On The Verge's Decoder podcast, former DOJ antitrust chief Jonathan Kanter discussed AI companies' requests for antitrust exemptions to jointly coordinate on safety, amid growing alarm from researchers at Anthropic and Google DeepMind who have quit citing unheeded safety risks. Kanter, who led major antitrust actions against Google, Apple, and Ticketmaster under Biden, weighed in on whether such exemptions represent legitimate safety collaboration or a bid for regulatory capture and cartel-like behavior.
UP.Labs has rebranded as Vantora after raising $100 million from Silversmith Capital Partners, shifting its model from building startups for the broader market to creating proprietary ventures exclusively for corporate partners. The firm still works with clients like Alaska Airlines and Porsche, and is now expanding into industrial manufacturing and oil and gas, with a heavier focus on physical AI applications such as retrofitting factory hardware for autonomy.
A new Resident Evil movie directed by Zach Cregger reportedly breaks from the franchise's Milla Jovovich-era action focus by recreating the dread and resource-scarcity feel of the original survival horror games. The story follows Bryan, a medical courier drawn into Raccoon City while grappling with impending fatherhood, and uses over-the-shoulder camera work reminiscent of classic Resident Evil gameplay. Cregger, known for Barbarian and Weapons, brings both horror filmmaking chops and genuine fandom to the adaptation.
Wealthy family offices are increasingly skipping traditional venture capital fund commitments in favor of buying secondary shares or striking direct deals with AI companies, according to Atlas Capital advisor Djoann Fal. He says these investors are drawn by the prospect of tripling returns in months rather than years, and want direct exposure to top AI names rather than ceding control to fund managers for a decade.
Analysts at Morgan Stanley, JPMorgan, and TrendForce report that legacy memory types like NOR flash and SLC NAND are facing severe supply shortages as manufacturers redirect production capacity toward more profitable HBM and DRAM chips driven by AI demand. Contract prices for both chip types have already more than doubled in the first half of 2026, with SLC NAND expected to rise another 120-170% in the second half.
At Fast Company's Innovation Festival, Nasdaq president Nelson Griggs discussed with senior writer Ainsley Harris how prospective massive public listings from AI leaders such as Anthropic and OpenAI could transform public markets. He framed these mega-IPOs as a distinct new category that could alter how capital flows into major industries and the broader economy.
Samsung has released Gallery Assistant, a Good Lock module that adds seven new tools to the Gallery app on Galaxy phones, including size reduction, rotate and flip, image clipping, watermarking, image comparison, and PDF export. Many of these tools support batch processing, letting users apply the same edit to multiple images or videos simultaneously instead of repeating actions one by one.
Anthropic and OpenAI are pursuing smaller data center deals in the 20-30 megawatt range, according to sources familiar with the discussions, even as both companies have already signed massive multi-hundred-megawatt and gigawatt infrastructure agreements. Anthropic has explored such deals in the UK and Nordics, while OpenAI has looked at similar opportunities in the Nordics, with talks also reportedly underway for smaller U.S. deployments. OpenAI confirmed it is building a 'diversified compute portfolio' but declined to discuss specific commercial talks; Anthropic did not comment.
Alec Litowitz joined Citadel in 1994 without a finance background, brought on by Ken Griffin for his way of thinking rather than his resume. He went on to help scale Citadel's equity business from about $100 million to $10 billion in assets before spending 18 years leading Magnetar Capital, which grew to roughly $20 billion by 2022.
Bain Capital Ventures has closed a new $1.6 billion fund, up 14% from its prior $1.4 billion vehicle raised three years ago. The firm plans to deploy the capital mainly into AI-focused startups, targeting infrastructure, healthcare, physical AI, and security as key sectors it believes will define what it calls the 'post-AGI era'.
A group called stegan0gram removed a Flock roadside camera and dissected its Android storage, finding an encryption key inside the 'media' partition that unlocked another partition holding all recorded files. That data included about 1.6 million images and 27,321 short video clips gathered over 21 days, capturing roughly 50,200 vehicles and 11 people.
Comp AI, a startup building AI agents to automate security and compliance tasks like drafting policies and gathering audit evidence, announced a $34 million Series A led by Roo Capital and Grand Ventures. The company was founded by Lewis Carhart, Claudio Fuentes, and Mariano Fuentes, who previously ran a workflow startup called LeapAI that they shut down after failing to find a sticky use case. Their frustration with the tedious SOC 2 compliance process while scaling LeapAI directly inspired Comp AI's product.
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