Voice-AI startup Wispr Flow has closed a $280 million Series B led by Menlo Ventures, with India-focused investors Peak XV Partners, Together Fund and Activate also taking stakes, nearly tripling the company's valuation to roughly $2 billion.
SoftBank Group is preparing to issue roughly ¥1 trillion ($6.3 billion) in bonds targeted at Japanese retail investors, the largest such offering ever by a Japanese company, as Masayoshi Son deepens SoftBank's reliance on debt to fund its AI ambitions.
Alibaba is raising roughly $10.2 billion through the largest-ever primary share placement by a Hong Kong-listed company, with all proceeds earmarked for chips, computing infrastructure and AI model development as it competes for global AI leadership.
Meta is on trial in Oakland federal court against a coalition of US states alleging it designed Facebook and Instagram to be addictive to children, in a case presided over by Judge Yvonne Gonzalez Rogers, who also oversaw Elon Musk's lawsuit against OpenAI.
A powerful new AI model called Ox Alpha has surfaced anonymously on the developer platform OpenRouter, offering a roughly 1 million-token context window and multimodal capabilities for free, even as its creator remains unidentified.
A small-scale UK power generator was forced offline for four consecutive days last month in what officials describe as the first successful Iran-linked cyberattack against British energy infrastructure, The Telegraph reported.
Chinese AI lab DeepSeek will stop charging peak API rates on weekends starting August 23, easing part of a pricing structure introduced just a week earlier that had raised some token costs by more than 1,100 percent.
Hugging Face, the open-source AI model and dataset repository often called "the GitHub of AI," is reportedly exploring a sale that could value the company at $13 billion or more — nearly triple its last disclosed valuation.
A Chinese humanoid robot ran 100 metres in 9.39 seconds at the World Humanoid Robot Games in Beijing, beating Usain Bolt's 9.58-second human world record, as China's robotics industry stages its largest-ever showcase of embodied AI.
Investment in UK financial technology companies fell to its lowest level since at least 2016 in the first half of 2026, as investors increasingly favour companies tied to artificial intelligence over traditional fintech plays.