China's Companion Law Forces Doubao, Qwen Offline
China's new AI anthropomorphic interaction rules take effect July 15, forcing ByteDance and Alibaba to shut down persistent AI companion features and permanently delete user conversation data.
News
Anthropic Signs $19B Lease With Former Bitcoin Miner
Anthropic signed a 20-year, $19 billion data center lease with TeraWulf at a former aluminum smelter in Kentucky, its largest dedicated infrastructure commitment yet.
Anthropic Caught Qwen Running 25,000 Fake Claude Accounts
Anthropic accused Alibaba's Qwen lab of running 25,000 fraudulent accounts that extracted 28.8 million Claude interactions in the largest AI distillation attack on record.
UN AI Commission Launches Without Google or OpenAI
The UN and ITU launched a new AI for Good Global Commission with 40+ founding members, but Google, Meta, and OpenAI are not among them.
Mechanical Turk Closes - AI Ate Its Own Training Data
Amazon will stop accepting new customers for Mechanical Turk on July 30, 2026, retiring the crowdsourcing platform that spent 21 years training the AI models now replacing it.
Midjourney Asks Court to Expose Studio AI Practices
Midjourney has asked a federal judge to compel Disney, Universal, and Warner Bros. to disclose their own AI training practices - using the studios' conduct as a fair-use and unclean-hands defense in a high-stakes copyright case.
Claude Hits Azure GA on NVIDIA's Blackwell Ultra Hardware
Anthropic's Claude models are now generally available in Microsoft Foundry on Azure, running on NVIDIA GB300 Blackwell Ultra NVL72 racks - with vendor numbers claiming 40% faster token generation than H100.
Alibaba Bans Claude Code, Citing Hidden Tracking Code
Alibaba classified Claude Code as high-risk software after a researcher alleged version 2.1.91 silently identified Chinese corporate users, escalating a bitter distillation war between the two companies.
SpaceX AI Device - Real Prototype or Investor Theater?
The WSJ says SpaceX showed investors a Grok-powered AI handset before its IPO. Musk called it false. We examine the hardware stack and what the denial actually means.
Crusoe Eyes $3B Round to Triple AI Factory Valuation
Crusoe is in talks to raise roughly $3 billion at a $30 billion valuation, tripling what investors paid eight months ago as AI compute demand outstrips available infrastructure.
US Adds 57K June Jobs as AI Hiring Slowdown Deepens
The Bureau of Labor Statistics reported 57,000 nonfarm payrolls added in June 2026, about half the consensus forecast, as tech and finance shed roles at 25,000-28,000 per month.
AI Took 70% of Record $510B Venture Haul in H1
Crunchbase data shows global startup investment hit $510 billion in H1 2026 - more than all of 2025 combined - with AI absorbing over 70% of Q2 capital and two labs capturing 43% of the total.
