• Ripple Labs investor and exec Chris Larsen plans to spend $3.5M to help Alex Bores, a NY congressional candidate at the center of a proxy war over AI regulation (New York Times)
• Sources: GameStop is preparing to make an offer for eBay after quietly building a stake; GameStop had a market cap of ~$11B as of May 1, while eBay had ~$45B (Lauren Thomas/Wall Street Journal)
• Avoca, whose AI agents let physical services businesses handle inbound calls and dispatch, raised $125M+ across seed, Series A, and Series B at a $1B valuation (Allie Garfinkle/Fortune)
• A UK court orders Samsung to pay ZTE $392M for patents needed to enable phone network access; Samsung faces similar suits from ZTE in China, Germany, and Brazil (Sam Tobin/Reuters)
• Waymo says it is continuing to "refine" its system preventing kids under 18 from riding alone, after adult riders reported new age-verification checks (Aarian Marshall/Wired)
• xAI launches Grok 4.3, featuring "always-on reasoning", 1M token context window, and low API pricing, and releases a voice cloning suite called Custom Voices (Carl Franzen/VentureBeat)
• Servers operated by Ubuntu and its parent company Canonical have been down for more than a day, following a "sustained, cross-border attack" (Dan Goodin/Ars Technica)
• Apple has stopped offering a 256GB storage option for the Mac mini globally; Mac mini now starts at 512GB for $799 in the US (Joe Rossignol/MacRumors)
• The Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences issues new rules saying acting and writing must be performed by humans and not AI to be eligible for Oscars (Lisa Richwine/Reuters)
• Sources: Cerebras is seeking to raise as much as $4B in its IPO and is targeting a valuation of about $40B (Bloomberg)
• How influencers boosting US-based AI and opposing Chinese AI are paid with money tied to Leading the Future, funded by execs from OpenAI, Palantir, a16z, others (Taylor Lorenz/Wired)
• "Podslop" is flooding listening platforms like Spotify; Podcast Index: of ~11K new podcast feeds in a recent 9-day span, ~39% were likely for AI content shows (Ashley Carman/Bloomberg)
• Pushing back on AI job loss fears, AWS CEO Matt Garman says Amazon plans to hire 11,000 software engineering interns in 2026, a figure in line with recent years (Ben Shimkus/Business Insider)
• Some retail traders are training AI agents to buy and sell assets on their behalf, as exchanges like Polymarket and Bybit roll out agent-friendly interfaces (Emily Nicolle/Bloomberg)
• The US, UK, Australia, Canada, and New Zealand publish guidance on orgs' use of agentic AI systems, saying many give AI more access than can be safely monitored (Greg Otto/CyberScoop)
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