AI News — June 25, 2026
Daily news briefing for 25th June 2026. Track model releases, research breakthroughs, startup funding updates, and AI signals published on this day.
All Stories Published on June 25 (48)
The White House is asking OpenAI to slow roll the release of its new model over safety concerns
penAI reportedly plans to share its newest model, GPT 5.6, with a select group of partners instead of to the broader public. The reason: the Trump...
Cursor Deal Puts US On Track For Record Startup M&A Year
While SpaceX's $60 billion acquisition of Anysphere dominates the headlines, a number of other multibillion-dollar transactions have also closed this year. We...
Anthropic's Claude is winning over paid consumers, a market owned by ChatGPT
Despite ChatGPT's commanding market lead, consumers who pay for AI have been increasingly choosing Anthropic's Claude, data shows.
Liquid AI's smallest model yet LFM2.5-230M beats models 4X its size at data extraction, can run 'anywhere'
Liquid AI, founded by former MIT computer scientists, today released its smallest AI language model yet, LFM2.5-230M , and enterprises would do well to...
Patronus AI lands $50M to build 'digital worlds' that stress-test AI agents
Agent-testing startup Patronus AI, founded by former Meta AI researchers, is experiencing nearly insatiable demand, its investor says.
Mirendil raises $200M to speed up scientific research with AI
Mirendil Inc., a startup developing artificial intelligence models for scientists, has raised $200 million in funding at a $1 billion valuation. The seed round was led by Andreessen Horowitz. Mirendil stated in its Wednesday funding announcement that Kleiner Perkins, Nvidia Corp. and several other...
General Intuition's $2.3B bet that video games can train AI agents for the real world
General Intuition has raised $320 million to scale AI trained on millions of hours of gameplay, betting action data can help AI develop something closer to...
Evaluating Performance and Efficiency of the GitHub Copilot Agentic Harness Across Models and Tasks
Explore how the GitHub Copilot agentic harness delivers strong results across multiple benchmarks and leading token efficiency, while maintaining flexibility.
Apple ratchets up prices, blames the cost of memory
Some Macs are hundreds of dollars more expensive today than yesterday.
IBM has unveiled chip technology that could help extend Moore's Law another decade
IBM has built a new prototype chip with around 100 billion transistors on an area the size of a fingernail, which is twice the density of the company's...
How Agents Are Transforming Work
A new OpenAI research paper shows how AI agent are transforming work, enabling longer, more complex tasks and expanding productivity across roles.
Ornn raises $33M to help companies buy and sell AI compute as a commodity like oil
Artificial intelligence startup Ornn AI Inc. made a big splash today as it raised $33 million in seed funding from Andreessen Horowitz's crypto-focused fund and others to build out a marketplace for computing power. The round was co-led by Galaxy Ventures and saw participation from Nordstar and SV...
Scaled Cognition nabs $100M to automate high stakes customer interactions
Artificial intelligence startup Scaled Cognition Inc. today announced that it has raised $100 million in funding. Khosla Ventures led the Series A deal with participation from Genesys Telecommunications Laboratories Inc., a provider of customer service software. The Wall Journal reported that...
Notion killing Skiff-influenced email app since most users use AI agents instead
Notion is "going all in on using agents to run your inbox."
Runpod raises $100M to build the leading cloud platform for AI developers
Artificial intelligence developer-centric cloud provider Runpod Inc. announced Wednesday that it has raised $100 million in early-stage funding, pushing the valuation of the company to $1 billion. The Series A funding, led by Summit Partners, brings the company's total funding to $122 million...
IBM claims world's first sub-1 nanometer chip technology
IBM's nanostack transistors could boost chip performance or energy efficiency.
Memory maker SK hynix files for $29B US IPO amid AI demand
SK hynix Inc., the world's largest supplier of HBM memory, today filed to list its shares on the Nasdaq stock exchange. The South Korean company hopes to sell up to 17.79 million shares for $29.4 billion. The public offering is expected to be the second-largest on record after the recent listing...
Europe is pushing back on Washington's chip war
As ASML CEO Christophe Fouquet told TechCrunch in May, what China can currently buy are older-generation deep ultraviolet tools - gear first shipped about a...
TrueFoundry acquires MLOps pioneer Seldon AI to accelerate enterprise agentic AI
TrueFoundry Inc., a startup providing management for artificial intelligence workloads, announced Wednesday that it acquired open-source cloud-agnostic enterprise machine learning platform Seldon Technologies Ltd. The company provides the infrastructure needed to run AI model in production...
New MCP specification kills old risks but opens fresh attack surfaces, Akamai finds
A major overhaul of the Model Context Protocol due next month removes several longstanding protocol-level security risks but hands developers a fresh set of attack surfaces to defend, according to research published today by Akamai Technologies Inc. The analysis examines the MCP 2026-07-28...
Incode acquires Identiq, commits $100M to privacy-first identity tech
Identity verification company Incode Technologies Inc. today announced that it has acquired Identiq Protocol Ltd., an Israeli startup that builds cryptographic tools letting companies share fraud signals without sharing the underlying customer data. Incode is treating the deal as the centerpiece...
Retrofit, don't rebuild: Agentic overlays for transforming legacy enterprise services
In this technical collaboration between AWS and the authors, we present a pragmatic solution: agentic overlays. Agentic overlays are thin wrapper layers that...
Optimize Model Training on Amazon SageMaker AI with NVIDIA Blackwell
This post shows you how to configure training jobs on Amazon SageMaker AI to get the most out of Blackwell's architecture on AWS.
Implementing Super Resolution by Deploying SeedVR2 on Amazon SageMaker AI
In this post, we demonstrate how to implement video upscaling using SeedVR2 on SageMaker AI.
Build Self-service AWS Health Analytics to Find Actionable Health Insights with AI Agents Powered by Amazon Bedrock
In this post, we show you how to build Chaplin (Customer Health and Planned Lifecycle Intelligence Nexus), an open source solution that uses AI agent exposed.
Building Agentic AI Applications with a Modern Data Mesh Strategy on AWS
This post shows how to build a governed, serverless data mesh on AWS that provides the secure, scalable data foundation production agentic AI requires.
Netris raises $15M Series A from a16z to help AI neoclouds go live faster
Netris provides software that runs on network switches, and offers a platform that helps neocloud operators reduce the time it takes to go live.
The Ultimate Summer Sale Pairing: Steam Sale Meets GeForce NOW Discounts
Summer savings are heating up. From the Steam Summer Sale to GeForce NOW membership discounts, this week's GFN Thursday delivers double the deals and more...
Nebulock raises $25M to expand hunt-first security platform
Threat hunting startup Nebulock Inc. revealed today that it has raised $25 million in new funding to push its autonomous hunting platform into broader "hunt-first" security analytics. Founded in 2023, Nebulock offers autonomous, vendor-agnostic threat hunts driven by artificial intelligence. Those...
Warp lands $60M to automate payroll, compliance and HR with AI
Employee management startup Warp today said it has raised $60 million in new funding to expand a platform that uses artificial intelligence to run payroll and other back-office work with little staff involved. The New York-based company pitches itself as an AI-native alternative to legacy human...
Agentic infrastructure startup Seltz raises $12.5M to help AI agents search the web for answers
Agentic search startup Seltz Inc. said today it has bagged $12.5 million in seed funding to build a more optimal infrastructure so that artificial intelligence agents can find their way around the web. The round was led by Speedinvest and B Capital. Also participating were Italian Founders Fund...
Microsoft adds another year to Windows 10 extended update program
About a quarter of PCs are still running Microsoft's previous operating system.
Databricks' former AI chief thinks he can cut AI's power bill by 1,000x
Un-0 is an image-generation system tool that shows for the first time how the company's technology can replicate conventional AI systems.
Repositioning retail for the AI era
Artificial intelligence is rapidly reshaping retail, but not in the ways consumers might immediately notice. The biggest transformation may not be flashy...
2 days left to save up to $190: Join 1,000+ founders and investors at TechCrunch Founder Summit
2 days left to lock in your spot at TechCrunch Founder Summit 2026 and save up to $190 before Early Bird rates expire on June 26 at 11:59 p.m. PT. Register...
World Cup Teams Are in a Race for AI Dominance
This year, FIFA is providing an AI agent that any team can use. Is it enough to level the playing field or will future winners be determined by which team can...
British Police Built a Sprawling Crime-Prediction Machine. Some Results Couldn't Be Trusted
As UK police embrace the AI revolution, a WIRED investigation reveals the messy inside story of one region's experiment with predictive analytics.
Capital One Software makes the case for AI-ready tokenization
AI tokenization has become essential for enterprises seeking to balance data security with innovation, enabling sensitive data to be used safely in AI workloads without compromising utility or compliance. That requirement is reshaping how data security leaders think about their role in the...
Understanding the Brain with AI-driven Explanations and Experiments
Researchers introduce generative causal testing, which translates black box models into clear hypotheses and verifies them in the scanner, revealing what.
Our Latest Google Finance Upgrades, Including a New App
The new Google Finance is coming out of beta and launching a new Android app.
EU Cyber Resilience Act: Overview, Requirements, and Timelines
Learn what the EU Cyber Resilience Act requires, including SBOM mandates, vulnerability reporting, and compliance deadlines for container teams.
Exclusive: Chainguard extends Repository scanning and policies to Java, Python and containers
Secure software supply chain solution provider Chainguard Inc. today expanded its Chainguard Repository product with malware scanning, policy enforcement and visibility feature that now cover Java packages, Python packages and container images. The update extends protections that previously...
Salesforce launches Help Agent to simplify AI customer service deployment
Salesforce Inc. is launching a new prepackaged artificial intelligence agent for customer service, enabling organizations to quickly build and deploy AI agent. Today Salesforce announced Help Agent, a prebuilt service agent set atop the Agentforce platform. It can be connected to company...
Applied Materials unveils more advanced chipmaking gear for 3D stacking architectures
Chipmaking equipment giant Applied Materials Inc. is trying to make life easier for its chip fabrication plant customers, so they can build the extremely complex 3D architectures necessary for the next generation of artificial intelligence processors. To do this, it has unveiled a host of new chip...
Exclusive: LucidLink launches MCP server to give AI agents shared access to distributed files
LucidLink Corp., the maker of a cloud network-attached storage system based on object storage technology, today extended its distributed file system technology into agentic artificial intelligence with the public beta release of a Model Context Protocol server that lets AI agent access shared...
BreachRx launches Rex Platform to coordinate AI-era incident response
Incident response company BreachRx Inc. today launched the Rex Platform, an agentic artificial intelligence incident command center built for a future in which AI-accelerated attacks set off several breaches at once. The platform grows out of Rex AI, the generative AI engine BreachRx put out in...
Building a Cluster-Aware AI Agent with Kubernetes, Argo CD, and GitOps
A practical walkthrough of running a self-hosted, read-only AI agent inside a Kubernetes cluster, with the full CI/CD chain handled by GitHub Actions and Argo CD Image Updater.