Tootfinder

AMD says its Mac Mini-sized Ryzen AI Halo PC starts at $3,999 with Ryzen AI Max 300 chips, for pre-order in June, and unveils AI Max 400 chips, available in Q3 (Devindra Hardawar/Engadget)
https://www.engadget.com/2177687/amd-price

AMD prices its Ryzen AI Halo PC at $3,999, unveils Ryzen AI Max 400 chips - Engadget
AMD is taking a direct shot at NVIDIA's DGX Spark with its $3,999 Ryzen AI Halo PC.

Once again, Metacurity kicks off with a concise summary of yesterday's blizzard of AI developments that cyber defenders should know, followed by briefs on other critical infosec developments, including
--US seizes 1,000 piracy sites streaming World Cup matches,
--7-Zip fixes critical RCE flaw,
--Attackers begin exploiting critical ServiceNow AI platform flaw,
--Millions of aftermarket car alarms can be hacked over Bluetooth,
--SonicWall zero-days used to d…

AI Watch: China's AI surge is forcing DC and Silicon Valley to rethink the AI race
US seizes 1,000+ piracy sites streaming World Cup matches, 7-Zip fixes critical RCE flaw, Attackers begin exploiting critical ServiceNow AI platform flaw, Millions of aftermarket car alarms can be hacked over Bluetooth, SonicWall zero-days used to deploy custom malware on VPN appliances, much more

So helpful! '7 Ways to More Frugal AI' by James Martin - from don't use AI to use the smallest model possible, use non-US models for greener electricity, host your own to 'green prompting'
https://bettertech.blog/2026/04/09/7-ways-to-more-frugal-ai/…

7 Ways to More Frugal AI
The onslaught of big AI seems unstoppable. But it’s not inevitable! Here are seven tried and scientifically tested ways to reduce the environmental impacts of AI. And its financial costs too&…

AI and being "left behind"
#ai

AI and being "left behind"
A century-old company adopts AI. We don't have to.

Ethical AI Companies | Ethical Consumer https://www.ethicalconsumer.org/technology/shopping-guide/ethical-ai-companies-llms

Ethical AI Companies | Ethical Consumer
Finding an ethical AI. Ethical and environmental rankings of 12 chatbots and generative AI large language models, with recommended buys and what to avoid. With a huge surge in use of AI chatbots and generative AI large language models (LLMs), we ask the important question of if there are any ethical AI tools available.

https://www.machinesociety.ai/p/how-ai-makes-people-confidently-wrong

Who would expect anything else?
#Enshittification #Google #AI

Europe must choose between AI and climate goals, data center lobby says.
OK then: climate goals, please.
https://www.politico.eu/article/europe-choose-ai-climate-goals-data-center-chief-warns/

Europe must choose between AI and climate goals, data center lobby says
Tech sector says only carbon-emitting gas plants are reliable enough today to power the EU’s AI goals.

[OT] Net benefit of #AI and the trillions of dollars being invested in it? Woke?
ECB's Lagarde says AI could trigger financial crises and calls for Cold War-style non-proliferation governance https://thene…

"Announcing #AI for #Libraries – a weekly #newsletter"

Yeah, 8,000 layoffs & 7,000 internal transfers tend to piss people off.
✅ Meta AI Reshuffle Sparks Employee Morale Revolt
https://winbuzzer.com/2026/06/21/meta-ai-reshuffle-sparks-reported-employee-morale-revolt-xcxwbn/

Meta AI Reshuffle Sparks Employee Morale Revolt
Meta's AI reorganization has reportedly deepened morale problems after 8,000 layoffs and 7,000 internal transfers, testing control over AI-support work.

AI advice suppresses people’s willingness to say “I don’t know”, even when the advice is wrong and accuracy is incentivized.
https://arxiv.org/abs/2607.13562v1

AI advice suppresses people's willingness to say "I don't know", even when the advice is wrong and accuracy is incentivized
Knowing when to say "I don't know" is fundamental to human judgment, yet AI assistants offer a fluent answer to almost any question. In five experiments (N = 3,132; four preregistered, one direct replication), participants answered difficult questions and could always decline to respond. We engineered the questions so that AI advice was wrong, separating AI use from its accuracy. Merely having access to AI nearly eliminated participants' willingness to suspend judgment, and this held whether th…

Google says it is testing new ad formats in search results and AI Mode, including Conversational Discovery ads, Highlighted Answers, and AI-powered Shopping ads (Anu Adegbola/Search Engine Land)
https://searchengineland.com/google-tests-ne…

Google tests new conversational ad formats in AI Mode and Search
Google is rolling out Gemini-powered conversational ad formats across AI Mode and Search as it looks to make ads more contextual,

Yikes! That’s infrastructure for a mass disinformation project.
Michigan’s newest newsrooms are AI machines built on others’ reporting | Interlochen Public Radio https://www.interlochenpublicradio.org/ipr-news/2…

Michigan’s newest newsrooms are AI machines built on others’ reporting
Prism News uses AI to rewrite local reporting in northern Michigan. Critics say the network of AI-generated news sites raises accuracy and trust concerns.

San Diego-based Aether AI, which is building "causal world models" to teach robots cause and effect instead of pattern-matching, raised a $20M seed led by MPCi (Cristian Dina/The Next Web)
https://thenextweb.com/news/aether-ai-causal-world-models-20m-…

"Sri Lankan ‘Grifters’ Pumping Out AI ‘Energy Policy Rage Bait’ on UK Facebook Feeds"
#SriLanka #Facebook #SocialMedia

Sri Lankan ‘Grifters’ Pumping Out AI ‘Energy Policy Rage Bait’ on UK Facebook Feeds Sri Lankan ‘Grifters’ Pumping Out AI ‘Energy Policy Rage Bait’ on UK Facebook Feeds
Experts say mass-produced AI misinformation is the “new Cambridge Analytica scandal”.

Nieuw goudhaantje in AI-land: Andrew Feldman betreedt beurs met een chip zo groot als een dinerbord | de Volkskrant
https://www.volkskrant.nl/tech/nieuw-goudhaantje-in-ai-land-andrew-feldman-betreedt-beurs-met-een-chip-zo-groot-als-een-dinerbord~bb47eebe/
📸 https://www.forbes.com/sites/johnkoetsier/2026/02/05/cerebras-pockets-1-billion-to-challenge-nvidia-in-ai-with-20x-faster-chip/

"The Electoral Commission has called for new legal controls over misinformation from AI chatbots, after a thinktank found they had made serious mistakes during the recent Scottish election.
The thinktank Demos said its investigation had found that AI services gave voters misinformation to 34% of the questions it posed"
#ScotPol

Five US tech giants' hidden debts soar to $1.65tn on opaque AI funding
Data center leases and GPU supply contracts raise liabilities at Meta, Oracle, Nikkei study shows
https://asia.nikkei.com/business/technology/five-…

Five US tech giants' hidden debts soar to $1.65tn on opaque AI funding
Data center leases, GPU supply contracts raise liabilities at Meta, Oracle, Nikkei study shows

AI Companies Are Buying Tons of Old Books Because They're Free of AI Slop https://www.404media.co/ai-companies-are-buying-tons-of-old-books-because-theyre-free-of-ai-slop/

heise | FAQ zu Siri AI: Was Sie über Apples verbessertes KI-System wissen müssen
Landen meine Daten bei Gemini? Wird Apple Intelligence besser? Brauche ich ein neues iPhone? Die KI-Partnerschaft von Apple und Google wirft Fragen auf.

FAQ zu Siri AI: Was Sie über Apples verbessertes KI-System wissen müssen
Landen meine Daten bei Gemini? Wird Apple Intelligence besser? Brauche ich ein neues iPhone? Die KI-Partnerschaft von Apple und Google wirft Fragen auf.

Documents: Meta's internal AI incubator is developing an AI model router, similar to OpenRouter's, to cut costs by sending some AI tasks to lower-cost models (Jyoti Mann/The Information)
https://www.theinformation.com/articles/me

Meta’s AI Incubator Is Developing an OpenRouter Rival to Cut Coding Costs
Meta Platforms’ internal incubator for AI-powered products and tools is developing a version of the OpenRouter service that would help cut costs by sending some AI tasks to lower-cost models. The incubator, called AAI Labs, is part of Meta’s Applied AI Engineering team, which Meta set up in ...

It’s a huge day in AI cyber policy, so don’t miss this morning's Metacurity, covering the cybersecurity developments everyone will be talking about tomorrow, including
--Trump prepares to sign AI cyber order today amid Mythos alarm,
--Cybercom to speed AI tools use,
--Hacker accessed GitHub repos via TanStack-compromised Nx Console VS Code extension,
--Ukraine cops bust 18-year-old for running infostealer op,
--S. Korean cops bust 32 for stealing bigwigs' …

Trump prepares to sign AI cyber order today amid Mythos alarm
Cybercom to speed AI tools use, Hacker accessed GitHub repos via TanStack-compromised Nx Console VS Code extension, Ukraine cops bust 18-year-old for running infostealer op, S. Korean cops bust 32 for stealing bigwigs' financial data and PII, Microsoft issues patches for Defender flaws, much more

YouTube clarifies its policies around AI slop and upsetting videos, including breaking down such content into three non-monetizable categories (Sarah Perez/TechCrunch)
https://techcrunch.com/2026/07/20/youtube-clarifies-policies-around-ai-slo…

YouTube clarifies policies around AI slop and upsetting videos | TechCrunch
YouTube has updated its monetization policies to more clearly define the kinds of AI-generated and low-quality videos that can’t earn ad revenue.

Read this. Just read it. No need to agree to all of it, but it raises several issues we need to tackle.
To Understand AI, Think Like A Dragonfly - NOEMA https://www.noemamag.com/to-understand-ai-think-like-a-dragonfly

To Understand AI, Think Like A Dragonfly
As AI rapidly reshapes our world, narrow, single-view thinking risks mistaking part of the picture for the whole.

OpenAI says its AI models hacked Hugging Face during testing
https://www.bleepingcomputer.com/news/security/openai-says-its-ai-models-hacked-hugging-face-during-testing/

OpenAI says its AI models hacked Hugging Face during testing
OpenAI says its AI models, including GPT‑5.6 Sol and a pre-release model, hacked into the Hugging Face artificial intelligence repository while being tested in a sandboxed testing environment.

Zero2IPO Research: Chinese AI startups raised $16.2B in Q1 2026, up 185% YoY, led by top AI labs including Moonshot, Z.ai, and MiniMax (Karen Tian/South China Morning Post)
https://www.scmp.com/tech/tech-trends/arti

China’s AI start-up funding triples in first quarter amid bets on LLMs, robotics
The fundraising boom follows years of state-led efforts to channel capital into strategic sectors such as chips, AI and manufacturing.

News Corp sues privacy-focused search engine Brave, alleging it uses masked web crawlers to bypass publishers' restrictions and deliver "verbatim" AI summaries (Max Tani/Semafor)
https://www.semafor.com/article/07/21/2026

NewsCorp accuses search engine Brave of AI copyright infringement
News Corp announced that it is suing Brave AI, a privacy-focused search engine with an AI sidebar tool that plugs into large language models.

Cisco senior incident responder Nate Pors concluded that using AI to write incident reports "is currently unsuitable for production use.”
https://blogs.cisco.com/security/ai-generated-reporting-lessons-learned-from-talos-incident-resp…

AI-generated reporting: Lessons learned from Cisco Talos Incident Response
Talos IR shares prompt engineering lessons for consistent, accurate AI-generated cybersecurity reports with a realistic case study.

Paris-based Pivot, which develops AI tools for procurement and financial workflows, raised a $40M Series B co-led by Forestay Capital and Notion Capital (Tamara Djurickovic/Tech.eu)
https://tech.eu/2026/05/21/pivot-raises-40m-to-expand-ai-pow…

Pivot raises $40M to expand AI-powered enterprise procurement platform
Paris-based Pivot, an AI-powered procurement and finance operations platform, has raised $40 million in an oversubscribed Series B funding round led by Forestay Capital and Notion Capital, with participation from Greyhound, procurement industry executives and existing investors including Hedosophia, Visionaries Club and Emblem. The latest financing brings the company’s total funding raised since its founding in 2023 to $70 million.Pivot develops an AI operating system designed to help e…

Stability AI releases a new family of audio models called Stability Audio 3.0 that is trained on licensed data; the top model can generate six-minute songs (Ivan Mehta/TechCrunch)
https://techcrunch.com/2026/05/20/stability-ai-releas…

Stability AI releases a new audio model that can create six-minute songs | TechCrunch
Stability Audio 3.0 small model can run on-device and generate two-minute long tracks

NYC-based Prosper AI, whose health care AI tool is designed to answer patient phone calls, raised a $30M Series A led by a16z, for $35M in total funding (Brock E.W. Turner/Axios)
https://www.axios.com/pro/health-tech-deals/2026/06/22/andreess…

Exclusive: Andreessen Horowitz leads $30M Prosper AI raise
Prominent investors are still showing a willingness to back AI agents in a variety of health care workflows.

Trump’s AI-Cyber order “fell apart hours before the signing as a top Trump adviser and some tech executives gave it a big thumbs down — to a president who didn't really want to regulate AI in the first place.”
https://www.

Anti-"doomer" feedback derails Trump's AI executive order
Any further delay of the order means more time for infighting and disagreements.

CAISI Director Chris Fall is resigning just three months after taking over the federal AI testing institute (Maria Curi/Axios)
https://www.axios.com/2026/07/20/trump-ai-security-agency-head-resigns

Scoop: Trump AI security agency head resigns
The abrupt departure comes as the Trump administration grapples with how to deploy AI safely and the agency hashes out standards.

Q&A with Hearst's Tim O'Rourke, VP for editorial innovation and AI strategy, on how Hearst's DevHub team of about 12 people collaborates with local newsrooms (Christiana Sciaudone/A Media Operator)
https://www.amediaoperator.com/analysis/at

At the Heart of Hearst’s AI, Editorial Innovation Strategy
JHVEPhoto - stock.adobe.com We spoke with Hearst’s Tim O’Rourke, vice president, editorial innovation and AI strategy, in charge of DevHub, a team of

Of course...because I made this the top story of Metacurity.
Scoop: White House postpones AI EO signing ceremony
https://www.axios.com/2026/05/21/white-house-postpones-ai-…

Scoop: White House postpones AI EO signing ceremony
It's another setback for an effort that has been stalled by internal disagreements.

Upscale, which is building AI networking infrastructure to rival Cisco, raised a $190M Series A-1 at a $2B valuation, up from $1B after raising $200M in January (Lily Mae Lazarus/Fortune)
https://fortune.com/2026/06/22/nvidia-upscale-ai-next-ciscoand-…

Exclusive: Upscale AI wants to be the next Cisco—and it just raised another $190 million
The AI networking startup has now raised $500 million in under 18 months.

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 (The Information)
https://www.theinformation.com/articles/mercors-fast-growth-r…

Mercor’s Fast Growth Relies on Biggest AI Companies, Documents Show
Mercor, a three-year-old data startup whose army of contractors teaches AI to give better answers, is growing fast but relies heavily on revenue from AI foundation model companies, financial documents seen by The Information show. The company generated $614 million in gross revenue in the first ...

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" (Vittoria Elliott/Wired)
https://www.wired.com/story/the-army-is-burning-through-its-ai-toke…

The Army Is Burning Through Its AI Tokens
Members of the Army received an email informing them that they were rapidly depleting their AI tokens, and needed to limit use.

Trump said he delayed the AI-Cyber EO “because I didn’t like certain aspects of it.”
“We’re leading China, we’re leading everybody, and I don’t want to do anything that’s going to get in the way of that lead,” Trump said.
https://www.washingt…

Trump calls off AI executive order over concern it could weaken US tech edge
President Donald Trump has called off plans to sign a new executive order on artificial intelligence hours before an expected White House ceremony

Sources and documents detail Satya Nadella's effort to revamp Microsoft's senior leadership, creating a startup-style operating model to compete in the AI race (Ashley Stewart/Business Insider)
https://www.businessinsider.com/satya-nadella-microsoft…

Satya Nadella is reorganizing Microsoft around AI — and changing who holds power
Microsoft is reshaping its leadership for the AI era as CEO Satya Nadella pushes flatter teams, faster decision-making, and AI-focused executives.

Are you confused by what the heck happened yesterday with the cancellation of Trump's AI-cyber order?
Check out today's Metacurity, which synthesizes and clearly explains it all based on some mighty reporting by an amazing crew of DC's top political reporting pros.
https:/…

Trump AI order dramatically collapses after Sacks-led revolt over cyber oversight
EU cops dismantle cybercriminals' favorite VPN service, Edmonton partnered with ethical 'scam baiters' to stop $42m in losses, Kimwolf builder Dort arrested in Canada, The Kremlin hijacked Bluesky accounts in influence op, Google accidentally leaked details about unfixed Chromium issue, much more

Sources: Anthropic is in talks to rent servers powered by Microsoft-designed chips; source: Anthropic has steadily increased its Azure usage since November 2025 (The Information)
https://www.theinformation.com/articles/anthropic-talks-use-microsofts-ai-chips…

Anthropic Is in Talks to Use Microsoft’s AI Chips
Anthropic is in talks to rent servers powered by Microsoft-designed AI server chips as it seeks more computing power to meet rising demand for its AI, according to two people who spoke to executives involved in the discussion. Winning Anthropic as a customer would be a coup for Microsoft, whose ...

A look at Jane Street's push to supercharge trading with AI and become a major AI investor; it invested $1B in CoreWeave in April and has a stake in Anthropic (Gregory Zuckerman/Wall Street Journal)
https://www.wsj.com/tech/ai/jane-street-ai

A look at the nonprofit Current AI, backed by $400M in commitments from many partners including $100M from France, that's funding open, public AI infrastructure (Kate Park/TechCrunch)
https://techcrunch.com/2026/07/19/nonpr…

Nonprofit Current AI is racing to build the World Wide Web of AI, free for all | TechCrunch
Current AI, a non-profit building AI that leaves no one culture behind, has made remarkable progress across devices, AI chat and more.

Sources: Trump delayed signing the AI EO because "he just hates regulation"; he spoke with Mark Zuckerberg, Elon Musk, and David Sacks just prior to the delay (Axios)
https://www.axios.com/2026/05/21/trump-ai-executive-order-postponed-why

Anti-"doomer" feedback derails Trump's AI executive order
Any further delay of the order means more time for infighting and disagreements.

Stability AI releases a new family of audio models called Stability Audio 3.0 that is trained on licensed data; the top model can generate six-minute songs (Ivan Mehta/TechCrunch)
https://techcrunch.com/2026/05/20/stability-ai-releas…

Stability AI releases a new audio model that can create six-minute songs | TechCrunch
Stability Audio 3.0 small model can run on-device and generate two-minute long tracks

Jeff Bezos dismisses AI job fears, defends billionaires against "vilification", proposes eliminating income taxes for low earners, and praises President Trump (CNBC)
https://www.cnbc.com/2026/05/20/jeff-bezos-taxes-ai-corporations-trump.html

Bezos defends billionaires, hypes AI, talks taxes and praises Trump in major CNBC interview
Jeff Bezos rejected accusations that Amazon's decision to release a documentary on first lady Melania Trump was an effort to curry favor with the president.

Meta quietly releases StoryKit, a new mobile app that uses AI to create personalized children's stories, including illustrations and original music, in Mexico (Zac Hall/9to5Mac)
https://9to5mac.com/2026/07/21/meta-testing…

Meta testing StoryKit, an AI iPhone app that creates 'personalized children's stories' - 9to5Mac
Meta has quietly released a new iPhone app that uses AI to create personalized children’s stories, complete with illustrations, narration,...

A look at JD Vance's "AI doctrine", which combines pro-innovation VC principles, worker protections, and concerns about power concentration in dominant AI labs (Vivian Salama/The Atlantic)

What Does J. D. Vance Think of AI
The vice president is making a case that is part Silicon Valley, part MAGA.

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 (Sam Sabin/Axios)
https://www.axios.com/2026/07/21/cisco-open-source-ai-models-cybersecurity
…

Cisco open-sources AI models for bug hunting
The company is open-sourcing two small-language models designed just to hunt for software bugs.

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 (New York Times)
https://www.nytimes.com/2026/07/21/technology/meta-ai-facebook-instagra…

What Happened When Meta Used A.I. to Ban Accounts on Facebook and Instagram
Users said the technology mistakenly deleted their accounts. To resolve the issue, they still had to rely on A.I.

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 (Marina Temkin/TechCrunch)
https://techcrunch.com/2026/07/20/natural-rai…

Natural raises $30M to reinvent payments for AI agents — and take on Stripe | TechCrunch
The one-year-old startup aims to reinvent financial architecture for autonomous AI transactions.

US Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent says the Trump administration is looking into Chinese AI models over distillation claims and it could "sanction them" (Ashley Capoot/CNBC)
https://www.cnbc.com/2026/07/21/bessent-china-ai-sanctions.html

Bessent says U.S. could sanction China over AI model 'theft'
Chinese open-weight models are gaining steam against leading offerings from American companies like OpenAI and Anthropic.

In a rare joint statement, Five Eyes leaders warn AI models capable of taking down governments and businesses are mere months away, urging leaders to "act now" (Sarah Basford Canales/The Guardian)
https://www.theguardian.com/technology/…

AI models that can take down governments and business months away, rare Five Eyes statement warns
Signal agencies in Australia, the US, the UK, New Zealand and Canada sound alarm after Trump blocks foreign nationals from Anthropic’s Fable AI model

Note: the White House postpones a planned ceremony this afternoon for Trump to sign a new EO on AI and cybersecurity; major tech CEOs were invited to attend (Ashley Gold/Axios)
https://www.axios.com/2026/05/21/white-house-postpones-ai-eo-signing

Scoop: White House postpones AI EO signing ceremony
It's another setback for an effort that has been stalled by internal disagreements.

Tencent launches an international beta for QClaw, its OpenClaw-based AI agent, and says the Chinese version, launched in March, reached over 1M users in 10 days (T. K. Lin/KrASIA)
https://kr-asia.com/tencent-opens-international-beta-for-ai-agent-product-qclaw

Tencent opens international beta for AI agent product QClaw
OpenClaw’s founder publicly endorsed the product’s rollout.

Kimi K3 marks the arrival of frontier open-weight models, and the Kimi team has incredible culture and freedom of expression within a GPU-limited environment (Nathan Lambert/Interconnects AI)
https://www.interconnects.ai/p/kimi-k3-the-open-weights-escalation

Kimi K3: The open-weights escalation
The global implications on the AI ecosystem.

A speculative scenario titled "Europe 2031" projects economic and political instability in the EU if it fails to keep pace with the US and China in the AI race (Aisha Down/The Guardian)
https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2026/jun/20/e…

A viral doomsday scenario aims to shake Europe out of its AI complacency
Does a thought-experiment about US ascendancy in the technology say as much about AI jitters as it does about the reality?

Satya Nadella says the public wouldn't tolerate a few AI labs "doing all of the learning for the world", as Microsoft moves to provide low-cost models and tools (Wall Street Journal)
https://www.wsj.com/tech/ai/microsofts-sat

Glow, a cybersecurity startup that uses AI agents to monitor software and developer tools, emerges from stealth with a $180M Series A at a $1.2B valuation (Jagmeet Singh/TechCrunch)
https://techcrunch.com/2026/07/22/glow

Glow emerges from stealth at $1.2B valuation to challenge endpoint security in the AI era | TechCrunch
Glow is targeting a new class of endpoint risks created by the rapid adoption of AI agents and developer tools inside enterprises.

Google announces the Gemini Enterprise Agent Platform, a revamped developer tool built on Vertex AI that manages the full lifecycle of AI agent fleets (Radhika Rajkumar/ZDNET)
https://www.zdnet.com/article/google-cloud-next-enterprise-agent-platform-ai/…

How Google just revamped Gemini Enterprise for the agentic era - here's what's new
Meet Gemini Enterprise Agent Platform, the new developer tool for managing fleets of agents at scale.

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 (Emma Roth/The Verge)
https://www.theverge.com/tech/968572/google-gemini-flash-cyber-ai-s…

Google launches a cheaper alternative to large AI security models like Mythos
Google is launching a new cybersecurity-focused AI model, called Gemini 3.5 Flash Cyber, that’s capable of finding and patching vulnerabilities at a lower cost compared to larger models.

Shenzhen-listed Apple supplier Lingyi iTech seeks to raise $1.1B in a June 26 Hong Kong debut, as the electronic parts maker expands into AI hardware and robots (Iris Deng/South China Morning Post)
https://www.scmp.com/tech/article/3357705/

Apple supplier Lingyi seeks US$1.1 billion Hong Kong IPO to fund AI and robotics
The Shenzhen-listed components maker is using a Hong Kong float to fund its push into AI servers, smart glasses and robotics.

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 (Iain Martin/Forbes)
https://www.forbes.com/sites/iainmartin/2026/…

American Open-Source Labs Think They Can Beat China’s Best AI Startups
Chinese open-source models like Kimi and Deepseek are now dominant AI tools. American startups like Thinking Machines, Reflection AI and now Poolside are trying to challenge that.

Google Cloud and Wiz debut new AI security agents at Next '26, including Threat Hunting and Detection Engineering agents, to combat automated zero-day exploits (Frederic Lardinois/The New Stack)
https://thenewstack.io/google-cloud-cat-mouse/

Google wants AI defense to be as fast as AI offense
Google Cloud and Wiz launched new AI security agents at Next '26 to combat automated zero-day exploits and secure vibe-coded apps across multi-cloud environments.

Granta and the Commonwealth Foundation say they can't determine yet if AI was used to write a prize-winning short story after critics pointed to signs of AI use (The Guardian)
https://www.theguardian.com/books/2026/may…

Singapore announces a National AI Partnership with Google and an MoU with OpenAI, which will set up an AI lab and commit $234M to the city-state's AI ecosystem (Dylan Butts/CNBC)
https://www.cnbc.com/2026/05/20/singapore-

Singapore inks AI deals with Google, OpenAI as ChatGPT-maker commits $234 million to local ecosystem
Singapore has signed new partnerships with Google and OpenAI to strengthen the city-state's position as a global AI hub and accelerating AI deployment.

A look at "humanizer" and "autotyper" apps that help students evade AI-detection software by slowly auto-typing essays and making AI text sound less robotic (Dana Goldstein/New York Times)
https://www.nytimes.com/2026/06/…

Student Cheating Is Becoming Impossible to Detect in an A.I. Era
Big tech companies and small start-ups are using social media to hype new tools that allow students to trick teachers and A.I. detectors.

Jensen Huang said that Nvidia has "largely conceded" China's AI chip market to Huawei and should "expect nothing" regarding chip sale approvals to China (Lee Ying Shan/CNBC)
https://www.cnbc.com/2026/05/21/nvidia-jensen-huang-china…

Nvidia says it has ‘largely conceded’ China’s AI chip market to Huawei
Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang said the company has "largely conceded" China's advanced artificial intelligence chip market to Huawei.

Higgsfield AI premieres Hell Grind, a 95-minute fully AI-generated film, at Cannes and says it took two weeks and cost $500K to make, of which $400K was on AI (Isabelle Bousquette/Wall Street Journal)
https://www.ws…

Gavin Newsom signs an EO mandating state agencies work with the AI industry and others to study subsidies for companies that don't replace workers with AI (Cecilia Kang/New York Times)
https://www.nytimes.com/2026/05/21/technol

Gov. Gavin Newsom to Sign Executive Order Aimed at A.I. Job Loss
Gov. Gavin Newsom issued an executive order to explore an overhaul of labor policies to deal with potential mass job displacement from artificial intelligence.

Driverless car startup Bliq.ai says it has received approval for fully driverless road operations in Estonia, the first authorization of its kind in the EU (Cate Lawrence/Tech.eu)
https://tech.eu/2026/05/22/bliqai-wins-approval-for-fully-drive…

Bliq.ai wins approval for fully driverless road operations in Estonia
Driverless car startup Bliq.ai this week announced that it has received approval to operate its vehicles on public roads in Estonia without a driver behind the wheel. The approval marks the first authorisation of its kind in an EU member state and enables Bliq to begin fully driverless road operations under remote supervision. With a dozen vehicles already in operation and further expansion underway, Bliq currently operates what the company believes to be the largest completely driverless vehi…

As Europe falls behind the US and China in consumer AI, its engineering companies and AI startups are turning to industrial AI applications to boost efficiency (Marilen Martin/Bloomberg)
https://www.bloomberg.com/news/features/20

A profile of Sarah Polcz, the UC Davis law professor that Bernie Sanders' team consulted while developing his AI sovereign wealth fund proposal (Eli Rosenberg/The Information)
https://www.theinformation.com/articles/law-professor-behind-…

The Law Professor Behind Bernie’s AI Sovereign Wealth Fund Idea
A couple of weekends ago, Sarah Polcz, a University of California, Davis, law professor, and her husband, Adam Brown, a top scientist at Google’s DeepMind, hosted a party at their Portola Valley home that had all the trappings of a geeky good time. One guest piloted a drone that rained down ice ...

Jensen Huang says "these Chinese models are excellent", "open-source models that are excellent should be used", and "free AI should be great for hardware" (Zachary Basu/Axios)
https://www.axios.com/2026/07/22/nvidia-jensen-huang-china-o…

Exclusive: Nvidia's Jensen Huang defends Chinese AI amid Kimi panic
Huang told Axios that American companies should "absolutely" be allowed to use Chinese models.

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 (Murray Stassen/Music Business Worldwide)
https://www.

Sony Music sues Udio again, asserting over 30,000 recordings a judge barred the major from adding to its
The complaint was filed on July 20 in New York…

Chicago-based Empirical Security, which uses AI to help companies predict threats by monitoring exploited vulnerabilities, raised a $25M Series A (Chris Metinko/Axios)
https://www.axios.com/pro/enterprise-software-deals/2026/07/20…

Exclusive: Empirical Security raises $25M
The cybersecurity startup uses AI modeling to stay ahead of attacks and vulnerabilities.

Source: Z.ai completed construction of a 1 GW data center housing only Chinese chips; Z.ai has built or operates several computing clusters each with 10K chips (Bloomberg)
https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2026-07-20/z…

Augustus, which is building a federally chartered "AI-native" clearing bank designed around stablecoins, raised $180M led by Tiger Global at a $1B valuation (Krisztian Sandor/CoinDesk)
https://www.coindesk.com/business/2026/07/

Stablecoin bank Augustus raises $180 million to build a clearing bank for the AI era
The firm, freshly valued at $1 billion, aims to replace legacy correspondent banking with always-on infrastructure that connects traditional payment systems and stablecoins.

Granta says it will stop publishing short story contest winners or join publishing partnerships it doesn't control after AI use allegations against a winner (Ella Creamer/The Guardian)
https://www.theguardian.com/books/2026/jun/20/granta-ma…

Granta stops publishing short story award winners over AI controversy
Literary magazine will no longer engage in ‘external publishing partnerships’ after Commonwealth prize furore

TSMC forecasts "several years" of margin dilution as overseas fab projects ramp up; the company has announced $200B in investment into US manufacturing (Kai Nicol-Schwarz/CNBC)
https://www.cnbc.com/2026/07/22/trump-pressure-ai-chips-us-tsmc-margins.html…

Trump's push for American-made AI chips hits TSMC's margins
The Taiwan-based chipmaker has announced $200 billion in investment into U.S. manufacturing since Trump returned to power in 2025.

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% (Luke Fountain/CNBC)
https://www.cnbc.com/2026/07/21/openai-anthropic-ai-lobbying-spending-q2-2026.…

OpenAI, Anthropic boost lobbying as legacy tech and defense spending slips
The two AI developers spent a combined $3.17 million in the second quarter, up 23% from the first three months of 2026.

Sources: last-minute calls with Elon Musk, Mark Zuckerberg, David Sacks, and others helped persuade President Trump not to sign the highly anticipated AI EO (Washington Post)
https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/20

Pressure from Silicon Valley helped block Trump’s expected order on AI
Industry leaders warned in last-minute calls to the president that the proposed safety vetting system could inhibit development of the pivotal technology.

Spotify closes up 13% after announcing new features and 2030 guidance, forecasting a compound annual growth rate in the mid-teens and gross margins of 35%-40% (Samantha Subin/CNBC)
https://www.cnbc.com/2026/05/21/spotify-spot-stock-guidance-investor-day-ai.ht…

Spotify soars 13% after announcing AI music deal with UMG, guidance
Spotify, which is holding its first investor day in four years, is now under the direction of co-CEOs Gustav Söderström and Alex Norström.

Sources: David Sacks told President Trump that federal reviews of AI models before release would slow down innovation and hurt the US in its AI race with China (Politico)
https://www.politico.com/news/2026/05/21/trump-ai-order-sacks-00933295

Commure, which offers AI, revenue cycle management, and workflow automation tools for healthcare providers, raised $70M led by GC at a $7B post-money valuation (Paige Minemyer/Fierce Healthcare)
https://www.fiercehealthcare.com/ai-and-ma

Anthropic commits another $20M to Public First Action, after giving $20M earlier in 2026; PFA says it is a counterweight to a16z-backed Leading the Future (Wall Street Journal)
https://www.wsj.com/tech/ai/anthropic-…

Google's AI Search is endangering the open web; Cloudflare: between June 2025 and April 2026, human traffic to sites of businesses in many industries fell ~40% (Kate Conger/New York Times)
https://www.nytimes.com/2026/07/20/technol…

How Google’s A.I. Search Is Imperiling the Open Web
As Google incorporates more artificial intelligence into search, people are spending more time on Google. Some website operators are crying foul.

Hark, founded by Figure AI CEO Brett Adcock to build AI-powered devices, raised a $700M Series A led by Parkway Venture at a $6B post-money valuation (Samantha Kelly/Bloomberg)
https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2026-…

Modal Labs, which offers a serverless cloud platform to build AI apps and run AI inference, raised a $355M Series C at a $4.65B valuation, up from $1.1B in 2025 (Deepa Seetharaman/Reuters)
https://www.reuters.com/business/modal-labs-valued-465-b…

Tencent starts testing the new Xiaowei AI assistant powered by WeLM and DeepSeek models in its WeChat app in China, in an effort to catch up in the AI race (Luz Ding/Bloomberg)
https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2026-06-22/…

Sources detail how Elon Musk has de-emphasized SpaceX's original aim of reaching Mars as it prepares to go public, focusing instead on AI and other moonshots (Ryan Mac/New York Times)
https://www.nytimes.com/2026/04/22/techn…

Musk’s SpaceX Goals Shift Ahead of Its I.P.O.
As SpaceX prepares to go public, Mr. Musk has proposed moonshots that differ from the company’s original aim of reaching Mars.

Google says it is testing new ad formats in search results and AI Mode, including Conversational Discovery ads, Highlighted Answers, and AI-powered Shopping ads (Anu Adegbola/Search Engine Land)
https://searchengineland.com/google-tests-ne…

AMD CEO Lisa Su projects the CPU market will grow over 35% annually through 2031, up from 3% to 4% historically, driven by AI inference and agentic AI demand (Cheng Ting-Fang/Nikkei Asia)
https://asia.nikkei.com/business/tech/semi…

AMD CEO says unexpected CPU demand surge to last 5 years
Lisa Su says China is a key market but not for advanced AI chips sales

Study: off-balance sheet debt at Alphabet, Microsoft, Amazon, Meta, and Oracle grew an est. ~8x since 2022 to ~$1.65T, eclipsing ~$1.35T in balance sheet debt (Kohei Yamada/Nikkei Asia)
https://asia.nikkei.com/business/technolo…

Five US tech giants' hidden debts soar to $1.65tn on opaque AI funding
Data center leases, GPU supply contracts raise liabilities at Meta, Oracle, Nikkei study shows

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 (Lily Mae Lazarus/Fortune)
https://fortune.com/2026/07/21/skypilo

SkyPilot, from Databricks’ cofounder, raises $20M to be the Switzerland of AI compute
Backed by Lux Capital, SkyPilot helps customers use GPUs wherever they're available.

Google says Gemini 3.6 Flash delivers better coding, knowledge work, and multimodal performance while reducing output token usage by up to 17% vs. 3.5 Flash (MacKenzie Sigalos/CNBC)
https://www.cnbc.com/2026/07/21/google-gemini-flash-ai-mythos-rival.html

Google expands Gemini lineup with cheaper models and new Mythos rival
Google is expanding Gemini with cheaper, more efficient models and a new cybersecurity offering as it tries to close product gaps and compete on cost.

Sources: the US and China plan to hold AI talks in September when President Xi visits the US, realizing a significant outcome of the Trump-Xi summit in May (Laurie Chen/Reuters)
https://www.reuters.com/world/china/us-china-hold-ai-talks-september-…

Google invests in independent movie studio A24 as part of a new AI partnership; sources say Google is investing $75M, equal to what Thrive invested in 2024 (Ben Fritz/Wall Street Journal)
https://www.wsj.com/tech/ai/google-investi