HappyRobot Vaults to $1.2 Billion Valuation as Enterprise Demand for AI Automation Soars
HappyRobot raised $150 million in Series C funding at a $1.2 billion post-money valuation. The round brought the AI agent platform's total funding to $200 million.
Great Barrier Reef’s Recovery From Bleaching is Aided by Monsoon
The Great Barrier Reef experienced six mass bleaching events between 2016 and 2025 due to warming oceans, compared to exceptionally rare events before the 1990s. A monsoon earlier this year provided temporary recovery relief to the 1,400-mile reef system off northeastern Australia.
OpenAI Daybreak Cyber Defense Models Land on Amazon Bedrock
Two cyber defense models called Daybreak Red and Daybreak Blue became available on Amazon Bedrock for eligible customers starting August 11, 2026. Access to these models running in US East (N. Virginia) requires enrollment in OpenAI's Trusted Access for Cyber vetting program.
Crypto impersonation scams grew 1,400% as AI supercharged fraud
Impersonation scams increased 1,400% year over year in 2025, with average payments rising over 600%. The average crypto payment across all scam categories climbed from $782 to $2,764.
Arthur Fery ready to test himself at Masters level after Wimbledon run
Arthur Fery reached the Wimbledon semi-finals as a wildcard while ranked 36th in the world. He returns to competition at Cincinnati after a month-long break, holding a first-round bye in the tournament.
Norway wealth fund holds $1.2bn stake in SpaceX
Norway's wealth fund disclosed a 0.05% ownership stake in SpaceX valued at $1.22 billion as of June 30. The world's largest sovereign wealth fund, managing $2.3 trillion in assets, revealed this holding for the first time in an updated list of investments.
SpaceXAI's Grok Bot turns agents into persistent digital coworkers that can operate your apps for $120-per-month
Persistent AI agents called Grok Bots can operate software applications continuously and autonomously across multiple platforms for $120 per month. Each Bot accesses applications through its own computer environment, continues working when the user's laptop is closed, and returns when needing approval or completing assignments.
Amex Ventures Funds Fazeshift’s Agentic AI Expansion Beyond Accounts Receivable
Fazeshift received an investment from Amex Ventures to expand its artificial intelligence agent platform beyond accounts receivable into other finance operations. The funding builds on Fazeshift's prior Series A round, enabling broader deployment across additional finance functions.
Cava’s sales surge as diners swap lettuce for grain bowls and pitas amid food-safety scare
Cava Group reported sales growth even as some customers avoided lettuce orders due to food-safety concerns affecting the restaurant industry. The fast-casual chain continued expanding despite the summer's widespread food-safety issues.
SpaceXAI launches Grok Bot as the agent race moves to office work
SpaceXAI released Grok Bot, AI agents that sign into apps and websites while retaining context between tasks and coordinating with each other. Initial access is limited to SuperGrok Heavy, Cursor Ultra, and Cursor Teams Premium subscribers, with an enterprise waitlist available.
Coinbase Enables Businesses to Get Paid by AI Agents
Businesses can now accept payments from artificial intelligence agents through Coinbase's Business suite using x402, an open standard for machine-to-machine payments. Funds settle instantly in USDC cryptocurrency.
Meet the Indigenous women restoring Kenya’s Mau Forest — and reshaping gender roles
Indigenous women in southwestern Kenya's Mau Forest region are conducting restoration work while challenging traditional gender roles in their community. Judy Mukut completes household tasks including water fetching, cattle milking, and childcare before 6:30 a.m., then proceeds to work at a resource center run by the Paran Indigenous women's organization.
NASA Completes Astronaut-Deployed Science Instrument for Lunar Surface
NASA completed the Lunar Environment Monitoring Station, a science instrument designed for astronauts to deploy on the Moon's surface near the South Pole. The payload finished hardware development and testing and is now ready for deployment during the Artemis mission.
Anthropic models will soon inject watermarks identifying AI-generated text
Anthropic will embed invisible watermarks in all text generated by Claude models starting August 2, 2026, to identify AI-generated content across all countries. The watermark persists when text is copied and pasted, and earlier models must be upgraded by December 2 to comply with EU AI Act transparency requirements.
Broadridge Financial Solutions’ Blockchain Repo Platform Handles $8T in July Transactions
Broadridge Financial Solutions' blockchain-based Distributed Ledger Repo platform processed $8 trillion in repurchase agreements during July 2026. The platform averaged $365 billion in daily transactions across trading days.
River AI Raises $1.1B Out of Stealth to Rebuild the Stack for Personal AI
River AI raised $1.1 billion in Series Seed and Series A funding rounds led by General Catalyst and AMP PBC. The startup, which exited stealth in June 2026, received strategic investments from Nvidia and AMD Ventures alongside participation from Y Combinator and Temasek.
Google’s Gemini app surges to 1 billion users
Google's Gemini app has reached 1 billion users. The chatbot generates over 150 million images daily, and 63% of users engage with it through the voice feature.
Gemini App Tops 1 Billion Monthly Users as Google’s Fastest-Growing Product
The Gemini app reached 1 billion monthly active users, making it Google's fastest-growing product and the company's 14th service to achieve this milestone. CEO Sundar Pichai announced the figure on August 11, 2026, crediting vice president Josh Woodward and the Gemini team.
Pro Women’s Baseball Resumes for First Time Since 1954: A League of Their Own is BACK!
A women's professional baseball league resumed operations for the first time since 1954. Ninety-nine-year-old Maybelle Blair, a former player from the original league, attended the inaugural game despite recently breaking four ribs.
Infantino’s opponents developing new framework for running world football
Uefa, Concacaf, and the AFC are jointly developing a new framework for running world football to replace what they view as Fifa's patronage system under Infantino. These three confederations initiated this effort after Infantino ignored their repeated calls for an independent governance review following his proposal to sell 21% of the World Cup.
Apple TV eyes US broadcast rights to the Open as foray into sports broadcasting continues
Apple TV is pursuing US broadcast rights to the Open Championship golf tournament after preliminary discussions with the R&A. NBC currently holds the rights, which expire in 2028.
Pathway Raises New Funding at $500M Valuation to Scale Post-Transformer AI
Pathway secured $30 million in seed financing at a $500 million valuation to develop post-Transformer AI models. The funding includes investors like Id4 Ventures, TQ Ventures, and Databricks Chief AI Scientist Jonathan Frankle.
IBM bets $240m on cheap, open-source inference to take on the hyperscalers
IBM is investing $240 million in a multi-year deal with startup Together AI to deploy Nvidia Blackwell systems on IBM Cloud, betting that enterprises prioritize inference cost over model prestige. The partnership focuses on making cheaper open-source AI inference available to enterprises through IBM Cloud infrastructure.
Bank of Russia Approves Bitcoin Trading For Retail Investors
The Bank of Russia has approved Bitcoin trading for retail investors, allowing ordinary citizens to purchase and trade the cryptocurrency. This regulatory approval represents Russia's formal move toward integrating digital assets into its financial system.
An unreleased Anthropic model made progress on one of math’s biggest unsolved problems
An unreleased Anthropic model made progress on the Riemann hypothesis, one of mathematics' greatest unsolved problems spanning over 150 years. The model demonstrated greater advancement on the problem than would typically be anticipated from an AI system.
NASA Shares Station Research Today Supporting Moon, Mars Tomorrow
The International Space Station conducted scientific experiments throughout 2026 to support future lunar and Mars missions. NASA's Artemis II mission achieved the first crewed flight around the Moon in more than 50 years in April.
Mistral AI wants to build 1 gigawatt of European compute by 2030 — and lock in customers now.
Mistral AI announced plans to build one gigawatt of European compute capacity by 2030 through multi-year customer commitments, with 200 megawatts operational by 2027. The company is also introducing regional inference endpoints, uptime guarantees for mission-critical workloads, and hosting third-party open models like GLM-5.2 from Chinese lab Z.ai.
NVIDIA Nemotron 3.5 Lightning and NeMo Switchyard Deliver Faster, Smarter, More Efficient Agentic AI
Nemotron 3.5 Lightning joins the Nemotron 3 model family as the highest-efficiency model for long-running agentic AI workloads. The open model expansion addresses market demand for full control over AI deployment and evolution.
LTX-2.5 can generate a 10-second AI video from an image in just 6.8 seconds on Nvidia superchips — and it's open weights
LTX-2.5 generates a 10-second AI video from a single image in 6.8 seconds on Nvidia superchips. The open-weights model is now available on Hugging Face, integrated into ComfyUI, and accessible through the LTX API for teams.
Nvidia's Switchyard router reshuffles AI models mid-task, cutting task costs to a third in its own tests
Nvidia released Nemotron 3.5 Lightning, a 30-billion-parameter mixture-of-experts model, alongside NeMo Switchyard, a routing library that directs each workflow step to the most appropriate model. According to Nvidia's tests, the combination achieves frontier-level task completion while reducing costs to approximately one-third compared to running Opus 4.8 alone.