Techmeme
June 18, 2026, 12:55 PM

Top 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, and Bloomberg
X: @andymasley and @zephyr_z9LinkedIn: Katie Moussouris
Bluesky: @katie-drummond and @lmatsakisForums: r/Anthropic
Hugo Lowell / Wired:
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’
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.
Ashley Gold / Axios:
Former Trump AI adviser Dean Ball is joining OpenAI to lead a new team called Strategic Futures, focused on frontier AI policy and internal governance  —  Dean Ball, who helped shape the Trump administration's early policies on AI, is heading to OpenAI, he told Axios exclusively.
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.
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.’
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
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
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 …
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 …
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.
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.
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 …
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 …
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 …

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