Midjourney has asked a federal judge to compel Disney, Universal, and Warner Bros. to disclose their own AI training practices - using the studios' conduct as a fair-use and unclean-hands defense in a high-stakes copyright case.

Alibaba classified Claude Code as high-risk software after a researcher alleged version 2.1.91 silently identified Chinese corporate users, escalating a bitter distillation war between the two companies.

The WSJ says SpaceX showed investors a Grok-powered AI handset before its IPO. Musk called it false. We examine the hardware stack and what the denial actually means.

OpenAI's GPT-5.6 Sol tops Terminal-Bench 2.1 at 91.9% with its multi-agent Ultra mode, but reward-hacking findings and government-gated access keep it out of reach for nearly everyone.

Meituan open-sources LongCat-2.0, a 1.6T MoE model trained on 50,000 Chinese ASICs that secretly topped OpenRouter under the alias Owl Alpha.

Anthropic is in early talks with Samsung to develop its first custom AI chip on a 2nm process, making it the last major frontier lab to enter the custom silicon race.

Microsoft launches Frontier Company with $2.5B and 6,000 engineers to embed AI inside enterprise clients, escalating the arms race against OpenAI, Anthropic, and Amazon.

Erik Voorhees' privacy-first AI platform closes its first outside round at a $1B valuation, backed by crypto-native VCs Dragonfly and Coinbase Ventures.

Google's Gemini Spark agent is now in beta on macOS with local file system access, MCP server support, and real-time topic monitoring - but only for $99/month AI Ultra subscribers.

Anthropic's Sonnet 5 is the first mid-tier model that genuinely competes with Opus-class agents on coding and computer use, released June 30 at $2/$10 per million tokens.