Alex Konrad / Upstarts Media:
Worktrace AI, founded by ex-OpenAI product lead Angela Jiang and researcher Deepak Vasisht, launches with a $9.3M seed, and unveils a workflow automation agent  —  Worktrace AI founders Angela Jiang and Deepak Vasisht are launching a workflow automation agent backed by $9M from Conviction, 8VC, OpenAI and prominent alumni.

Maxwell Zeff / Wired:
Cursor launches Visual Editor, a vibe-coding product for designers that integrates professional design controls with natural language editing via Cursor's agent  —  The 300-person startup hopes bringing designers aboard will give it an edge in an increasingly competitive AI software market.

Carlos Garcia / Fortune:
Berlin-based LI.FI, which provides businesses with price comparisons of crypto exchange rates and bridging fees, raised $29M, taking its total funding to ~$52M  —  When businesses decide to engage with crypto, they quickly discover the landscape is fragmented across numerous blockchains.

Jess Weatherbed / The Verge:
AT&T launches Connected Life, a smart home security system with hardware from Google and Abode, designed to keep working during power or internet outages  —  Connected Life combines Nest and Abode devices with AT&T cellular backup to stay online during outages.

Todd Spangler / Variety:
Disney sends Google a cease-and-desist, accusing Google of copyright infringement on a “massive scale” and using AI to “exploit and distribute” the content  —  Disney sends cease-and-desist letter to internet giant  —  As Disney has gone into business with OpenAI …

Robert McMillan / Wall Street Journal:
Stanford researchers develop AI hacking bot Artemis and say it surpassed nine out of 10 penetration testers by rapidly finding bugs in the university's network  —  A recent Stanford experiment shows what happens when an artificial-intelligence hacking bot is unleashed on a network

OpenAI:
Disney and OpenAI sign a three-year deal to bring 200+ Disney characters to Sora; Disney makes a $1B investment in OpenAI and will become a major OpenAI client  —  Agreement marks a significant step in setting meaningful standards for responsible AI in entertainment.

Clare Duffy / CNN:
Study: 15 TikTok accounts posting AI videos of sexualized underage girls have nearly 300K followers; TikTok says that 14 of the accounts don't violate its rules  —  TikTok AI  —  AI-generated videos showing what appear to be underage girls in sexualized clothing or positions have together racked …

Steve Dent / Engadget:
Google brings Gemini to Chrome for iOS and iPadOS, after debuting on desktop and Android earlier in 2025, starting in the US in English for signed-in users  —  It can summarize pages, create a FAQ on a topic and modify recipes for your dietary needs.  —  After rolling it out on desktop …

Financial Times:
Dutch payments group Mollie agrees to acquire London-based fintech GoCardless for €1.5B, set to close in 2026; GoCardless was last valued at $2.1B in early 2022  —  Dutch payments group aims to create new European fintech  —  Dutch payments group Mollie has agreed to acquire …

The Information:
Sources: in recent months, Tencent aggressively hired AI researchers from ByteDance, including by offering to double their salaries, and reorganized its AI team  —  Throughout the past couple of years, as AI fever swept China's technology sector, one giant—Tencent—seemed to mostly be sitting on the sidelines.

Aisha Malik / TechCrunch:
Fertility startup Inito, which offers an at-home health diagnostics platform, raised a $29M Series B and plans to use AI-designed antibodies to make new tests  —  Fertility startup Inito has raised $29 million in Series B funding to scale its at-home health diagnostics platform …

Agnee Ghosh / Bloomberg:
Medra, which programs robots with AI to conduct and improve biological experiments, raised $52M led by Human Capital, taking its total funding to $63M  —  Medra, which programs robots with artificial intelligence to conduct and improve biological experiments, has raised $52 million to build …

Francesca Micheletti / Politico:
The EU opens investigations into Temu and airport scanner maker Nuctech to assess whether they unfairly penetrated the EU market thanks to Beijing subsidies  —  The Commission is probing whether the companies receive unfair support from Beijing when they operate in Europe.

Dominic-Madori Davis / TechCrunch:
Runware, which operates a developer tool platform that generates images, video, and audio in real-time, raised a $50M Series A, taking its total funding to $66M  —  Flaviu Radulesc started Runware in 2023 when he was testing a text-to-image company and realized that, though genAI tech was powerful, it was slow in generating images.

Julie Bort / TechCrunch:
Israeli startup Port, which offers a proprietary developer portal competitor to Spotify's open-source Backstage, raised a $100M Series C at an $800M valuation  —  Spotify may be synonymous with music streaming, but it's also got a wildly popular developer-tool side-hustle called “Backstage.”

Jagmeet Singh / TechCrunch:
Harness, which uses AI to automate code testing, verification, security, and governance, raised a $240M Series E led by Goldman Sachs at a $5.5B valuation  —  AI DevOps tool Harness, founded in 2017 by serial entrepreneur Jyoti Bansal, is on track to exceed $250 million in annual recurring revenue in 2025, Bansal tells TechCrunch.

Julie Jargon / Wall Street Journal:
OpenAI faces a wrongful death lawsuit from the estate of an 83-year-old woman killed by her son, who had engaged in delusion-filled conversations with ChatGPT  —  The estate of victim Suzanne Eberson Adams is suing OpenAI for wrongful death, and her grandson is speaking out for the first time

Tim Dettmers:
An Ai2 research scientist says AGI may never emerge because such a concept ignores the physical realities and limits of computation, such as energy constraints  —  If you are reading this, you probably have strong opinions about AGI, superintelligence, and the future of AI.

Patrick O'Shaughnessy / Invest Like The Best on YouTube:
Q&A with investor Gavin Baker of Atreides Management on the economics of AI, data centers in space, mistakes SaaS companies are making in adopting AI, and more  —  In this episode of Invest Like The Best, Patrick O'Shaughnessy sits down with investor Gavin Baker to explore the rapidly evolving AI landscape.