Techmeme
August 15, 2026, 2:25 AM

Top News

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 …
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
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 …
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 …

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