• Sources: Mark Zuckerberg met with Kalshi CEO Tarek Mansour about a possible takeover last year, before directing Meta employees to build a prediction market app (Bobby Allyn/NPR)
• Omen AI, which provides real-time coolant health monitoring for data centers, raised a $31M Series A led by Nava Ventures, bringing its total funding to $41.5M (Tim Fernholz/TechCrunch)
• Google shuts down the Tenor API, affecting GIF pickers on platforms like Discord, WhatsApp, and Bluesky; Nikita Bier says X has migrated elsewhere (Ben Schoon/9to5Google)
• Claude Sonnet 5 costs $2 per 1M input tokens and $10 per 1M output tokens through August 31, after which prices rise to $3 and $15, respectively (Zac Hall/9to5Mac)
• Anthropic launches Claude Sonnet 5, saying it nears Opus 4.8 performance at lower prices and is substantially better than Sonnet 4.6 for agentic work (Anthropic)
• A study of 22K US companies shows those spending most heavily on AI are adding workers faster than peers, but most gains are among tech companies and startups (Financial Times)
• Source: OpenAI engineers earlier this month told some colleagues they had figured out a way to more than halve the cost of inference (Stephanie Palazzolo/The Information)
• Anthropic launches Claude Science, an AI workbench that uses existing Claude models like Opus 4.8 to integrate 60+ scientific databases and specialized toolkits (Rebecca Bellan/TechCrunch)
• Ottawa-based Dominion Dynamics, which is building software, sensors, and drones to autonomously monitor the Arctic, raised a CA$139M Series A led by Georgian (Josh Scott/BetaKit)
• Visa, Mastercard, Stripe, BlackRock, Coinbase, and 140+ companies join Open Standard to launch Open USD, a stablecoin that shares earnings from its reserves (Kyle Baird/The Block)
• Schneider Electric agrees to buy industrial AI company Cognite in a $3.1B all-cash deal, and plans to combine Cognite with its industrial software company Aveva (Frank Connelly/Bloomberg)
• SCOTUS agrees to hear Apple's appeal of a 2025 contempt ruling in its Epic case after a district judge found Apple violated an order to make App Store changes (Mike Scarcella/Reuters)
• Google launches Nano Banana 2 Lite, a low cost text-to-image model that delivers outputs in four seconds, and rolls out Gemini Omni Flash to developers (The Keyword)
• Filings: Microsoft's Ireland hub generated $47B in pretax profits for FY 2025, or 38.1% of its global total; new EU rules require country-by-country reporting (Wall Street Journal)
• MDOTM, which makes AI software for asset and wealth managers, raised $27M led by Expedition Growth Capital, bringing its total funding to $36.5M (Ryan Lawler/Axios)
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