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August 12, 2025, 7:00 PM
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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.
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:
Epic says it is bringing Fortnite back to iOS in Australia “at a date to be determined”, after a judge ruled Apple and Google's app stores are anticompetitive
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 …
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.
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.
Sharon Goldman / Fortune:
NYC-based Profound, which helps brands optimize visibility in AI search responses, raised a $35M Series B led by Sequoia, bringing its total funding to $58.5M  —  Profound co-founders James Cadwallader and Dylan Babbs, who are betting big on helping brands get discovered in AI search
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.
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:
Google launches Preferred Sources in the US and India, allowing users to personalize the news in Search's “top stories” section by selecting favorite outlets  —  A new feature will let you pick the news outlets you see in Google Search's top stories.
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:
How Jensen Huang successfully lobbied Trump to resume Nvidia's H20 sales to China; US officials hadn't vetted the 20% pay-to-play proposal when Trump offered it

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This is a Techmeme archive page. It shows how the site appeared at 7:00 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.

From Mediagazer

Alex Weprin / The Hollywood Reporter:
Stephen Colbert says CBS lawyers blocked an interview with Democratic US Senate candidate James Talarico, citing the FCC's equal time guidance for TV talk shows

Todd Spangler / Variety:
Paramount says it is “prepared to engage” with WBD on takeover talks during a seven-day negotiating window, but doesn't say whether it will raise its bid

Gene Maddaus / Variety:
Warner Bros. joins Disney and Paramount claiming infringement on ByteDance's AI video tool, Seedance, and demands ByteDance cease training AI on WB characters

More News

Lauren Goode / Wired:
Q&A with AMD CEO Lisa Su on AI accelerators, US manufacturing, becoming AMD's CEO in 2014, OpenAI, Tesla, xAI, China, ROCm, aiming to surpass Nvidia, and more

Earlier Picks

Dan Goodin / Ars Technica:
ESET says two Russian cybercrime groups are exploiting a high-severity WinRAR zero-day, backdooring computers that open malicious archives in phishing messages
Skylar Woodhouse / Bloomberg:
President Trump meets with Intel CEO Lip-Bu Tan and says his Cabinet members would continue talks with him in the coming days, after calling for his resignation
Zac Hall / 9to5Mac:
Anthropic adds a memory feature to let Claude reference information from past chats, available now to Max, Team, and Enterprise subscribers, and soon to others
Ina Fried / Axios:
GitHub CEO Thomas Dohmke says he will “leave GitHub to become a founder again”, with GitHub and its leadership team moving into Microsoft's CoreAI organization
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