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:
Try Gemini 3 Pro  —  Google's newest and most intelligent AI model that helps you bring any idea to life
Shopify:
Shopify: Revolutionizing Commerce with Winter Edition '26  —  Over 150+ new features transform how merchants build, design, and grow—with technology that amplifies creative vision.
Zoho:
The best time to become a Zoho Partner  —  The business world is not only changing but it is being rebuilt.  Customers want connected ecosystems that will help them automate, unify their data, and do more with less.
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

Hard Fork:
Australia Kicks Kids Off Social Media + Is the A.I. Water Issue Fake? + Hard Fork Wrapped
The future is already here. Each week, journalists Kevin Roose and Casey Newton explore and make sense of the latest in the rapidly changing world of tech.
Subscribe to Hard Fork.
Access:
Why the next AI frontier is phone calls, with Beside CEO Maxime Germain
A show about the tech industry's inside conversation, hosted by tech reporter Alex Heath and founder whisperer Ellis Hamburger.
Subscribe to Access.
Great Chat:
So what happens after AGI?
A podcast mostly about tech. Brought to you weekly by Angela Du, Sally Shin, Mac Bohannon, Helen Min, and Ashley Mayer.
Subscribe to Great Chat.
Tools and Weapons with Brad Smith:
Ted Sarandos: Netflix and how tech changed storytelling
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.
Subscribe to Tools and Weapons with Brad Smith.
Big Technology Podcast:
AI Is Upending Law. Is That A Sign For The Rest Of Us? — With Melia Russell
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.
[trading places]:
Ben Black Akkadian Ventures🏆 | Secondaries Secrets 💎 | RAISE Conf 🎯 | Vercel $9B 🚀
a very bad podcast about broken unicorns & busted carry hosted by dave mcclure and aman verjee
Subscribe to [trading places].
 

About This Page

This is a Techmeme archive page. It shows how the site appeared at 10:05 PM ET, August 2, 2025.

The most current version of the site as always is available at our home page. To view an earlier snapshot click here and then modify the date indicated.

More News

Daniel Kim / Cerebras:

Earlier Picks

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