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August 12, 2025, 7:55 PM
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| Katherine Blunt / Wall Street Journal: |
Perplexity offers to acquire Chrome for $34.5B, significantly more than Perplexity's estimated $18B valuation, and says large VC funds agreed to back the deal — With its unsolicited bid for Google's browser, AI startup seeks to take advantage of uncertainty over pending antitrust ruling
More: 9to5Mac, The Register, AppleInsider, Axios, Variety, Reuters, The Guardian Nigeria, Ad Age, Financial Times, Thurrott, Tomasz Tunguz, News.ng, Spyglass, Ars Technica, Mashable, Motley Fool, Blockchain.News, TechCrunch, Agence France-Presse, Fast Company, The Times, The Information, Android Police, CNBC, Implicator.ai, PhoneArena, Australian Financial Review, PCWorld, Benzinga, Android Authority, The Wrap, Dexerto, MediaPost, UPI, Business Today, Capital Brief, Proactive, Fortune, SiliconANGLE, Reclaim The Net, Spokesman.com, ZeroHedge News, iPhone in Canada, Tom's Guide, DNA India, Yahoo Finance, Bloomberg Law, Shacknews, Chrome Unboxed, TechEBlog, Crypto Briefing, Adweek, The Crypto Times, Daring Fireball, San Francisco Examiner, Entrepreneur, Techstrong.ai, Livemint, and Investor's Business Daily
Bluesky: @hrbrmstr.dev, @mgsiegler.com, @jake.sooscreek.productions, @blowdart.me, and @hunterwalk.com
Threads: @pkafka, @pkafka, @gruber, @tomgara, @benedictevans, and @technologizer
X: @highyieldharry, @richardsocher, @eric_seufert, @kimmonismus, @sri_batchu, @mikeisaac, and @dylanbyers
Forums: Hacker News, r/google, r/perplexity_ai, r/diabrowser, r/artificial, and r/technology
| Mark Gurman / @markgurman: |
In response to Elon Musk's claims that the App Store favors the ChatGPT app, Apple says the App Store “is designed to be fair and free of bias” — Apple on @elonmusk's claims: “The App Store is designed to be fair and free of bias. We feature thousands of apps through charts, algorithmic recommendations, and curated lists selected by experts using objective criteria.” https://www.bloomberg.com/...
More: MacRumors, 9to5Mac, Moneycontrol, Digit, and MarketWatch
| Surbhi Misra / Reuters: |
Elon Musk says that Apple “makes it impossible for any AI company besides OpenAI” to top its App Store, an “antitrust violation”, and xAI will take legal action — Billionaire Elon Musk said on Monday his artificial intelligence startup xAI would take legal action against Apple …
More: Bloomberg, AppleInsider, SiliconANGLE, The Verge, Forbes, PCMag, Quartz, New York Times, The Center Square, The Guardian, 9to5Mac, Associated Press, Ars Technica, Axios, Business Insider, iPhone in Canada, New York Post, CNN, Financial Times, Fox Business, The American Bazaar, HuffPost, Wall Street Pit, Yahoo Finance, Windows Report, The Times, Breitbart, Decrypt, New York Sun, Engadget, Android Headlines, The Information, BusinessLIVE, Proactive, Fortune, BBC, CNET, Wall Street Journal, The Hill, The Shortcut, Coinpedia Fintech News, PC Guide, Daily Kos, Entrepreneur, CNBC, NBC News, TMZ.com, and Semafor
Bluesky: @karlbode.com, @vegandroid, @mariadagloriaii, and @jimander
X: @elonmusk, @sama, @elonmusk, @markgurman, @elonmusk, @munster_gene, @sama, @alexeheath, @sama, @elonmusk, @elonmusk, @amxfreeze, @elonmusk, @ns123abc, @devahaz, @elonmusk, @markgurman, @neilcybart, @nikitabier, @deedydas, @neilcybart, @ns123abc, @elonmusk, @elonmusk, @teortaxestex, @elonmusk, @basedbeffjezos, @basedbeffjezos, @lutherlowe, @teroterotero, @apollozac, @zerohedge, @scobleizer, @scobleizer, @sama, @ns123abc, @blkmdl3, @jwsherrod, @elonmusk, @lutherlowe, and @firstsquawk. Forums: r/Enough_Sanders_Spam
| Bob Van Voris / Bloomberg: |
In US court, Terraform Labs co-founder Do Kwon says he will plead guilty to charges of conspiracy and wire fraud under an agreement with prosecutors — Terraform Labs Pte. co-founder Do Kwon pleaded guilty to charges in a US fraud prosecution tied to the $40 billion collapse of the TerraUSD stablecoin in 2022.
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Bluesky: @molly.wiki. X: @sdnynews, @zguz, @zguz, @innercitypress, @fatmanterra, @spreekaway, and @molly0xfff
| Financial Times: |
Anthropic signs a deal to offer Claude to US lawmakers for $1/year, following OpenAI; a source says Google is in talks to offer Gemini on similarly cheap terms — Group follows rival OpenAI in making enterprise tools available to government branches — Anthropic will offer its Claude chatbot …
More: Anthropic, FedScoop, Engadget, Observer, CNBC, Benzinga, Sherwood News, Mashable, Reuters, The Verge, WinBuzzer, NDTV Profit, The Economic Times, PYMNTS.com, UPI, iPhone in Canada, TechCrunch, Proactive, and Implicator.ai
Bluesky: @onekade, @convolver, @alyssaharad, @ejwillingham, @edzitron.com, @chriswarcraft, and @toobigtofail. X: @anthropicai
| ABC: |
An Australian federal judge rules Apple and Google engaged in anticompetitive conduct by misusing their app store market power, but rejects Epic's other claims — By national consumer affairs reporter Michael Atkin and the Specialist Reporting Team's Melanie Vujkovic
More: Australian Financial Review, SiliconANGLE, The Guardian, Reuters, RNZ, UPI, Benzinga, Screen Rant, iPhone in Canada, TechCrunch, The Mac Observer, Seeking Alpha, Lawyerly, and The Australian
Forums: r/auslaw, r/apple, r/australia, and Slashdot
| Redd Brown / Bloomberg: |
CoreWeave Q2: revenue up 207% YoY to $1.21B, vs. $1.08B est., adjusted net loss of $130.8M, vs. $96.3M est., up from $5M in Q2 2024; CRWV drops 10%+ after hours — CoreWeave Inc. posted steeper losses as it continued to build to meet demand from artificial intelligence developers … | Maxwell Zeff / TechCrunch: |
Anthropic updates Claude Sonnet 4 to support a 1M token context window, letting it process prompts up to 750K words or 75K lines of code, up 5x on its old limit — Anthropic is increasing the amount of information that enterprise customers can send to Claude in a single prompt …
More: Anthropic, BleepingComputer, 9to5Mac, The Verge, Implicator.ai, The Decoder, The New Stack, VentureBeat, ZDNET, and Simon Willison's Weblog
Bluesky: @edzitron.com. X: @scaling01, @claudeai, @basedjensen, @bonegpt, @xlr8harder, and @claudeai
Forums: r/claude, r/accelerate, r/ClaudeCode, and r/ChatGPTCoding
| Financial Times: |
Sources: OpenAI is preparing to back a Neuralink rival called Merge Labs, co-founded by Sam Altman, that aims to raise $250M at an $850M valuation — OpenAI in talks to invest in brain implant start-up that would compete with Musk's company — Ivan Levingston in London …
More: MassDevice. Bluesky: @hunterwalk.com. X: @andrewcurran_, @basedbeffjezos, and @elonmusk. LinkedIn: Jo Jo. Forums: r/singularity
| Emily Price / Fast Company: |
Meta says Threads has 400M monthly active users, up from 350M MAUs in April — Meta's Twitter rival has hit 400 million monthly users, closing the gap with X on mobile. — Meta's Threads is on a roll. — The social networking app is now home to more than 400 million monthly active users, Meta shared with Fast Company on Tuesday.
More: TechCrunch, PhoneArena, Social Media Today, Watcher Guru, Android Headlines, Engadget, Benzinga, iPhone in Canada, and The National
Threads: @mosseri, @zuck, @darrenrovell, @thebrianpenny, @theromit, @kurtwag8, @conno_r, and @jbillinson. X: @pitdesi. Forums: r/technology
| New York Times: |
Sources: investigators have uncovered evidence that Russia is at least in part responsible for a recent hack of the US federal court filing system — Federal officials are scrambling to assess the damage and address flaws in a sprawling, heavily used computer system long known to have vulnerabilities.
More: The Verge, Bloomberg Law, Engadget, TechCrunch, Reuters, Newser, The Kyiv Independent, and InfoRiskToday.com
Forums: r/law, r/craftofintelligence, r/news, r/worldnews, r/politics, and r/technology
| Allie Garfinkle / Fortune: |
Squint, which uses AI and AR to modernize manufacturing processes, raised a $40M Series B led by The Westly Group and TCV at a $265M valuation — Devin Bhushan, founder and CEO of Squint. — SQUINT — Manufacturing dates back about 2.5 million years, when early hominins fashioned stone tools.| Henry Chandonnet / Business Insider: |
Despite Musk's claim Apple “makes it impossible” for non-OpenAI AI apps to top its App Store, DeepSeek was #1 in January and Perplexity was #1 in July in India — - Elon Musk's X post alleges without evidence that Apple rigged the App Store against non-ChatGPT AI apps.| Kylie Robison / Wired: |
Character.AI says it's generating revenue at a run rate of $30M+ and has 20M MAUs who spend, on average, 75 minutes a day chatting with a bot — Startup Character.AI once promised superintelligence. Its new CEO says it's now an entertainment company with 20 million users.
X: @kyliebytes and @kyliebytes
| James Hunt / The Block: |
Circle reports Q2 revenue up 53% YoY to $658M, USDC circulation up 90% YoY to $61.3B, a $482M net loss, and unveils Arc, a stablecoin-focused Layer 1 blockchain — - Circle is planning to launch a stablecoin-focused EVM-compatible Layer 1 blockchain called Arc.| Adrian Zmudzinski / Cointelegraph: |
Qubic, a layer-1 blockchain project that pools mining resources, has been trying a 51% attack on Monero and says it succeeded, causing Monero's price to fall — at 1:30 pm UTC): This article has been updated to add a Qubic announcement. Layer-1 blockchain Qubic said it has … | Mayank Parmar / BleepingComputer: |
OpenAI is adding Connectors for Gmail, Google Calendar, and Google Contacts in ChatGPT for Pro users, with Plus, Team, Enterprise, and Edu plans to follow — OpenAI wants ChatGPT to know more about you, including your emails, calendar events in Google Calendar, and even your Google contacts, to reference everything in a conversation.| Emma Roth / The Verge: |
Google launches Preferred Sources in the US and India, allowing users to personalize the news in Search's “top stories” section by selecting favorite outlets — A new feature will let you pick the news outlets you see in Google Search's top stories.| Ashley Stewart / Business Insider: |
Sources: Microsoft is trying to poach Meta's AI talent and is making multimillion-dollar offers, with a mandate to match Meta's compensation for top talent — - Microsoft targets Meta employees in AI talent war, internal documents show. — The software giant has an internal list of its most-wanted Meta engineers.| Bloomberg: |
Sources: Chinese authorities urge local companies to avoid using less advanced US chips, particularly Nvidia's H20s, for government or national security work — Supply Lines is a daily newsletter that tracks global trade. Sign up here. — Beijing has urged local companies …
More: Windows Central, The Information, Tom's Hardware, PC Guide, TheStreet, The Register, Ars Technica, The American Bazaar, CNBC, Semafor, Benzinga, Asia Financial, GZERO, ZeroHedge News, Implicator.ai, Investor's Business Daily, and Financial Times
X: @rnaudbertrand, @shakeelhashim, and @chinabeigebook
Forums: r/hardware and r/China
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