Techmeme
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Retailers are updating their websites to rank highly in chatbot results, while making sure purchases are done on their own sites to collect customer data (Arriana McLymore/Reuters)
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TMTG interim CEO Kevin McGurn says the company is pulling back from a pair of Crypto.com deals to focus on its media arm and its pending merger with TAE (Sara Fischer/Axios)
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Sources: Cursor told staff on Thursday that SpaceX could complete its $60B acquisition as soon as next week and the Cursor brand name will likely be phased out (Grace Kay/The Information)
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The US Treasury sanctions Dubai-based unlicensed crypto exchange Shelbit, alleging it processed millions in crypto for IRGC and other Iran-linked groups (Reuters)
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Microsoft plans to end support for Manifest V2 extensions in Edge starting this month, following Google Chrome, and for enterprise users in early 2027 (Stevie Bonifield/The Verge)
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Munich-based NavVis, which provides enterprises with spatial data on factories, plants, buildings, and more, raised an $85M Series D led by The Jordan Company (Rahul Raj/EU-Startups)
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Sources: legal AI startup Harvey is in talks to raise $500M+ at a $15.5B valuation, up from $11B in March, and is generating $350M+ in annualized revenue (The Information)
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Cloudflare debuts Kitesurf, a cloud-hosted browser for AI agents built on top of its Workers serverless service, available for free while in beta in Browser Run (Sarah Perez/TechCrunch)
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OpenAI says it has expanded safety testing around its upcoming model Astra as it "cannot rule out" critical cyber capabilities, potentially delaying its launch (Axios)
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Singapore-based Multiplier, which acquires accounting firms to boost their growth with AI tools, raised a $35M Series B led by TheGP at a $300M valuation (Maria Armental/Wall Street Journal)
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Nielsen agrees to acquire and take digital media monitor DoubleVerify private in an all-cash deal with a ~$2.15B enterprise value, expected to close by Q1 2027 (Brian Steinberg/Variety)
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Singapore-based AI infrastructure startup Acrab raised a $130M Series B, bringing its total funding to more than $480M (Mars W. Mosqueda Jr/DealStreetAsia)
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Ad measurement company VideoAmp cut ~20% of its staff this week, citing that "AI is a major platform shift"; sources: 50 to 60 were laid off, including the CTO (Nat Ives/Wall Street Journal)
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Anthropic updates Claude Fable 5's biology safeguards to reduce false positives, cutting biology-related "fallbacks" by ~85% in testing across product surfaces (Anthropic)
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At Black Hat, OpenAI reconstructs the OpenAI-Hugging Face incident and examines its implications for AI security, cyber resilience, and alignment (Black Hat on YouTube)