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August 15, 2026, 2:15 AM
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Madison Mills / Axios:
Risk report: Anthropic raises misalignment risk estimate from very low to low and says it doesn't plan to release a stronger internal model called “Model 2”  —  Anthropic does not plan to release an internal model that appears to be more powerful than top-of-the-line Mythos …
Bloomberg:
Docs: Anthropic told investors it generated $11.5B+ in revenue, with positive adjusted operating income, in Q2, up from $787M in Q2 2025 and $4.73B in Q1 2026  —  Anthropic PBC is telling prospective investors its second-quarter revenue jumped at least 14-fold versus the same period a year ago …
Bloomberg:
SpaceX closes its $60B acquisition of Cursor, two months after SpaceX formally announced it had agreed to acquire the startup  —  SpaceX has completed a $60 billion acquisition of artificial intelligence coding startup Cursor, a key part of Elon Musk's bid to gain ground on rivals Anthropic PBC and OpenAI.
Kate Rooney / CNBC:
Source: OpenAI CFO told investors that enterprise business now generates more revenue than ChatGPT-led consumer business; enterprise customers grew 32% in July  —  At the end of a week of turmoil in OpenAI's C-suite, finance chief Sarah Friar held a meeting with investors on Friday …
Reuters:
Z.ai says GLM-5.3 scores 84.5% on CyberGym, vs. Mythos 5's 83.8%, and its most sensitive cybersecurity functions will only be available to verified users  —  Chinese AI startup Z.ai said on Friday its open-source GLM-5.3 model had neared Anthropic's restricted Mythos 5 in identifying software …
Wall Street Journal:
Sources: PayPal is in talks to sell itself to a group including Stripe and Advent, which proposed paying $60.50/share in July; PayPal is seeking a higher price  —  The fintech startup and private-equity firm Advent offered to buy the struggling payments company in July
Emma Roth / The Verge:
Google adds a toggle in Gemini and Flow to remove visible watermarks from AI-generated images, videos, and music; SynthID watermarks and C2PA metadata remain  —  Google will still embed invisible SynthID and C2PA watermarks into AI-generated images, videos, and music.
Fred Lambert / Electrek:
Waymo receives approval from the California Public Utilities Commission to expand across 18 counties, including Sacramento and San Diego  —  Waymo says California regulators have signed off on the biggest expansion of its robotaxi service yet, covering 18 counties from Sonoma down to San Diego.
Anissa Gardizy / Wall Street Journal:
Sources: Nvidia has reworked a deal to finance an OpenAI Ohio data center campus so that it would initially guarantee only half of its planned $250B backstop  —  Under new proposed terms, the chip maker would initially backstop only half of the 10-gigawatt project
Michael Martina / Reuters:
Source and letter: the US plans to tell 35 partner countries they'll be excluded from the US-led Pax Silica initiative if they also join China's rival framework  —  The U.S. is preparing to tell dozens of countries they must pick sides in the artificial intelligence race with China …
Abhinaya Prabhu / Tech Funding News:
SF-based Vals, which develops evaluations and benchmarks to test AI models on real-world tasks, raised a $40M Series A led by a16z at a $400M valuation  —  - Vals AI raised $40 million in a Series A round at a $400 million valuation.  — Revenue has grown eightfold since 2025 …
Reuters:
The US OCC conditionally approves a bank charter application for Trump family's World Liberty Financial, allowing it to directly issue its USD1 stablecoin  —  A national U.S. bank regulator on Friday conditionally approved a bank charter application linked to President Donald Trump …
The Economic Times:
Sources: Uber and Rapido discussed merging their India ride-hailing operations in May; talks collapsed after disagreements over the proposed deal's structure  —  Uber and Rapido discussed merging their India ride-hailing operations in May, sources told us.  Talks collapsed after disagreements over the proposed deal's structure.
More: Inc42 and VCCircle
Natasha Mascarenhas / Bloomberg:
Investor letter: Thrive's 2022 early-stage $516M fund that invested in OpenAI and SpaceX was worth $3.7B+ as of the end of June, net of fees and other charges  —  Thrive Capital's 2022 early-stage venture capital fund, a $516 million investment vehicle that made early bets on OpenAI …
M. Sriram / Newcomer:
How dual-valuation deals became pervasive in the current frenzied AI funding cycle, with prestige VC firms monetizing their brand names by getting better prices  —  Prestige firms are monetizing their brand names by getting better prices than others in the same funding round

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About This Page

This is a Techmeme archive page. It shows how the site appeared at 2:15 AM ET, August 15, 2026.

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

Ted Johnson / Deadline:
President Trump urges Congress to support a federal film and TV tax incentive and lists a bipartisan group of lawmakers that he's working with to pass the bill

Alex Sherman / CNBC:
Sources: in its next US TV deal, the NHL seeks a 50%-100% increase over its seven-year, $4.5B contract with ESPN and TNT; formal talks can begin on January 1

Bloomberg:
A look at Disney's AI push; sources: it is testing AI-powered suggestions and could add chats with characters on Disney+, and execs saw AI demos at Amazon MGM

More News

Joann Muller / Axios:
Nevada granted Tesla a robotaxi permit, but capped the fleet at 10 vehicles, not 5,000 that Tesla sought, banned airport pickups, and ordered other restrictions
@alibaba_qwen:
Alibaba releases weights for Qwen3.8 models under Apache 2.0 license, including Qwen3.8-27B, which it says beats Qwen3.7-Plus and excels in real-world coding
Reuters:
France's top court blocks a bill banning social media for under-15s, saying it infringed upon freedom of expression; Macron orders the PM to rework the bill

Earlier Picks

Carl Franzen / VentureBeat:
DeepSeek debuts DeepSeek Harness under the MIT license in developer preview, touting a design where “everything is a plugin” that can be swapped out
Sean Hollister / The Verge:
Epic v. Google: in a compliance hearing, a judge orders Google to remove “anticompetitive friction” for installing third-party app stores from its Play Store
Financial Times:
Sources: JPMorgan Chase terminated its banking relationship with Polymarket in 2025 over regulatory concerns, though it still maintains some ties to the company
J.J. McCorvey / Bloomberg:
A judge orders Kalshi to stop offering most of its prediction market contracts in Washington state, after finding it likely violated state gambling-related laws
The Information:
A profile of Camilla Clark, quiet adviser to husband Dario Amodei and behind-the-scenes player at Anthropic; she once pitched a porn startup to Jeffrey Epstein
Frederic Lardinois / The New Stack:
OpenAI launches Computer History, an opt-in feature that turns day-to-day computer activity on macOS into memories and a timeline that ChatGPT and Codex can use
Zac Hall / 9to5Mac:
OpenAI previews Ultrafast, an API tier powered by Cerebras that runs GPT-5.6 Sol up to 14× faster and generates up to 750 output tokens per second
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