• Samsung Galaxy Z Fold 8 review: comfortable when shut, 4:3 inner display is great, and impressive battery life, but no telephoto or IP68 and some app errors (Dominic Preston/The Verge)
• The UK CMA launches an investigation into Microsoft over potential consumer law breaches involving Microsoft 365 subscription renewals that added Copilot (Upmanyu Trivedi/Bloomberg)
• New York-based AI detection startup Pangram raised $9M led by Menlo, and releases Pangram 4.0 and its first AI image detection model, claiming 99.5% accuracy (Niko Gallogly/New York Times)
• BNY, the world's biggest bank for safeguarding assets, plans to use blockchain tech for its transfer agency record-keeping systems that service ~$8.6T in assets (Financial Times)
• OpenAI, Google, Meta, BlackRock, and others are recruiting electricians and carpenters by the thousands, with some of the highest pay the industry has ever seen (Lydia DePillis/New York Times)
• Lake Mary, Florida-based Spur Intelligence, which helps distinguish human and bot traffic to find fake users and threats, raised $200M led by Insight Partners (Julie Bort/TechCrunch)
• Freehand, which builds AI agents to manage supply chain spend and operations for Fortune 500 companies, raised a $75M Series B, after a $25M Series A in 2024 (Mary Ann Azevedo/Crunchbase News)
• London-based Agon, which is developing sovereign AI training infrastructure for European defense, emerges from stealth with a $7M pre-seed and a $23M seed (Ingrid Lunden/Resilience Media)
• Sources: Moonshot AI hit a $35B valuation after closing a $3.5B round, exceeding its initial target of $1B to $2B, and plans a Hong Kong IPO as soon as 2026 (Bloomberg)
• CXMT's IPO prospectus showed Alibaba had a nearly 5% stake, which is now worth $20B+, a nearly 20x return, based on CXMT's ~$464B closing market cap on July 28 (Wency Chen/South China Morning Post)
• Russia's FSB charges Telegram founder Pavel Durov with facilitating terrorist activities, including by Ukraine, and issues an international arrest warrant (Reuters)
• A look at Kioxia, the Japanese NAND flash memory maker that went from being cash-strapped in 2023 to an expected 30-fold jump in operating income in Q1 FY 2026 (Bloomberg)
• GPTZero finds AI hallucinations in four PwC Middle East reports; GPTZero's prior investigations led EY and KPMG to retract reports with apparent hallucinations (Financial Times)
• ETH Zurich spinout ZuriQ, which is developing trapped-ion quantum computing processors based on a 2D architecture, raised a $25.5M seed led by Quantonation (Tamara Djurickovic/Tech.eu)
• Sources: Google DeepMind has reassigned most of the AlphaFold papers' original authors over the past year; nearly a quarter of the full-time authors have left (Madhumita Murgia/Financial Times)
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| • Rare, fully-functional Nintendo Famicombox retro consoles were discovered in a Japanese love hotel
• Google shuts down its Nobel-prize winning AlphaFold project as it focuses on Gemini
• OpenAI says the rogue agent that hacked Hugging Face also breached other services
• Valve says Steam Machine reservation-holders aren't being leapfrogged
• xAI is challenging a new Minnesota law banning 'nudify' apps
• The US is banning foreign-made humanoid robots and power inverters
• eBay and its former execs settle cyberstalking case brought by journalist couple
• Fired Tesla manager says Full Self-Driving cars were 'rolling hazards'
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• Double Fine lays off about a third of its employees
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