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Cashea, Venezuela's largest fintech startup that offers a banking and payments app, raised a $40M Series A, including $20M in debt, and a $60M Series B (Maria Clara Cobo/Bloomberg)

Poolside launches Laguna S 2.1, an 118B open-weight model built for agentic coding and long-horizon work, that it says competes with larger open models (Iain Martin/Forbes)

Block launches Buzz, an open source collaboration workspace on Nostr protocol for humans and AI agents to share messages, code repositories, workflows, and more (Block)

Natural, which aims to help companies let their AI agents make autonomous payments, raised a $30M Series A led by Forerunner, bringing its total raised to $40M (Marina Temkin/TechCrunch)

OpenAI paused internal access to an unreleased model that disproved the Erdős unit distance conjecture after it repeatedly found ways to act outside its sandbox (OpenAI)

Anduril and Archer unveil an autonomous aircraft platform designed for commercial and military uses, along with an autonomous attack rotorcraft called Thunder (Reuters)

Hugging Face says it used the open-weight GLM-5.2 hosted on its own compute for breach forensics, after US frontier model safety guardrails blocked the requests (Edward Targett/The Stack)

Hugging Face says an agentic AI system hacked its data pipeline, accessing several internal clusters and credentials; its own AI-based triage caught the breach (Hugging Face)

Moonshot AI pauses new subscriptions, saying that over the past two days Kimi K3 demand nearly passed the limit of its capacity, and also reworks its plan tiers (@kimi_moonshot)

As many companies cut AI costs by using cheaper models, some, like Shopify, go all-in on frontier models, barring engineers from using anything else (Belle Lin/Wall Street Journal)

NYT Connections hints and answers for Sunday, July 19 (game #1134)

UK's incoming PM Andy Burnham is expected to scrap Keir Starmer's plans for digital ID cards; last year a petition opposing the cards attracted ~3M signatures (Geraldine McKelvie/The Guardian)