Search: “techmeme”

Mackenzie Hawkins / Bloomberg: Sources: the US Commerce Department's BIS is reviewing how Chinese AI companies access Nvidia chips overseas, including by legally renting foreign data centers — A key U

Bloomberg: A look at Sequoia's revamped strategy under new stewards Alfred Lin and Pat Grady, including bold AI bets; sources: Sequoia recently closed $10B in new funding — Alfred Lin and Pat Grady ar

Tobias Mann / The Register: AMD acquires Toronto-based Taalas, which integrates model weights directly into silicon to boost inference performance, for an undisclosed sum — Early tech demos show model

Bloomberg: DeepSeek says it plans to implement substantial price increases across its services; V4 Flash currently costs 0.14/1M input and 0.28/1M output tokens — DeepSeek plans to implement a signifi

Anna Tong / Forbes: Docs: US data labeling companies, like Surge AI and Mercor, that sell training datasets to US AI labs and the government are also selling them to Chinese labs — The same Silicon Va

Eduardo Baptista / Reuters: Filing: DeepSeek has invested ~20.8M in Unitree Robotics' Shanghai IPO and agreed to jointly develop AI models for humanoid machines — Chinese artificial intelligence start

Megan Morrone / Axios: Filing: OpenAI says “Apple should not be permitted to use a baseless and pretextual lawsuit to make up for its failures to integrate AI into its products” — If the case survives

Bloomberg: Google centralizes its AI leadership at Mountain View in a bid to catch its rivals; Sebastian Borgeaud, who led a major AI coding effort, moved from the UK — Alphabet Inc.'s Google is conce

Jada Jones / ZDNET: Google is expanding its Gemini-powered Ask Maps feature in English to 130+ countries and adds agentic food ordering, hotel booking, and attraction searching — ZDNET's key takeaways

Melissa Hancock / Fortune: Ooredoo, Nvidia, Nokia, and Indosat launch Zankore, Indonesia's first dedicated AI compute and neocloud platform; Ooredoo, which owns a 49% stake, commits $800M — Ooredoo Gr

Zac Hall / 9to5Mac: OpenAI debuts Agent Plugins, an open standard for bundling skills and MCP servers, and says Amazon, Cursor, Microsoft, and Vercel are on its steering committee — OpenAI's GPT-5 tur

Bloomberg: OpenAI files a motion to dismiss Apple's lawsuit accusing the AI company of stealing trade secrets, saying that the iPhone maker's allegations are meritless — OpenAI is asking a federal jud

Herb Scribner / Axios: OpenAI updates the default model for free users to GPT-5.6 Luna, adds unlimited text chats for free users, rolls out an improved GPT-5.6 Sol version, and more — OpenAI on Thursd

Cristina Criddle / Financial Times: PitchBook: AI voice startups raised 7B in Q1 2026, up from 1B in Q1 2025, as OpenAI and Google bet on voice as the main interface for next-gen AI agents — OpenAI an

Carl Zimmer / New York Times: Scientists trained AI on genetic sequences to design viruses not found in nature, yielding 16 viable viruses that can infect bacteria but don't threaten humans — Scientis

Reuters: Sources: Alibaba plans to ask heavy commercial users of its next Qwen open model for a share of revenue; Moonshot's Kimi K3 requires up to a 30% revenue share — Chinese technology giant Aliba

The Information: Sources: Canva slashed revenue growth forecast as heavy use of new AI features drove up costs and slowed their rollout, while more Canva users turned to ChatGPT — Executives at Canva,

Nichiket Sunil / Reuters: Sydney-based AI data center company Firmus raised 2B in funding from Coatue, Nvidia, and others at a 10.5B post-money valuation, up from 5.5B in April — Firmus said on Friday

Tom Carter / Business Insider: Anthropic confirms it is building an in-house silicon team to design custom chips for Claude, co-designing hardware and models and using a “multi-chip approach” — - Anth

Kyt Dotson / SiliconANGLE: Cloudflare open sources a new version of Cloudflare OS, a browser-accessible AI agentic workspace for enterprises that lets employees build custom micro-apps — Cloudflare In

Axios: Demis Hassabis is stepping down as CEO of Google DeepMind to be the unit's chairman and will add the title of Alphabet chief scientist; GOOG drops 3%+ — Demis Hassabis is leaving his role as CE

New York Times: Developers in Africa are increasingly choosing Chinese open-source AI models over US models, saying they are downloadable, easier to customize, and much cheaper — Developers built Sunf

Bloomberg: Filing: Microsoft recorded $24.1B in revenue from OpenAI during the year ended in June, suggesting OpenAI accounted for more than half of Microsoft's AI sales — Microsoft Corp. generates mo

Bloomberg: Google says Chief AI Architect and Google DeepMind CTO Koray Kavukcuoglu will lead Google DeepMind as SVP, reporting to Sundar Pichai — Alphabet Inc.'s Google is losing some of its most pro

Ivan Mehta / TechCrunch: Hark, founded by Figure AI CEO Brett Adcock, previews Handoff, a computer use agent it says outperforms GPT-5.4 and Opus 4.8, and plans for a summer release — Hark, a startup

Wall Street Journal: Meta is offering a cheaper Muse Spark 1.2 “contributor” tier priced at 0.10/1M input and 0.20/1M output tokens in exchange for using user prompts for training — The company, press

Jonathan Vanian / CNBC: Meta releases Muse Code in beta, a terminal coding agent powered by Muse Spark 1.2, a coding-focused model priced at 1.25/1M input and 4.25/1M output tokens — Meta is rolling o

Lily Hay Newman / Wired: OpenAI says the Hugging Face breach involved AI agents creating an internal message board, unnoticed by humans, where they shared exploits and planned the hack — At the Black

Jay Peters / The Verge: Reddit expands its test of Rules Hub, a suite of tools that rely on LLMs to help moderators manage their communities, and plans a full launch later this year — It's also planni

Business Insider: Sources: Google is in talks with AI coding agent startup Mechanize on a possible deal, potentially worth $1.5B+, to hire some of its talent and license its tech — Google wants its AI

Blake Brittain / Reuters: A US appeals court overturns a ruling that had temporarily barred Perplexity from using its agentic shopping tools on Amazon's platform — A U.S. appeals court on Tuesday over

Dina Bass / Bloomberg: AI cloud startup Volta Infra raised 300M led by a16z and Altimeter at a 2.4B valuation and says it landed a 10B contract with an unnamed leading AI developer — Volta Infra Holdi

Lily Mae Lazarus / Fortune: HappyRobot, which uses AI to automate freight operator communications, raised a 150M Series C at a 1.2B valuation, after a $44M Series B in September 2025 — Pablo Palafox l

Mistral AI Blog: Mistral releases Shieldstral, a 3B multimodal safety classifier that it says matches models up to 7x its size on text safety, available under Apache 2.0 — Every product that ships a m

Wired: OpenAI says one of its models exploited a website after third-party AI security lab Irregular mistakenly gave it access to the internet during evaluations — Rogue AI agents from OpenAI and Anth

Financial Times: Sources and filings: Google assembled a ~200B financing program for Anthropic, with 150B+ tied to TPUs and involving Broadcom, Blackstone, Apollo, and others — Private credit, chip le

Bloomberg: Sources: Anthropic agreed to a 10B deal for computing capacity in Norway from Nvidia-backed AI cloud startup Volta Infra, which says the deal is for six years — Anthropic PBC has struck a 1

Sam Sabin / Axios: The UK AISI says it observed a total of 19 instances where Mythos and GPT-5.6 Sol tried to hack people and companies during a routine cyber evaluation in July — The U.K. AI Security

Zvi Mowshowitz / Don't Worry About the Vase: A detailed recap of the real-world target hacks by OpenAI and Anthropic models, exposing failures in AI alignment training and lack of meaningful supervisi

Eduardo Baptista / Reuters: Artificial Analysis: DeepSeek's V4-Flash costs 0.14/1M input and 0.28/1M output tokens, or 0.03 per test, far below Kimi K3's 0.86 and GPT-5.6 Sol's $1.86 — A version of Ch

Irina Anghel / Bloomberg: Indeed: UK employers are creating jobs for senior staff in software engineering and IT, where AI enhances the value of experience, while cutting back elsewhere — UK employers

Tim Bradshaw / Financial Times: London-based AI chip startup Olix raised 312M led by Fundomo, with participation from Arm, at a 3.3B valuation, up from 1B+ after raising 220M in February — British ent

Axios: Source: Dario Amodei expressed concern about staff coming to Anthropic for the money rather than the mission, as Anthropic, OpenAI, and others battle for talent — Top AI researchers continue to

The Information: Sources: the Trump administration invites staffers from OpenAI, Google, Anthropic, and others to the White House on Tuesday to review the AI oversight framework — The Trump administra

Katherine Hamilton / Wall Street Journal: Visa plans to acquire Israeli company BioCatch, which uses AI to detect fraud and distinguish legitimate users from attackers in real time, for $2.4B in cash

Anthony Ha / TechCrunch: YouTuber Hank Green faces online criticism after using ChatGPT to help research a script, and says his LLM usage “is not healthy for me or good for the world” — Hank Green, a