01
Bloomberg Technology ↗
Microsoft is replacing OpenAI and Anthropic models with its own internally built MAI models in software products like Excel and Outlook, with tens of thousands of prompts in those apps now handled weekly by Microsoft's in-house AI. AI chief Mustafa Suleyman said in June that the company is trying to reduce and ultimately eliminate what it pays Anthropic, citing the high cost of relying on outside labs. Microsoft unveiled seven new AI models at its Build developer conference in June, including one it says matches the coding ability of Anthropic's Opus 4.6 at a lower cost. The shift comes as Microsoft's discounted pricing under its long-standing OpenAI partnership faces an uncertain future.
02
TechMeme ↗
SpaceXAI and Cursor plan to launch their first jointly developed AI model as soon as Wednesday, according to an internal memo sent to staff and reported by The Information. The companies pushed back the original launch timeline this week to improve the model's efficiency before release. The new model follows SpaceX's all-stock acquisition of Cursor, part of a push by Elon Musk's company to build what it calls the world's most useful AI models. It is expected to roll out inside Cursor's coding tools and xAI's Grok Build platform.
03
Reuters Technology ↗
Chinese authorities have held meetings with major domestic AI firms over the past month about potentially restricting overseas access to the country's most advanced AI models, including ones not yet released, according to Reuters. Companies involved in the talks include Alibaba, whose Qwen model is among China's most widely used, and the startup Z.ai, whose GLM-5.2 model is seen as approaching the capability of leading U.S. systems at a fraction of the cost. A summary of the discussions published in an official Supreme People's Court journal proposed a tiered system: basic open source tools would need only a simple filing, more advanced technology would face security reviews, and the most sensitive frontier models would be barred from public release or restricted to domestic use. Officials also discussed making theft of proprietary AI technology a national security offense and floated new curbs on who can fund domestic AI startups.
04
Ars Technica ↗
China's DeepSeek is developing its own AI chip designed for inference, the stage where a trained model generates responses for users, rather than for training new models, according to three sources cited by Reuters. The effort is at an early stage, with DeepSeek reaching out to external partners and holding talks with chip design, foundry, and memory companies. The push is driven by U.S. export controls that bar Chinese firms from buying Nvidia's most advanced chips, as well as Beijing's pressure on its tech champions to build domestic alternatives. DeepSeek has historically relied on both Nvidia and Huawei chips, and a U.S. ban on Huawei chip exports has helped that company capture roughly half of China's $50 billion domestic AI chip market.
05
The Verge ↗
Meta has launched Muse Image, the first image generation model built by its Superintelligence Labs division under Chief AI Officer Alexandr Wang, rolling it out across the Meta AI app and Instagram Stories in the U.S., with Facebook and additional messaging apps coming soon internationally. The model can generate images from text prompts, edit existing photos, and compose images that include friends by pulling from their public Instagram posts. Users can tag public Instagram accounts to incorporate their photos into a generated image, a feature that is enabled by default though accounts can opt out of being included. Muse Image is free for everyday use, with heavier usage requiring a paid Meta One subscription, and the model will also power more than 30 new AI effects on Instagram and be offered to advertisers.
06
Bloomberg Technology ↗
When Amazon sold its biggest ever bond earlier this year, investor orders poured in amid enthusiasm for the AI boom, but its latest bond sale is drawing a cooler reception. Amazon is seeking to raise at least $25 billion in a new dollar bond sale to fund its AI infrastructure spending, marking another jumbo debt offering as the company ramps up capital expenditures. The tepid response reflects growing investor fatigue with the wave of AI-related debt financing from major tech companies. Amazon has said it does not plan to issue additional debt for the remainder of 2026.
07
CNBC Technology ↗
Hesai Technology, a Shanghai based lidar maker, was blacklisted as a national security threat in 2024 by the U.S. Department of Defense, which designated the company a Chinese military entity, yet it still partners with Nvidia as a lidar supplier for the DRIVE Hyperion 10 autonomous vehicle platform. Security experts including Craig Singleton of the Foundation for Defense of Democracies warn that lidar's detailed mapping data could be turned against U.S. infrastructure, noting Chinese law can compel companies like Hesai to hand over data to Beijing. A Duke University researcher demonstrated to CNBC that compromised lidar hardware could fabricate objects or make real obstacles disappear from a sensor's output. Hesai's CEO has said its sensors lack the memory capacity to store data and that responsibility for securing collected data falls to its partners.
08
CNBC Technology ↗
Chip stocks sold off globally on Tuesday after Samsung's preliminary second quarter operating profit of about $58 billion, a 19-fold jump from a year earlier, failed to impress investors following the stock's 145% run up this year. U.S. memory makers Sandisk and Micron fell about 7% and 5% respectively, the SOXX semiconductor ETF slid roughly 5%, and Intel dropped 9% while Marvell, Lam Research, Applied Materials, and AMD each declined 6% or more. Investors were unsettled by high expectations for the AI trade and concerns about the sustainability of data center spending. The selloff was compounded by a separate report that China's DeepSeek is developing its own AI chip to reduce its dependence on Nvidia.
09
Bloomberg Technology ↗
British Columbia has retained outside counsel to pursue legal action against OpenAI over its failure to alert authorities to threats made on ChatGPT before the mass shooting at Tumbler Ridge Secondary School, one of the deadliest attacks in Canadian history. The shooter, an 18-year-old, killed five students and a teacher at the school after also killing her mother and young half brother at their home. The province's complaint alleges that in June 2025 OpenAI's automated systems flagged her account for gun violence activity and planning, and that a safety team urged company leadership to notify authorities, but the company instead deactivated the account. British Columbia has hired outside law firms to explore legal options, following separate lawsuits already filed against OpenAI by victims' families in U.S. federal court.
10
VentureBeat ↗
Anthropic has expanded Claude Cowork to mobile and web, turning what was a desktop-only agent into a cross-device platform where tasks can start on a laptop, continue running in the background, and be reviewed later from a phone. The rollout begins in beta with Max subscribers before expanding to other plans. Alongside the launch, Anthropic published usage data from 1.2 million anonymized Cowork sessions across more than 600,000 organizations, showing that only 8.7% of usage involved software development. The largest category, at 33.4%, was general business process work such as compiling reports and reconciling spreadsheets, followed by content creation and copywriting at 16.4%, suggesting Cowork's biggest audience is knowledge workers rather than coders.