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AI News Flash: Samsung announced it will return up to 110 trillion won (about $79 billion) to shareholders, highlighting the semiconductor giant’s dilemma of rewarding investors while pouring massive capital into the AI race to stay competitive. The shareholder return plan comes after Samsung’s stock slid on market fears of oversupply in memory chips, with investors worried that expanding memory capacity could lead to a supply glut and push prices down. Notably, Samsung’s semiconductor division posted record operating profit in the April-June 2026 quarter, showing that despite concerns about oversupply, AI-related demand (like high-bandwidth memory, HBM) is still driving strong earnings.

AI News Brief: OpenAI is mounting a comeback against Anthropic in the US enterprise market. Fresh data from corporate card and expense management company Ramp shows Anthropic first overtook OpenAI in market share among its paying enterprise users in May, hitting 41% versus 39%; by July the gap widened further to nearly 44% versus nearly 40%, with OpenAI still unable to reclaim the lead.

AI news brief: Micro1, a four-year-old AI training data annotation startup, has grown its gross annual run rate from $100M to $500M over the past eight months. Like its peers, Micro1 hires doctors, lawyers, scientists and other domain experts as contractors to label data, keeping roughly 60-70% of that gross revenue, which puts net annual run rate at roughly $150M to $200M.

AI News Brief: Google DeepMind recently published a retrospective tracing its 15-year history of using video games to drive AI research since its founding in 2010, and announced a new round of prototype collaborations with game developers. Key milestones mentioned include the 2015 Deep Q-Network (DQN) paper published in Nature.

AI news brief: Taiwan stock market data staleness false alarms recently gave a glimpse into the spread of cross-border scams across Southeast Asia. Nikkei Asia (Tokyo/Hanoi) reports that AI is helping scam networks and other cross-border criminal groups in Southeast Asia cut operating costs and scale up, creating a game of whack-a-mole. Under U.S. pressure, Cambodia has launched a major crackdown on scam compounds within its borders, forcing some scam operations to shut down or relocate—but these groups haven’t disappeared, they’ve just resettled in other countries like Sri Lanka to keep operating.

AI News Flash: Foreign ownership of Japanese stocks hit a fresh record for the third straight fiscal year in FY2026, with overseas investors now holding more than a third of all Japanese shares. The biggest gains clustered around two groups: AI-related companies and stocks targeted by activist investors. The report notes that improving corporate governance in Japan is the main driver pulling in more activist investment, suggesting foreign interest in Japanese equities isn’t just about AI-driven growth potential — it’s also about the improved shareholder value expectations that come with more transparent governance.

AI news flash: Japan’s share of core AI technology patents has shrunk dramatically over the past two decades, dropping from 25% of the global total to just 8%, driven mainly by the US and China’s dominance in breakthrough AI technologies and related fields. In core areas like AI mechanisms and foundational technology, Japan now ranks just fourth in patents, behind China, the US, and South Korea — a clear sign that Japan has fallen behind these three major competitors in the AI patent race. See the full story below.

AI news brief: Bitdeer AI, the AI cloud computing subsidiary of Taipei-based Bitcoin miner Bitdeer, has signed a five-year contract with an undisclosed but creditworthy customer covering roughly 50% of the capacity at its Malaysia A102 facility, with the deal locked in before the facility even goes live. The agreement is expected to bring Bitdeer around $400 million in total revenue, with related revenue and costs recognized starting Q1 2027 when service…

AI News Brief: major exchanges like Binance and others are gradually opening up crypto markets to autonomous AI agents, with different players taking different strategic paths. Kraken launched an AI investment assistant in July that monitors markets and recommends trades based on users’ financial goals and risk preferences, but still requires user approval before execution—an ‘assisted decision, human gatekeeper’ model. OKX is going further, launching a beta marketplace where AI agents can find work opportunities on their own, trade with each other, and even…

AI news flash: OpenAI has launched a new blog series called ‘AI Futures,’ focused on exploring how transformative AI might reshape power structures, government governance models, economic systems, and individual freedom. The series positions itself as OpenAI’s long-term platform for public reflection, using ongoing articles to explore the key questions society needs to think through as AI capabilities keep advancing.