01
Forbes Tech ↗
OpenAI said an internal version of Astra, its next major model family, produced new results for 10 problems in mathematics and theoretical computer science that had been open for at least a decade, including Alain Connes's rigidity conjecture, Ehrhart's volume conjecture and three problems from Paul Erdos's list. The headline result is an explicit construction of a non sofic group, a question left open since Mikhail Gromov introduced soficity in 1999. OpenAI published a 249 page manuscript collection alongside Lean 4 proof certificates on GitHub under an Apache 2.0 license, with a sorry count of zero, meaning no step in any formalized proof was left unproven. The company put the compute cost of finding the solutions at roughly $2,000 at Sol API rates.
02
CNBC Technology ↗
Alibaba unveiled Qwen3.8-Max on Monday, a 2.4 trillion parameter mixture of experts model that activates about 95 billion parameters per query and handles text, images and video with a one million token context window. On the Arena.AI leaderboard it became the highest ranked Chinese model for text tasks and placed second globally on vision, trailing only Anthropic's Claude Fable 5. Alibaba shares rose roughly 4.5 percent in New York premarket trading and about 7 percent in Hong Kong. The model is available through Alibaba Cloud Model Studio, with open weights due to follow next week.
03
The Verge ↗
The European Union's AI Act transparency obligations under Article 50 took effect on August 2, requiring companies to tell users when they are interacting with a chatbot rather than a person and to label AI generated or manipulated content such as deepfakes. The rules apply even to systems the Act does not classify as high risk, and they reach providers based outside the bloc whose output is used inside it. Penalties for breaching the obligations run up to 15 million euros or 3 percent of global annual turnover, whichever is higher.
04
Axios ↗
The White House said on Monday it had met its deadline to establish a voluntary framework for evaluating advanced AI models, but declined to say what the framework contains, who has seen it, or when companies will start using it. The Trump administration separately invited staffers from OpenAI, Google, Anthropic and other major labs to the White House on Tuesday to review the oversight framework. Policymakers, AI safety advocates and US allies have been waiting on the document as a signal of how Washington intends to supervise frontier models.
05
Reuters Technology ↗
DeepSeek released its V4 Flash model on Friday, and research firm Artificial Analysis found it is by far the cheapest well known model to run, at $0.14 per million input tokens and $0.28 per million output tokens. That works out to more than 100 times cheaper than Anthropic's Claude Fable 5. The model scored 50 out of 100 on the firm's Intelligence Index, which blends nine benchmarks across coding, reasoning and workplace style tasks, matching Google's Gemini 3.6 Flash and finishing one point behind Meta's Muse Spark 1.1 and GLM-5.2 from Z.AI.
06
CNBC Technology ↗
Palantir shares jumped 12 percent after second quarter revenue rose 93 percent year over year to $1.94 billion, with US commercial revenue up 149 percent to $764 million. GAAP operating income reached $912 million at a 47 percent margin, while adjusted operating income hit $1.19 billion. The company raised full year 2026 revenue guidance to roughly $8.15 billion, implying 82 percent growth, and lifted its US commercial outlook to at least $3.42 billion.
07
CNBC Technology ↗
Visa agreed to buy Israeli behavioral biometrics firm BioCatch from funds advised by Permira for $2.4 billion in cash, with the deal expected to close by the end of Visa's fiscal second quarter of 2027. BioCatch analyzes signals such as typing cadence, touchscreen swipes and device handling to spot fraud in real time, and its systems protect 1.8 billion devices and 760 million users across more than 350 banking clients in 21 countries. Visa framed the purchase as a response to generative AI making scams cheaper, faster and more convincing, a problem estimated to cost the global economy more than $1 trillion a year.
08
Financial Times Tech ↗
Olix, the British AI chip start up founded two years ago by 25 year old James Dacombe, raised $312 million at a $3.3 billion valuation, triple where it stood six months ago. The round was led by New York investor Fundomo, with participation from Arm, quant trading firm Hudson River Trading, Netflix co-founder Reed Hastings and the UK government's Sovereign AI fund. Olix is building inference systems around a novel photonic interconnect that splits each stage of inference onto specialized chips, a bet Dacombe frames as the end of Nvidia handling every AI workload.
09
Ars Technica ↗
A roughly $100 million deal will fit 50,000 Ukrainian drones with US developed AI software, one of the largest single drone orders in NATO. The order covers Shrike first person view drones built by Ukrainian manufacturer SkyFall running Auterion's Skynode S, which enables autonomous tracking and engagement of moving targets and lays the groundwork for future swarm attacks. Deliveries have already begun with the remainder due later this year, and software updates push across the entire fleet at once.
10
Bloomberg Technology ↗
Valar Atomics raised $1 billion in a Series B round led by Sequoia to build what it calls America's first nuclear gigasites, aimed at powering AI data centers. The company also closed a $200 million credit facility as it works toward becoming a vertically integrated industrial nuclear power company. Founder and chief executive Isaiah Taylor laid out the plan in an interview with Bloomberg Technology.