Techmeme
August 5, 2025, 1:35 PM

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 …
Kathrin Hille / Financial Times:
Taiwanese prosecutors say two ex-TSMC employees and a third suspect were arrested for allegedly stealing proprietary tech; investigators searched Tokyo Electron  —  Taiwanese prosecutors probe ‘potential trade secret leaks’ in first case since key technologies added to national security legislation
Bloomberg:
White House OSTP Director Michael Kratsios says the US is exploring software or physical ways to track the location of AI chips, as part of its AI Action Plan  —  The US is exploring ways to equip chips with better location-tracking capabilities, a senior official said …
Anthropic:
Anthropic releases Claude Opus 4.1 to paid Claude users, in Claude Code, via its API, and more, featuring broad improvements over Opus 4 for the same cost  —  Today we're releasing Claude Opus 4.1, an upgrade to Claude Opus 4 on agentic tasks, real-world coding, and reasoning.
Shirin Ghaffary / Bloomberg:
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
Jay Peters / The Verge:
Google DeepMind releases its Genie 3 model, which can generate 3D worlds from a prompt and has enough visual memory for a few minutes of continuous interaction  —  AI world models have many limitations, but Genie 3 offers improvements like real-time interaction and better memory.
Mike Masnick / Techdirt:
The UK's Online Safety Act shows the UK prioritized government control over improving safety, becoming a cautionary tale for democracies regulating the internet  —  Well, well, well.  The “age assurance” part of the UK's Online Safety Act has finally gone into effect, with its age checking …
Kelly Lawler / USA Today:
Roku launches Howdy, an ad-free streaming service for $2.99 per month, initially only on Roku devices, with content from Lionsgate, WBD, FilmRise, and others  —  Roku is ready to say Howdy.  —  The company − which sells set-top streaming devices, smart TVs and has its own free …
Reece Rogers / Wired:
OpenAI releases gpt-oss-120b and gpt-oss-20b, its first open-weight models since GPT-2; the smaller model can run locally on a consumer device with 16GB+ of RAM  —  The models, gpt-oss-120b and gpt-oss-20b, represent a major shift for the AI company.  —  OpenAI just dropped its first open-weight models in over five years.
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 …
Reuters:
Sources: Intel's 18A process yield has remained low, with only ~5% of its Panther Lake 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 …
Emma Roth / The Verge:
WhatsApp adds a new “safety overview” that appears in new group chats, including info on the group and when it was created, to help protect users from scams  —  The overview will contain information about when the group was created, who invited you, and how many members it has.
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.
Tobias Mann / The Register:
Google signs a deal with two power utilities to lower its power use by pausing non-essential AI workloads during demand surges or weather-based grid disruptions  —  Google will pause non-essential AI workloads to protect power grids, the advertising giant announced on Monday.
Bloomberg:
US DOT Secretary Sean Duffy proposes a rule change to let commercial drones fly beyond an operator's line of sight, a boon for Walmart and Alphabet's Wing  —  Takeaways by Bloomberg AI  —  Hide … Tell us how AI is shaping your news experience.  Share your feedback
The Information:
Internal email: Cognition offers buyouts to its ~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 …
John Herrman / New York Magazine:
Search-engine optimization feels dated as marketers look to generative-engine optimization, or GEO, which focuses on tricking AI chatbots rather than Google  —  Search-engine optimization now feels dated.  Generative-engine optimization is all about trying to trick AI chatbots.
Michael J. de la Merced / New York Times:
NYC-based sales automation startup Clay raised $100M led by CapitalG at a $3.1B valuation, up from $1.25B in January 2025, and expects $100M in revenue in 2025  —  Investors valued the company, which describes its core user as a kind of marketing engineer, at $3.1 billion.
Anthony Hughes / Bloomberg:

Sponsor Posts

Subquadratic:
Subquadratic: the LLM built for 12M-token reasoning  —  SubQ can reason across entire codebases and document sets in one pass with no RAG workarounds.  Read how SubQ 1.1 Small holds near-perfect retrieval out to 12M tokens.
Cloudflare:
Cloudflare Connect 2026: The Agentic Conference  —  Stop preparing for agents.  Start running them.  100+ sessions, workshops, and speakers from OpenAI, Arm, and Cloudflare across AI, security, and performance.
Zoho:
Zoho Sign takes a bite of Apple's latest: iOS 27, iPadOS 27, and macOS Golden Gate  —  It's September, and you know the drill.  Apple just handed us a fresh batch of releases, and there's plenty to look forward …
IDrive:
Protecting your Cloud Applications Data  —  Backing up Office 365, Google Workspace, Dropbox & Salesforce data is critical to preventing data loss or corruption, complying with laws and avoiding critical downtime in case of a disaster.

Featured Podcasts

Big Technology Podcast:
A Sober Conversation About AI Existential Risk — With Nate Soares
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.
Channels with Peter Kafka:
AI Wants to Shop for You. What Could Go Wrong?
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.
Invest Like the Best:
Michael Moritz - Lessons From 40 Years of Investing and Writing
The leading destination to learn about business and investing. We do this by showcasing exceptional talent and ideas.
Subscribe to Invest Like the Best.
Sources:
Baseten's CEO on why every company will want to own its AI
Candid conversations with the leaders shaping what's next in AI and the broader tech industry. Hosted by Alex Heath, who has covered Silicon Valley for more than a decade.
Subscribe to Sources.
Training Data:
Box's Aaron Levie: On Reinventing Yourself in the AI Age and Enterprise Diffusion
Sequoia Capital partners host conversations with leading AI builders and researchers to develop a deeper understanding of the evolving technologies and their implications.
Subscribe to Training Data.
Uncapped with Jack Altman:
Andrew Feldman from Cerebras
Conversations with people I admire about things I'm genuinely interested in.
Subscribe to Uncapped with Jack Altman.
 

More News

Earlier Picks

Jon Blistein / Rolling Stone:
Samantha Subin / CNBC:
Mike Wheatley / SiliconANGLE: