:A Chinese lab's new model is nea...
Ramp's July AI index: Anthropic's market share hit 43.5%, widening its lead over OpenAI; Fable 5 is only 6% of tokens businesses bought, likely due to high cost
US-based robot vacuum maker Matic rolls out a firmware update to add Matic Cues, which lets users control its $1,245 vacuum with voice commands in 70+ languages
Sources: Alibaba is nearing a deal to sell its Lingxi Games to PE firm Trustar Capital at a potential $1.5B+ valuation, as Alibaba continues its reorganization
Asian private equity firm Trustar Capital is nearing a deal to acquire Alibaba Group Holding Ltd.'s video game business, according to people with knowledge of the matter.
HPE secures court approval for its settlement with the US DOJ over its takeover of networking company Juniper, defeating a challenge by Democratic state AGs
Sources: OpenAI is on track to generate annualized revenue of $40B+ based on its current performance, roughly doubling its run rate from the end of 2025
but it's barely turned a profitYoon Kyung-hwan /Seoul Economic Daily:OpenAI Aims to Double Revenue as It Races Anthropic to IPORyu Hyunseokby Hwang Yoonju /The Asia Business Daily:OpenAI Projects $40 ...
Sources: Vantage Data Centers, a major hyperscale developer and operator, is exploring options including a sale or an IPO at a ~$100B valuation as soon as 2027
Source: Greg Brockman is “in founder mode” and getting more involved across every level of OpenAI to build out a leadership team ahead of an expected IPO
Madison Mills /Axios: