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June 18, 2026, 12:20 PM
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WeSmirchTop News
| Wired: |
Sources: the White House's move to restrict Mythos 5 came after it ordered Anthropic to revoke South Korea-based SK Telecom's access over alleged ties to China — Days before Anthropic took its most advanced AI models offline, the White House ordered the company to revoke SK Telecom's access …
More: The Next Web, UPI, Bloomberg, and Gizmodo
| Maria Curi / Axios: |
As David Sacks steps back and Sriram Krishnan prepares to leave, Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick and others are leading AI policy in the Trump administration — Like its AI policy, the Trump administration's AI team is taking shape on the fly. … But with Sacks stepping … | Hugo Lowell / Wired: |
More: Gizmodo, Risky Business, The Rundown AI, and New York Times
| Rolfe Winkler / Wall Street Journal: |
In an interview, Tim Cook says Apple price hikes are “unavoidable” to offset surging memory and storage chip costs, and “the situation has become unsustainable” — The CEO tells the Journal in an exclusive interview that soaring costs make price increases ‘unavoidable’
More: Wall Street Journal, MacRumors, TechCrunch, The Information, Engadget, Barron's Online, CNBC, CNET, Thurrott, Gizmodo, 9to5Mac, PCMag, CNN, ITPro, The Verge, Forbes, Pocket-lint, Phone Scoop, The Mac Observer, Benzinga, Tom's Hardware, CBS News, Proactive, Daring Fireball, The Shortcut, Business Standard, Dexerto, BGR, BBC, Newser, TrendForce, The National, Fast Company, Pixel Envy, Al Jazeera, PC Gamer, TechRadar, Android Authority, Entrepreneur, MacTech.com, Neowin, International Business Times, IntoMobile, Fortune India, Watcher Guru, Trak.in, The Independent, Baller Alert, Euronews, Mirror, iThinkDifferent, Seoul Economic Daily, Cult of Mac, Telegraph, The Next Web, Yahoo Finance, T3, SamMobile, Moneycontrol, Livemint, TechSpot, Asymco, Dow Jones Newswires, IGN, Macworld, Digit, Malay Mail, Sources, The Economic Times, Gizchina, Information Age, Instapundit, Insider Gaming, PYMNTS, MarketWatch, ZeroHedge News, iPhone in Canada, Fox Business, Mashable, Digital Trends, Digital Music News, Business Insider, New York Post, Daily Mail, Appleosophy, Tech in Asia, AppleInsider, Reuters, and MacDailyNews
X: @autismcapital, @mweinbach, @vadimyuryev, @dylanmcd8, @nicnguyen, @stocksavvyshay, and @briansozzi
Forums: r/technology, r/MU_Stock, r/MacStudio, r/apple, r/wallstreetbets, Slashdot, and MacRumors Forums
| The Information: |
Noam Shazeer leaves Google to join OpenAI as lead for architecture research; he rejoined Google as a Gemini co-lead in 2024 during the $2.7B Character.AI deal — Noam Shazeer, the Google DeepMind researcher whose work underpinned the generative AI boom, is joining OpenAI, the AI firm told staff on Wednesday.| Kai Nicol-Schwarz / CNBC: |
Intel's stock jumps 5%+ after Trump said “Apple has agreed to work with Intel to design and build its Chips in America”; INTC is up 500%+ in the past year — Intel's stock rose 8% on Thursday, after President Donald Trump said the semiconductor company had agreed to a deal with Apple to design and build chips in the U.S.
More: Tom's Hardware, International Business Times, Semafor, The Hill, Portland Business Journal, UPI, Reuters, Motley Fool, AppleInsider, Cult of Mac, Dow Jones Newswires, Yahoo Finance, Blockonomi, Barchart.com, Benzinga, Livemint, Business Insider, TechSpot, Coinpaper, Reuters, iPhone in Canada, Barron's Online, 9to5Mac, Bloomberg, Wall Street Journal, Proactive, Reality Tea, Sherwood News, ANI News, Washington Examiner, Channel NewsAsia, and MacDailyNews
| Richard Lawler / The Verge: |
Midjourney unveils its first hardware product, the Midjourney Scanner, an ultrasound-based full-body scanner; it is unclear how AI fits into the medical effort — The AI image generator says this side project will be ‘in many ways superior to even MRI machines.’
More: Midjourney, Gizmodo, Latent.Space, Bloomberg, Tech Times, The Decoder, The Next Web, Engadget, Mashable, The Neuron, The Information, RuntimeWire, and RuntimeWire
X: @ccatalini, @nickfloats, @midjourney, @nikitabier, @tszzl, @midjourney, @chrissgpt, @elonmusk, @markgurman, @autismcapital, @autismcapital, and @davemorin
LinkedIn: Carlos Rodrigues and Maria Burpee
Bluesky: @aerialeverything …, @iamstan.dev, @ernie.tedium.co, and @philpax.me. Threads: @ericflo. Mastodon: @yiningkarlli@mastodon …
Forums: Hacker News, Hacker News, r/BetterOffline, r/midjourney, and r/doctorsUK
| Sean O'Kane / TechCrunch: |
Filings: Waymo pulls its ~4K robotaxis from highways after finding 13+ instances of the cars driving into highway sections under construction — Waymo has recalled its fleet of nearly 4,000 robotaxis to restrict them from driving on highways while it figures out how to make the vehicles behave around construction zones.| Gergely Orosz / The Pragmatic Engineer: |
An in-depth look at Meta's AI-fueled rampage through its engineering organization, 30% to 50% of engineers on core teams reassigned to data labeling, and more — Leadership at the social media giant has been on an AI-fueled rampage through its engineering org. We report what's happened| Angel Au-Yeung / Wall Street Journal: |
AI inference startup Baseten is raising $1.5B in a dual-tiered deal, with some investors putting in money at an $11B valuation and others at a $13B valuation — Baseten, part of a growing Silicon Valley ecosystem offering services to enable low-cost AI models, is raising $1.5 billion in a new round
More: PYMNTS, Forbes, The Next Web, and DatacenterDynamics
| Robert McMillan / Wall Street Journal: |
Nation-state hackers are increasingly using preinstalled software on low-cost home devices to create residential proxy networks for masking cyberattack traffic — Nation-state cyberattackers are increasingly using residential proxy networks to mask their traffic, turning everyday electronics into a massive global threat
More: Tech Times
| Mark Bergen / Bloomberg: |
Amazon's AI chief Peter DeSantis says the company is in talks to sell its custom Trainium AI chips for use in third-party data centers — Amazon.com Inc. is in talks to sell its custom-made artificial intelligence chips for use in other companies' data centers, a key expansion of its efforts to cut into Nvidia Corp.'s dominance.
More: Financial Times
| Michael J. de la Merced / New York Times: |
Businesses have started using Kalshi to hedge their business risks; Kalshi says institutional trading volume on its platform has grown 800% since November 2025 — Platforms like Kalshi let millions wager on sports and pop culture. They're now hoping institutions will use them for big-ticket trading like hedging.
More: kentucky.gov and CBC News
| Natalia Kniazhevich / Bloomberg: |
Prem AI, a Swiss startup that lets hedge funds and law firms run AI models on their own infrastructure, is raising a $100M Series A, targeting a $500M valuation — Prem AI, a Swiss startup that helps companies including hedge funds and law firms run artificial intelligence models …
More: Pulse 2.0, The Next Web, RuntimeWire, Tech Funding News, and Startup.eu
| New York Times: |
SpaceX's all-stock Cursor deal illustrates the power of the public markets, which could help SpaceX catch up to Anthropic's and OpenAI's models via acquisitions — Shares in Elon Musk's SpaceX have been on a tear, giving the rockets and artificial intelligence company financial resources to box out competitors.| Jeremy Hsu / Ars Technica: |
Nvidia researchers unveil ENPIRE, an agent harness framework that develops robotic self-improvement strategies for physical tasks with minimal human supervision — What happens when you give AI coding agents a lab full of robotic arms, some compute resources, and a “generous token budget” for teaching the robots various tasks?
More: NVIDIA, Tech Times, Decrypt, The Decoder, and Tom's Hardware
| Pew Research Center: |
A survey of US adults: 49% reported using chatbots in 2026, up from 33% in 2024, 24% said that they use chatbots on a daily basis, and 44% said they use ChatGPT — More Americans are using chatbots, and some are adopting AI summaries and smart speakers. But views about AI …
More: Gizmodo, Implicator.ai, TechSpot, Washington Post, The Verge, Axios, Newsweek, and Variety
X: @pewresearch, @moreperfectus, and @ali_lev. LinkedIn: Kayla Schwoerer, Ph.D.. Bluesky: @paleofuture
| Saritha Rai / Bloomberg: |
A PwC study suggests that AI is rewarding companies that use it to enhance human skills, while leaving those that use it merely to cut costs further behind — Artificial intelligence is pulling the global labor market in two opposite directions, rewarding companies that use AI to enhance human skills … | Kerry Flynn / Axios: |
Seattle-based Gradial, which makes AI agents that automate enterprise marketing workflows, raised a $65M Series C led by Insight Partners at a $675M valuation — Gradial, a Seattle-based startup that deploys AI agents to automate enterprise marketing workflows, has raised $65 million in Series C funding … | Todd Bishop / GeekWire: |
AWS Summit: Amazon unveiled AWS Continuum, which uses AI to find and fix code vulnerabilities, AWS Context, which organizes company data for AI agents, and more — Amazon Web Services is announcing a new set of AI agents for businesses, developers, and individual users … | Bloomberg: |
Sources: ByteDance has been Microsoft's biggest AI customer in recent years, largely using OpenAI models, and is on track to spend $1B+ a year on Azure services — Microsoft Corp. has built a big business selling AI models to Chinese companies despite the growing rivalry between the US and China over artificial intelligence.
More: Proactive, Blockchain.News, The Next Web, Blockonomi, Motley Fool, AI News, and Memeburn. LinkedIn: Brody Ford
| Rebecca Bellan / TechCrunch: |
Sources: General Intuition, which trains AI agents in spatial reasoning, is in talks to raise $300M from Jeff Bezos and others at a $2B+ valuation — General Intuition, the New York-based startup building a foundation model that trains AI agents how to move through space and time … | Bloomberg: |
Sources: as early as next week, the EU is set to unveil its preliminary findings that AWS and Azure seem to meet the criteria for regulation under the DMA — Microsoft Corp.'s Azure and Amazon Web Services are on a collision course with the European Union's tough digital competition rulebook …
More: DatacenterDynamics, The Hindu, and Yahoo Finance
| Bloomberg: |
Former Gojek CEO and Indonesian education minister Nadiem Makarim is charged with taking ~$46M in rewards tied to a Chromebook procurement contract for schools — The trial of one of Southeast Asia's most successful entrepreneurs is adding to concern about governance under President Prabowo Subianto.| Mark Gurman / Bloomberg: |
Sources: Apple is testing a second-generation iPhone Air, planned for spring 2027, with a second rear camera for ultrawide-angle photos and better battery life — Apple Inc. is preparing a second-generation iPhone Air for spring 2027, aiming to boost the appeal of the slimmed-down device … | New York Times: |
Guardrails Alliance, a super PAC that has raised $5M, debuts to advocate for AI safety legislation and counter pro-industry lobbying, running ads for Alex Bores — The Guardrails Alliance, which has raised $5 million, is positioning itself as a populist effort that will take on the pro … | Financial Times: |
Sources: JPMorgan Chase has stopped its staff in Hong Kong from accessing Anthropic's AI models internally, after a similar move by rival Goldman Sachs in April — Bank follows Goldman Sachs in preventing use of Claude in Asian financial hub — JPMorgan Chase has stopped its staff … | CNBC: |
Report: DeepSeek's first external funding round has a non-negotiable term for investors to not poach its staff or encourage them to start their own companies — China's DeepSeek has a precondition for its $7.4 billion maiden fundraise: no poaching the AI lab's talents.
More: South China Morning Post
| The Information: |
Sources: the early Chinese backers of Manus, including HSG, ZhenFund, and Tencent, plan to buy the AI startup back from Meta at the $2B price Meta paid — The early Chinese backers of AI firm Manus are planning to buy the firm back from Meta Platforms at the $2 billion price Meta paid …
More: Reuters, The Economic Times, and Axios
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