• With each successive era of AI, from early scaling, to reasoning, to agentic, open models have taken half as long to catch up to the first closed model (SemiAnalysis)
• Rundoo, a provider of AI-powered business operations software for independent supply stores, raised a $30M Series B led by Battery Ventures (Mike Wheatley/SiliconANGLE)
• OpenAI President Greg Brockman's role has expanded significantly, giving him control over its product and scaling teams following a wave of executive departures (Hayden Field/The Verge)
• Following abandoned IPO attempts in NYC and London, Shein is struggling to grow as it nears a Hong Kong listing at a fraction of its peak valuation of $100B (Sui-Lee Wee/New York Times)
• How politicians who once championed data centers, including Greg Abbott and Josh Shapiro, are now slowing their development as the issue becomes a liability (Wall Street Journal)
• Sources: Anthropic's bankers said the company could raise $100B+ in its IPO, which could value it at $2T, in recent discussions with potential investors (New York Times)
• Amazon raises prices for its Echo smart speakers, Fire TV line, Kindle devices, and eero mesh networking systems to offset increases in memory and storage costs (Sebastian Herrera/Fortune)
• Helcim, a payments processor for SMBs, raised a CA$53M Series C led by Business Development Bank of Canada's Growth Venture Fund at a CA$250M valuation (Madison McLauchlan/BetaKit)
• OpenAI says California should amend SB 53 to expand safeguards, including requiring monitoring of frontier models under training, following AI agent hacks (Chase DiFeliciantonio/Politico)
• Gurman: as part of Vision Pro cuts, Apple is largely shutting down a team focused on gaming and reducing the size of a unit producing immersive video content (Chance Miller/9to5Mac)
• Nvidia makes a minority investment in Cloverleaf, which works with utilities and energy providers to secure infrastructure for data center sites (Rashika Singh/Reuters)
• OpenAI cuts GPT-5.6 Sol's API and credit prices by over 20% for the next three months, to $4/1M input tokens and $20/1M output tokens (Anzar Mehraj/Reuters)
• Sources: Devoted Health, which uses AI to help coordinate medical care for those enrolled in Medicare Advantage, is raising new funding at a $25B valuation (Katie Roof/Business Insider)
• Nvidia says its general-purpose coding agent system AVO scored 100% across all 25 environments in the ARC-AGI-3 public set, completing all 183 levels (Terry Chen/NVIDIA Technical Blog)
• Anthropic hires Amir Salek, who ran Google's TPU business until 2022, to join its compute team as part of a push to develop its own chips (Dina Bass/Bloomberg)
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| • Apple reportedly cut more than 200 jobs across Vision Pro and Siri software teams
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• Walmart will finally accept tap to pay in stores by the end of 2026
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