The Kalshi Netflix documentary dispute landed in legal territory on Friday, when the prediction market company sent Netflix a cease-and-desist letter demanding the trailer for an upcoming film be removed from the streaming platform’s homepage. The complaint centres on a single screenshot of a $5,000 bet, and the story of that screenshot turns out to be more tangled than either side is letting on. The documentary in question is Instadocs: The Prediction Games, part of Netflix’s fast-turnaround “Instadoc” series, due to debut on Sunday 26 July. Its trailer, released on 24 July according to CNN, opens on a Las Vegas…
Author: Marcus Hale
Marcus Hale
Marcus Hale has been filing general news for the better part of fifteen years. He started at a regional evening paper, moved to a mid-sized digital outlet covering UK news, and spent three years as a general assignment reporter before going freelance. He has covered inquests, council elections, infrastructure announcements, and the kind of stories that sit on page five but matter on page one. He writes about public services, housing, local government, and the institutional stories that take six months to develop and thirty seconds to read. He prefers facts to angles and considers that unfashionable. Marcus lives in Bristol. He still reads the local paper and thinks that makes him an endangered species.
A single downed power line near Washington, DC, turned into an object lesson in AI data centre grid stability, and why it is becoming one of the most pressing reliability problems facing electricity networks in the United States. When the line failed, more than 3.1 gigawatts of data centre load vanished from the PJM Interconnection grid in roughly 30 seconds, according to PJM data. The grid operator, which serves 67 million customers from New Jersey to Illinois, is the largest in the country. It took more than 11 minutes to fully stabilise, and at its worst the network was carrying…
The Codex Micro keypad from OpenAI sold out within 12 hours of its 15 July 2026 debut, according to Fortune, which is either a ringing endorsement of the product or a reminder that people will queue for almost anything with a hype logo on it. Units subsequently appeared on eBay for as much as $1,850, before resale prices settled to around $800–$1,000 in the following week and dropped to approximately $450 at the time of Fortune’s reporting. The list price, for reference, is $230. What the Codex Micro Keypad Actually Does The full product name is Codex Micro, developed through…
Cognition acquires Poke in a deal valued in the ‘low nine figures,’ picking up the text-based AI assistant and its unusually warm interaction style to inject some personality into Devin, its autonomous coding agent. It is a bet that how an AI behaves with people is becoming as commercially valuable as what it can actually do. What Cognition Acquires With Poke Poke, built by The Interaction Company of California, launched in March 2026 as an AI assistant users could message through Apple’s iMessage, SMS, Telegram, or WhatsApp in supported markets. It handles travel, health, finance, scheduling, and education queries, though…
Rivian sues the US government not because the legal battle is in doubt, but because winning at the Supreme Court is apparently not enough to guarantee getting your money back. The electric vehicle maker filed suit on Thursday in the US Court of International Trade, naming the US government, US Customs and Border Protection (CBP), and CBP commissioner Rodney Scott as defendants, seeking a full refund of tariffs it paid under President Trump’s ‘Liberation Day’ levies. A Supreme Court Win That Still Needs a Paper Trail The Supreme Court ruled on 20 February 2026, in Learning Resources, Inc. v. Trump,…
The AI guardrails cybersecurity researchers encounter daily are no longer a minor inconvenience: they are actively redirecting legitimate offensive security work away from US-governed frontier models and toward Chinese open-source alternatives with zero restrictions. That is the blunt conclusion from several people working in offensive security who spoke about how AI tools fit into their workflows, and whose frustrations have sharpened following a turbulent few weeks for Anthropic’s flagship models. The Export-Control Flashpoint That Shook the Field Anthropic released Fable 5 and Mythos 5 on 9 June 2026, describing them as the most capable models in the company’s history, with…
The AegisAI Series A funding round has closed at $36 million, with Battery Ventures leading and existing backers Accel and Foundation Capital returning. The raise brings the startup’s total capital to $49 million and arrives less than a year after AegisAI’s public launch, which is either a sign of genuine market pull or a very well-timed pitch deck. Probably both. AegisAI was founded in 2025 by Cy Khormaee and Ryan Luo, both former Google security executives who spent years building the infrastructure most of us quietly rely on. According to the AegisAI company page, Khormaee led Safe Browsing, reCAPTCHA, and…
Etched’s Series C valuation has landed at $10.3 billion after the AI chip startup closed a $300 million round led by Sequoia, co-founder and COO Robert Wachen confirmed. That is roughly double the $5 billion valuation the company carried in December, achieved in about seven months. Not bad for a firm that was, until recently, best known for the scepticism it attracted. Andreessen Horowitz, SK Hynix, Jane Street, and Diffusion Capital joined the round alongside earlier backers. The company says this is the highest valuation ever for a Sequoia-led Series C, a claim it has volunteered cheerfully and which, for…
The Kimi K3 distillation claims coming from the White House carry political weight, but the technical case behind them is looking shaky. What’s holding up rather better is a separate, arguably more damaging allegation: that Moonshot AI obtained advanced Nvidia chips banned from export to China. White House Office of Science and Technology Policy Director Michael Kratsios, confirmed by the Senate 74 to 25 and sworn in by Vice President JD Vance, publicly accused Moonshot of building Kimi K3, currently the largest available open-weight large language model, by copying Anthropic’s Fable LLM. He also alleged Moonshot used chips banned from…
The ServiceNow BusinessNext investment, announced on 23 July 2026, sees the US enterprise software group take a roughly 5% stake in the Noida-based banking software specialist for $40 million, implying a valuation of $700 million. That is nearly four times the $181 million figure BusinessNext carried after its last external round in 2021, which tells you something about how the market is pricing AI-native banking software right now. The two companies plan to sell jointly to financial institutions, combining ServiceNow’s back-office workflow automation with BusinessNext’s customer-facing banking platform. Think of it as a front-to-back stack play, which is exactly how…