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• Prediction market political betting on insider info spreads in DC; sources: WH lawyers raised alarms over anonymous Polymarket bets on the Iran ceasefire timing (Wall Street Journal)
• How the Trump administration shifted from a "light-touch" approach to AI policy to an interventionist stance that led to restrictions on top AI models in the US (Leo Schwartz/The Information)
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• A review of Microsoft's 13-inch Surface Laptop shows 8GB of RAM is not enough for a good Windows 11 experience; PC makers have unveiled upcoming 8GB laptops (Antonio G. Di Benedetto/The Verge)
• Analysis: recent open weight models lag frontier closed models' cyber capabilities by 4 to 7 months, a narrower gap than the 6 to 10 months through most of 2025 (AI Security Institute)
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• Feathery, which develops an AI operating and decisioning system for financial services, raised $30M in total funding, including a recently completed Series A (FinTech Global)
• China's National Data Administration says the country's daily AI token consumption hit 140T in March 2026, up from 100T in December 2025 and 100B in early 2024 (Minxiao Chang/South China Morning Post)
• London-based Risk Ledger, which helps organizations manage supply chain cyber risks, raised a £24M Series B led by Axiom Equity, taking total funding to £33.8M (Ionut Arghire/SecurityWeek)
• Data infrastructure startup Cribl acquires CardinalOps, which offers AI-powered threat detection tools and had raised $40M, sources say for around $100M (Meir Orbach/CTech)
• Sources: China's National AI Industry Investment Fund gained voting rights in DeepSeek by joining its $7.4B round; other investors like Tencent and JD got none (Bloomberg)
• Thira, an AI startup founded by Apptio co-founders to develop AI agents that handle back-office tasks such as IT support, raised a $21M seed led by Madrona (Todd Bishop/GeekWire)
• Japan plans to buy 27,500 Nvidia Rubin chips to develop a domestic AI foundation model for robots, in a Noetra-led effort that includes SoftBank, Sony, and NEC (Bloomberg)
• Anthropic says Claude Fable 5 will be included in Max and Team Premium plans at 50% of limits from July 20 and via usage credits for Pro and Team Standard users (Claude/@claudeai)
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