Techmeme
August 12, 2025, 7:25 PM

Top News

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
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  —  Billionaire Elon Musk said on Monday his artificial intelligence startup xAI would take legal action against Apple …
Henry Chandonnet / Business Insider:
Despite Musk's claim Apple “makes it impossible” for non-OpenAI AI apps to top its App Store, DeepSeek was #1 in January and Perplexity was #1 in July in India  —  - Elon Musk's X post alleges without evidence that Apple rigged the App Store against non-ChatGPT AI apps.
Bob Van Voris / Bloomberg:
In US court, Terraform Labs co-founder Do Kwon says he will plead guilty to charges of conspiracy and wire fraud under an agreement 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.
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 …
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  —  By national consumer affairs reporter Michael Atkin and the Specialist Reporting Team's Melanie Vujkovic
The Verge:
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 …
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.
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.
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  —  - Circle is planning to launch a stablecoin-focused EVM-compatible Layer 1 blockchain called Arc.
Adrian Zmudzinski / Cointelegraph:
Qubic, a layer-1 blockchain project that pools mining resources, has been trying a 51% attack on Monero and says it succeeded, causing Monero's price to fall  —  at 1:30 pm UTC): This article has been updated to add a Qubic announcement.  Layer-1 blockchain Qubic said it has …
Emma Roth / The Verge:
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:

Sponsor Posts

Command Line:
Introducing Microsoft-Decision-1, our model for fast decision-making  —  Our new model delivers top performance in latency and quality on structured decision tasks to outperform other models.
Will Reed:
The best sales leaders aren't job hunting.  Here's how to reach them without months of cold outreach.  —  Our team came from Box, Square, and Brex, so we already know the GTM leaders worth meeting.
Zoho:
Zoho Books now supports CT600 & Final Accounts Filing as an add-on in the FREE plan  —  Managing end-of-year filing for limited companies in the UK is often expensive and multi-layered.
IDrive:
Protecting your Cloud Applications Data  —  Backing up Office 365, Google Workspace, Dropbox & Salesforce data is critical to preventing data loss or corruption, complying with laws and avoiding critical downtime in case of a disaster.

Featured Podcasts

Big Technology Podcast:
Meta & Microsoft's Claude Slowdown, His Agent Leaked His Banking Info, Don't Bully Your AI
The Big Technology Podcast takes you behind the scenes in the tech world featuring interviews with plugged-in insiders and outside agitators.
Subscribe to Big Technology Podcast.
Sources:
Qualcomm's CEO on the coming AI phone supercycle
Candid conversations with the leaders shaping what's next in AI and the broader tech industry. Hosted by Alex Heath, who has covered Silicon Valley for more than a decade.
Subscribe to Sources.
The Upstarts Podcast:
Bringing Back Mammoths And Building Noah's Ark 2.0 | Colossal's Ben Lamm
Veteran tech reporter Alex Konrad sits down with breakout entrepreneurs taking on the status quo to shake up their fields in AI, design, nuclear energy, space, and more.
Subscribe to The Upstarts Podcast.
Great Chat:
The launch industrial complex
A podcast mostly about tech. Brought to you weekly by Angela Du, Sally Shin, Mac Bohannon, Helen Min, and Ashley Mayer.
Subscribe to Great Chat.
Channels with Peter Kafka:
Larry Ellison's Media Ambitions & Kevin Roose on AI's Biggest Gamble
Media and tech aren't just intersecting - they're fully intertwined. To understand how those worlds work, Peter Kafka talks to industry leaders, upstarts and observers.
Subscribe to Channels with Peter Kafka.
Training Data:
Google's AI Infrastructure Chief, Amin Vahdat, on the Physics & Economics of Frontier AI
Sequoia Capital partners host conversations with leading AI builders and researchers to develop a deeper understanding of the evolving technologies and their implications.
Subscribe to Training Data.
 

About This Page

This is a Techmeme archive page. It shows how the site appeared at 7:25 PM ET, August 12, 2025.

The most current version of the site as always is available at our home page. To view an earlier snapshot click here and then modify the date indicated.

More News

Sharon Goldman / Fortune:
Lauren Goode / Wired:

Earlier Picks

Dan Goodin / Ars Technica:
Skylar Woodhouse / Bloomberg:
Zac Hall / 9to5Mac:
Ina Fried / Axios: