☕ Apple sues OpenAI for stealing hardware secrets & Google sold AI to blacklisted Chinese firms.

• Federal and industry experts are advocating for the use of continuous monitoring, evaluation, and "red teaming" to secure AI models against evolving threats. • Kevin Walsh, IT and Cybersecurity Director for the Government Accountability Office, warns that the rapid speed of AI-driven attacks is making it increasingly difficult to maintain human oversight.

• Investor Michael Burry warns of a potential AI bubble, citing a contradiction between Nvidia's need for endless chip demand and cloud providers' plans to reduce capital expenditures within three to four years. • Palantir CEO Alex Karp and Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella have criticized AI labs for implementing excessive pricing and undermining the data sovereignty of enterprise clients.

• Vendelux, an AI-powered event intelligence platform for B2B marketers, raised $50 million in Series B funding on July 13, 2026. • The funding round was led by Tribeca Venture Partners, with additional participation from S3, Pelion Ventures, HubSpot Ventures, FirstMark, and Cervin Ventures.

• Meta has announced plans to build the Hyperion data center supercluster in Richland Parish, Louisiana, with a projected investment exceeding $50 billion. • The facility is designed as a 5GW supercluster, representing a massive scale-up in infrastructure to support the company's growing artificial intelligence capabilities.

• Meta is expanding the compute capacity of its Hyperion data center in Richland Parish, Louisiana, to 5 GW, pushing the total project investment beyond $50 billion. • Since construction commenced in December 2024, local businesses have already secured more than $1.6 billion in contracts related to the facility.

• Congress is entering a critical "cyber sprint" to pass key legislation before the upcoming August recess. • Lawmakers are focused on two primary objectives: advancing AI security legislation and resolving a deadlock over warrantless surveillance authority.

• U.S. businesses are increasingly shifting from American AI models to Chinese open-weight alternatives due to rising token costs and financial pressures. • This trend is evidenced by the rapid adoption of Z.ai’s GLM 5.2, which became the fastest-adopted model on its platform in 2026.

• The new president of BusinessEurope has issued an urgent call for the rapid delivery and completion of the European single market. • The leader warned that failure to provide economic hope for the future will lead to significant instability and suffering within Europe's political landscape.

• More than 70 European tech funding deals were tracked last week, totaling over €2.8 billion in capital, alongside five exits and M&A transactions. • Notable investments include €19.2M for Belgium's e-peas, €18M for Germany's Stenon, €18M for the Netherlands' Protein Brewery, and $18M for Spain's Sherpa.ai.

• Zubr Capital's Q2 2026 digest reveals a strong trend of investment in European quantum technology, specifically across hardware, software, and enabling technologies. • Key funding milestones include France's Quobly closing a €115 million Series A to industrialize silicon-based quantum computers and Algorithmiq raising €18 million for quantum software.

• The European Union and Britain have imposed sanctions on Russian military intelligence officers, hackers, and private companies involved in a major cyberspying campaign. • The move follows a Swedish report from April identifying a pro-Russian group linked to security services as the culprit behind a cyberattack on a heating plant last year.

• Anthropic has named UST as its second Global Premier Partner, aiming to help enterprises transition AI projects from proof-of-concept to full production scale. • Databricks shared insights from its 5th Genie hackathon, detailing how its AI agents manage natural language queries and multi-step workflows for data analytics.