Techmeme
July 1, 2025, 12:35 PM

Top News

Maxwell Zeff / TechCrunch:
Cloudflare debuts “Pay per Crawl”, a marketplace that lets sites charge AI crawlers per crawl; new sites using Cloudflare will now block AI crawlers by default  —  Cloudflare, a cloud infrastructure provider that serves 20% of the web, announced Tuesday the launch of a new marketplace …
Bloomberg:
The Senate votes 99-1 to remove a Trump tax bill provision that would have barred states from regulating AI if they got funding from a $500M broadband program  —  The Senate killed a controversial effort to prevent US states from regulating artificial intelligence, marking a loss …
Avery Lotz / Axios:
Miles Kruppa / The Information:
Morgan Stanley says xAI raised $5B of equity in addition to $5B in debt; the startup raised $6B in December from a16z, BlackRock, Lightspeed, MGX, and others  —  Elon Musk's xAI raised $5 billion of equity in addition to $5 billion in debt, according to Morgan Stanley, which advised on the debt transactions.
Krystal Hu / Reuters:
Grammarly acquires email startup Superhuman as part of a push to diversify and build an AI productivity suite; Superhuman was valued at $825M in August 2021  —  Grammarly has acquired email efficiency tool Superhuman as part of the company's push to build an artificial intelligence-powered productivity suite …
Mark Gurman / Bloomberg:
Sources: Mike Rockwell and Craig Federighi started a project to evaluate external models to power Siri; after testing, Anthropic's tech seemed most promising  —  Apple Inc. is considering using artificial intelligence technology from Anthropic PBC or OpenAI to power a new version of Siri …
Sebastian Herrera / Wall Street Journal:
Amazon says it has 1M+ robots in its warehouses, the most it's ever had and near the count of human workers, with ~75% of global deliveries assisted by robotics  —  The e-commerce giant now counts more than one million of the machines at its facilities  —  | Photographs and Videos by Desiree Rios for WSJ
Emma Roth / The Verge:
Threads launches DMs for users aged 18 and older, without support for E2EE, and announces a “highlighter” feature to emphasize trending topics  —  For now, you can only send DMs to your followers on Threads or mutual followers on Instagram. … Threads has officially launched direct messaging for everyone.
Reuters:
Sources: data labeling company Surge AI aims to raise up to $1B, targeting a $15B+ valuation; Surge AI had $1B+ in 2024 revenue, vs. Scale AI's reported $870M  —  Surge AI, a data-labeling firm that competes with Scale AI, has hired advisors to raise as much as $1 billion in the first capital raising …

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More News

Hannah Lang / Reuters:

Earlier Picks

Alex Riehl / BetaKit:
Jon Brodkin / Ars Technica:
Kurt Wagner / Bloomberg:
Jody Godoy / Reuters:
Lorenzo Franceschi-Bicchierai / TechCrunch:
Benjamin Mayo / 9to5Mac:
Associated Press: