DAILY SITUATION RECAP: SpaceXAI releases Grok Bot in early beta. Grok Bot is an agent swarm product designed for white-collar work tasks, an early preview of what Leopold Aschenbrenner called a “drop-in remote worker”. Bots can learn workflows and improve over time. This is likely part of the joint SpaceXAI-Tesla MACROHARD project, which seeks to eventually emulate entire software companies. OpenAI VP of Special Projects Brad Lightcap departs the company in order to start something new. Lightcap joined OpenAI in 2018 as CFO and helped build out many of its operations and business teams. He became COO in 2022, and VP of Special Projects (including the OpenAI Deployment Company) in April 2026. Previously, he was an investor at YC (along with Sam Altman) and worked in finance at Dropbox and JPMorgan. River AI raises $1.1B. The neolab, founded by xAI cofounder Igor Babuschkin, seeks to build powerful personal AI that knows and works for the user, starting with enterprise and moving to individuals over time. Anthropic is responding to tough investor questions on competition from cheap open-source Chinese models, on the firm’s tense relationship with the Trump administration, and on public backlash against data centers. Anthropic makes a $9.1B deal with Riot Platforms for compute. Riot is a former Bitcoin mining firm (and also former biotech diagnostic machinery manufacturer) that’s now pivoting to providing AI data center capacity. UK sovereign AI startup Cosine raises $15M, backed by the UK government and major financial companies. The 30-person startup plans to train LLMs for highly regulated industries that need sovereign AI. $15 million is around 0.005% of the total cumulative funding raised by OpenAI and Anthropic. Gemini hits 1 billion monthly users, becoming the fastest-growing product in Google’s history. Google now has 14 products (Search, Gmail, Drive, Chrome, Maps, Play Store, Calendar, Photos, Android, Discover, Lens, YouTube, Messages, Gemini) with more than a billion users. VC firm Accel raises $3.5B to make early-stage AI investments. $1.35B will go to larger rounds and follow-on investments, $800M to US (primarily Silicon Valley) investments, $800M to Europe and Israel, and $550M to India. Intel raises $20B in a share sale, showing continued demand for AI stocks. Chicago Mayor Brandon Johnson calls for a data center moratorium amid increasing anti-data center sentiment nationwide. Written by @theojaffee. Read more at our link in bio.

Daily new accounts on TRON increased 42.87% to 230,862, marking the network’s strongest daily signup total in a month. With more users joining the network and stablecoin activity continuing to expand, TRON’s global footprint keeps growing. Read the full article from @beincrypto 👇

DAILY SITUATION RECAP: Nvidia launches the Open Secure AI Alliance in order to find and fix vulnerabilities using open-source AI, sort of like an open Project Glasswing. Founding partners include a mix of enterprise software companies (Databricks, Salesforce, IBM, SAP, Siemens, Snowflake), cybersecurity companies (Palo Alto Networks, Red Hat), open-source providers (Hugging Face, LangChain, OpenClaw, Nous, the Linux Foundation), AI labs (SpaceXAI, Thinking Machines, Cognition), and other major companies (Nvidia, Microsoft, Cisco, Palantir, Dell). Moonshot AI releases the Kimi K3 weights and technical report after eleven days since launch. Kimi K3 is a 2.8T parameter mixture-of-experts (MoE) model with 104B active parameters and a 1M token context window. Moonshot also open-sourced much of their infrastructure, including their attention kernels, agent environment platform, and MoE communication library. Just because you can download it in theory doesn’t mean you actually can — the model is far too big to be run on any consumer hardware. Nvidia invests $5B in Ilya Sutskever’s SSI. Sutskever, formerly co-founder and Chief Scientist of OpenAI, founded Safe Superintelligence in 2024 with the sole goal of building a safe superintelligence, with no other products along the way. It has since raised $3B at up to a $32B valuation (likely higher now). SSI is famously very secretive about its research, but Sutskever said it’s “focused on overlooked aspects of how the human brain functions”. The new funding, and access to Nvidia Vera Rubin GPUs, will allow SSI to 10x its compute. More companies sign on to Nvidia’s open source letter. The letter, posted by Jensen Huang on Friday, advocates for a robust American open-source ecosystem with minimal government regulation. New signatories include Google, SpaceXAI, OpenAI, AMD, Cisco, Palo Alto Networks, Nebius, Scale, Fireworks AI, Baseten, Cohere, Sakana AI, Periodic Labs, Core Automation, OpenClaw, and GitHub. Every major American frontier lab except for Anthropic has now signed. CXMT stock surges 466% on its first trading day. The company, formerly ChangXin Memory Technologies, is the largest memory manufacturer in China and the fourth-largest in the world (after SK Hynix, Samsung, and Micron), with a 9% global market share. It now has the second-highest market cap of any Chinese company after Tencent. CXMT doesn’t make the most leading-edge HBM for AI chips, but supplies DRAM to consumer tech manufacturers and data centers. Nvidia may guarantee $250-350B of financing for an OpenAI data center. SB Energy, a subsidiary of SoftBank, is developing a massive 10 GW data center on federal land in Ohio at a total cost of over $500B. The financing guarantee would allow SB Energy to borrow money at lower rates, and possibly allow OpenAI to spend more on Nvidia chips. China begins manufacturing DUV machines. Deep ultraviolet (DUV) lithography machines print intricate nanoscale patterns on silicon wafers, a critical step in chipmaking. The new machines, built by an unnamed state-backed company, will be shipped to local chipmakers including SMIC, Hua Hong Semiconductor, and CXMT. China is still behind on the most advanced extreme ultraviolet (EUV) lithography, which is solely produced by Dutch company ASML. ASML stock fell 6% on the news. Dario Amodei explains Anthropic’s position on open models: open-weight models without dangerous capabilities are a public good, and Anthropic has never supported a full ban. However, we should be worried about the CCP using them for repression, as well as cyber/bio/alignment risk. To that end, we should not sell chips to China, crack down on distillation, and require mandatory safety testing for all sufficiently capable open and closed models. China threatens to respond if the US sanctions their AI labs. The Chinese Ministry of Commerce said US accusations of distillation were “smears” and that China will “take all necessary measures” to defend its rights and interests against any action that substantively harms them. DeepSeek has suspended its recent funding round after comments from a private investor call with CEO Liang Wenfeng were leaked. Written by @theojaffee. Read more at our link in bio.

DAILY SITUATION RECAP: Nvidia releases an open letter advocating for open-weights models. The letter urges government to support the open models ecosystem, and is signed by a number of companies including Andreessen Horowitz, Arena, Black Forest Labs, Box, Dell, Hugging Face, IBM, the Linux Foundation, Meta, Microsoft, Mistral, Mozilla, Palantir, Perplexity, Replit, and Y Combinator. Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang joined X just for this post, which is currently at 112k likes and 30.3M views. Huang has accumulated over 500k followers in less than 12 hours. New information about the OpenAI/Hugging Face incident has been released. The agent first attempted to break out of its sandbox on July 9, and the intrusion at Hugging Face lasted from July 11-13. Hugging Face published a blog post on July 15, but did not know the source of the attack. OpenAI took until July 18-19 to notice that the agent had escaped. The companies only communicated about the incident for the first time on July 20, and published their blog post on July 21. OpenAI recorded one case of an agent leaving notes for future versions on how to escape from OpenAI’s sandbox infrastructure. Midjourney is acquiring astrology app Co-Star. CEO Banu Guler will join Midjourney as Chief Design Officer. Midjourney will be using the Co-Star team to help design their upcoming image generation app. Midjourney, founded in 2021 as an image generation company, keeps expanding into new areas like medical devices. Elon Musk says Grok 4.6 in 2 weeks and Grok 4.7 in 4 weeks. Grok 4.5 is currently the best coding model in its price range, so we’ll see if the next models compete on price, frontier intelligence, or something else (maybe both?) Written by @theojaffee. Read more at link in bio.

Daily Hard Tech Headlines: - @PsiQuantum has secured a $125 million agreement with Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) to expand testing of its approach to building a utility-scale, fault-tolerant quantum computer. The company remains one of only two participants in Stage C, the final phase of DARPA’s Quantum Benchmarking Initiative. - @terraindustries, an African defense and critical infrastructure security startup, has launched Kama, an autonomous interceptor drone built to counter weaponized commercial drones. The company plans to produce the system at its Abuja and Accra factories. - @_Andrenam_ has secured an $18 million Series A. The Los Angeles startup develops sonar systems for maritime security, with the round led by Upfront Ventures. - @Saronic has partnered with Samsung Heavy Industries to scale autonomous ship production in the United States, focusing on robotic shipyard automation and high-throughput manufacturing. - Hokkaido Spaceport’s Launch Complex 1, a new Japanese orbital launch site, is nearing completion. - Northrop Grumman has launched its Mission Robotic Vehicle aboard a SpaceX Falcon 9, enabling the inspection of satellites in orbit using two robotic arms and the installation of propulsion modules to extend their operational lives. - Bahrain is exploring the development of its first small modular nuclear power plant. - The Jacksonville Sheriff’s Office has launched a Drone as First Responder program using systems provided by Paladin. - MOBY Robotics, an ocean intelligence startup, has secured a commercial contract to map the seabed in the Clarion-Clipperton Zone using deep-ocean robotic systems. The customer was not disclosed. - United States Marine Corps tested forward manufacturing capabilities in Okinawa during Valiant Shield 26, including circuit-board repair, metal restoration, hybrid manufacturing, and 3D printing while in transit. - @vast, the Long Beach space infrastructure startup, has launched a national security division focused on space-based capabilities for the DOW and intelligence community. Melanie Stricklan will lead the division. - Babcock International Group, ACUA Ocean and Frankenburg Technologies are teaming up to develop a maritime C-UAS system combining Acua’s unmanned surface vessel, Babcock’s launcher and Frankenburg’s precision-guided interceptor missiles. - Cooperative Ventures, backed by two of North America’s largest agricultural cooperatives, has invested in OpenTug, which develops software for the inland barge networks that move grain, fertilizer, and other bulk commodities across the United States. - Simon Shuham, the former head of product at Exowatt, has launched a Denver-based stealth startup developing high-efficiency systems that convert stranded waste heat into electricity. - Canadian Strategic Missions Corporation (CSMC) secured a $4.5 million investment from the Canadian government to support the scaling of small nuclear technology for the Arctic.

Daily trading volumes for $LUNC collapse after May spike. Beginning in late April 2026, the $LUNC token experienced a surge in trading interest, daily trading volume rising to an impressive $242.1M on May 5, per data from @artemis. However, the fairytale ended then and there, with daily volumes collapsing to just ~$10M - a downtrend that a resurgent crypto market has so far failed to prevent.