Nvidia posted $96B in quarterly revenue and guided to 70% growth next year, then agreed to buy Hugging Face for $12.9B. Trump weighed sweeping chip tariffs, cybersecurity stocks ripped on AI threats, and Instinct raised at $2.5B.

Links

• Nvidia reports Q2 revenue up 106% YoY to $96.22B, above $92.17B est., Data Center revenue up 117% to $89B, above $85.08B est., and net income up 126% to $59.7B (Nvidia)
• Nvidia guides to ~70% revenue growth next fiscal year, well above the 45% analysts expected, sending shares up as much as 7.6%, though margins will bottom at 71%-72% on memory costs (Bloomberg)
• Source: Nvidia has agreed to acquire Hugging Face for $12.9B; the AI repository has had several potential suitors among its investors, including Salesforce (The Information)
• Sources: the Trump administration is weighing sweeping new tariffs on chips and other products like laptops and consoles, despite warnings from tech companies (Politico)
• Cybersecurity stocks surge, with Okta up 20%+ and CrowdStrike up 15%+, after earnings showed that AI adoption is driving attacks and spending on security tools (CNBC)
• AI assistant Instinct is raising a $250M Series B co-led by Index and Benchmark at a $2.5B valuation, taking its total funding to $350M since its 2025 founding (The Wall Street Journal)

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Meta agreed to pay up to $16.68B to settle state claims it hooked kids on Facebook and Instagram, with teen time limits attached. Z.ai unmasked Ox Alpha, Amazon killed Mechanical Turk, and Reuters detailed Zuckerberg's aborted AI-native purge.

Links

• Filing: Meta agrees to pay up to $16.68B to settle US states' claims that it designed Facebook and Instagram to addict children, misled consumers, and more (Reuters)
• The deal ends the bellwether Oakland federal trial where four states sought roughly $200B; Meta pays ~$12B upfront and $5B more only if Snap, TikTok, and YouTube also settle (The New York Times)
• The remedies include age assurance with linked-account checks, push notifications disabled during school hours, productive pauses at 60 and 90 minutes, and no cosmetic filters or likes for teens (The Verge)
• Z.ai confirms Ox Alpha is a new iteration of its GLM series and says it will release the weights for it tonight; Ox Alpha topped OpenRouter's leaderboard (Bloomberg)
• AWS says it plans to shut down Mechanical Turk on September 30, "following an assessment"; the service, launched in 2005, outsourced tasks to 500K+ humans (CNBC)
• Investigation: Meta explored slashing many teams by ~60% to become "AI native", but pulled back after staff revolted and data showed AI agents were ineffective (Reuters)

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Apple refreshed the Mac Studio with M5 Max and M5 Ultra and gave the Mac mini M6 silicon, at higher prices. OpenAI's Jalapeño chip beat Nvidia on efficiency, Perplexity went fully local, WhatsApp toughened logins, and Uber livestreamed teen rides.

Links

• Apple updates the Mac Studio with M5 Max and M5 Ultra, with up to 4.3x faster AI performance, faster graphics, and up to 512GB of unified memory for $2,499+ (Apple Newsroom)
• Apple unveils a Mac mini with M6 and M5 Pro, with up to 4x faster AI performance and 2x faster graphics, for $899+ and $1,699+, with preorders today and shipping September 22 (The Verge)
• Apple's M6 is its first 2nm chip with a 12-core CPU and GPU, while the M5 Ultra fuses two dual-die M5 Max chips into a 36-core CPU, 80-core GPU "most powerful chip ever" (The Verge)
• OpenAI says its Jalapeño chip delivered 1.5x-1.9x more AI work per watt and 1.7x-3.6x lower latency than Nvidia chips across GPT-OSS, DeepSeek R1, Kimi K2.5 1T (The Verge)
• WhatsApp upgrades its two-step verification, letting users replace the six-digit PIN with a longer alphanumeric password, and adds support for multiple passkeys (TechCrunch)
• Perplexity launches Portable Computer, a local AI agent platform running fully on-device with zero token costs, starting with Nvidia DGX Spark and RTX Linux PCs (VentureBeat)
• Uber launches an optional safety feature allowing parents or guardians to watch a livestream of their teen's ride via the driver's front-facing phone camera (Bloomberg)

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Hugging Face explored a sale at $13B+, keeping the AI M&A wave rolling. Trump scolded towns that reject data centers while Abbott said the industry dug its own grave, Fable 5 spending plateaued, and Apple cut 200+ jobs.

Links

• Sources: Hugging Face is exploring a sale that could value it at $13B+, up from $4.5B in 2023, and has been working with a bank to evaluate bidders' interest (Business Insider)
• Delangue has said Hugging Face is close to profitability and barely touched its 2023 round, and it turned down a $500M Nvidia investment at a $7B valuation earlier this year (TechCrunch)
• President Trump says communities that oppose data centers are "making a mistake" as they create "tremendous amounts of jobs and money", amid bipartisan backlash (Axios)
• Texas Gov. Greg Abbott says data center companies "dug their own grave" and deserve the backlash, after ordering an audit that has stalled roughly 1,800 projects (Fortune)
• Ramp data: Fable 5, launched in June, has plateaued at ~11% of spending on Anthropic tools, as companies shift to cheaper models; Opus 5 surpassed Fable 5 (Financial Times)
• Nvidia plans to use its $6B licensing deal with Poolside to build one of the world's most powerful open-weight models, to compete with DeepSeek and Kimi K3 (The Wall Street Journal)
• Sources: Apple is cutting 200+ jobs, including ~100 positions from the Vision Pro unit and another 100 from the Siri team, as it focuses on new devices and AI (Bloomberg)

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In this episode, we explore Onix, a platform that enables experts to train their own AI models to help millions with health, wellness, and personal development. Founders Nicholas Nadeau and David Bennahum discuss how their domain-specific, trust-based approach is reshaping AI and expertise sharing.

Stripe made the OpenRouter deal official at $7.5B. Unitree's Shanghai debut popped 460% past a $50B market cap, YouTube dangled millions to keep creators off Netflix, Slack launched Slack Code, and Binance turned AI agents loose on trading.

Links

• Stripe agrees to acquire NYC-based OpenRouter; a source says Stripe is paying $7.5B, with $1.5B going to the startup's founders and $6B to its investors (The New York Times)
• Collison frames tokens as the central currency for companies building with AI, capping two years of Stripe buying the plumbing under AI spending, from Metronome to Bridge (SiliconANGLE)
• Hangzhou-based humanoid robot maker Unitree's stock surges 460% in its Shanghai trading debut, giving it a $50B+ market cap, after it raised ~$904M in its IPO (Bloomberg)
• Unitree says its new "Superman" humanoid can hit 12.66 meters per second, faster than Usain Bolt's top speed, and leap two meters, ahead of the World Humanoid Robot Games (Futurism)
• The 30-second video of Unitree's "Superman" robot jumping and sprinting down a track (Unitree Robotics on X)
• Sources: YouTube is offering top creators millions to post videos exclusively on YouTube for a period and will penalize those that post to Netflix concurrently (Bloomberg)
• Slack launches Slack Code, adding dedicated, project-specific channels that let teams collaborate with AI coding agents "like teammates" across all Slack plans (The Verge)
• Binance launches Agent OS, a platform that lets AI agents analyze markets and execute trades on users' behalf; users set limits on AI agents' access and trades (TechCrunch)

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OpenAI paused training and rewrote its Preparedness Framework after Astra flirted with a critical cyber threshold. Leaked numbers showed Anthropic out-earning OpenAI nearly two to one, Anthropic prepped supervoting shares, Amazon expanded drone delivery, and Meta's addiction trial opened.

Links

• OpenAI changed safety practices and paused RL training for two weeks after the Hugging Face breach and evidence Astra may have met a critical cyber threshold (Axios)
• Sources: OpenAI's Q2 sales grew 18% QoQ to $6.7B as its losses widened from $9.3B to $12.3B; Anthropic's sales grew 2x+ to $11.6B, with a small operating profit (The Wall Street Journal)
• Sources: Anthropic's revenue run rate reached $65B by the end of July, up from $47B in May 2026, $19B in March 2026, $9B in December 2025, and $4B in July 2025 (Bloomberg)
• Sources: Anthropic prepares to give its co-founders shares with extra voting power to help insulate them from outside pressure; Amodei owns ~2% of Anthropic (The Information)
• Amazon plans to expand Prime Air drone deliveries to cities in at least five more US states in the coming months, including Chicago and Atlanta by 2026's end (Bloomberg)
• In opening arguments, US state AGs say that Meta intentionally sought to addict children to Facebook and Instagram in pursuit of profit; Meta rejects the claims (Reuters)

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Apple made peace with the EU, unveiling new App Store terms and a 5% Core Technology Commission. OpenAI launched ChatGPT for Teens, camera-equipped AirPods Ultra leaked, Alibaba's Qwen model blew past 1M downloads, and Harvey built its own legal model.

Links

• Apple squashes EU beef with new App Store rules (The Verge)
• AirPods Ultra with cameras just leaked in video — and the privacy debate has already started (Tom's Guide)
• OpenAI debuts ChatGPT for Teens, a mode that limits high-risk chats about self-harm, eating disorders, violence, and more, and has studying tools and guardrails (The New York Times)
• Comcast is rolling out Wi-Fi motion sensing to its Xfinity XB7 and newer gateways, a free opt-in feature that enables its routers to detect movement at home (The Verge)
• Alibaba says its new open-source multimodal model, Qwen3.8-27B, passed 1M+ downloads within a few days of release, making it one of its fastest-growing models (The Information)
• Harvey announces Harvey Tenet, its first in-house, proprietary model for legal work, trained on mock disputes and case files using a version of Kimi K3 (Business Insider)

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Stripe locked in a $7B+ deal for OpenRouter, and OpenAI leased a 10GW Ohio campus with Nvidia backstopping it. The Journal found $3T in off-balance-sheet AI commitments, an AirTag caught Amazon shredding rare books, and Anthropic detailed Claude's invisible watermarks.

Links

• Sources: Stripe has finalized a deal to acquire AI model marketplace OpenRouter for more than $7B; founded in 2023, OpenRouter had a $1.3B valuation in May (Bloomberg)
• OpenAI signs a 20-year, 10GW data center deal in Ohio with SoftBank's SB Energy; Nvidia agrees to backstop a portion of the value of the completed data center (The Wall Street Journal)
• Analysis: nine top tech companies including Alphabet and Meta had ~$3T of AI-related off-balance-sheet commitments, far exceeding their $600B in reported capex (The Wall Street Journal)
• Anthropic explains how Claude's invisible text watermarks will work (The Verge)
• Investigation: Amazon is buying huge quantities of rare books, scanning them for AI, and destroying them; a tracked Biblio order went to its Las Vegas facility (The Decoder)
• Used bookstores are seeing a sales resurgence driven not by readers but by AI companies placing bulk orders in the thousands, with the books destructively scanned, then pulped (Fast Company)
• AI film startups are setting up studios in Hollywood, using US and Chinese AI models while touting lower production costs and a way around traditional financing (The Guardian)

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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)

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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)

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