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Latest updates from the world of artificial intelligence
Latest updates from the world of artificial intelligence
Anthropic has launched Claude Science, an AI workbench with 60+ preconfigured tools for genomics, proteomics and chemistry — and is starting its own in-house drug-discovery program aimed at neglected diseases.
Anthropic
Read more →U.S. employers added just 57,000 jobs in June — about half of forecasts — as unemployment slipped to 4.2%. With AI now cited in some 102,000 layoff announcements this year, the report sharpens the debate over how much of the hiring stall is artificial intelligence and how much is cover for restructuring.
U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics
Crusoe, the data-center builder behind AI compute for Microsoft, Oracle, OpenAI and Meta, is reportedly in talks to raise about $3 billion — a round that could value it near $30 billion, nearly triple its October mark and a fresh signal of how hard capital is chasing AI infrastructure.
Bloomberg
Read more →Meituan open-sourced LongCat-2.0 on June 30 — a 1.6-trillion-parameter mixture-of-experts coding model trained and served end to end on more than 50,000 Chinese-made chips, with no Nvidia hardware in the loop. After two months quietly topping OpenRouter under the alias “Owl Alpha,” the MIT-licensed model claims 59.5% on SWE-bench Pro at a fraction of GPT-5.5’s price.
VentureBeat
Read more →Higharc, which turns new homes into structured 3D spatial databases, raised a $95M Series C led by Insight Partners, pushing total funding past $170M. It also launched AI Estimating for materials distributors with US LBM as the first partner — extending its platform from design into the supply chain.
PR Newswire
Read more →Together AI, the cloud platform for training and serving open-source models, closed an $800M Series C at an $8.3B valuation — more than double its early-2025 mark. Aramco Ventures led, with Nvidia joining, as the company posts $1.15B in annual bookings serving customers like Cursor and Cognition.
Tech Startups
Venice AI, a privacy-first platform that routes prompts through 200+ models without storing any data, raised a $65M Series A at a $1B valuation led by Dragonfly — its first outside funding. The two-year-old startup is already profitable, with 3M users and $70M+ in annualized revenue.
TechCrunch
Read more →Cloudflare will sort AI bots into three behaviors — Search, Agent, and Training — and from September 15 block Training and Agent crawlers by default on ad-supported pages. Multi-purpose crawlers like Googlebot get judged by all their behaviors, forcing operators to separate indexing from ingestion.
Cloudflare
Read more →Anthropic launched Claude Science on June 30 — a beta research workbench that unifies literature review, HPC compute, and reproducible, publication-ready figures. It ships with 60+ scientific skills, connectors to databases like PDB and UniProt, an NVIDIA BioNeMo integration, and a reviewer agent that checks its own citations.
Anthropic
Read more →The Commerce Department has lifted the export controls that forced Anthropic to pull Claude Fable 5 and Mythos 5 offline worldwide, ending an 18-day standoff. Anthropic began restoring access on July 1 — the first reversal of a U.S. national-security shutdown of a frontier AI model, and it comes with new reporting obligations attached.
CNBC
Read more →Google let its self-imposed June deadline for Gemini 3.5 Pro pass without a launch, and now says the frontier model will reach general availability in July. The company points to token-efficiency and long-horizon agentic tuning — even as a wave of senior DeepMind researchers heads for the exits.
TechTimes
Read more →Anthropic released Claude Sonnet 5 on June 30 — its most agentic mid-tier model yet, scoring 63.2% on SWE-bench Pro and matching Opus 4.8 on some knowledge work, with introductory pricing of $2/$10 per million tokens. It is now the default model on Claude’s Free and Pro plans.
Anthropic
Read more →Chamath Palihapitiya’s 8090 Labs landed a $135 million Series A led by Salesforce Ventures — and the famed investor named himself chief executive, betting enterprises in regulated industries want a governed “Software Factory,” not another coding co-pilot.
TechCrunch
Read more →DeepReinforce has open-sourced Ornith-1.0, an MIT-licensed family of coding models (9B to 397B) that learn to write their own agent scaffolds during reinforcement training. The 397B flagship resolves 82.4% of SWE-Bench Verified issues — second only to Claude Opus 4.8 — while the 9B model runs on a single 80GB GPU, putting frontier-class agentic coding within reach of self-hosters.
MarkTechPost
Meta has restricted its engineers from using Anthropic’s Claude Code and OpenAI’s Codex — and temporarily halted some work with them — over fears that rival model outputs could leak into its own training data. Internal memos reported by The Information warn of “serious escalations” with partner companies, as Meta builds its own coding assistant and the industry’s distillation disputes escalate.
The Decoder
Read more →Weeks after an export-control directive pulled Claude Mythos 5 offline worldwide, the U.S. government has cleared Anthropic to redeploy its most powerful cyber model — but only to a vetted set of organizations that defend critical infrastructure, and with safeguards attached.
CNN
Read more →Stanford economist Erik Brynjolfsson, using ADP payroll data covering one in six US workers, finds employment for 22-to-25-year-olds in the most AI-exposed jobs is shrinking 3.8% a year — and accelerating — while workers aged 35-40 in the same fields are growing. The decline is driven by stalled hiring, not layoffs, and an aggregate 0.2% dip hides the generational split. “It’s not going away,” he says.
Fortune
Princeton’s new CEO-Bench drops AI agents into the chief-executive’s chair of a simulated startup with $1M and 500 days to grow it. Of the frontier models tested, only Claude Opus 4.8 and GPT-5.5 ended their best runs above the starting cash — and neither did so consistently. Most went bankrupt, exposing how far long-horizon agents still are from the autonomy vendors are selling.
arXiv (Princeton University)
Anthropic’s June 2026 Economic Index, titled “Cadences,” uses aggregated Claude data to show AI usage rising and falling with the clock and calendar — news requests peak at 7 a.m., recipes hit 2.3× by 6 p.m., and tax queries spiked 8× around the April deadline. Personal use jumps from ~35% on weekdays to nearly 50% on weekends, while higher-wage work consumes about twice the tokens.
Anthropic
Read more →OpenAI released GPT-5.6 on June 27 as a three-model family — the flagship Sol, the balanced Terra and the fast, cheap Luna — but only as a limited preview to about 20 U.S. government-approved partners. Sol leads agentic-coding benchmarks (91.9% on Terminal-Bench 2.1) and matches prior security results using roughly a third of the output tokens, with general availability promised in the coming weeks.
OpenAI
Read more →After three years of falling token prices, the AI pricing race has flipped: GPT-5.5 and Claude Fable 5 launched at double their predecessors, while customers respond by optimizing usage and routing to cheaper challengers like DeepSeek. CNBC reports OpenAI spent ~$1.35 per dollar earned in 2025, even as Anthropic turned a Q2 profit on enterprise coding.
CNBC
Read more →Baseten, the platform that runs AI models in production, raised a $1.5 billion Series F on June 22 at a valuation of up to $13 billion — a roughly 160% jump in under five months. The startup now serves more than a billion inference calls a day across 87 clusters and 18 clouds, as "inference" becomes one of AI's most contested markets.
Business Wire
Taktile, which automates underwriting, claims, fraud and AML decisions for banks and insurers, raised a $110M Series C led by Goldman Sachs Alternatives on June 24. The platform wraps AI agents in rules and human oversight, powering millions of auditable decisions a day.
Tech Startups
Read more →Assort Health, which builds AI agents for the patient journey — scheduling, intake, referrals, refills and billing — raised a $120M Series C led by Menlo Ventures on June 24, reaching a $1.2B valuation after handling 190M+ patient interactions and growing revenue 20x in 15 months.
Tech Startups