AI news brief: Alibaba is reportedly set to ban employees from using Anthropic’s coding tool Claude Code starting July 10, requiring them to switch to its in-house Qoder tool instead, with Claude Code internally classified as high-risk software. The background of this ban lies in Anthropic’s own terms of service, which explicitly prohibit Chinese companies and their overseas-controlled entities from using its…
AI news brief: Midjourney is striking back in copyright lawsuits against three major Hollywood studios — Disney, Universal, and Warner Bros. — asking the court to compel the studios to fully disclose their own AI usage. The three studios sued Midjourney last year, alleging its image generation model can produce copyrighted characters like Bart Simpson from The Simpsons and Darth Vader from Star Wars, and claiming this constitutes infringement. Midjou…
AI News Brief: Japanese precision components giant MinebeaMitsumi (美蓓亞三美) has announced an investment of 58 billion yen (approximately 360 million USD) to expand production of precision bearings for AI data centers, planning to increase capacity by about 30%. The new facility will be set up at one of its existing manufacturing sites in Cambodia or Thailand, leveraging the established Southeast Asian supply chain to reduce construction costs and risks. These bearings are primarily used in cooling fans for data center cooling equipment…
AI news brief: Content creator and startup founder Ben Guez used the open-source AI agent OpenClaw with Claude Code to set up automated scripts that mass-posted ’trial Reels’ on Instagram, racking up over a million views and 200 DMs in just a few days. The strategy combined event-triggered content generation with a forced-funnel approach where all DMs are routed through his Canary language-learning app.
AI News Brief: Microsoft officially announced on July 3, 2026 the launch of a new operating subsidiary called ‘Microsoft Frontier Company’, focused on helping enterprise clients deploy AI applications, with an initial investment of $2.5 billion and a deployment team of 6,000 industry and engineering experts. Microsoft’s Chief Commercial Officer Judson Althoff deliberately sidestepped the commonly used ‘Forward Deployed Engineer (FDE)’ label, emphasizing this move ‘goes far beyond FDE’ and aims to build the largest, most capable, outcomes-driven engineering organization in the industry.
AI News Brief: Anthropic is in early-stage talks with Samsung to explore co-developing its own custom AI chips. The Information disclosed this on Thursday, just months after Reuters reported in April that Anthropic was considering making its own chips due to supply shortages. The partnership remains in very early stages, and Anthropic has yet to decide on the chip’s specific use, ser…
AI News Brief: Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg admitted during Thursday’s internal all-hands meeting that AI agent development hasn’t accelerated as top leadership had previously expected. Earlier this year, Meta laid off roughly 8,000 employees — about 10% of its corporate headcount — and reassigned 7,000 people to multiple AI-related departments, including a new organization called ‘Agent Transformation’…
AI News Brief: Meta quietly launched a new app called Pocket on June 29, 2026, simultaneously on App Store and Google Play. This app lets users generate small interactive apps and games through text AI prompts — these interactive experiences are called ‘gizmos’ on the platform. Pocket was born from Meta’s earlier acquisition of the Gizmo development team…
AI News Brief: Sandwich chain Jersey Mike’s recently filed its IPO paperwork, and one detail caught tech media’s attention: this S-1 filing mentions “artificial intelligence” or the abbreviation “AI” 22 times when communicating with investors. By comparison, “software” appears 52 times and “data” a whopping 112 times — yet the company’s core business is selling submarine sandwiches, not building AI products.
AI news brief: Japan’s industrial robot makers are aggressively betting on AI and open collaboration strategies, hoping to reclaim the competitive edge they once dominated globally. According to reports, Japanese robot makers’ global market share has dropped from their former leadership levels to roughly 40%, and facing mounting pressure from Chinese and European competitors, the industry is being forced to accelerate its transformation. Yaskawa Electric is one of the representative cases of this AI-driven wave. More detailed information can be found at the original article link.