• NJ Governor says a software error at DMV led to the improper voter registration of ~6,600 noncitizens between June 2023 and June 2024; 400 of those cast ballots (Tracey Tully/New York Times)
• Federal lobbying disclosures: Anthropic spent $1.97M in Q2, up 26% QoQ, and OpenAI spent $1.2M, up 18%; Meta remained the largest spender at $5.99M, down 15% (Luke Fountain/CNBC)
• Meta adds the Xbox Game Pass starter edition to its Horizon Plus plan, which costs $60/year or $8/month; the starter pass allows 10 hours of gaming per month (Scott Stein/CNET)
• Analysis: every frontier AI model tested in cybersecurity evaluations attempted to "cheat", led by GPT-5.4 at 14.1% of tasks; Mythos cheated the least, at 7.8% (AI Security Institute)
• Apple says it fixed a vulnerability in its Hide My Email tool that let anyone see a user's real email address; researchers first reported the issue in June 2025 (Joseph Cox/404 Media)
• Meta quietly releases StoryKit, a new mobile app that uses AI to create personalized children's stories, including illustrations and original music, in Mexico (Zac Hall/9to5Mac)
• University of Tennessee Research Foundation sues Anthropic in Delaware for allegedly infringing neural network patents, the first such case against Anthropic (Blake Brittain/Reuters)
• OpenAI executive Chris Lehane says Sam Altman plans to brief the Trump administration and US lawmakers next week on the company's upcoming generation of models (Maggie Eastland/Bloomberg)
• Google says Gemini 3.6 Flash delivers better coding, knowledge work, and multimodal performance while reducing output token usage by up to 17% vs. 3.5 Flash (MacKenzie Sigalos/CNBC)
• Google launches Gemini 3.6 Flash, 3.5 Flash-Lite, and 3.5 Flash Cyber, and says it has started its "most ambitious pre-training run yet" for Gemini 4 (Tulsee Doshi/Google)
• Nvidia details its Vera CPU for data centers, its first CPU with a custom core design, featuring 88 cores and 176 threads, set for general release in H2 2026 (Jake Roach/Tom's Hardware)
• Sources: Apple plans to launch Apple Upgrade, a leasing program for iPhone, iPad, Mac, and Apple Watch, in partnership with Klarna in the US next week (Mark Gurman/Bloomberg)
• Google says Gemini 3.5 Flash Cyber is a "cost-efficient and highly capable alternative" to models like Mythos, available first to governments and some partners (Emma Roth/The Verge)
• Google prices Gemini 3.6 Flash lower than 3.5 Flash, at $1.50/1M input tokens and $7.50/1M output tokens; Gemini 3.5 Flash-Lite is priced at $0.30 and $2.50 (Abner Li/9to5Google)
• Augustus, which is building a federally chartered "AI-native" clearing bank designed around stablecoins, raised $180M led by Tiger Global at a $1B valuation (Krisztian Sandor/CoinDesk)
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• FIFA’s World Cup Halftime Show Puts American-Style Spectacle on the World Stage
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• FIFA Doesn’t Have a Plan to Deal With Climate Change
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• SteelSeries Coupon Codes: 15% Off in July 2026
• AWS Billing Glitch Hits Customers With Billion-Dollar Fees
• What Cities From Chicago to Washington, DC, Look Like Under a Blanket of Wildfire Smoke
• Polymarket’s Corporate Structure Is a Mystery—Even to Some of Its Former Employees
• ICE Is Using Data Broker Tools to ‘Identify Unaccompanied Minors’ and ‘Fraud’
• ‘The Odyssey’ Backlash Failed Tremendously
• Lyft’s CEO Says, ‘We’re the Good Uber’
• The Best New Camping Gear at REI (2026): Tents, Coolers, Bikes, More
• Conspiracy Theorists Think Trump’s Speech Paves the Path to the Insurrection Act
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| • How to connect your Ring doorbell camera to your smart TV
• Meta Horizon+ subscriptions now include Xbox Game Pass starter edition
• Lego just unveiled a 1,500-piece X-Files set, complete with Mulder, Scully and a grey alien
• This Spotify setting makes your music feel DJ mixed
• Garmin finally made a screenless fitness tracker
• Samsung aims to help you make more sense of health data with a new AI-powered assistant
• The Light Flip is a minimalist flip phone that leaves out all those distracting apps
• The UK will legalize plug-in solar on August 27
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• xMEMS unveils super tiny cooling fan that fits inside smart glasses
• Samsung establishes a robotics division
• Sony files another lawsuit against AI music generator Udio
• Judge approves Anthropic's record-breaking $1.5 billion settlement for AI copyright lawsuit
• FCC plans to ban companies selling DJI products under other brands
• Amazon's Adaptive Display for Fire TVs is officially rolling out today
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• Samsung just unveiled a Galaxy credit card ahead of Unpacked
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