Techmeme
August 1, 2025, 11:10 PM

Top News

Washington Post:
A US jury finds Tesla partially liable for Autopilot's role in a fatal 2019 crash in Florida, and orders the company to pay $243M in damages  —  The outcome is a stunning rebuke for Tesla, which for years has fought to absolve itself of responsibility when its technology is involved in a crash.
Kylie Robison / Wired:
Anthropic revoked OpenAI's API access to Claude, citing ToS violations; sources: OpenAI's use of the API let it compare its models' behavior against Claude's  —  OpenAI lost access to the Claude API this week after Anthropic claimed the company was violating its terms of service.
New York Times:
Source: OpenAI raised $8.3B led by Dragoneer at a $300B valuation, months ahead of schedule and part of a $40B goal for 2025; 5M business users pay for ChatGPT  —  The venture capital round values the ChatGPT maker at $300 billion, and underscores the fierceness of the A.I. money race.
Mark Gurman / Bloomberg:
Sources: in a rare companywide meeting, Tim Cook said the AI revolution is “ours to grab”, Apple's AI efforts will mirror its iPhone successes, and more  —  Apple Inc. Chief Executive Officer Tim Cook, holding a rare all-hands meeting following earnings results …
Maxwell Zeff / TechCrunch:
Google rolls out Gemini 2.5 Deep Think, its most advanced reasoning model, which considers multiple ideas simultaneously, to its $250/month Ultra subscription  —  Google DeepMind is rolling out Gemini 2.5 Deep Think, which, the company says, is its most advanced AI reasoning model …
The Information:
Source: GPT-5 improvements won't be comparable to the leaps in performance of earlier models, such as between GPT-3 in 2020 and GPT-4 in 2023  —  OpenAI made waves across the industry in December when it published the results from its tests of artificial intelligence that performs better …
Emma Roth / The Verge:
Ryan Browne / CNBC:
Anthropic:
Anthropic details “persona vectors”, patterns of activity within an AI model's neural network that control its character traits, such as evil and sycophancy  —  Read the paper  —  Language models are strange beasts.  In many ways they appear to have human-like “personalities” …
Jay Peters / The Verge:
Bloomberg:
Meta, Alphabet, Microsoft, and Amazon have collectively spent ~$90B on capex in their most recent quarters and are expected to spend over $344B for the year  —  If there's any lesson to take from the spending plans issued by the world's largest technology companies over the past two weeks …
Margaret Attridge / Courthouse News Service:
A US jury finds Meta violated the California Invasion of Privacy Act when it intentionally recorded the health data of women via the period tracking app Flo  —  The jury got to decide how seriously Big Tech takes privacy, the attorney for a class of Flo users said in closing arguments.
Abner Li / 9to5Google:
Google says it will preserve “actively used” goo.gl URLs, after announcing earlier that all existing goo.gl links would stop working in August 2025  —  After originally planning to have all goo.gl URLs stop working later this month, Google will now “preserve actively used links.”
Aisha Malik / TechCrunch:
Instagram now requires users to have a public account with 1,000+ followers to go live, aligning with TikTok; previously, the feature was open to all users  —  Instagram users now need a public account with a minimum of 1,000 followers to go live on the platform, the social network confirmed to TechCrunch.
BBC:
In the UK, X and Reddit are blocking wide-ranging content, including about parliamentary debates, Ukraine, and Gaza, to comply with the Online Safety Act  —  Social media companies are blocking wide-ranging content - including posts about the wars in Ukraine and Gaza - in an attempt to comply …
Daniel Kim / Cerebras:
Cerebras announces the $50/month Code Pro and the $200/month Code Max plans, offering users access to Qwen3-Coder at speeds of up to 2,000 tokens per second  —  We are launching two new plans designed to make AI coding faster and more accessible: Cerebras Code Pro ($50/month) and Code Max ($200/month).
James Hunt / The Block:
The UK's Financial Conduct Authority plans to allow retail investors to access crypto exchange-traded notes, dubbed cETNs, on FCA-approved, UK-based exchanges  —  - The UK financial regulator is set to open up access to crypto exchange-traded notes for retail investors on FCA-approved, UK-based exchanges.

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Featured Podcasts

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Hard Fork:
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Microsoft Vice Chair and President Brad Smith speaks with leaders in government, business, and culture to explore the most critical challenges at the intersection of technology and society.
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More News

Tom Warren / The Verge:

Earlier Picks

Megan Farokhmanesh / Wired:
Christy Santhosh / Reuters:
Amanda Silberling / TechCrunch:
Apple: