|
🇺🇸 US tells allies to pick US or China
LINK
|
- The US is set to tell 35 partner countries they must pick between American and Chinese AI systems, according to a draft State Department letter, warning that belonging to both is no longer allowed.
- The pressure runs through Pax Silica, a US-led effort to secure supply chains for AI models, chips and critical minerals, offering members shared investment deals while threatening to shut out any nation that joins China's rival framework.
- About two dozen countries have signed on, including Japan, Australia and South Korea, while Kazakhstan sits in both camps because of its critical minerals, and Europe is stuck trying to keep its "strategic autonomy" without picking a side.
|
💳 Stripe buys AI startup OpenRouter for $7B
LINK
|
- Stripe has agreed to buy OpenRouter, the company that routes developer requests across more than 400 AI models, for over $7 billion, pushing the payments giant further into the infrastructure behind AI technology.
- OpenRouter does not build models but acts as middleware, sending each task to the cheapest, fastest, or most reliable option, and its Auto router uses spending data from 8 million developers to steer requests toward affordable choices.
- The price marks a steep jump from OpenRouter's $1.3 billion valuation in its May 2026 Series B, reflecting weekly activity that climbed from 5 trillion to 25 trillion tokens over six months.
|
📚 Amazon destroys books for AI
LINK
|
- An investigation by 404 Media found that Amazon buys printed books in bulk, scans them to train its Nova AI models, and destroys the copies in the process by cutting off their spines.
- Reporters tracked a shipment of rare books using a hidden AirTag to an Amazon warehouse in Las Vegas, run by a team called VGT3, where workers said they slice off spines to scan books faster.
- Amazon isn't alone: Anthropic ran a similar effort called "Project Panama," and a judge ruled its scanning was fair use partly because destroying the printed originals meant they weren't copied and resold.
|
🐫 Alibaba's Qwen leads AI model downloads
LINK
|
- Alibaba's Qwen family of open-weight AI models has become the most downloaded in the world, drawing more than 3 billion downloads over the past six months and passing rivals including Meta, Google and Chinese competitor DeepSeek.
- Alibaba said Qwen has released over 460 open-source models, spawning more than 300,000 derivative versions, while Hugging Face data showed Google reached 418 million downloads for the year and Meta 227 million.
- Because open models can be used to build new AI products, download counts serve as a gauge of developer influence, and Hugging Face said Qwen has become a default choice for developers deciding which models to fine-tune and deploy.
|
👀 Stripe is in talks to buy PayPal
LINK
|
- Stripe and private equity firm Advent International are in talks to buy PayPal, after their July offer of $60.50 a share, valuing the payment system at $53 billion, failed to close a deal.
- Stripe and Advent are now discussing a higher price and could announce a deal within weeks, with each holding an equal stake and no plans to break up PayPal, keeping its parts together.
- A merger would make Stripe one of the world's biggest payment companies, handling roughly $3.7 trillion a year, and let it fold in Venmo, PayPal's checkout and crypto tools while leaning less on Visa and Mastercard.
|
🐙 GitHub is down worldwide
LINK
|
- GitHub is down for users around the world, with a widespread outage on August 17 throwing errors across the website, API, Actions, Pull Requests, Issues, Webhooks, and other services developers depend on.
- The company's status page shows error rates near 20% for web traffic and the API, while archive downloads and raw repository content are failing at roughly 50%, and authentication tools like SAML, OIDC, and SCIM are also broken.
- At 14:31 UTC, GitHub said its AI coding tool Copilot had degraded too, though Git Operations, Packages, Pages, and Codespaces stayed working; the company hasn't said what caused the problem and is still investigating.
|
|
