🔥 Story Of The Week: OpenAI reverses its closed-source stance, releasing its first open-weight models since 2019.
⭐️ Must Reads: Perplexity is accused of stealth web scraping, Google launches its premium Gemini 2.5 Deep Think, OpenAI offers ChatGPT to the US gov for $1/year and Microsoft's valuation hits a massive $4 trillion.
🧰 Technology: DeepMind's Genie 3 generates interactive AI worlds, Anthropic releases Claude Opus 4.1 model and Google's AI coding agent Jules exits beta.
📊 Business And Economy: ChatGPT's user base surges to 700M weekly, Amazon considers adding ads to Alexa conversations and Apple is reportedly developing its own 'answer engine' to rival Google.
📝 Policy And Regulation: US gov approves OpenAI, Google, and Anthropic as AI vendors, ElevenLabs launches a commercially-cleared AI music generator and Disney's use of AI in films faces legal roadblocks.
⚡ Startups And Investments: AI funding frenzy continues as French startup Mistral seeks $1B, legal AI firm August secures $7M and sales platform Clay raises $100M.