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NYT Connections hints and answers for Sunday, July 26 (game #1141)

China's market regulator says it had fined and confiscated ~$770M from Trip.com for abusing its dominant position in the domestic online hotel-booking market (Reuters)

Several universities including Yale, Johns Hopkins, and the University of Waterloo have restricted or disabled their use of AI detectors over accuracy concerns (Ima Jackson-Obot/Financial Times)

Anthropic says Opus 5 model "is the least susceptible to being tricked into misuse"; it is Anthropic's fourth model release in less than two months (Madison Mills/Axios)

GitHub plans a two-tier bug bounty program that cuts rewards for the public and boosts payouts for invite-only researchers, amid a flood of AI-powered reports (Carly Page/The Register)

Yope, a social network that has ~15M registered users for its "micro communities" and no algorithms, ads, or public content, raised $12.3M seed led by Northzone (Sarah Perez/TechCrunch)

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)