Techmeme
August 5, 2025, 2:25 PM

Top News

Kathrin Hille / Financial Times:
Taiwanese prosecutors say two ex-TSMC employees and a third suspect were arrested for allegedly stealing proprietary tech; investigators searched Tokyo Electron  —  Taiwanese prosecutors probe ‘potential trade secret leaks’ in first case since key technologies added to national security legislation
Cheng Ting-Fang / Nikkei Asia:
Sources: TSMC fires several employees for violating rules on obtaining sensitive information about its 2nm tech; TSMC says it detected “unauthorized activities”  —  TAIPEI — Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Co. has fired several employees for violating rules …
Bloomberg:
White House OSTP Director Michael Kratsios says the US is exploring software or physical ways to track the location of AI chips, as part of its AI Action Plan  —  The US is exploring ways to equip chips with better location-tracking capabilities, a senior official said …
Anthropic:
Anthropic releases Claude Opus 4.1 to paid Claude users, in Claude Code, via its API, and more, featuring broad improvements over Opus 4 for the same cost  —  Today we're releasing Claude Opus 4.1, an upgrade to Claude Opus 4 on agentic tasks, real-world coding, and reasoning.
Shirin Ghaffary / Bloomberg:
Reece Rogers / Wired:
OpenAI releases gpt-oss-120b and gpt-oss-20b, its first open-weight models since GPT-2; the smaller model can run locally on a consumer device with 16GB+ of RAM  —  The models, gpt-oss-120b and gpt-oss-20b, represent a major shift for the AI company.  —  OpenAI just dropped its first open-weight models in over five years.
Wall Street Journal:
A draft White House EO shows President Trump plans to step up pressure against big banks over alleged discrimination against crypto companies and conservatives  —  The president is expected to sign an executive order as soon as this week that targets so-called debanking of businesses including crypto companies
Jay Peters / The Verge:
Google DeepMind releases its Genie 3 model, which can generate 3D worlds from a prompt and has enough visual memory for a few minutes of continuous interaction  —  AI world models have many limitations, but Genie 3 offers improvements like real-time interaction and better memory.
Mike Masnick / Techdirt:
The UK's Online Safety Act shows the UK prioritized government control over improving safety, becoming a cautionary tale for democracies regulating the internet  —  Well, well, well.  The “age assurance” part of the UK's Online Safety Act has finally gone into effect, with its age checking …
Kelly Lawler / USA Today:
Roku launches Howdy, an ad-free streaming service for $2.99 per month, initially only on Roku devices, with content from Lionsgate, WBD, FilmRise, and others  —  Roku is ready to say Howdy.  —  The company − which sells set-top streaming devices, smart TVs and has its own free …
Reuters:
Sources: Intel's 18A process yield has remained low, with only ~5% of its Panther Lake chips meeting its specifications in late 2024 and ~10% by summer 2025  —  The production process that Intel (INTC.O) hoped would pave the way to winning manufacturing deals and restore its edge in churning out high-end …
Emma Roth / The Verge:
WhatsApp adds a new “safety overview” that appears in new group chats, including info on the group and when it was created, to help protect users from scams  —  The overview will contain information about when the group was created, who invited you, and how many members it has.
Lydia Beyoud / Bloomberg:
The CFTC is asking for public comment by August 18 about trading spot crypto asset contracts listed on CFTC-registered futures exchanges  —  Takeaways by Bloomberg AI  —  Hide … Tell us how AI is shaping your news experience.  Share your feedback  —  The Commodity Futures Trading Commission …
Belle Lin / Wall Street Journal:
ElevenLabs launches Eleven Music, letting individuals and businesses use its AI model to generate music cleared for commercial use via English-language prompts  —  New model allows customers to create music with AI that is cleared for commercial use.  But AI-generated music still faces legal battles and stiff opposition from artists.
John Herrman / New York Magazine:
Search-engine optimization feels dated as marketers look to generative-engine optimization, or GEO, which focuses on tricking AI chatbots rather than Google  —  Search-engine optimization now feels dated.  Generative-engine optimization is all about trying to trick AI chatbots.
Tobias Mann / The Register:
Google signs a deal with two power utilities to lower its power use by pausing non-essential AI workloads during demand surges or weather-based grid disruptions  —  Google will pause non-essential AI workloads to protect power grids, the advertising giant announced on Monday.
The Information:
Internal email: Cognition offers buyouts to its ~200 newly acquired Windsurf staff, with Cognition CEO Scott Wu writing “we don't believe in work-life balance”  —  Cognition, a two-year-old artificial intelligence coding startup last valued at $4 billion, has offered buyouts …
Michael J. de la Merced / New York Times:
NYC-based sales automation startup Clay raised $100M led by CapitalG at a $3.1B valuation, up from $1.25B in January 2025, and expects $100M in revenue in 2025  —  Investors valued the company, which describes its core user as a kind of marketing engineer, at $3.1 billion.

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Jon Blistein / Rolling Stone:
Samantha Subin / CNBC:
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