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Google rolls back an image generation tool in Google Earth to add "stronger guardrails" after concerns arose it can be used to create deepfake satellite imagery (Geoff Brumfiel/NPR)

Snap says its recommendation systems will be adjusted so only videos created by real people, not AI-generated ones, are eligible for Spotlight recommendations (Lauren Forristal/TechCrunch)

Google pilots a faster twice-a-week schedule for Chrome security releases as AI tools drive a surge in bug discoveries; Chrome 149 and 150 fixed 1,072 bugs (Lily Hay Newman/Wired)

Waymo gradually resumes freeway routes, starting with Phoenix, more than two months after suspending them to improve performance around construction zones (Kirsten Korosec/TechCrunch)

Thinking Machines Lab co-founder Lilian Weng is returning to OpenAI after announcing earlier this week she was leaving TML over workload-related health concerns (The Information)

The Agentic AI Foundation updates MCP with a fully stateless architecture, a hardened authentication model, a formal 12-month deprecation policy, and more (Michael Nuñez/VentureBeat)

NYC-based AI startup Runlayer sues Rippling for allegedly stealing trade secrets to "build essentially a clone" of Runlayer's safety and governance product (Taylor Herzlich/New York Post)

X rolls out X Money to US Premium and Premium+ subscribers, combining a deposit account with up to 6% APY, free instant transfers on X, and a Visa debit card (Zac Hall/9to5Mac)

Xbox says it is working to resolve a "major outage" affecting its Account & Profile, Store & Subscriptions, and Apps & Mobile services (Chris Scullion/Video Games Chronicle)

NYT Connections hints and answers for Monday, July 27 (game #1142)

How AI companies are targeting the education market, including making free or cut-price tailored learning tools in partnership with schools and edtech startups (Jamie John/Financial Times)

India eases foreign investment rules for e-commerce companies, a win for Amazon, which lobbied to buy goods directly from Indian sellers and sell them overseas (Aditya Kalra/Reuters)

Once hailed as an AI visionary, Satya Nadella faces pressure as a compute crunch forces Microsoft to prioritize its own AI products over Azure cloud customers (Ashley Stewart/Business Insider)

A look at China's bid to build an alternative global order in AI by making open models widely available and training people in developing countries to use them (Financial Times)

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)