Tech Daily News Update

1. White House takes down ‘Build the Wall’ game after the Tetris Company complains

   The Trump administration's short-lived arcade game "Build the Wall" is now nowhere to be found after the Tetris Company posted that it takes "copyright infringement very seriously."

2. Hackers are stealing Claude tokens from subscribers

   Last month, a Claude user noticed his account was consuming tokens even though he wasn't working. Anthropic has since warned users about hackers.

3. Cognition hits $48B valuation, signaling investors believe AI coding is far from a winner-take-all market

   Cognition's valuation multiple is higher than Cursor's was before selling to SpaceX.

4. The Exploration Company nabs $450 million to challenge SpaceX

   The Exploration Company (TEC) has raised $450 million to build reusable spacecraft, in what it describes as “the largest-ever Series C by a European space company.”

5. Meta debuts its Muse AI agent. Will consumers trust it?

   Meta's new personal AI agent Muse wants access to users' email, calendars, payments, health services, and more — making the company's biggest consumer AI bet yet a major test of whether people still trust Meta with their data.

6. How to watch Apple’s foldable iPhone announcement

   Apple's annual iPhone event will stream live on September 9 at 10 a.m. PDT, and we're expecting big news.

7. OpenAI fought dirty on career-making math problem, says NYU mathematician

   There is a $1 million bounty for the first person providing a solution to the Navier-Stokes existence and smoothness problem.

8. Google Cloud races to catch up in the AI deployment wars with Accenture deal

   Google Cloud expands its enterprise AI push with Accenture, betting on forward-deployed engineers to drive adoption and overcome deployment bottlenecks.

9. Google’s revived nuclear power plant gets $1.9B loan from US government

   Google said it would bring an Iowa nuclear power plant back from the dead. Now the plant's owner is getting a $1.9 billion loan from the U.S. Energy Department.

10. Chrome is now shipping updates every 2 weeks as AI changes the security landscape

    Google is speeding up Chrome’s release schedule to ship security patches and new features faster.

11. Mistral raises €3B as sovereign AI becomes big business

    The French AI lab has raised €3 billion at a €21 billion valuation in a Series D round led by Samsung, Scaleup Europe, and PSG Equity.

12. A hacker stole $340M in a crypto heist, then returned most of it

    The latest heist is one of the largest thefts of cryptocurrency to date.

13. Nuclear startup Bluecore Energy raises $50M seed round, just two months after launch

    Bluecore Energy announced Tuesday an oversubscribed $50 million seed round — just months after raising a $10 million pre-seed and coming out of stealth. 

14. Poseidon Aerospace lands $60M ahead of first pilotless test flight

    The startup is trying to rethink the economics of cargo aircraft by removing pilots from the equation entirely.

15. Stoke Space raises another billion to rival SpaceX at re-flying rockets

    Stoke has "completed the initial closing" of a $1B Series E round intended to help it reach orbit and prepare a new, larger rocket for operations.

16. Eric Wu’s newest company, out of stealth since May, is going after construction’s labor crunch

    Eric Wu, who built and ran Opendoor before stepping away in 2022, has had his new company, NavigateAI, out of stealth since May — building AI copilots that give construction workers real-time, hands-free guidance through smartphones and Meta's AI glasses, backed by $25 million from Elad Gil, Khosla Ventures, and Lennar to tackle a labor shortage severe enough that data center projects alone now need 4,000 to 5,000 workers apiece.

17. Opaque recurrence, and other AI terms that you should probably know

    The rise of AI has brought an avalanche of new terms and slang. Here is a glossary with definitions of some of the most important words and phrases you might encounter.

18. A secret new Elizabeth Holmes documentary stuns Telluride

    Nathan Fielder and Lance Oppenheim's secret Elizabeth Holmes documentary, "You Can See Everything," stunned Telluride audiences Sunday night with its generous access to the Theranos founder.

19. What we expect from the upcoming Apple launch

    While Apple's first foldable iPhone Ultra will headline the September 9 launch, we're also expecting news about AirPods and HomePods.

20. Phil Schiller’s App Store exit reportedly driven by wariness over future plans

    Schiller reportedly had reservations about new CEO John Ternus' goal of bringing in more recurring revenue from the App Store.