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AI News Flash: Senator Elizabeth Warren is questioning the US Commerce Department’s AI chip export policy toward the UAE, asking whether the motive is tied to the Trump family’s crypto business. Per CNBC’s Wednesday report, Warren sent a letter to Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick demanding an explanation for why the government eased export restrictions on advanced AI chips to the UAE after two separate UAE investments in Trump-linked crypto venture World Liberty Financial.

AI news brief: Hark, the startup that raised $700M in a Series A this past May, launched its browser-use agent Hark Handoff today, positioning it as an efficient way to complete all kinds of tasks in a browser. The company says Handoff can operate smoothly on websites without official APIs, including Target, Walmart, OpenTable, and LinkedIn.

AI News Flash: Shopify said on its Q2 earnings call that AI search is delivering meaningful business growth for the company rather than replacing traditional Google search. President Harley Finkelstein said AI has become a ‘complement’ to search rather than a ‘replacement,’ benefiting long-tail e-commerce in particular, including the small and mid-sized merchants who make up the bulk of its customer base. In Q2, AI-driven traffic and orders grew threefold year-over-year; meanwhile…

AI News Flash: World, one of Japan’s largest apparel companies, has launched a new generative-AI-driven brand called ‘OO,’ with both the clothing designs and the model imagery created entirely by generative AI, and some items sold out shortly after launch, showing that AI-designed fashion is getting a positive market response. See the original article for more details.

AI News Brief: WindBorne Systems closed a $37 million Series B co-led by Khosla Ventures and Galvanize, with participation from TransLink Capital, Lux Capital, and existing investors, valuing the company at $250 million post-money. Founded in 2019, the startup originally built its business around low-cost weather sensors and long-range balloons for data collection…

AI News Flash: Arthur Hayes (BitMEX co-founder) warns that the debt-fueled AI infrastructure boom could replay a 2008-style credit crisis, but he expects the government liquidity rescue that follows to ultimately push Bitcoin (BTC) past $1 million. In a Tuesday blog post, he argues investors are mistaking data center and power infrastructure spending for high-growth tech investment, when it’s really closer to a leveraged real estate pla…

AI News Brief: This is a news summary, generated directly without tool lookups. A new report from SaferAI finds that GLM-5.2, the open-weight model from Z.ai, is closing in on frontier-level capability, but its safety measures still show clear gaps.

AI News Flash: Furukawa Electric announced plans to double its optical fiber production capacity to meet growing demand driven by data center construction amid the AI boom. As data centers powering AI computing continue to need more communication bandwidth, orders for the company’s optical fiber cables have risen accordingly, becoming the main driver behind this expansion plan. See the original article for full details.

AI News Brief: Hongda Holdings Global Digital Technology has completed the switch of its core platform to a self-developed AI engine and launched a multilingual customer service module for the Japanese market. Sorry, this one doesn’t work — the original summary barely has any substantive content, and I can’t make up details. Here’s the corrected version that matches the scope of the original: the Japanese government is considering introducing multiple US-made AI systems into the Self-Defense Forces’ command and control systems, aiming to speed up decision-making and strengthen integration with US military operations…

AI News Flash: SoftBank has announced an investment in Seven & i Holdings, the parent company of Japan’s convenience store giant 7-Eleven, marking the latest move in a series of industry partnerships aimed at collecting massive amounts of data from Japan’s industrial and retail sectors to build an AI-centered ’economic sphere.’ SoftBank Corp CEO Junichi Miyakawa said this investment in Seven & i will help the company use AI and robotics to support new retail operating models.