• Dario Amodei shares his view on AI regulation, says open-weights aren't a "sufficient" solution, defends testing, highlights a "crisis of trust" in AI, and more (Dario Amodei/@darioamodei)
• How Congressional lawmakers and aides are using AI tools with little oversight to write speeches and news releases, sort constituent mail, and more (Anna Liss-Roy/Washington Post)
• A look at Unitree's G1 and R1, the humanoid robots behind viral influencer accounts worldwide, as Unitree shipped 5,500+ units in 2025 and readies its China IPO (Zeyi Yang/Wired)
• Sources: Nvidia in talks to invest up to $3B in SoftBank-backed data center developer SB Energy that aims to IPO soon and is behind a huge OpenAI campus in Ohio (The Information)
• Sources: Mercor and other firms gathering data for AI labs are driving demand to buy or license internal datasets from startups shutting down or being acquired (Alix Coutures/The Information)
• A Wyoming woman joined a federal suit against xAI alleging her stepfather used Grok to turn one childhood photo of her into 7,000+ CSAM images he traded online (Washington Post)
• Anthropic details Claude's text watermark: it only shows Claude was likely involved, is sparse in code and factual text, and disappears after a full rewrite (Anthropic)
• Alibaba's open-weight models have accumulated 3B+ global downloads in the past six months; Hugging Face: Google had 418M downloads while Meta had 227M in 2026 (Saritha Rai/Bloomberg)
• Shanghai's tech-focused Star 50 index is up 29% in 2026, and its P/E ratio is 150+, above Nasdaq 100's 35, fueled by Beijing's tech push and an investor frenzy (William Sandlund/Financial Times)
• BCG: enterprise users spent a total of $300M on quantum computing in 2025, outranking the combined spending of research labs and governments for the first time (Isabelle Bousquette/Wall Street Journal)
• Effective altruism, hit by the SBF turmoil, is drawing record funding as Anthropic and OpenAI IPOs are set to mint new millionaires wedded to "effective giving" (Financial Times)
• Point2 Technology, which develops RF-based data center interconnection tech, raised a $136M Series B from LB Investment, Arm, Maverick Silicon, and others (Giacomo Lee/SDxCentral)
• SF-based Vals, which develops evaluations and benchmarks to test AI models on real-world tasks, raised a $40M Series A led by a16z at a $400M valuation (Abhinaya Prabhu/Tech Funding News)
• Sources: China plans to soon lift a travel ban on Manus founders as the company unwinds its $2B acquisition by Meta; CEO Xiao Hong plans to return to Singapore (Zijing Wu/Financial Times)
• Sources: Uber and Rapido discussed merging their India ride-hailing operations in May; talks collapsed after disagreements over the proposed deal's structure (The Economic Times)
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