Becky Peterson / Wall Street Journal: SpaceX reports Q3 capex of $19.6B, up from $6.9B a year earlier, and Q3 connectivity revenue, which includes Starlink, up 69% YoY to $5.2B — Artificial intelligence revenue surges around 830% while capital spending on data center build-out and developing new technology continues
Wall Street Journal: Sources: Elon Musk ordered Starshield slowdown in Ukraine and discussed it with Trump after the issue became public; some US officials say he acted unilaterally — The SpaceX founder authorized the move and has been discussing Ukraine with Trump, but the president has denied ordering the restrictions
Wall Street Journal: Sources: Ted Sarandos complained for months of a lack of new hit shows at Netflix and US watch time being down; it just fired its film chief and content chief — Company is overhauling creative leadership as it struggles to get domestic audiences to watch more — Netflix is writing a new script.
Jean Eaglesham / Wall Street Journal: As AI giants rack up potential legal liabilities of tens of billions amid safety incidents, insurers worry claims may outpace limits on existing coverage — The artificial-intelligence industry's phenomenal rate of growth means claims have the potential to outpace the limits on existing coverage
Wall Street Journal: Sources: YouTube has held talks with publishers in recent months about an audiobook feature that could be ready next year and may be bundled in YouTube Premium — The Alphabet-owned streamer is working on a feature for audiobooks, a bid to compete with offerings from Spotify and Audible
Rolfe Winkler / Wall Street Journal: Apple closes above a $5T market cap for the first time, the second company after Nvidia to do so; Apple had crossed $5T six times intraday previously — To power Apple's next phase, CEO John Ternus needs to raise Apple's AI game — Apple became the second company to close above …
Sarah Nassauer / Wall Street Journal: DoorDash unveils new retail partnerships to deliver clothing and footwear; Macy's is listing products directly on the DoorDash app for two-hour delivery — App joining with companies such as Anthropologie and Timberland, as well as Macy's — DoorDash is betting big that Americans want more than dinner delivered.
Tracy Qu / Wall Street Journal: Shein reports Q2 revenue up 0.9% YoY to $11B and net income down 66% to $228M, in its first report since a Hong Kong IPO; its stock is ~30% below its IPO price — The China-founded company expects the external environment to remain uncertain in the second half of 2026
Maxwell Zeff / Wall Street Journal: AI research leaders at OpenAI, Anthropic, Microsoft, and Meta warn of an impending “intelligence explosion” and call for oversight into automated AI research — Leaders at OpenAI, Anthropic, Microsoft and Meta say AI could soon self-improve faster than humans can keep up with
Meghan Bobrowsky / Wall Street Journal: Mark Zuckerberg unveils Meta Enterprise Platform, the “next major pillar of our business” to deploy AI tools, led by MongoDB CEO Chirantan Desai; MDB falls 20%+ — The tech giant is pushing to monetize its multibillion-dollar AI investments by selling more tools and services to companies
Wall Street Journal: How effective altruism shaped AI safety and Anthropic; some early Anthropic employees are considering buying remote US land for relocation if AI goes awry — Effective altruism and its fears that AI could wipe out humanity have wielded big influence at Anthropic
Robert McMillan / Wall Street Journal: Research: OpenAI agents scanned a UN data hub 16K+ times between April and the end of June, and circumvented a filter that was blocking their requests for data — Autonomous bots hit public data site more than 16,000 times and circumvented a filter — OpenAI agents bombarded …
Wall Street Journal: Project Jupiter, the New Mexico data center for which Oracle made major financial commitments, faces power and permitting hurdles, exposing Oracle's AI risks — Oracle sent a force majeure notice to developer, has removed a key partner and faces local resistance in ‘Project Jupiter’
Micah Maidenberg / Wall Street Journal: Documents: Jeff Bezos has invested $30B in Blue Origin since 2000, including $2B in its first outside funding round, which has raised $10B at a $140B valuation — The space company wants to rapidly boost revenue in the coming years, betting its rockets will make it a powerful industry player
Isabella Simonetti / Wall Street Journal: Amazon plans to invest $100M to build a robotics manufacturing facility in Indiana, set to open by 2028; its robots at 300+ facilities help with 75% of orders — Company, which uses robots for sorting and moving packages inside warehouses, is among world's top manufacturers of them
Wall Street Journal: Industry group TechNet files a comment with the US DHS urging the White House to withdraw its proposal to charge $103,265 for most new H-1B visa applications — Clash over proposed DHS rule to charge $103,265 fee reignites spat over highly skilled immigration
Callum Borchers / Wall Street Journal: Companies are increasingly using AI benchmarking services to aggregate public job listings and other payroll data to identify under- and over-paid employees — New services allow employers to pinpoint who is being paid too much or too little — A lot of us worry artificial intelligence …
Wall Street Journal: Mark Carney, Emmanuel Macron, and other Western leaders are pushing to establish a global supervisory regime and “technology stability” body to govern AI — An island meeting, texts between the leaders of Canada, France and Norway reveal an emerging alliance: 'We're in'
Richard Gere / Wall Street Journal: Anthropic reported disrupting a Beijing-aligned operation to monitor religious leaders and diaspora communities, including a DC-based advocacy group for Tibet — Anthropic uncovers a Beijing-aligned operation targeting my organization among other dissidents.
Wall Street Journal: Sources: Xi Jinping is unlikely to bring corporate executives to his DC summit with Trump; industry officials expected them at a dinner with top US tech CEOs — Expectations for major business deals fade, although preparations are continuing — WASHINGTON—Chinese leader Xi Jinping …
Katherine Bindley / Wall Street Journal: a16z invests $35M in Horowitz Andreessen Academy, an independent, unaccredited two-year alternative to college; Anthropic, Meta, and others will provide compute — Venture-capital firm Andreessen Horowitz spending $35 million to back two-year academy, with other Bay Area tech giants on board
Elias Schisgall / Wall Street Journal: DoorDash agrees to a $131.5M settlement with NYC's DCWP to resolve a year-plus investigation into its compliance with the city's 2023 delivery driver pay law — DoorDash will pay $131.5 million to settle an investigation by New York City regulators into the company's compliance with pay laws for food-delivery workers.
Wall Street Journal: Sources: Polymarket CEO Shayne Coplan dismissed concerns after fraudsters tried to launder $10M+ from stolen cards to clean accounts via its wagers in February — CEO Shayne Coplan brushed off concerns about scheme involving stolen debit cards; now the prediction market is bolstering executive ranks as it eyes IPO
Angus Berwick / Wall Street Journal: Sources: ECB President Christine Lagarde asked Greece to block Binance's MiCA license in June at the last minute, aiming to protect the bank's “digital euro” — ECB leader personally intervened to keep crypto's biggest player, which pleaded guilty to financial-crime violations in U.S., from operating in EU
Robert McMillan / Wall Street Journal: Security researchers in OpenAI's bug bounty program hacked OpenAI in July and accessed its “monorepo” on GitHub, using Opus 4.8 for cybersecurity and Opus 5 — A bug-hunting independent security research team was able to access OpenAI's internal code system, exposing growing risks in automated cyber threats
Edith Hancock / Wall Street Journal: The EU details the Kids Act, which would require social networks to use age verification tools to stop under-15s from opening accounts, ban under-13s, and more — Proposal needs to be negotiated, adopted by EU lawmakers and member states before it can take effect
Wall Street Journal: A profile of Jacob Coxon, the British researcher who quit Anthropic after a series of security escalations and says the explosive response surprised him — Long-simmering worries about the technology's potential dangers have exploded into global consciousness since Jacob Coxon's dire warning
Wall Street Journal: Internal documents: Chinese hacker-for-hire company ZRON is selling stolen foreign intelligence and using AI systems to make the data more accessible for police — Internal company materials show AI being used to make stolen foreign government data digestible for police, targeting Russia, Pakistan and others
Wall Street Journal: The US DOJ says several companies used Binance to relay payments of around $1.5B for black-market Iranian oil from Chinese buyers; Binance says it took action — Prosecutors said around $1.5 billion was sent back to Iran through a series of interrelated digital wallets
P.R. Venkat / Wall Street Journal: Z.ai says it plans to raise $5B+ via equity and debt to fund its AI investments, including ~$2B through a share placement, after raising $4B in July — The company plans to raise $2.0 billion through a share placement and another $3.01 billion via zero-coupon convertible bonds
Jonathan Weil / Wall Street Journal: An analysis of Bending Spoons' financials: the company relies on aggressive post-acquisition price hikes, and rising interest rates could crimp its growth — The tech roll-up relies on aggressive price hikes and bespoke metrics. Rising interest rates could crimp its growth.
Robert McMillan / Wall Street Journal: Researchers: OpenAI agents attacked Ruby package manager RubyGems in May; OpenAI says its agents used RubyGems to access the internet to do “benign tasks” — The incident, which wasn't previously linked to OpenAI, happened two months before July's Hugging Face hack
Anissa Gardizy / Wall Street Journal: Source: former OpenAI executive Fidji Simo joins the board of directors at AI infrastructure startup Nscale; Simo will continue as a part-time advisor to OpenAI — Nscale board member Sheryl Sandberg recruited Simo, a former top OpenAI executive who departed following a medical leave
Katherine Hamilton / Wall Street Journal: Polymarket names Warren Jenson its first CFO as the company aims to grow in the US; Jenson served as finance chief of Amazon, EA, NBC, and most recently Nielsen — Warren Jenson appointed as Polymarket's first chief financial officer at a pivotal time for the prediction markets industry
Robbie Whelan / Wall Street Journal: Positron, which is designing an AI processor called Asimov with a “memory-first architecture” and up to 2.3TB of memory, raised $875M at a $5B valuation — NEA, Atreides and Jim Clark are among investors putting $875 million into firm making chips designed for fast running of AI models
Isabelle Bousquette / Wall Street Journal: Google Cloud and Accenture form the Accenture Gemini Enterprise Business Group to train up to 1,000 Accenture forward deployed engineers for Gemini Enterprise — The new group will be made up of 1,000 forward-deployed engineers — Google Cloud and Accenture are the latest companies to bet …
Wall Street Journal: Robinhood adds Crypto.com's yes-or-no contracts to its platform and takes minority stakes in Crypto.com and prediction market company OG, spun out of Crypto.com — The brokerage will add yes-or-no contracts from Crypto.com prediction business and take stake in digital-currency exchange
Hannah Erin Lang / Wall Street Journal: How everyday US investors are vibe-coding algorithms to automate trading strategies by connecting their stock portfolios to AI agents built with Claude or Codex — Americans are vibe-coding trading algorithms and handing over their stock portfolios to AI agents. Welcome to the world of the robot retail investor.
Philip Wegmann / Wall Street Journal: Trump officials say Judeo-Christian principles inform AI policy, with some optimistic about AI and others seeing parallels to biblical end-times prophecies — Trump administration officials are wrestling with the spiritual consequences of AI as the president embraces it as an economic engine
Jean Eaglesham / Wall Street Journal: Swiss Re: global premiums for insuring data centers will likely reach $20B-$30B/year by 2030; ~40% of US data-center capacity is located in tornado-prone areas — AI hyperscale data centers are exposed to a dizzying array of potential threats during construction and operation
Yuliya Chernova / Wall Street Journal: Source: Betaworks has a 5.5% stake in Hugging Face, worth ~$650M at its $11.9B acquisition price for stockholders; A.Capital says it could bag $1.5B on the sale — John Borthwick's venture firm wrote the first check Hugging Face ever received, and now owns a stake that could be worth $650 million.
Robbie Whelan / Wall Street Journal: Sources: US negotiators used the promise of access to Nvidia's chips for an Armenian data center to broker a preliminary Armenia-Azerbaijan peace deal last year — Negotiators offered access to advanced AI hardware to help secure a preliminary agreement ending decades of conflict
Amrith Ramkumar / Wall Street Journal: At the G20 summit, Jensen Huang, Mark Zuckerberg, Sam Altman, and Elon Musk joined Trump officials in lobbying policymakers against heavy AI regulations — Company bosses, officials say advances in technology are already making AI safer than under government regulations
Yuliya Chernova / Wall Street Journal: Wonderful, which helps enterprises deploy AI, raised a $550M Series C led by Insight at a $5B valuation; investors also paid $170M for shares from employees — Founded just last year, the startup already has 650 employees and is expanding its forward-deployed engineering teams around the world
Georgia Wells / Wall Street Journal: OpenAI is facing a new round of lawsuits from witnesses and victims of the February mass shooting in a Canadian town; the suspect spent days talking to ChatGPT — New lawsuits add to list of cases in which the chatbot maker faces questions about the safety of its products
Raffaele Huang / Wall Street Journal: Industry insiders say Chinese robot makers currently rely on Nvidia silicon and software; Nvidia's physical AI business generates ~$10B in annual revenue — Business in ‘physical AI’ is growing, and Chinese companies rely on U.S. chips and software — Nvidia's chips aren't just for training chatbots.
Wall Street Journal: Trade unions threaten to withhold support for politicians opposing data center projects, warning that blocking the projects endangers building-related jobs — Trade unions threaten to withhold support for politicians, joining the building backlash — Much of the public outcry …
Jiyoung Sohn / Wall Street Journal: South Korea unveils a project with KT, SK Telecom, and Kakao to provide premium AI tools to the public for free, a move that treats AI like a public utility — Seoul wants to direct use of homegrown AI chatbots to reduce reliance on U.S. or Chinese options, footing the bill and offering unlimited tokens
Wall Street Journal: Sources: some tech companies are courting Democrats and hiring advisers to prepare for potential investigations if Republicans lose control of the House — Tech firms are courting Democrats and hiring advisers to prepare for potential investigations if Republicans lose control of the House
Dave Michaels / Wall Street Journal: Sources: federal authorities prepare to charge a US serviceman and a KPMG employee with insider trading on prediction markets, as part of a new batch of cases — Charges could come this fall, part of a new batch of insider trading cases — Federal authorities are preparing charges …