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August 12, 2025, 11:25 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
M.G. Siegler / Spyglass:
Perplexity's unsolicited $34.5B bid for Chrome with claimed VC backing is clearly a marketing stunt and strategic signaling amid Google's antitrust uncertainty  —  Why not offer a quadrillion dollars? … I'll give Perplexity one thing: making the offer thirty-four-POINT-five billion dollars is a nice touch.
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/...
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
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.
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 …
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 …
Bob Van Voris / Bloomberg:
In US court, Terraform Labs co-founder Do Kwon pleaded guilty to conspiracy and wire fraud charges over TerraUSD's $40B collapse in a plea deal 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.
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.
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 …
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  —  In a landmark decision, the federal court has today ruled against tech giants Apple and Google in a major win for consumers …
The Verge:
Epic says it is bringing Fortnite back to iOS in Australia “at a date to be determined”, after a judge ruled Apple and Google's app stores are anticompetitive
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 …
Sharon Goldman / Fortune:
NYC-based Profound, which helps brands optimize visibility in AI search responses, raised a $35M Series B led by Sequoia, bringing its total funding to $58.5M  —  Profound co-founders James Cadwallader and Dylan Babbs, who are betting big on helping brands get discovered in AI search
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
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 …
Wall Street Journal:
How Jensen Huang successfully lobbied Trump to resume Nvidia's H20 sales to China; US officials hadn't vetted the 20% pay-to-play proposal when Trump offered it

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From Mediagazer

David Ellison / @ellisonskydance:
David Ellison announces that the combined Paramount and Warner Bros. Discovery will be called Skydance “to preserve what has made each of these studios iconic”

New York Times:
Sources: Trump personally told his budget director to use taxpayer money for TV ads praising his presidency; at least four spots have run at a cost of ~$5.5M

Todd Spangler / Variety:
Disney licenses a large group of titles to Netflix, including all five Ice Age movies, Percy Jackson and the Olympians, Felicity, Elio, and more

More News

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

Earlier Picks

Lauren Goode / Wired:
Q&A with AMD CEO Lisa Su on AI accelerators, US manufacturing, becoming AMD's CEO in 2014, OpenAI, Tesla, xAI, China, ROCm, aiming to surpass Nvidia, and more
Zac Hall / 9to5Mac:
Anthropic adds a memory feature to let Claude reference information from past chats, available now to Max, Team, and Enterprise subscribers, and soon to others
Ina Fried / Axios:
GitHub CEO Thomas Dohmke says he will “leave GitHub to become a founder again”, with GitHub and its leadership team moving into Microsoft's CoreAI organization
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