Techmeme
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Sources: Anthropic's IPO draws multiple times the orders for the shares available; a source says Dario Amodei and Jamie Dimon have a livestream event on Friday (Bailey Lipschultz/Bloomberg)
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Salt Lake City-based energy storage startup Torus raised a $500M Series C led by Magnetar to build shipping container-sized AI data centers at 1MW to 20MW sizes (Mark Chediak/Bloomberg)
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London-based AI chip startup Fractile raised $720M from Thrive, Founders Fund, and others, sources say at a $7B post-money valuation, up from ~$1.1B in May (George Hammond/Financial Times)
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Wesleyan Media Project: political campaigns spent ~$187M on ~300 AI-generated or AI-enhanced ads in the midterms; 90% of tracked AI ads were for GOP candidates (Loreben Tuquero/Poynter)
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Anthropic's IPO roadshow video: Dario Amodei says cancer, Alzheimer's, heart disease, and mental illness will be "relics of the past" in "less than a decade" (@firesidealpha)
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Game developer House House confirms using AI during Big Walk's final development, sparking an intense debate among Independent Games Festival judges and jurors (Luke Plunkett/Aftermath)
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German defense tech giant Helsing launches Clarity, an intelligence platform using military-customized AI agents to rival Palantir's Maven and Anduril's Lattice (Ingrid Lunden/Resilience Media)
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Sources: ByteDance co-founder Zhang Yiming says the company plans to launch a Muse-like AI assistant in the coming weeks and reach the AI frontier by 2029-2030 (Bloomberg)
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As Anthropic prepares to IPO, Amazon and Google collectively own 25%+; Amazon's $18B investment could reach $250B+ in value and Google's $33B could hit $140B (Karen Weise/New York Times)
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Sources: SoftBank reserved 13GW+ of turbines, equivalent to six Hoover Dams, to power AI; SoftBank took a $3.7B earnings hit mostly from canceled reservations (Wall Street Journal)
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After China's anti-corruption crackdown on hospital visits and pharma reps, drugmakers are turning to AI assistants from Alibaba and others to reach physicians (Andrew Silver/Reuters)
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Filing: Alphabet agrees to additional privacy protections to salvage its $10M acquisition of bankrupt Spirit Airlines' data, resolving union objections (Alexander Gladstone/Wall Street Journal)
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The European Commission introduces the Digital Fairness Act, which aims to curb addictive design features and manipulative "dark patterns" or face large fines (Gian Volpicelli/Bloomberg)
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Rather than being a spy, Alice Huang is likely a commercial fixer or "white glove" for businesses, leveraging a career in China's capital-market structures (Desmond Shum)
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Sources: the UK's proposed under-16 social media ban is expanding to target recommender systems and user content, including YouTube Kids, Lego Play, and Spotify (Jessica Elgot/The Guardian)