Linked and quoted from the labs, the press and the people using them. Times in UTC.
Every development we picked up, including smaller stories beyond the labs. Newest first, times in UTC.
River AI, a startup founded by xAI co-founder Igor Babuschkin, raised $1.1 billion in a round led by General Catalyst. The company is two months old and is working on personal agents.
Anthropic is preparing an IPO for September or October, according to the Wall Street Journal, potentially the largest ever. During investor meetings, the company, valued at $965 billion, is fielding questions about Chinese competition, tensions with the Trump administration, and protests against data center…
Anthropic will embed invisible watermarks in all Claude-generated text and sign files using the C2PA standard. New models from August 2026 will have labeling built in, and detection tools are planned for third-party verification.
Naïve raised $28.5 million to automate much of the work involved in setting up and running a company. The startup says its infrastructure can handle most of these tasks.
Cohere and the University of Waterloo announced a partnership aimed at strengthening Canada's AI talent pipeline. The announcement was published on Cohere's official site.
Texas has halted new data center construction and the governor has called for audits. The state had attracted tech companies with loose regulations and abundant power supply.
Cohere signed the EU Code of Practice on Transparency of AI-Generated Content. The announcement was published on Cohere's site on July 31, 2026.
Smallest.ai, officially Smallest Inc., closed a $13 million Series A led by Seligman Ventures with participation from Sierra Ventures and 3one4 Capital. The funding is intended to accelerate development of its asynchronous voice AI architecture.
Pangram has raised $9 million to scale its AI detection software. The startup also released a new AI text detection model, Pangram 4, and an AI image detection model in research preview.