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August 20, 2026, 6:00 PM
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WeSmirchTop News
| Jess Weatherbed / The Verge: |
Slack launches Slack Code, adding dedicated, project-specific code channels that let teams collaborate with AI coding agents “like teammates” across all plans — Slack Code provides a dedicated open space for teams to collaborate with AI agents.
More: Salesforce, The New Stack, The Register, Gizmodo, SiliconANGLE, WeRSM, Unite.AI, Salesforce Ben, and RuntimeWire
X: @benioff, @scobleizer, @nrmehta, @eltintero, @jordienr, @kimmonismus, and @sawyerhood
LinkedIn: Sean Reape, Joseph P. DeMuyt, James Baldwin, Jeff Wareham, Zach Ciliotta-Young, and Slack. Mastodon: @carnage4life@mas.to
| Douglas Gillison / Reuters: |
Study: 150+ Polymarket wallets may have traded on internal US military information, making $8M overall with a 97.2% average win rate and attracting copycat bets — More than 150 wallets on Polymarket International may have traded on inside U.S. military information, attracting copycat bets …
More: CTech, International Business Times, Task & Purpose, The Crypto Times, and Bitcoin Insider
Bluesky: @newdems, @jacobsilverman.com, @michaelsderby, @mims, @philippeauclair, @stucowan, @bradheath, and @willoremus.com
Forums: r/technology and r/army
| Bloomberg: |
Sources: Anthropic expects to match or beat the size of SpaceX's record-setting IPO, as it prepares to file publicly for its IPO as soon as the end of August — Anthropic PBC expects to match or beat the size of SpaceX's record-setting initial public offering, according to people familiar with the matter …
More: Bloomberg Law, Quartz, The Asia Business Daily, Yahoo Finance, Bitcoin Insider, and Motley Fool. Bluesky: @jordanswinter
| Matt G. Southern / Search Engine Journal: |
Google rolls out an embeddable “Preferred Sources” button, natural language Discover controls, and custom audio briefings in the Google News app on Android — Google is rolling out a new embeddable Preferred Sources button, natural language Discover controls, and customizable audio briefings in the Google News app.| Newcomer: |
Sources: Poolside struck a non-exclusive $6B licensing deal with Nvidia, plus a $1B investment at a $12B pre-money valuation; 109 staffers get Nvidia job offers — EXCLUSIVE TO NEWCOMER: Poolside AI, the artificial intelligence model-building startup, has struck a non-exclusive licensing deal … | Qianer Liu / The Information: |
Sources: Nvidia plans to begin small-batch shipments of an LPU tailored for Chinese customers by the end of 2026; the chip complies with US export control rules — Nvidia plans to begin small-batch shipments of an AI chip specially tailored for Chinese customers by the end of the year … | Kate Clark / Wall Street Journal: |
Stripe's OpenRouter acquisition, its largest yet, is a bet on a future where users turn to a mix of AI models and tokens are the central currency for businesses — The Stripe deal for OpenRouter, founded by an NFT entrepreneur, is a bet on a future where users turn to a mix of AI models
More: Stripe, Financial Times, Axios, The Information, New York Times, and Bloomberg
| Edward Ludlow / Bloomberg: |
Waymo says it has built an ASIC chip that will improve its robotaxis' reflexes and navigational skills and help it diversify away from third parties like Nvidia — Alphabet Inc.'s Waymo has built a custom chip that the company said will improve the performance of its robotaxis … | Ram Iyer / TechCrunch: |
Ramp launches Router, an AI model routing service it has been using internally over the past three years, in the US; Router is free to use for the rest of 2026 — Corporate expense management platform Ramp is hot on the heels of Stripe in setting up toll houses for AI inference.
More: The New Stack, Ramp, RuntimeWire, The Stack, Unite.AI, and MakeUseOf
| Vlad Fedorov / The GitHub Blog: |
GitHub says its 7+ hour August 17 outage was caused by a capacity failure when peak traffic overwhelmed an infrastructure component in a Central US data center — An update on the August 17 outage and the steps we're taking to improve reliability. — On August 17, GitHub experienced an outage that lasted 7 hours and 47 minutes.
More: The New Stack, ITPro, and Neowin
X: @acolombiadev and @vlad_github
Forums: Hacker News and r/programming
| Brody Ford / Bloomberg: |
Source: Meta is spending hundreds of millions per year to use trillions of AI tokens weekly via Azure, quietly becoming one of Microsoft's largest AI customers — Meta Platforms Inc. has become one of Microsoft Corp.'s biggest AI customers, underscoring how demand for the emerging technology remains concentrated in the tech industry.
More: Implicator.ai, Blockonomi, Barchart.com, Telecoms Tech News, and The Asia Business Daily. LinkedIn: Brody Ford
| Bloomberg: |
Sources: Broadcom is in talks with a group of lenders to raise $60B+ in debt for an AI chip financing deal that will benefit Anthropic and other companies — Broadcom Inc. is in talks with a group of lenders to raise more than $60 billion in debt for an AI chip financing deal …
More: Reuters and Blockonomi
| Chris Metinko / Axios: |
San Mateo-based Twin1 AI, which creates professional digital twins that integrate with tools like Slack, launches from stealth with a $20M seed — Twin1 AI, a startup that helps professionals create a digital twin, launched from stealth with a $20 million seed round, co-founder Lewis Liu tells Axios Pro.
More: FinSMEs, Artificial Lawyer, Ventureburn, and City A.M.
| Reuters: |
The Chinese city of Hangzhou deploys traffic-control robots that operate autonomously, using cameras and radar to signal traffic and flag violations — It is not quite the “RoboCop” of the 1987 movie: no gun, no power to arrest and wheels rather than the Hollywood cyborg's mechanical stride.
More: The Independent and Bloomberg
| Sarah Perez / TechCrunch: |
Meta rolls out Pocket, an experimental vibe-coding app that lets users create and share small games, in the US, after launching it in Brazil last month — Meta's experimental vibe-coding gaming app, Pocket, is now rolling out to everyone in the U.S. The app, which arrived quietly last month …
More: Engadget, Neowin, Business Insider, Digital Trends, and WeRSM
X: @makegizmos, @jsiegz, @tjack, and @dtrinh
| Rachel Metz / Bloomberg: |
Source: Anthropic plans a change for later this year that still requires enterprises to retain data for 30 days but lets them do so on their own cloud systems — Anthropic PBC plans to allow business customers to keep greater control of their data when using its most capable artificial intelligence models … | Kristin Robinson / Billboard: |
Email: Apple Music tells industry partners that songs tagged as “materially generated using AI” by content providers will be visibly labeled on the service — The news builds on Apple's recent announcement of AI Transparency Tags for songs. Now, the service will soon make those disclosures visible to users.
| Google: |
Google DeepMind says its Gemma family of open models has surpassed 1B downloads and developers have published 100K+ Gemma model variants over the past two years — From outer space to underwater, here's how developers are bringing a positive impact with our open models.
More: Unite.AI. X: @osanseviero, @_philschmid, @o_lacombe, @ollama, @google, @cockerillbill, and @ai_for_success
| Luz Ding / Bloomberg: |
Alibaba reports Q1 revenue up 9% YoY to ~$39.64B, meeting est., and net income down 75% to ~$1.54B due to heavy AI spending and weak domestic retail consumption — Alibaba Group Holding Ltd.'s profit plunged more than 75% after the Chinese company ratcheted up quarterly capital spending …
More: CNBC, Bloomberg, PYMNTS, Decrypt, International Business Times, Wall Street Journal, Business Wire, Nikkei Asia, Quartz, Constellation Research, Proactive, Yahoo Finance, Blockonomi, BusinessDay, Associated Press, Reuters, and Finimize. LinkedIn: Alibaba Group
| Alexander Gladstone / Wall Street Journal: |
A bankruptcy court delays Google's $10M purchase of Spirit Airlines' data after former flight attendants objected, seeking assurance their info would be removed — The flight attendants want assurance that their confidential information will be removed from the sale of the defunct airline's digital records
More: Gizmodo, Business Insider, Mercury News, Bloomberg Law, View from the Wing, Fortune, RuntimeWire, PYOK, and AeroTime
| Georg Szalai / The Hollywood Reporter: |
Charter closes its $34.5B Cox acquisition, announced in May 2025, uniting two of the biggest US cable and broadband providers, and completes its Liberty deal — “When Liberty first invested in Charter more than a decade ago, we saw an opportunity to build scale behind a great management team and operating model," said John Malone.| Olivia Carville / Bloomberg: |
Two US senators demand answers from TikTok about a “depraved” test that withheld a safety feature from 10% of US users, including a teenager who died by suicide — Two US senators have sent a letter to TikTok executives demanding answers about an experiment the company ran …
More: Engadget, TechCrunch, and The Record
| Dean Takahashi / GamesBeat: |
Astromech, which uses genomic data to build predictive AI models of biological change, raised $20M at a $3.8B valuation, bringing its total funding to $60M — Astromech has raised $20 million to advance its evolutionary biology AI predictive models of biological change.| Michael Martina / Reuters: |
How Unitree's Go series, which helped the company dominate the quadruped robot market, drew on openly published US university research funded by the US military — China's Unitree Robotics - among the world's biggest producers of humanoid and quadruped robots - based designs … | Paul Kiernan / Wall Street Journal: |
PitchBook: 4,000+ California-based startups have raised ~$366B in venture capital in 2026 so far, more than triple the total of all other 49 US states combined — California-based companies have announced a record haul in startup funding, despite billionaire-tax fearsSponsor Posts
Subquadratic:
Subquadratic: the LLM built for 12M-token reasoning — SubQ can reason across entire codebases and document sets in one pass with no RAG workarounds. Read how SubQ 1.1 Small holds near-perfect retrieval out to 12M tokens.
Subquadratic: the LLM built for 12M-token reasoning — SubQ can reason across entire codebases and document sets in one pass with no RAG workarounds. Read how SubQ 1.1 Small holds near-perfect retrieval out to 12M tokens.
Cape:
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Zoho:
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IDrive:
Protecting your Cloud Applications Data — Backing up Office 365, Google Workspace, Dropbox & Salesforce data is critical to preventing data loss or corruption, complying with laws and avoiding critical downtime in case of a disaster.
Protecting your Cloud Applications Data — Backing up Office 365, Google Workspace, Dropbox & Salesforce data is critical to preventing data loss or corruption, complying with laws and avoiding critical downtime in case of a disaster.Featured Podcasts
Channels with Peter Kafka:
The $12.5 Billion Lakers, the NFL's TV Fight, and Sports Media's Big Split
Media and tech aren't just intersecting - they're fully intertwined. To understand how those worlds work, Peter Kafka talks to industry leaders, upstarts and observers.
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Big Technology Podcast:
Nick Bostrom: Worries About AI Existential Risk Just Became More Concrete
The Big Technology Podcast takes you behind the scenes in the tech world featuring interviews with plugged-in insiders and outside agitators.
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Microsoft Vice Chair and President Brad Smith speaks with leaders in government, business, and culture to explore the most critical challenges at the intersection of technology and society.
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