Techmeme
August 5, 2025, 8:30 AM

Top News

Cheng Ting-Fang / Nikkei Asia:
Sources: TSMC fires several employees for violating rules on obtaining sensitive information about its 2nm tech; TSMC says it detected “unauthorized activities”  —  TAIPEI — Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Co. has fired several employees for violating rules …
Lydia Beyoud / Bloomberg:
The CFTC is asking for public comment by August 18 about trading spot crypto asset contracts listed on CFTC-registered futures exchanges  —  Takeaways by Bloomberg AI  —  Hide … Tell us how AI is shaping your news experience.  Share your feedback  —  The Commodity Futures Trading Commission …
Wall Street Journal:
A draft White House EO shows President Trump plans to step up pressure against big banks over alleged discrimination against crypto companies and conservatives  —  The president is expected to sign an executive order as soon as this week that targets so-called debanking of businesses including crypto companies
Anthony Hughes / Bloomberg:
Mike Masnick / Techdirt:
The UK's Online Safety Act shows the UK prioritized government control over improving safety, becoming a cautionary tale in internet regulation for democracies  —  Well, well, well.  The “age assurance” part of the UK's Online Safety Act has finally gone into effect, with its age checking requirements kicking in a week and a half ago.
Cloudflare:
Cloudflare says Perplexity uses stealth crawling techniques, like undeclared user agents and rotating IP addresses, to evade robots.txt rules and network blocks  —  We are observing stealth crawling behavior from Perplexity, an AI-powered answer engine.  Although Perplexity initially crawls …
John Herrman / New York Magazine:
SEO is being supplanted by generative-engine optimization, or GEO, which focuses on AI chatbots and does not benefit from longstanding SEO tricks  —  Search-engine optimization now feels dated.  Generative-engine optimization is all about trying to trick AI chatbots.
The Information:
Internal email: Cognition offers buyouts to the ~200 newly acquired Windsurf staff, with Cognition CEO Scott Wu writing “we don't believe in work-life balance”  —  Cognition, a two-year-old artificial intelligence coding startup last valued at $4 billion, has offered buyouts …
More: The Information and WinBuzzer
Bluesky: @edzitron.comX: @theinformation and @lauramandaroLinkedIn: Scott Johnson
Mike Wheatley / SiliconANGLE:
Google unveils Kaggle Game Arena, a benchmarking platform where AI models compete head-to-head in strategic games, starting with a chess tournament this week  —  The world's top performing artificial intelligence models, including OpenAI's o3 and 04-mini, Google LLC's Gemini 2.5 Pro and Gemini 2.5 Flash …
Belle Lin / Wall Street Journal:
ElevenLabs launches Eleven Music, letting individuals and businesses use its AI model to generate music cleared for commercial use via English-language prompts  —  New model allows customers to create music with AI that is cleared for commercial use.  But AI-generated music still faces legal battles and stiff opposition from artists.
More: WinBuzzer
Min Jeong Lee / Bloomberg:
Filings: SoftBank increased its Nvidia stake to ~$3B in Q1 and bought $330M worth of TSMC stock; a source says Vision Fund monetized ~$2B of assets in H1 2025  —  Takeaways by Bloomberg AI  —  Hide … Tell us how AI is shaping your news experience.  Share your feedback
More: Tech in Asia
Reuters:
Sources: Intel's 18A process is facing significant yield challenges, with only ~5% of chips meeting its specifications in late 2024 and ~10% by summer 2025  —  The production process that Intel (INTC.O) hoped would pave the way to winning manufacturing deals and restore its edge in churning out high-end …
Forums: r/intelstock
MacKenzie Sigalos / CNBC:
OpenAI says it will hit 700M weekly active users for ChatGPT this week, up from 500M in March and up 4x YoY, and has 5M paying business users, up from June's 3M  —  OpenAI is set to hit 700 million weekly active users for ChatGPT this week, up from 500 million in March …
Ian Carlos Campbell / Engadget:

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Earlier Picks

Jon Blistein / Rolling Stone:
Samantha Subin / CNBC:
Fred Lambert / Electrek:
Sarah Perez / TechCrunch:
Olivia Solon / Bloomberg: