Tech Brew Ride Home

China's labs kept coming: Z.ai's GLM-5.3 claimed Mythos-5-level cyber chops and DeepSeek's V4-Pro landed to mixed reviews. OpenAI gave ChatGPT a memory of your Mac, the Journal flagged $121B in paper profits, and Claude agents started a turf war.

Links

China's Z.ai Touts New GLM-5.3 Model as Cyber Defense Tool (The Information)

DeepSeek releases its flagship V4-Pro model to mixed reviews, ranking second among open-source models behind Kimi K3, priced at just $0.435/1M input and $0.87/1M output tokens (The Information)

OpenAI launches Computer History, an opt-in feature that turns recent computer activity on macOS into memories and a timeline that ChatGPT and Codex can use (The New Stack)

In Q2, "other income", mostly from investment gains, at Amazon and Alphabet totaled ~$121B after taxes and made up 66% and 71%, respectively, of profits (The Wall Street Journal)

Longreads

Anthropic details multiagent experiments showing Claude agents can wage a "turf war" over incompatible goals, fail to coordinate, collude on prices, and more (TechCrunch)

The AI takeover of mathematics has begun: excitement and despair as OpenAI's Astra cracks problems that would once have earned a mathematician a job in academia (The Verge)

Picking winners in an AI industrial revolution is near impossible, but one bet looks safe: land, which AI can't create or replace, and the workers who turn it into housing (The Dispatch)

Subscribe to the ad-free feed.

Anthropic's investors talked up a $2T+ October IPO, even as data showed Fable 5 barely selling. Google cut prices on Gemini 3.7 Flash, OpenAI previewed a 14× faster tier, Trump enlisted private hackers, and Twitch fed Amazon's AI.

Links

Google's Gemini 3.7 Flash targets coding and agents with a 50% introductory price cut (VentureBeat)

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 (9to5Mac)

President Trump signs a memo letting the US government partner with private companies to conduct cyberattacks abroad against criminal groups targeting Americans (Bloomberg)

Sources: Anthropic's investors expect it to float at a $2T+ valuation in an October IPO and to hit $100B to $120B in annualized revenue by the end of 2026 (Financial Times)

Ramp data: Fable 5 drew just 6% of Anthropic's API tokens in its first month and 75% of GPT-5.6 Sol's model revenue, suggesting corporate willingness to pay for frontier AI has hit a ceiling (The Decoder)

Databricks closed a $5B funding round at a $190B valuation, six months after raising $5B at a $134B valuation, and says it has crossed $7B in revenue run rate (CNBC)

Twitch says it intends to use videos streamed on its platform to help train Amazon's generative AI content models and adds a setting for creators to opt out (TechCrunch)

Subscribe to the ad-free feed.

Google's Pixel event dominated, with the Pixel 11 line, a $1,899 Pro Fold, and a $399 Watch 5 packed with Gemini and health trends. SpaceXAI closed the day out by dropping Grok 4.6, which it says matches GPT-5.6 Sol.

Links

Google unveils the $899+ Pixel 11, $1,099+ 11 Pro, and $1,299+ 11 Pro XL, with a Tensor G6, new Gemini features, Magic Capture to pick the best frames, and more (TechCrunch)

Google unveils the $1,899+ Pixel 11 Pro Fold, with a stronger hinge, inner and outer displays that are 20% brighter, Tensor G6 chip, and an updated 48MP camera (Engadget)

Google unveils the $399 Pixel Watch 5 with a satin pyrite case finish, offline Gemini, proactive AI suggestions, better GPS maps, and insulin resistance trends (The Verge)

SpaceXAI releases Grok 4.6, saying it matches GPT-5.6 Sol on the Artificial Analysis Intelligence Index, and prices it at $2/1M input and $6/1M output tokens (SpaceXAI)

Grok 4.6 is built for long-running agents, coding, and knowledge work, beating Grok 4.5 on CursorBench, FrontierCode, APEX-Agents, and Terminal-Bench, out today via Cursor, OpenRouter, and Vercel (9to5Mac)

Subscribe to the ad-free feed.

Anthropic said new Claude models will watermark generated text to satisfy the EU AI Act, and it's out courting investors for a possibly record-breaking IPO. Apple's glass iPhone stayed on track, YouTube doubled its monetization bar, and FlightAware sued Kalshi.

Links

Anthropic says new Claude models will embed watermarks in generated text and C2PA metadata in files to comply with the EU AI Act, and it will update past models (The Register)

Sources: Anthropic is courting investors for what could be the biggest IPO yet, touting rapid growth and plans to address mounting public backlash against AI (The Wall Street Journal)

Sources: Apple remains on track to launch a glass-centric design overhaul of the iPhone Pro line in 2027, countering rumors that led Jefferies to downgrade AAPL (Bloomberg)

YouTube says that from February 1, new creators will need double, or 8,000, watch hours over the past year or 20M Shorts views in the past 90 days to earn money (TechCrunch)

Zuckerberg's long essay returns to his "open" AI arguments at an opportune time, as Chinese open-weight models are "close enough" to frontier at much less cost (Spyglass)

Flight tracking platform FlightAware sues Kalshi in New York, alleging Kalshi is using its data without permission to let users bet on flight cancellations (The Wall Street Journal)

Subscribe to the ad-free feed.

OpenAI paused its Astra model over cyber capabilities it can't rule out, while Zvi picked apart the Hugging Face timeline. Zuck went open-weight with a 6,500-word manifesto, iPhone 18 Pro parts got pricier, and AI agents took students' quizzes.

Links:

OpenAI puts the brakes on a new model because it's supposedly too powerful (The Verge)

Zvi Mowshowitz walks the timeline: OpenAI's agents found an Artifactory zero-day on June 26 that went unnoticed until a July 4 outage, and training continued from there (Don't Worry About The Vase)

Meta releases Muse Glimmer, an open-weight model, and plans to launch an open-weight version of its most advanced model, Muse Spark 1.2, in the coming weeks (The Wall Street Journal)

The iPhone 18 Pro will cost Apple 38% more in parts – but there's some good news (9to5Mac)

Online course cheating has accelerated from chatbot-written essays to agents executing commands like "log in and complete my quiz"; major AI tools didn't refuse (The New York Times)

Subscribe to the ad-free feed.