#ai Tech News.

CuspAI, a British startup, raised $450 million in Series B funding to use AI for discovering new materials in semiconductors, clean energy, and advanced manufacturing. Backers include Jeff Bezos and the UK government's sovereign AI fund. The company partnered with Nvidia and other industry leaders.

A federal judge gave final approval to Anthropic's $1.5 billion settlement of a class action copyright lawsuit. The payout delivers $3,000 per work across an estimated 500,000 works to authors and publishers. Judge William Alsup had ruled that training AI on copyrighted text counts as fair use, but found Anthropic's use of pirate sites illegal.

David Sacks warned the U.S. could lose the AI race after a Chinese model's breakout. The warning highlights growing competition from Chinese AI models, which have demonstrated rapid advances and could challenge U.S. leadership in artificial intelligence development.

A letter argues that artificial intelligence can assist with tasks but will struggle to fully replace human hands. The piece highlights the limitations of AI in replicating the nuanced physical dexterity and adaptability of human touch. The author emphasizes that certain manual skills remain uniquely human.

NVIDIA unveiled Synthetic Video Detector at SIGGRAPH 2026, an AI tool that identifies AI-generated videos. The system processes 1080p video in 22 milliseconds on RTX systems and achieves up to 92% accuracy on uncompressed video. It ranks top on the AI GVD Bench and will integrate into Wowza's framework across 35,000 deployments.

Researchers at Writer published a paper showing a systematic optimization of the AI harness, the orchestration layer around a foundation model. The approach reduces tokens per task and drops cost-per-successful-task by up to nearly 40% without sacrificing accuracy, addressing the ROI paradox of enterprise AI production costs.

Alibaba's Tongyi Lab released Qwen-Audio-3.0-TTS, a hosted text-to-speech model in Flash and Plus tiers. Flash targets real-time interaction with 300 ms latency. Plus ranks first on the Artificial Analysis leaderboard at $27.59 per 1M characters. The model supports 16 languages and 86 inline tags for expressive control.

The Nasdaq lost early gains as persistent fears over oil prices and artificial intelligence weighed on the market. The decline reflects ongoing investor concerns about rising energy costs and the impact of AI developments on technology stocks.

Natural raised $30 million in a Series A led by Forerunner to build payment infrastructure for AI agents. The startup, founded in 2025 by Kahlil Lalji, Eric Wang, and Walt Leung, enables autonomous payments and fund transfers. Natural competes with Stripe and has hired staff from Stripe, Ramp, and Square.

The US has revived a push to ban Chinese AI models, with OpenAI also urging the US to ban open-weight models. The policy test now targets open weight AI models, while the Chinese AI model Kimi divides Trump advisors on the issue.

Anthropic launched the AI for Science rare disease research grants program. The initiative provides funding to researchers using artificial intelligence to study rare diseases. Applications are now open for the grant program.

Replit published telemetry on its Self-Driving Company model, showing a 5.8x increase in code contributions, nearly tripled output per engineer, and 30% faster code reviews. Agents replaced a seven-figure SaaS contract. Employees reported feeling promoted as AI handled routine tasks.

At VB Transform 2026, Zillow SVP of Engineering Toby Roberts said AI ROI numbers only hold up if measured before building. Zillow and Glean co-founder and CEO Arvind Jain described building AI architecture to carry customer context across a multi-step journey spanning phone, loan officer, and real estate agent. Context, not raw data, was the harder problem.

Mathematician Levent Alpöge used Anthropic's Fable 5 to disprove the Jacobian conjecture, a 90-year-old open problem in algebraic geometry. Columbia professor Andrew Blumberg said the counterexample is not interesting on its own, as AI is expected to find such concise counterexamples.

YouTube updated its YouTube Partner Program policies on July 16 to ban monetization of three categories of inauthentic content: generic repetitive AI-generated material, off-putting emotionally manipulative videos, and content using AI personas to discuss sensitive topics like finance or healthcare. Trust and Safety chief Matt Halprin said the goal is to cut down on content farming.

At SIGGRAPH in Los Angeles, NVIDIA is showcasing neural rendering, world models, and simulation methods for AI. The NVIDIA keynote features research leaders Neil Ashton, Edward Liu, and Ming-Yu Liu discussing techniques built by AI that transform how worlds are created and understood by people and machines.

AMD will ship its first rack-scale AI system, Helios, to Microsoft and other customers later this year. Each rack packs 72 Instinct MI455X GPUs with 31 terabytes of HBM4 memory and 2.9 exaflops of FP4 inference. Microsoft will use Helios to power new Azure ND MI455X v7 instances optimized for inference workloads.

CuspAI Ltd., a UK-based AI startup, raised $450 million in Series B funding led by Kleiner Perkins and NEA, with backing from Bezos Expeditions. The round values the company at $2.6 billion. CuspAI launched the AI Materials Foundry, a consortium of over 45 members including Nvidia, Meta, and Samsung, to accelerate materials discovery using its MIRA platform.