• Sources: Vista Equity and Quinti made a takeover bid for Criteo that values the French ad tech company at a 50%+ premium to its stock price in recent weeks (Bloomberg)
• Source: Thrive Capital spinoff Thrive Holdings seeks to raise around $2B from SoftBank, Altimeter, D1, and others, after previously raising $1B (Julia Hornstein/The Information)
• Sources: CISA's Attack Surface Evaluation team is using Mythos to audit government code repositories and has already uncovered a large number of vulnerabilities (Raphael Satter/Reuters)
• SCOTUS declines to block a Texas law requiring app stores and developers to verify the age of mobile device users, and for minors to obtain parental consent (Andrew Chung/Reuters)
• Sources: the US considers housing the Strategic Bitcoin Reserve at Commerce instead of Treasury amid concerns over Treasury's legal authority to manage it (Bloomberg)
• Xbox appoints Helen Chiang as its first COO; Chiang was previously corporate vice president for the Minecraft Franchise and the studio head of Minecraft (Sam Smith/GamesBeat)
• Source: Xbox Game Pass currently has about 30M subscriptions; document: Microsoft had projected Game Pass subscriptions would reach around 77M this year (Ben Fritz/Wall Street Journal)
• A term sheet shows Tencent is seeking to raise as much as $1.55B in a selldown of part of its stake in short-video app operator Kuaishou through a block trade (Julia Fioretti/Bloomberg)
• Tencent releases Hy3, a 295B-parameter model that it says is competitive with GLM-5.1 and 5.2, under the Apache 2.0 license, following a preview launch in April (Sam Witteveen/VentureBeat)
• Source: Mercor hit over $2B in gross revenue run rate in June, double its pace in April, and is profitable on a free cash flow basis (Julia Hornstein/The Information)
• Illinois Governor JB Pritzker signs SB 315, a bill requiring annual third-party safety audits of leading AI companies; OpenAI and Anthropic backed the bill (Adam Harrington/CBS News)
• Nintendo plans to stop selling the original Switch, Lite, and OLED in Europe from mid-February 2027 and update the Switch 2 to comply with new EU battery rules (Andrew Webster/The Verge)
• Filing: Strategy sold 3,588 bitcoin for ~$216M between June 29 and July 5 to replenish its USD reserve; its holdings have an $11.4B paper loss at current prices (James Hunt/The Block)
• Microsoft's Xbox unit plans to cut 3,200 jobs over the next year, including 1,600 on Monday, and divest up to five studios, including Ninja Theory, in a "reset" (Bloomberg)
• Microsoft is laying off ~4,800 employees, or ~2.1% of its workforce; most are in sales or Xbox, where ~20% of jobs are set to be cut by the end of FY 2027 (Tom Warren/The Verge)
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