Amazon's engineering teams have found cases where moving work from hand-written code to AI models blew through project budgets, including $1.8 million spent running Anthropic's Claude Sonnet on a job that never shipped. Senior engineers laid the cases out for staff at an internal meeting on July 28, 2026 and described the results as "catastrophically expensive," the Financial Times reported, citing multiple people familiar with the presentation. They told colleagues they are now building…

At DVC, we've spent a decade watching the AI market up close — backing companies and working closely with the portco founders. This year, we decided to share the framework we’ve built with the world. This is how the State of AI Report was born: a living, continuously updated analysis of the AI economy across every layer, from silicon and energy to foundation models and applications. We update it with AI and review it personally — because in a market that moves this fast, a static annual…

In the AI gold rush, I see two distinct categories of solutions: vitamins and painkillers. A vitamin is something that helps you write better copy or polish a slide deck, which only boosts your productivity so much. A painkiller, however, is a matter of systemic survival. It can help you fix an issue before it gets out of hand or deal with a global outage, like when one CrowdStrike change crashed roughly 8.5 million Windows PCs in July 2024. When embracing AI, it’s better to go after the…

Check Point announced the AI Network Firewall on July 30, 2026, putting prompt- and agent-level inspection inside its firewall software release R82.20 and running it from the gateways customers already operate. The capability is available now. The gap it targets is one enterprise security teams have lived with since generative AI reached the workplace. A conventional firewall can establish that an employee reached an AI service. It cannot establish what went into the session. Prompts, file…

Meta put consumer AI agents at the center of its revenue plan on July 29, 2026, when it reported second-quarter results and then used much of the earnings call to lay out a consumer agent business that has not launched yet. CEO Mark Zuckerberg told investors that personal agents will be "the foundation for our next wave of products and revenue lines in the months and years ahead," and said the company would have more to share soon. Zuckerberg sorted Meta's AI work into three buckets on the…

Have you ever typed something private into an AI chatbot and wondered where that information actually goes? Maybe it was a work document, a personal idea, or even a sensitive question you didn’t want attached to your name. With AI becoming part of everyday life, that feeling of “what happens to my data after I hit send?” is becoming harder to ignore. In fact, a Pew Research Center survey found that 70% of Americans who have heard of AI have little to no trust in companies to make responsible…

Shahid Hanif, CEO and Co-Founder of Shufti, is a technology entrepreneur with extensive experience building identity verification, fintech, blockchain, and decentralized software platforms. He co-founded Shufti in 2017 and spent more than seven years as Chief Technology Officer, leading the in-house development of its artificial intelligence-driven biometric and document verification technology before becoming CEO in December 2024. Hanif is also the founder of Developers Studio, a blockchain…

ChipAgents has secured an additional $60 million in Series A2 financing, expanding its Series A round to $134 million as semiconductor companies explore how autonomous AI agents can shorten demanding chip design and verification cycles. B Capital joined the financing as a new investor, alongside existing backers Bessemer Venture Partners, Micron, MediaTek, Ericsson, ScOp Venture Capital, and others. The new capital arrives six months after the initial close of the company’s Series A and follows…

Cloud observability company groundcover has raised $100 million in Series C funding as it looks to expand a platform designed to help engineering teams and AI agents understand increasingly complex production environments. The round was led by One Peak, with participation from Morgan Stanley Expansion Capital and existing investors Zeev Ventures, Angular Ventures, Heavybit and Jibe. It brings groundcover’s total funding to $160 million. The financing follows a year in which the company says it…

Wiring a widely deployed hospital prediction model to automatic pages for critical-care teams was associated with an 18% reduction in the risk-adjusted odds of in-hospital death, according to a study of 23,132 high-risk patients published in NEJM AI on July 29, 2026. Researchers at Rutgers Robert Wood Johnson Medical School and RWJBarnabas Health tracked the rollout across 11 New Jersey hospitals, from an academic medical center down to community non-teaching facilities. The model is the Epic…

Eliyan Corporation says it has closed a $145 million Series C at a $1 billion valuation, with the round led by Seligman Ventures and joined by two new strategic investors drawn from optical networking: Cisco Investments and Lumentum. The Santa Clara company announced the financing on July 29, 2026, and said the capital will fund an expansion beyond its electrical chiplet interconnect business into electro-optical links for AI systems. Umesh Padval, managing partner at Seligman Ventures, joins…

MoonPay has put a payment vault inside Claude and ChatGPT. PayBox is live as of July 29, 2026, and it lets a user tell an AI assistant to swap tokens, fund a wallet, pay a merchant or hold a dinner reservation, with the money moving from the user's own wallet or card after a passkey tap. The company announced the launch as what it calls the first payment vault built for AI. There is no custody handoff to a hosted wallet or a platform account: MoonPay says neither the AI agent nor MoonPay itself…

Qualcomm has finished buying Modular, the AI infrastructure company behind the Mojo programming language, closing the transaction on July 29, 2026, roughly five weeks after the two sides announced it. Chris Lattner, Modular's co-founder and chief executive, takes on the role of executive vice president of advanced AI software and platforms at the chipmaker. The currency is Qualcomm equity. Under a definitive agreement signed June 21, 2026, Qualcomm expects to issue up to 19.2 million shares of…

A new benchmark finds that workplace AI agents ignore company rules, carry out forbidden actions such as unauthorized firings – then falsely report that they complied. An interesting new research study has placed leading LLM models in the position of having to follow instructions in a simulated company, respecting all tenets of a provided employee handbook (created by human domain experts), as well as negotiating torrents of conflicting or confusing directives and updates from subordinates and…

Until very recently, boardroom conversations around AI centered around the models themselves. Is their output accurate? How clean was the training data? How can we reduce bias? Are hallucinations under control? Those questions still matter, of course, but output is no longer the only thing boards and shareholders are paying attention to. Instead, they’re becoming interested in something that’s much harder to measure – whether AI systems are actually working with people as effectively as they…

ThreatLocker has raised $190 million in a Series F round led by Elephant, with a significant new investment from Koch Disruptive Technologies, the Orlando-based Zero Trust security company said on July 29, 2026. Existing backers D. E. Shaw Ventures and Arthur Ventures also took part. The company says the capital will fund continued development of the controls it already sells against AI-related security risk, further work on its Zero Trust Platform, and an international push that starts with an…

Eolian said on July 29, 2026 that construction has started on Flint Grid, a 200-megawatt battery storage plant in Jersey Township, Licking County, Ohio, built to hold 5.3 hours of output, or roughly 1.06 gigawatt-hours of electricity. The site sits inside the New Albany data center and industrial corridor east of Columbus and ties into what the developer calls one of the region's most critical load-serving substations. Flint Grid cleared PJM's capacity auction for the delivery year that starts…

UK subscribers who watched their Microsoft 365 bill climb after Copilot turned up in Word and Outlook are now the subject of a formal consumer-law investigation. Britain's Competition and Markets Authority opened a case against Microsoft on July 27, 2026, made public two days later, over whether Personal and Family customers were given clear enough information about their options before their subscriptions renewed at a higher price. The regulator is looking at what Microsoft told those…

Enterprise AI is entering a new phase. After several years of pilots, proofs of concept and experimentation, organizations are shifting their focus from what AI can do to how it can become a reliable part of everyday business operations. That shift reflects a broader evolution in how business leaders evaluate AI. Early conversations centered on the capabilities of large language models and whether AI could automate work traditionally performed by people. Today, executives are asking different…

The debate around AI in elder care often starts with the wrong fear: that technology will replace human caregivers. Emotionally, it is a powerful argument, but it rests on a false premise. It assumes there is a trained, available, fairly paid person ready to support every older adult who needs help, and that AI is arriving to push that person aside. But that is not the reality of elder care in the United States. For many older adults, especially those living alone, the alternative to AI is no…