Media

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: 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: OpenAI CEO Sam Altman has reportedly pitched the US government on a plan to transfer 5% of the company’s equity to a US sovereign wealth fund. If implemented, the US government would directly hold a stake in OpenAI through a national fund, letting the general public indirectly share in the financial gains from the AI boom. The move has also reignited broader debate over whether AI industry wealth should be opened up to the public in a more inclusive way rather than concentrated among a handful of private investors.

AI news flash: Indian serial entrepreneur Bhavin Turakhia (46) self-funded $30 million to found enterprise AI platform Neo. His core argument: workplace software designed before the AI era cannot be upgraded by simply adding chatbots; it must be rebuilt from scratch. He uses the analogy ‘you can’t build an iPhone using Nokia parts’ to illustrate this point. Neo began internal use in April…

AI News Flash: Ashton Kutcher announces departure from Sound Ventures, co-founded with Guy Oseary, to launch a new VC firm with partner Morgan Beller. Sound Ventures is known for concentrated high-conviction bets, focusing its investment strategy on leading AI labs across categories, with a core style of selecting few targets and deep positioning.