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AI News Brief: Japan has posted a trade deficit for two consecutive months, while the Philippines’ monthly deficit continues to widen—Thursday’s data from both governments lays bare a divergence in Asia’s trade landscape. Rising crude oil prices are squeezing trade balances and currencies across multiple Asian economies, and the numbers show a clear split: some economies are riding tech export growth hard enough to offset the energy cost shock, while others can’t fully absorb it, and their trade deficits are widening as a result. Japan and the Philippines fall squarely in the latter camp—both saw their trade accounts deteriorate in June, reflecting the dual pressure on trade balances and local currencies from rising oil prices layered on top of uneven tech export momentum. The original summary does not provide specific deficit figures, year-over-year changes, or which tech export items are driving other Asian economies’ performance, so details will need to be verified against the original source.

AI News Brief: Teleperformance, a France-based business process outsourcing (BPO) group, revealed to Nikkei Asia that the company plans to open its first site in Vietnam before the end of this year. The move primarily targets demand related to AI data services, as AI technology is reshaping how the call center industry operates, prompting the company to adjust its strategic positioning in response to structural market shifts. The original summary only outlines high-level plans without further details on site scale, investment amount, staffing, or specific AI data service content — see the original link for full details.

AI News Brief: SoftBank Corp. and NTT are partnering with dozens of Japanese companies and research institutions to drive a nationwide AI and data sharing initiative, aiming to build a foundational technology platform for cross-industry data integration. This move is seen as part of Japan’s strategy to catch up with the US and China in AI. Since Japan lags behind the US and China in AI model development, the government and industry hope to leverage the scattered data resources held by various companies and institutions to build AI infrastructure with scale and differentiation…

AI News Brief: SK Hynix’s AI chip boom benefits exporters like South Korea, but the US, despite investing hundreds of billions in AI infrastructure, sees limited economic growth. The report points out that while US data center construction pushes up semiconductor prices, most of the profits flow to chip exporters like SK Hynix rather than showing up in US GDP growth. In short, the AI infrastructure boom’s short-term lift to the US economy is weaker than expected, with upstream chip-exporting countries capturing the biggest dividends.

AI News Brief: OpenAI found that adjusting two API settings can nearly triple GPT-5.6’s scores on the ARC-AGI-3 benchmark while also improving efficiency. The first setting retains reasoning across multi-turn tasks so the model continues its reasoning chain instead of rethinking from scratch; the second enables compaction, which compresses prior reasoning before handing it to subsequent steps to slash context length and compute without losing key info. Combined, they show that managing a model’s memory and reasoning continuity is itself a direct lever for boosting both performance and cost — not just swapping models or scaling compute.

AI news brief: KOSPI triggered circuit breakers for two consecutive days, wiping $620 billion in market cap, mainly because SK Hynix’s Q2 earnings missed analyst expectations (despite record operating profit of 60.54 trillion KRW and 557% YoY growth, still below the 64 trillion KRW consensus). Stock fell another 4% that day, and combined with Tuesday’s drop, SK Hynix and Samsung Electronics together account for nearly half of the Korean index weight. The sell-off was amplified by single-stock leveraged ETFs approved in May…

AI News Flash: This Cointelegraph original summary contains only copyright notice text and does not include any substantive technical details, numbers, or mechanism descriptions about MoonPay’s AI Payment Vault supporting crypto transactions for ChatGPT and Claude. See the original link for details.

AI News Brief: OpenAI announces free access to its most advanced ChatGPT AI models for 100,000 academic researchers, aiming to accelerate scientific research, cross-institutional collaboration, and academic discovery. This initiative allows researchers to use OpenAI’s top-tier models to assist with literature review, hypothesis generation, and data analysis without subscription fees, potentially lowering the barrier for academia to adopt advanced AI tools and fostering collaboration among cross-disciplinary research teams…

AI News Flash: Cyera (a data security company) just raised $600 million at a $12 billion valuation and on Tuesday announced it has signed a letter of intent to acquire Oasis Security for approximately $1 billion, with the deal mostly paid in cash and the remainder in Cyera shares. Oasis focuses on securing non-human identities, primarily AI agents. As the number of AI agents explodes, enterprises need security tools that can monitor these agents’ behavior and manage their access permissions to other software. Founded in 2022, Oasis has raised approximately $195 million to date from investors including Accel, Craft Ventures, and Cyberstarts. This deal highlights the rapid growth of the cybersecurity market and surging enterprise demand for products that defend against weaponized AI threats. Notably, Cyera and Oasis share common investors Accel and Cyberstarts, and Cyera has been on an acquisition spree lately — having previously acquired Ryft (backed by Index Ventures) and Genie Security (founded less than a year ago). After the deal closes, Cyera plans to integrate Oasis’s technology into a unified identity and data security platform. However, according to a TechCrunch report last month, while Cyera’s ARR has surpassed $150 million, the company is still some distance from profitability. This five-year-old company has raised a total of approximately $2.3 billion to date.

AI news brief: Pangram, a New York startup focused on detecting AI-generated content, has raised $9M led by Menlo Ventures with participation from Haystack, ScOp, Script Capital, and Cadenza. They also launched Pangram 4 (text detection) and Pangram Image (image detection), claiming over 99% accuracy in detecting AI-assisted writing, human-AI hybrid content, and AI humanizer-rewritten text. The image detection model is currently research-preview only with wider release planned in coming weeks.