• X relaunches its Android app after a year-long rewrite from scratch; Nikita Bier calls it "one of the largest engineering projects" in the company's history (Sarah Perez/TechCrunch)
• Taiwan indicts a former TSMC executive for allegedly stealing trade secrets, in what authorities say is the first National Security Act case involving China (Cheng Ting-Fang/Nikkei Asia)
• Natural, which aims to help companies let their AI agents make autonomous payments, raised a $30M Series A led by Forerunner, bringing its total raised to $40M (Marina Temkin/TechCrunch)
• OpenAI paused internal access to an unreleased model that disproved the Erdős unit distance conjecture after it repeatedly found ways to act outside its sandbox (OpenAI)
• Anduril and Archer unveil an autonomous aircraft platform designed for commercial and military uses, along with an autonomous attack rotorcraft called Thunder (Reuters)
• Cybersecurity companies say hackers are exploiting vulnerable WordPress versions to take over websites; WordPress patched two critical security flaws last week (Lorenzo Franceschi-Bicchierai/TechCrunch)
• Source: Z.ai completed construction of a 1 GW data center housing only Chinese chips; Z.ai has built or operates several computing clusters each with 10K+ chips (Bloomberg)
• Chicago-based Empirical Security, which uses AI to help companies predict threats by monitoring exploited vulnerabilities, raised a $25M Series A (Chris Metinko/Axios)
• Levent Alpöge, a mathematician who works at Anthropic, says he was able to disprove the 87-year-old Jacobian conjecture with the help of Fable 5 (Matthew Sparkes/New Scientist)
• Infinity, founded by Jeremy Nixon, the creator of hacker network community AGI House, to build an inference library that runs on all chips, raised a $15M seed (Dominic-Madori Davis/TechCrunch)
• CAISI Director Chris Fall is resigning after taking over the federal AI testing institute in April; NIST Director Arvind Raman will serve as acting director (Maria Curi/Axios)
• Source: Tencent is in talks to acquire Israeli game developer SuperPlay in a deal valuing SuperPlay at $1B-$1.5B; Playtika acquired SuperPlay in 2024 for $690M (Golan Hazani/CTech)
• Billionaire-backed Building A Better California reserves $87M in TV ad time to oppose California's proposed one-time wealth tax; Sergey Brin put $82M into BABC (New York Times)
• Chinese open models are proper competition that should be welcomed, not something to ban or treat as a danger, and open-sourcing is an old business strategy (Bill Gurley/Washington Post)
• Sensor Tower: the number of new apps released in Apple's App Store doubled to ~560K in H1, vs. the ~600K added in all of 2025, as vibecoded apps flood the store (Kalley Huang/New York Times)
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