The European Commission fined AliExpress 550 million euros, the biggest Digital Services Act penalty yet, for failing to detect and remove illegal and counterfeit products.

By Oliver Grant

Image: WrS.tm.pl / Wikimedia Commons (CC0)

Databricks signed a Coatue-led funding deal valuing the data and AI company at $188 billion, up from $134 billion in February's Series L.

Databricks has signed a term sheet for a new funding round valuing the company at $188 billion — a $54 billion jump from February, when it closed a $5 billion Series L at $134 billion. Five months, roughly 40% added, and the data-and-AI company still is not listed on any exchange. The round is led by Coatue, already an investor, with new and existing backers joining, and is expected to close later this summer — the announcement is on Databricks' official…

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The Pentagon is accelerating AI across military systems, including weapons able to pick their own targets. In Congress, some senators are trying to slow it down.

For years, the unwritten rule of American defence was simple: the machine assists, the human decides. That line is getting fainter. The US administration is pushing the armed forces to speed up the adoption of artificial intelligence — including, according to the American press, in weapons systems with the autonomy to pick and attack targets on their own, the step that was always treated as taboo. The budget request for 2026 includes 13.4 billion dollars…

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Google delayed Gemini 3.5 Pro by months after the model fell short on coding and complex reasoning. Alphabet shares dropped about 4%, erasing roughly 200 billion dollars in market value.

Gemini 3.5 Pro was supposed to arrive in June — and Google had already pushed the launch to July promising fine-tuning. Now Google admits its most powerful AI model is months behind schedule — and Wall Street was not amused. Alphabet shares fell about 4% in a single day, erasing roughly 200 billion dollars in market value. Because the model is not living up to the company's own promises. In internal testing, its ability to write, understand and debug code…

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China's regulator approved Apple Intelligence running Alibaba's Qwen model on iPhones. Alibaba's shares added billions on the news.

Apple Intelligence finally has a green light for China — and it will arrive speaking Qwen. The country's cyberspace regulator approved the launch of Apple's AI services, built on a deal that integrates Alibaba's model across the company's operating systems: iPhone, iPad, Mac and Vision Pro. For Apple, this removes one of the biggest commercial roadblocks of recent years: selling iPhones in a giant market where its AI simply couldn't switch on. For…

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The semiconductor index fell 6% after OpenAI reportedly halved inference costs and Meta confirmed its in-house Iris AI chip enters production in September. AMD, Intel and Nvidia all slid.

The fear that has hovered over the semiconductor market for months now has a concrete question attached: if AI labs can squeeze far more out of the chips they already own, how many new chips do they really need to buy? That doubt swept through Wall Street on Friday and shoved the semiconductor index down around 6%. Two blows on the same day. First, a report in The Information described OpenAI engineers celebrating optimisations that cut inference costs by…

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Brussels has ordered Google to open Android to rival AI assistants and share search data under the DMA. The Android changes must be done by July 2027.

Android has always been Google's house — and Brussels has just ordered it to hand keys to the neighbours. Under the Digital Markets Act, the European Commission has determined that Google must open Android to rival AI assistants and share search data with competitors. Failure to comply can bring fines of up to 10% of global annual turnover. Two big things. On Android, rival AI assistants will be able to work the way Gemini does today: users pick their…

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San Francisco's City Attorney sent cease-and-desist letters to Apple and Google demanding the removal of 13 AI face-swap and nudify apps used to create nonconsensual sexual images.

San Francisco has decided to attack one of generative AI's most toxic uses through the door that hurts: the app stores. The City Attorney sent cease-and-desist letters to Apple and Google demanding the removal of 13 face-swap and "nudify" apps — tools used overwhelmingly to create fake sexual images of real people without consent, mostly targeting women and girls. They're applications that take an ordinary photograph and generate an undressed or…

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Xi Jinping delivered the opening keynote of the World AI Conference in Shanghai for the first time, pushing open-source AI and global cooperation, with concrete pledges for developing countries.

Shanghai's World AI Conference is on its ninth edition, but it had never seen this: Xi Jinping opening the event in person. China's leader took the WAIC stage on Friday for the first time since the conference began in 2018, and the gesture says as much as the speech — AI has officially moved to the top of China's political agenda, at the exact moment US restrictions are squeezing the country's access to the most advanced chips. Very concrete things. Over…

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China's Moonshot AI released Kimi K3, a 2.8-trillion-parameter open-weight model that beats GPT-5.5 and Claude Opus on several benchmarks. Asian AI stocks shook.

It's called Kimi K3, it has 2.8 trillion parameters, and according to Moonshot AI it's the largest open-weight AI model ever published. The Beijing startup dropped it this week with carefully staged timing — days before the World AI Conference in Shanghai — and the numbers explain the noise: on benchmark tests, K3 goes toe to toe with the most powerful closed systems the United States has to offer. In the published benchmarks, the model beats Anthropic's…

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OnePlus confirmed it will stop launching phones in Europe and North America. Existing owners keep updates and after-sales support — here is what changes for OnePlus buyers in Portugal.

For a few years, OnePlus was the obvious answer to anyone insisting a good phone had to cost a thousand euros. That run is over: on 16 July the brand confirmed it will stop launching new products in Europe and North America. Nothing immediate, and that is the good news. The company said existing users keep their rights, including after-sales support and software updates. The phone in your pocket keeps working and keeps getting updates. What disappears is…

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Waze's July update brings Gemini-powered voice search, conversational incident reports, routes personalised to your driving habits and a 'less chatty' mode that trims instructions to the essentials. Rolling out on Android and iOS.

Anyone who drives with Waze knows the dilemma: the app is priceless, but it will not stop talking. July's update goes straight at that — a new "less chatty" voice mode trims instructions to the essentials (turns and road hazards) and leaves your music and podcasts alone. It's rolling out on Android and iOS. The voice finally understands humans. With Gemini built in, you can report incidents conversationally — describe the pothole or the crash in your own…

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On 2 August 2026 the AI Act's core obligations apply, including the rules for high-risk AI systems used in hiring, credit, education or essential services. What changes for companies in Portugal.

Straight answer: on 2 August 2026 the AI Act — the EU's artificial intelligence regulation — enters its most demanding phase, as the obligations for high-risk systems and most transparency rules start to apply. For many companies in Portugal using AI in decisions about people, the warm-up period ends this summer. The regulation has been in force since August 2024, but it was built to land in stages: outright bans first (manipulation, social scoring), then…

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Meta removed the Muse Image feature that generated images from public accounts' photos and visual style without their owners' consent. The tool fell three days after launch, under fire from users and artists.

Three days. That is how long Instagram's most controversial feature of the summer survived: a Muse Image tool that let anyone @-mention a public account and ask the AI to generate new images inspired by that profile's photos, visual style and public information — all without asking the owner. Meta announced the removal in a blogpost on 10 July, with the usual diplomatic wording: the feature "didn't meet the expected goal". The free translation is less…

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Days before Christopher Nolan's The Odyssey opens, AI studio Fountain O announced Odysseus: The Fall, a 135-minute film generated entirely by AI for a five-figure sum. The backlash was instant.

The timing was no accident. Days before Christopher Nolan's The Odyssey reaches cinemas, a self-described AI movie studio announced its own take on Homer: Odysseus: The Fall, a 135-minute film generated entirely by artificial intelligence. As a marketing stunt it worked — everyone talked about it. Just not for the reasons the studio hoped. The film is the work of Ash Koosha and Fountain O, a London-based company that bills itself as the world's leading AI…

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