Techmeme
June 18, 2026, 8:30 AM

Top News

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’
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, Gizmodo, and Bloomberg
Bluesky: @katie-drummond and @lmatsakisForums: r/Anthropic
Hugo Lowell / Wired:
Trump administration officials say Anthropic must ensure Fable 5's guardrails can't be circumvented before rerelease; experts say that may not be possible  —  Trump administration officials tell WIRED that if Anthropic wants to rerelease Fable 5, it will need to ensure the model's guardrails can't be circumvented.
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.
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.’
Financial Times:
Sources: Amodei, Altman, and Hassabis called for US-led collaboration on AI rules at the G7 summit; Macron and Modi raised concerns over the US' block of Mythos  —  Dario Amodei is supported by rival Sam Altman in call for international co-operation  —  Anthropic chief executive Dario …
Kai Nicol-Schwarz / CNBC:
Intel stock jumps around 9% in premarket trading, after Trump said “Apple has agreed to work with Intel to design and build its Chips in America”  —  Intel's stock rose 9% in premarket trading on Thursday, after President Donald Trump said the semiconductor company had agreed …
Michael J. de la Merced / New York Times:
Businesses have started using Kalshi to hedge 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
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 …
Andy Robinson / Video Games Chronicle:
Epic says Unreal Engine 6, planned for early access in late 2027, will unify UE5 and Unreal Editor for Fortnite, add Claude and Gemini integrations, and more  —  Epic has detailed Unreal Engine 6, which it says will prominently integrate generative AI models to allow developers to …
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 …
Robert McMillan / Wall Street Journal:
Nation-state hackers are increasingly using preinstalled software on low-cost home devices to create residential proxy networks and mask 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
Gergely Orosz / The Pragmatic Engineer:
An in-depth look at Meta's AI-fueled rampage through its engineering organization, reassignments of engineers on core teams 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
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 …
James Van Straten / CoinDesk:
Hive stock jumps 10% in premarket trading after announcing a $220M, three-year GPU cloud contract with Bell Canada and Cohere, as it pivots from bitcoin mining  —  HIVE Digital Technologies (HIVE) shares jumped 10% in pre-market trading on Thursday after the company announced a $220 million …
More: TheEnergyMag
Lawrence Abrams / BleepingComputer:
A newly discovered data leak has exposed what appears to be a collection of Fortinet and FortiGate VPN credentials for 73,932 firewall URLs across 194 countries  —  A newly discovered data leak dubbed “FortiBleed” has exposed what appears to be a collection of Fortinet and FortiGate VPN credentials …
Summer Maxwell / Bloomberg:
Verse Enterprises, which wants to provide energy-management software for 100 data centers by 2027, raised a $54M Series B from Nvidia and others  —  Verse Enterprises Inc. is betting batteries and solar can help data centers skip the line.  —  Long queues to get connected to the strained energy grid …
Financial Times:
A Blackstone-led consortium agrees to take control of software company Medallia from Thoma Bravo, which will lose the entire $5B it invested in Medallia  —  Blackstone-led consortium to take over software company and inject $150mn to help cut its debt load  —  A Blackstone-led consortium …
More: Bloomberg

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Anhata Rooprai / Reuters: