Techmeme
August 2, 2025, 10:05 PM

Top News

Wall Street Journal:
Sources: the researcher who declined Zuckerberg's offer of a $1.5B+ package over six years is Thinking Machines co-founder and ex-Meta staffer Andrew Tulloch  —  The loyalties and larger-than-life figures prompting some people to turn down insanely lucrative offers in Silicon Valley right now
Salvador Rodriguez / CNBC:
An in-depth look at the rise of relationships between humans and AI companion chatbots on apps like Nomi, coinciding with a loneliness epidemic in the US  —  Nikolai Daskalov lives alone in a small house in rural Virginia.  His preferred spot is a brown suede recliner in the middle …
Jonathan Greig / The Record:
SentinelOne researchers detail over 10 offensive cybersecurity patents filed by Shanghai Firetech, a company allegedly involved in Beijing's Silk Typhoon hacks  —  Researchers have discovered more than 10 patents for powerful offensive cybersecurity technologies filed by a prominent Chinese …
Washington Post:
How Palantir has benefited since President Trump took office, securing new and expanded government contracts and becoming the S&P's top-performing stock of 2025  —  From warfighting and tracking deportations to writing State Department cables with AI, the company is benefiting …
Mayank Parmar / BleepingComputer:
Anthropic cited OpenAI's use of Claude Code “ahead of the launch of GPT-5” but says it will provide API access to OpenAI for benchmarking and safety evaluations  —  Anthropic says it has revoked OpenAI's access to the Claude API after ChatGPT's engineers were found using Claude's coding tools.
Anthony Ha / TechCrunch:
Lina Khan cites Figma IPO as vindication of M&A scrutiny, saying letting startups grow independently, rather than be acquired, can generate “enormous value”  —  A surprising figure is celebrating Figma's successful IPO: Lina Khan, former chair of the Federal Trade Commission.
Yuliya Chernova / Wall Street Journal:
@semianalysis_:
Microsoft's latest 10-K shows that the company's committed datacenter construction is down YoY, with almost no new leases signed in the past 12 months  —  Microsoft datacenter strategy - still in⏸️mode 🧵 @JeremieEO Four months ago we flagged Microsoft's pause on more than 1.5 GW of self-build capacity — on top of the leasing freeze we called out in December. Microsoft's latest 10-K backs us up: committed datacenter construction [image]
Carl Franzen / VentureBeat:
Manus unveils Wide Research, an experimental feature that lets users on its Pro plan enlist dozens of parallelized AI agents for large-scale, high-volume tasks  —  Chinese AI startup Manus, which made headlines earlier this year for its approach to a multi-agent orchestration platform for consumers and …
Bloomberg:
Analysis: since April 2, President Trump has excluded over $100B in US smartphone and laptop imports from tariffs, highlighting conflicting administration goals  —  Exclusions reflect conflicting goals: to rip up the rules of global trade while cushioning US consumers.
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” …

Sponsor Posts

Google:
Reimagine your photos with a prompt  —  Our new native image generation and editing is state-of-the-art, and ranked #1 in the world.  Try it for free in the Gemini app.
F5:
Securing AI models and agents in the enterprise  —  The new AI stack creates a highly dynamic attack surface, and traditional controls aren't keeping up.  F5's recent acquisition will bring advanced AI guardrails to enterprise apps.
Zoho:
The next big growth move is building a marketplace  —  This is a guest post by Webkul.If you're running a business on Zoho Commerce, you already have a powerful platform.  It's perfect for managing your products …
IDrive:
Protecting your Cloud Applications Data  —  Backing up Office 365, Google Workspace, Dropbox & Box data is critical to preventing data loss or corruption, complying with laws and avoiding critical downtime in case of a disaster.

Featured Podcasts

Decoder with Nilay Patel:
How chatbots — and their makers — are enabling AI psychosis
A show from the Verge about big ideas - and other problems.
Subscribe to Decoder with Nilay Patel.
Lenny's Podcast:
Why experts writing AI evals is creating the fastest-growing companies in history | Brendan Foody (CEO of Mercor)
Interviews with world-class product leaders and growth experts to uncover actionable advice to help you build, launch, and grow your own product.
Subscribe to Lenny's Podcast.
Channels with Peter Kafka:
I tried Zuckerberg's $800 Ray-Bans. Are they the future? With Alex Heath
Media and tech aren't just intersecting - they're fully intertwined. To understand how those worlds work, Peter Kafka talks to industry leaders, upstarts and observers.
Subscribe to Channels with Peter Kafka.
Big Technology Podcast:
Are 95% of Businesses Really Getting No Return on AI Investment? — With Aaron Levie
The Big Technology Podcast takes you behind the scenes in the tech world featuring interviews with plugged-in insiders and outside agitators.
Subscribe to Big Technology Podcast.
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The Social Radars:
Founder Mode: Christina Cacioppo, Founder & CEO, Vanta
Come be a fly on the wall as Y Combinator's Jessica Livingston and Carolynn Levy talk to some of the most successful founders in Silicon Valley about how they did it.
Subscribe to The Social Radars.
 

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More News

Daniel Kim / Cerebras:

Earlier Picks

Margaret Attridge / Courthouse News Service:
Tom Warren / The Verge:
Ryan Browne / CNBC: