• Mercor acquires Deeptune, which builds reinforcement learning environments for AI agents, three months after CEO Brendan Foody backed Deeptune's $43M Series A (Lily Mae Lazarus/Fortune)
• Sources: Netflix executives are increasingly worried about declining engagement and are exploring adding live TV and bundling streaming services like Peacock (Wall Street Journal)
• Coinbase's chief legal officer, Paul Grewal, is stepping down after six years; VP of legal Molly Abraham moves into his role with the title of general counsel (Hannah Lang/Reuters)
• Federal Reserve Chair Kevin Warsh names Marc Andreessen and Xbox CEO Asha Sharma to lead a task force on the economic impact of new technologies, including AI (Andrew Ackerman/Washington Post)
• Google says it will automatically add a disclosure to ads that are made with its AI advertising tools, expanding the disclosure beyond election ads to all ads (Sarah Perez/TechCrunch)
• PitchBook: US venture funding hit $412.7B in H1 2026, up 30% on all of 2025, with AI startup funding accounting for 86%, or $355.9B; Q2 saw seven $1B+ rounds (Duncan Riley/SiliconANGLE)
• Anthropic, set to add usage-based billing for Fable 5 on July 12, aims to return the model to Claude's subscription plans "when sufficient capacity allows" (Maxwell Zeff/Wired)
• The EU Parliament advances a bill letting tech companies scan for CSAM, reviving a proposal rejected in March, with an exemption for E2EE services like WhatsApp (Sam Clark/Politico)
• OpenAI is discontinuing ChatGPT Atlas, its standalone desktop browser, in favor of the new ChatGPT desktop app (Zac Hall/9to5Mac)
• Sources: AI contractor marketplace Mercor is discussing raising new funds at a roughly $20B valuation, less than a year after raising money at a $10B valuation (Bloomberg)
• OpenAI merges Codex and ChatGPT desktop apps for Mac and Windows under a new ChatGPT desktop app, allowing users to switch between Codex, Chat, and Work (Zac Hall/9to5Mac)
• GPT-5.6 Sol costs $5 per 1M input tokens and $30 per 1M output tokens, GPT-5.6 Terra costs $2.50 and $15, and GPT-5.6 Luna costs $1 and $6 (OpenAI)
• OpenAI broadly releases GPT-5.6, and launches ChatGPT Work, an AI agent that can gather context across apps and files to create documents, on Mac and Windows (Axios)
• Microsoft President Brad Smith says the US now has AI "regulation without transparent or complete rules", and adds that "without rules, businesses can't plan" (Beatrice Nolan/Fortune)
• Kraken Technology, which designs and builds autonomous maritime platforms, such as uncrewed subsurface vessels, raised a $175M Series B at a $1B valuation (John Reynolds/Tech.eu)
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