Techmeme

Shane Goldmacher / New York Times: Google quietly rolled out a new program to let verified political campaigns more easily bypass Gmail's spam filter, after years of complaints from the GOP  —  Republicans previously sued Google claiming its spam filter was biased, but the case was dismissed.

Prathik Jayaprakash / Reuters: Velaura AI, which is developing low-power chips for data centers and physical AI applications, like robotics, raised a $110M Series A at a $1B+ valuation  —  Velaura AI was valued at more than $1 billion on Tuesday after raising $110 million in a Series A funding round …

Hannah Lang / Reuters: As sweeping US crypto legislation stalls, the SEC and CFTC are moving to establish rules; the SEC is set to exempt certain token offerings from securities laws  —  As sweeping U.S. crypto legislation stalls, President Donald Trump's regulators are set to fill the void, but efforts …

Andy Greenberg / Wired: Q&A with Proton CEO Andy Yen on Proton's story, dislodging “a hundred million people” from Google, AI backlash, privacy, US politics, EU Chat Control, and more  —  Proton's CEO is a champion of encryption for everyone.  So why is he going all in on un-encryptable AI?

Connor Hart / Wall Street Journal: Klarna says CFO Niclas Neglén and CMO David Sandström plan to step down in early 2027, and lowers its full-year GMV guidance; KLAR falls 19%+ pre-market  —  The payments company tempered its outlook for the year, even as it swung to a profit and logged higher revenue in the second quarter

Diana Novak Jones / Reuters: How a bipartisan coalition of US states fought to present a united case against Meta; Judge Rogers established a hybrid structure for the multi-week trial  —  As opening statements get underway in a landmark trial over claims that Meta Platforms (META.O) misled the public about the safety …

Julian Chokkattu / Wired: Dutch company Fairphone launches its $650 flagship repairable Fairphone (Gen 6+) in the US and plans to keep launching new phone generations every two years  —  More than a decade after launching in Europe, the Netherlands company is now selling its repairable phones in the US, starting with the Fairphone (Gen 6+).

Bloomberg: Xiaomi reports Q2 revenue down 6.1% YoY to ~$16.2B and net income down 21% to ~$1.4B, above est., amid a persistent memory shortage and weaker smartphone demand  —  Xiaomi Corp. posted profit that fell less than expected, raising hopes it can weather a persistent memory shortage that's weakened demand for smartphones.

Cecilia Kang / New York Times: OpenAI launches ChatGPT for Teens, a new mode that limits high-risk chats around self-harm, eating disorders, and other topics, adds studying tools, and more  —  The artificial intelligence start-up announced a chatbot mode that will automatically limit some conversations to better protect young users.

Juro Osawa / The Information: Alibaba says its new open-source multimodal model, Qwen3.8-27B, passed 1M+ downloads within a few days of release, making it one of its fastest-growing models  —  Alibaba Group said its new small-size AI model that customers can run on their own personal computers has been downloaded …

Jay Peters / The Verge: Reddit launches an early experiment to convert select text posts and comments into short videos with AI voiceovers, rolling out on the web, iOS, and Android  —  Reddit's latest experiment creates videos with AI voices reading posts and comments out loud.

Jeanny Yu / Bloomberg: Alibaba's Alipay launches a new “all-in-one” platform for businesses to use AI agents to automate tasks; Alibaba's stock jumps 5%+ and is up 40%+ since June  —  Alibaba Group Holding Ltd. shares rose the most in two weeks as the launch of a new ecommerce platform boosted optimism toward …

Robbie Whelan / Wall Street Journal: AI inference chip startup Etched raised $700M led by its new server rack customer Jane Street at a $21B valuation, up from $10.3B after raising $300M in July  —  Etched, founded by Harvard dropouts, has its own in-office data center and has signed quant-trading firm Jane Street as its first customer.

Bloomberg: Sources: China orders some state-linked entities to uninstall a government-tailored version of Windows 10, ahead of its February 2027 retirement timeline  —  China is pulling the plug on an older version of Microsoft Corp.'s Windows tailored for government agencies, taking another step toward rooting …

Madeleine Cuff / New Scientist: Google unveils Operation Blue Skies, a £5M trial to re-route North Atlantic aircraft to reduce contrail-induced warming using Google's AI atmospheric forecasts  —  Operation Blue Skies is the world's first trial to deploy contrail avoidance measures across an entire airspace …

Washington Post: A Wyoming woman joined a federal suit against xAI alleging her stepfather used Grok to turn one childhood photo of her into 7,000+ CSAM images he traded online  —  When Jane Doe 4, as she is identified in legal filings, arrived at her parents' house in Wyoming to set up a family party earlier this year …

Anthropic: Anthropic details Claude's text watermark: it only shows Claude was likely involved, is sparse in code and factual text, and disappears after a full rewrite  —  Future Claude models will generate text that contains a watermark.  This is a way of determining the likelihood that Claude …

Saritha Rai / Bloomberg: Alibaba's open-weight models have accumulated 3B+ global downloads in the past six months; Hugging Face: Google had 418M downloads while Meta had 227M in 2026  —  Alibaba Group Holding's open-weight models have accumulated more than 3 billion global downloads in the past six months …

William Sandlund / Financial Times: Shanghai's tech-focused Star 50 index is up 29% in 2026, and its P/E ratio is 150+, above Nasdaq 100's 35, fueled by Beijing's tech push and an investor frenzy  —  Support from Beijing has helped power 29% gain for Star 50 index this year  —  Backing from Beijing and an investor frenzy …

Isabelle Bousquette / Wall Street Journal: BCG: enterprise users spent a total of $300M on quantum computing in 2025, outranking the combined spending of research labs and governments for the first time  —  Many companies are pouring millions into quantum computing programs to gain a competitive edge and prepare for future encryption threats