Meta will notify parents when teens discuss suicide or self-harm with Meta AI starting July 16, 2026, via Instagram Parental Supervision in the US, UK, Australia and Canada. It flags chats with a clear self-harm reference for manual review, applies Instagram’s “Limited Content” to Meta AI, and plans global rollout before year-end.
Applied Computing, a London-based startup, announced in July 2026 that it has raised a $20 million Series A to expand its foundation AI model for the oil, gas, and petrochemical industry. The round…
xAI filed what it calls its first legal action against a Grok user, alleging South Carolina’s Terry Wayne Harwood bypassed safeguards and used the chatbot to alter nonconsensual images and generate CSAM. Harwood was arrested in Feb. 2026 and faces eight felony charges.
Thinking Machines Lab released its first AI model, called Inkling, in July 2026. The open-weight model can be downloaded and modified by researchers and startups, and was trained from scratch to…
Apple’s Maps ad policies, effective July 14, 2026, set tighter limits than Google’s Local Services Ads: home services (plumbers, electricians, locksmiths, HVAC, pest control, roofers, contractors) are banned outright. Crypto ATMs and bail bonds are also blocked; medical is reviewed case-by-case as U.S./Canada Maps ads arrive “this summer.”
Microsoft patched a remastered Age of Empires II invite flaw (CVE-2026-50663) on Patch Tuesday, July 15, 2026, that could enable remote code execution if a victim joins an attacker’s lobby and accepts user-created content. Rapid7 flagged it, and Rick de Jager demoed it on X; no in-the-wild attacks were found.
Microsoft’s July 15, 2026 Patch Tuesday hit a record 570 security fixes, citing AI-assisted bug discovery across Windows and Office. Two zero-days include a Windows Server privilege-escalation flaw and a SharePoint issue CISA says is being actively exploited.
July 15, 2026: Whatnot acquired Shaped to improve real-time discovery in live shopping, with ex-Meta CEO Tullie Murrell leading a new Applied AI Research group. Whatnot processes 500,000+ hours of live video and millions of interactions weekly, and cut recommendation latency from ~a day to minutes over six years.
U.S. prosecutors have charged three Russian nationals and two web hosting companies with hacking, conspiracy, and money laundering for their alleged roles in facilitating cyberattacks that caused…
China regulators cleared Apple Intelligence in July 2026, and Reuters says approval announced Wednesday enables Alibaba’s Qwen models to plug into iOS, iPadOS, macOS and visionOS. Qwen will support text and image understanding/generation, but no launch timeframe was given; Alibaba shares rose 6%+ and Apple’s Greater China Q2 sales hit $20.5B (+28%).
OpenAI launched its first piece of consumer hardware in July 2026 — not the much-discussed AI device in development with former Apple designer Jony Ive, but a compact control pad built for its coding platform, Codex. The device, called Codex Micro, is a limited-run collaboration…
Gidi Littwin, co-inventor of Apple’s FaceID and Vision Pro technology, has raised $52 million for his startup Hemispheric, which is developing an AI model designed to diagnose cognitive disorders by…
