• Nevada granted Tesla a robotaxi permit, but capped the fleet at 10 vehicles, not 5,000 that Tesla sought, banned airport pickups, and ordered other restrictions (Joann Muller/Axios)
• Google adds a toggle in Gemini and Flow to remove visible watermarks from AI-generated images, videos, and music; SynthID watermarks and C2PA metadata remain (Emma Roth/The Verge)
• Apple officially opens ad bookings for businesses on Apple Maps ahead of an upcoming full rollout across the US and Canada (Ryan Christoffel/9to5Mac)
• Alibaba releases weights for Qwen3.8 models under Apache 2.0 license, including Qwen3.8-27B, which it says beats Qwen3.7-Plus and excels in real-world coding (@alibaba_qwen)
• In Q2, "other income", mostly from investment gains, at Amazon and Alphabet totaled ~$121B after taxes and made up 66% and 71%, respectively, of profits (Jonathan Weil/Wall Street Journal)
• Source: Greg Brockman is "in founder mode" and getting more involved across every level of OpenAI to build out a leadership team ahead of an expected IPO (Madison Mills/Axios)
• France's top court blocks a bill banning social media for under-15s, saying it infringed upon freedom of expression; Macron orders the PM to rework the bill (Reuters)
• Sources: stablecoin payments company RedotPay has delayed its plans for a US IPO to 2027 or later, as it seeks regulatory approvals and deals with legal issues (Bloomberg)
• Chip equipment maker Lam Research plans to invest $3B+ over five years to expand its global R&D network, as it seeks to increase its experiment capacity by 50%+ (Anzar Mehraj/Reuters)
• DeepSeek debuts DeepSeek Harness under the MIT license in developer preview, touting a design where "everything is a plugin" that can be swapped out as a plugin (Carl Franzen/VentureBeat)
• Sources: Alibaba is nearing a deal to sell its Lingxi Games to PE firm Trustar Capital at a potential $1.5B+ valuation, as Alibaba continues its reorganization (Bloomberg)
• Epic v. Google: in a compliance hearing, a judge orders Google to remove "anticompetitive friction" for installing third-party app stores from its Play Store (Sean Hollister/The Verge)
• Sources: JPMorgan Chase terminated its banking relationship with Polymarket in 2025 over regulatory concerns, though it still maintains some ties to the company (Financial Times)
• Blackbird and Airtree revalue Canva at $34.9B, down from $42B in 2025, as it struggles in the AI era; Canva's internal valuation falls to $31B, down from $38.9B (Australian Financial Review)
• Z.ai debuts GLM-5.3, which uses the same base model as GLM-5.2 with scaled post-training for stronger coding skills, and says it'll release weights in two weeks (Z.ai)
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