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National Economic Council Director Kevin Hassett told CNBC that AI safety concerns are solvable and best addressed by companies themselves rather than through expanded government oversight. His remarks followed President Trump's dismissal of AI danger warnings as a 'hoax,' as the administration pushes to keep the U.S. ahead of China in AI development.
Digital Realty CEO Andrew Power said warnings of a potential AI development slowdown from firms like Anthropic, OpenAI and xAI would not mean a halt to data center real estate demand. He argued that non-AI digital transformation and cloud computing growth remain strong drivers for his business, even as Digital Realty and Equinix shares fell on Monday amid AI slowdown fears.
Analyst Jeff Pu reports that most iPhone 18 Pro models are shipping immediately, with the Pro Max facing delays of at most three to four weeks depending on color and storage configuration. He interprets this as a sign of softer demand compared to prior iPhone launches, based on pre-order availability data.
NYU mathematician Tristan Buckmaster alleges OpenAI's announcement that its Astra model solved the century-old Navier-Stokes problem came suspiciously soon after he and Anthropic researcher Levent Alpöge developed their own solution using AI tools. Buckmaster says OpenAI scientists approached him to jointly announce the finding and allegedly suggested refusing could hurt his career, while declining to confirm whether their model had access to his research. OpenAI credited Astra with the proof and denied using customer data directly, though it admitted it could not rule out use of anonymized data to improve its models.
At the launch event for GPT-6 Astra, OpenAI president Greg Brockman claimed the company's new model marks the start of the 'AGI era,' referencing systems capable of matching or exceeding human performance across nearly all cognitive tasks. Independent AI researchers dispute this framing, arguing that Astra's strong benchmark scores do not constitute proof that artificial general intelligence has actually been achieved.
President Trump used social media posts to reject growing concerns from AI industry figures about the technology's risks, comparing the safety debate to what he called the 'Global Warming Scam' and 'RUSSIA, RUSSIA, RUSSIA HOAX'. His comments came shortly after Anthropic co-founder Jack Clark told the BBC that a mandatory 'kill switch' verified by outside parties might be necessary for dangerous AI systems, part of a wave of warnings from AI executives that had already triggered a tech stock selloff.
Broadcom CEO Hock Tan told CNBC that his company's AI semiconductor revenue forecasts remain unchanged despite market jitters over Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei's call to slow frontier AI development. Broadcom shares fell 4.8% and chip stocks broadly dropped after Amodei's comments, which drew backing from Sam Altman and Elon Musk. Tan said demand for AI compute infrastructure remains strong and durable, and reaffirmed that Anthropic is set to become Broadcom's largest custom chip customer by 2027.
OpenAI has reportedly acquired Glass Imaging, a Los Altos-based smartphone camera company, for more than $300 million according to the Wall Street Journal. Founded in 2019 by former Apple engineers Ziv Attar and Tom Bishop, who helped build Portrait Mode, the startup had raised roughly $30 million before the deal and uses neural networks trained on specific camera hardware to improve image quality directly at capture rather than through post-processing edits.
Anthropic co-founder Jack Clark told the BBC that regulators may eventually need to require AI companies to have a verifiable shutdown mechanism, checkable by outside parties, to disable systems that become too dangerous. He said most AI labs already have some way to pull the plug internally, but argued this should become part of the broader policy debate rather than left to individual firms.
Anthropic released an economic model estimating that widespread AI adoption could push US GDP up by as much as 32%, reaching $44.4 trillion within four years. The model breaks down jobs, using a nurse's shift as an example, into tasks that vanish, get augmented, get automated, or spawn new AI-oversight work. Anthropic also released an interactive simulator letting users adjust variables to generate their own projections based on the company's assumptions.
In an interview, Payoneer CEO John Caplan described how the 22-year-old fintech now serves two million customers across 190 countries, processing roughly $100 billion annually for entrepreneurs selling on platforms like Amazon, Shopify and Etsy. Caplan said the company has grown into a billion-dollar revenue business with nearly $300 million in adjusted EBITDA since he took over, up from a $500 million operation.
Japan's Digital Agency disclosed that an attacker exploited a known, medium-severity vulnerability in a VPN device used by its Government Solution Service to access internal systems. The breach, detected after unusual account activity on June 25 and confirmed on July 9, may have exposed roughly 246,000 rows of data including names, emails, phone numbers and some addresses belonging to government staff and affiliated businesses.