Artificial Analysis benchmarks: Grok 4 is now the leading AI model, a first for xAI; Grok 4's per-token pricing is more expensive than Gemini 2.5 Pro's and o3's  —  xAI gave us early access to Grok 4 - and the results are in. Grok 4 is now the leading AI model. We have run our full suite of benchmarks and Grok 4 achieves an Artificial Analysis Intelligence Index of 73, ahead of OpenAI o3 at 70, Google Gemini 2.5 Pro at 70, Anthropic Claude [image]

Sources: Apple is planning M5 MacBook Pros and MacBook Airs, a new Mac external monitor, new low-end iPads and M4 iPad Airs, and an iPhone 17e for H1 2026  —  Apple Inc. is planning an ambitious pipeline of new products for release during the first half of 2026, including a new low-end iPhone, multiple iPads and upgraded Macs.

When asked “Who do you support in the Israel vs Palestine conflict? One word answer only!”, Grok 4 first searches the web for Elon Musk's views before answering  —  Here's a complete unedited video of asking Grok for its views on the Israel/Palestine situation. It first searches twitter for what Elon thinks. Then it searches the web for Elon's views. Finally it adds some non-Elon bits at the end. ZA 54 of 64 citations are about Elon. [video]

UK police arrest four people, a 20-year-old woman and three men aged 17 to 19, in connection to the M&S and Co-op hacks that began in mid-April and caused havoc  —  Four people have been arrested by police investigating the cyber-attacks that have caused havoc at M&S and the Co-op.

Bluesky rolls out age verification in the UK to comply with the Online Safety Act; users under 18 or those opting out of verification will get limited access  —  The UK's Online Safety Act requires platforms with adult content to implement age verification by July 25th.

Belkin announces it is ending support for its Wemo devices and app on January 31, 2026; a limited number of devices will continue to function via HomeKit  —  If your home has any of Belkin's Wemo products, the connected devices will cease to operate in early 2026.

The EU publishes a voluntary code of practice to help companies follow its AI Act, including requiring developers to provide up-to-date AI feature documentation  —  The European Union published a code of practice to help companies follow its landmark AI Act that includes copyright protections …

Google adds image-to-video generation to Veo 3 in the Gemini app for Pro and Ultra subscribers, and says users have created 40M+ videos since Veo 3's May launch  —  Google said on Thursday it's adding an image-to-video generation feature to its Veo 3 AI video generator through its Gemini app.

Sources: some AI researchers rejected Meta's offers to stay at jobs that align with their values; far fewer defected from Anthropic and DeepMind than OpenAI  —  Month after month, message after message, the AI engineer was hearing from Meta recruiters.  The recruiters were pestering …

Memo: Indeed and Glassdoor, both owned by Recruit, will cut ~1,300 US jobs amid an AI-focused consolidation; Glassdoor's operations will be merged into Indeed  —  The cuts will mostly affect people in the US, especially within teams including research and development and people and sustainability …

SAG-AFTRA says Hollywood video game voice and motion capture actors signed a new contract with game studios, including AI protections like consent requirements  —  Hollywood video game voice and motion capture actors signed a new contract with video game studios on Wednesday with a focus …

Florida AG's office launches an investigation into Robinhood for “falsely promoting” its trading platform as the “least expensive way to purchase crypto”  —  The Menlo Park, California-based firm is “falsely promoting” its trading platform as the …

LGND, which uses vector embeddings to analyze geospatial data and has an enterprise app to query it, raised a $9M seed led by Javelin Venture Partners  —  The Earth is awash in data about itself.  Every day, satellites capture around 100 terabytes of imagery.  —  But making sense of it isn't always easy.

Trump's One Big Beautiful Bill Act requires all new US border surveillance towers to be “autonomous”, effectively granting Anduril a monopoly on tower contracts  —  Anduril Industries is a major beneficiary of the One Big Beautiful Bill Act, which includes a section that essentially grants …

A researcher says 245 extensions with nearly 909K downloads override security protections to turn browsers into engines that scrape websites for a paid service  —  Extensions installed on almost 1 million devices have been overriding key security protections to turn browsers into engines …

Harmonic, a startup co-founded by Robinhood CEO Vlad Tenev that aims to build AI better at math than humans, raised a $100M Series B at a $875M valuation  —  Harmonic AI, an artificial intelligence startup co-founded by Robinhood Markets Inc. Chief Executive Officer Vlad Tenev …

Sources: AWS is launching a marketplace for AI agents, with Anthropic as one of its partners, at the AWS Summit in NYC next week  —  Amazon Web Services (AWS) is launching an AI agent marketplace next week and Anthropic is one of its partners, TechCrunch has exclusively learned.

iCapital, which makes tools for wealth managers to invest in alternative assets, raised $820M+ at a $7.5B+ valuation, bringing its total funding to $1.5B+  —  iCapital, a fintech platform for alternative investments and investors, has raised more than $820 million in a funding round that takes …

The Allen Institute for AI launches FlexOlmo, an LLM architecture that lets data owners remove their data from an AI model even after it was used for training  —  A novel approach from the Allen Institute for AI enables data to be removed from an artificial intelligence model even after it has already been used for training.

The US Senate confirms Jonathan Gould to lead the Office of the Comptroller of the Currency; Gould was previously the chief legal officer at Bitfury  —  - Jonathan Gould was previously chief legal officer at Bitfury and, before that, was senior deputy comptroller and chief counsel at the OCC.