Techmeme
June 30, 2026, 7:35 PM

Top News

Anthropic:
Anthropic launches Claude Sonnet 5, saying it nears Opus 4.8 performance at lower prices and is substantially better than Sonnet 4.6 for agentic work  —  Claude Sonnet 5 is built to be the most agentic Sonnet model yet.  It can make plans, use tools like browsers and terminals …
Kyle Baird / The Block:
Visa, Mastercard, Stripe, BlackRock, Coinbase, and 140+ companies join Open Standard to launch Open USD, a stablecoin that shares earnings from its reserves  —  Quick Take  — Payment giants, banks, tech firms and crypto companies are among Open Standard's launch members.
Mike Scarcella / Reuters:
SCOTUS agrees to hear Apple's appeal of a 2025 contempt ruling in its Epic case after a district judge found Apple violated an order to make App Store changes  —  The U.S. Supreme Court agreed on Tuesday to hear Apple's (AAPL.O) bid to escape being found in contempt in its legal fight with …
Rebecca Bellan / TechCrunch:
Anthropic launches Claude Science, an AI workbench that uses existing Claude models like Opus 4.8 to integrate 60+ scientific databases and specialized toolkits  —  Anthropic introduced Claude Science on Tuesday, an AI workbench that gives scientists one environment to do computational research …
The Keyword:
Google launches Nano Banana 2 Lite, a low cost text-to-image model that delivers outputs in four seconds, and rolls out Gemini Omni Flash to developers  —  We're making it easier to experiment and scale your ideas with Nano Banana 2 Lite, our fastest, most cost-efficient Gemini Image model …
Russell Brandom / TechCrunch:
AWS launches an internal organization for AI-focused forward-deployed engineers, backed by $1B in resources, following OpenAI and others in launching FDE teams  —  As companies struggle to integrate AI, they're increasingly ready to bring in outside help — and service providers are launching …
Reuters:
Filing: President Trump reports $1.4B+ in income from his family's crypto ventures in 2025, including $500M+ from WLF and $635M from the sale of his $TRUMP coin  —  U.S. President Donald Trump reported more than $1.4 billion in income from his family's crypto ventures last year …
Reuters:
Meituan open-sources LongCat-2.0, a 1.6T-parameter model that it says was trained on a 50K-chip cluster of domestic Chinese processors, without giving details  —  China's food delivery giant Meituan (3690.HK) said on Tuesday it had released and would open-source its next-generation LongCat …
Financial Times:
Sam Tabahriti / Reuters:
Emmy Martin / New York Times:
As OpenAI and Anthropic prepare to go public, San Francisco tech workers making six figures say they cannot compete with the new AI elite and may have to leave  —  As OpenAI and Anthropic prepare to go public, tech workers making six figures are grousing that they cannot compete with the new A.I. elite.
Politico:
Sources: the Trump administration plans to lift export restrictions on Anthropic's Fable 5 as early as Tuesday evening, making it available to all general users  —  Anthropic and the administration had previously discussed conducting a technical assessment to evaluate similar risks posed by models in the future.
Bloomberg:
Sources: Kalshi agreed to pay $20M to sponsor the World Cup knockouts, after initially balking at FIFA's $150M asking price, alongside ADI Predictstreet  —  When the World Cup knockout round began Sunday, Kalshi joined the likes of Coca-Cola, Visa and Adidas with sideline advertising in the stadiums …
Dina Bass / Bloomberg:
AI inference startup Etched raised $800M from investors including Jane Street and a TSMC-linked venture firm, and says it has signed sales contracts worth $1B  —  Nvidia rival says it has raised $800 million and has $1 billion in contracts.  —  AI chip startup Etched said it has raised $800 million …
Stephanie Stacey / Financial Times:
Hotels, tour operators, and travel agencies rush to launch proprietary online tools and loyalty schemes to fend off future competition from AI travel agents  —  Chatbots could help to find, filter and book customers' destinations  —  Hotels, tour operators and travel agencies are rushing …

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Semafor:
Emma Roth / The Verge:
Lauren Forristal / TechCrunch:
Marcus Mendes / 9to5Mac: