TerraFirma, a construction tech company founded by two former SpaceX engineers to build remote-controlled construction equipment, raised $115M (Samantha Subin/CNBC)
Sources: Trump admin and industry groups have discussed streamlining releases of US open models of equal or lesser capability than leading Chinese open models (Benjamin Guggenheim/Washington Post)
Apple releases the first public betas of iOS 27, iPadOS 27, macOS 27 Golden Gate, watchOS 27, and tvOS 27, marking the public debut of the new Siri AI (Will Shanklin/Engadget)
Microsoft announces a Windows 11 search overhaul that prioritizes local results, removes promotional web content, and more, rolling out to Windows Insiders (Zac Bowden/Windows Central)
Q&A with Xinzhou Wu, head of automotive at Nvidia, on Nvidia's chips and AI models for autonomous driving, lidar's usefulness for Level 4 autonomy, and more (Nilay Patel/The Verge)
Memo: Tang Jie, founder of Z.ai, the Chinese lab behind the GLM models, argues frontier AI capabilities should stay "as open and widely accessible as possible" (Bloomberg)
Sources: Cursor is building a general-purpose AI agent codenamed Sand, aimed at non-developers, that handles emails, texts, and documents to rival Claude Cowork (Grace Kay/The Information)
OpenAI, Meta, and SpaceXAI may be able to put pressure on Anthropic by emphasizing cost efficiency, as business customers increasingly scrutinize AI spending (Bloomberg)
Anthropic says it is extending Claude Fable 5 access on all paid plans, as well as keeping Claude Code's weekly rate limits 50% higher, through July 19 (The Economic Times)
A look at Bending Spoons' hiring process: the company, which owns Vimeo, AOL, and Evernote, received 800,000 job applications last year and made only 286 hires (Ben Cohen/Wall Street Journal)
Current AI market dynamics point to frontier models becoming commodity infrastructure as the token crunch eases, with value shifting to products built on top (Benedict Evans)
Psychologist Peter Gray argues that school stress, not smartphone use, is the main driver of the teen mental health crisis, challenging Jonathan Haidt's thesis (Kaitlyn Tiffany/The Atlantic)
Apple's lawsuit could sidetrack OpenAI's hardware aspirations for years, or possibly forever, as the startup gets into yet another controversy and messy divorce (M.G. Siegler/Spyglass)
The Department of Commerce loosens export controls to the UAE, letting G42 and US companies like Apple, Meta, and xAI export AI chips to UAE without a license (Karen Freifeld/Reuters)
Filing: college social app Fizz accuses Maveron's Jerry Lu of giving confidential info to rival Sidechat after he met with Fizz as a potential investor in 2022 (Sarah Perez/TechCrunch)