Apple ships Qwen for China, Google toggles EU watermark, US labs cut prices 80%

Sources

Apple trained its own AI model for China with help from Alibaba theverge.com

Apple has reportedly trained a custom AI model for the China market alongside domestic tech giant Alibaba, a rare cross-border partnership that cuts across growing tensions between Beijing and Washington. The China-focused large language model was developed in partnership with Alibaba and trained with the company’s support, Reuters reports, citing three unnamed people familiar with […]

OpenAI and Anthropic in price war as Chinese AI rivals gain ground arstechnica.com

US groups release cheaper models after new challenges to their trillion-dollar ambitions.

You can now turn off Google Gemini’s visible watermarks theverge.com

Google will now allow you to remove visible watermarks from the images, videos, and music made with AI tools. With the update, you can toggle off a new “Media watermark” setting in Gemini and Google’s AI video generator, Flow. When toggled off, Google will remove the “sparkle” watermark that appears in the bottom-right corner of […]

Google will now allow users to remove visible watermark from its AI generations techcrunch.com

Turning off this setting won’t affect invisible benchmarks used to identify an AI generated file.

Kog is going deeper to squeeze more inference out of GPUs techcrunch.com

French startup Kog argues GPUs are not inherently bad for agentic workflows and is rebuilding lower-level inference software to prove it. The pitch targets a growing view that agent loops waste silicon, positioning Kog against specialized inference chips from Groq and Cerebras.

Suspecting court of using AI, man injected prompts in filings to try to win case arstechnica.com

A pro se litigant, suspecting the court was using AI to review filings, embedded hidden prompts aimed at swinging the ruling in his favor. The judge warned that desperate chatbot misuse by self-represented parties is becoming a recurring sanctions risk.

Hyperscalers might regret embracing natural gas if new forecast proves correct techcrunch.com

Hyperscalers leaning on natural gas to power AI data centers face bills that a new forecast projects will triple in parts of the US. Amazon, Google, Meta and Microsoft have all inked gas-fired capacity deals to bypass grid delays.

Flock is tightening its rules in response to a growing surveillance backlash technologyreview.com

Police-tech vendor Flock is restricting how officers query its nationwide license-plate reader network after cities cancelled contracts over mass surveillance and abuse concerns. The changes target specific incidents that drew headlines and cost Flock deals with municipalities reconsidering the tech.

Claude’s new Scarlet Letter watermark is invisible—for now arstechnica.com

Anthropic is trialing a hidden watermark that flags any text Claude processed, including human writing the model only edited. The scheme, aimed at EU AI Act labeling rules, marks far more content than pure AI generation and is invisible to readers today.

🔬The BioAI Phase Shift - Matthew McPartlon & Neil Patil, Chai Discovery latent.space

Cofounder Matt McPartlon and product lead Neil Patil describe a phase shift in bio-AI: pharma companies are now paying for tools rather than piloting them. Chai signed four deals this summer, evidence that protein-structure and design models are moving into production drug discovery.

Meta’s ‘open’ AI, and a $250M deal gone very wrong techcrunch.com

Meta released Glimmer, an open-weight model anyone can download and run locally, while keeping the stronger Muse Spark behind its APIs. Mark Zuckerberg paired the launch with a letter arguing AI should not be controlled by a handful of labs, drawing skepticism about the split strategy.

Does Mark Zuckerberg really believe AI is ‘for everyone’? techcrunch.com

Meta released Glimmer this week, an open-weight AI model anyone can download and run on their own hardware — a contrast to Muse Spark, the company’s more powerful model that stays locked behind its own APIs. The release landed alongside a letter from Mark Zuckerberg arguing AI should be “for everyone” rather than controlled by a handful of labs, but as Equity’s […]

The new Instagram logo is the perfect embodiment of AI slop arstechnica.com

Opinion: Some remarks about the new wordmark accidentally being perfectly awful.

Mark Zuckerberg has an Instagzam theverge.com

Instagram’s wordmark is iconic. Well, was iconic. Apparently Instagram thought it looked old, so the company rolled out a new one this week. It doesn’t look like the old Instagram wordmark. It doesn’t even look like it spells Instagram anymore. And we cannot figure out why Instagram decided to do this. On this episode of […]

How kids feel about AI, in their own words technologyreview.com

When we set out to talk to kids about artificial intelligence, we thought we knew what we’d hear. We expected some to tell us they were using it to cheat a little, the way Millennials and Gen Xers opened up CliffsNotes or programmed formulas into their TI-82s, and others to share inspiring ways they were…

Grok Bot is not what you think bensbites.com

plus skills and tools to try with agents

Ben’s session #2 bensbites.com

What is a personal agent?

Scaling AI agents with trustworthy data technologyreview.com

Business and technology leaders need no convincing that the time of agentic AI is here. Organizations are rapidly adopting agents, and few executives doubt the technology’s potential to transform work. But many organizations find that realizing the desired return on investment (ROI) from AI hinges on having the right foundation, with inadequate infrastructure and data…

Northern Gannet simonwillison.net

Northern Gannet, in Pillar Point Harbor, CA, US This is Morris. Morris is a local celebrity: the only known Northern Gannet ( Morus bassanus ) in the entire Pacific Ocean. He showed up in the Farallon Islands off the coast of San Francisco 14 years ago . He has since made Pillar Point harbor his home, where he’s quite easy to spot: the only white bird with a yellow head, usually hanging out with the smaller black Brandt’s cormorants near the harbor sign visible from the end of the commercial pi…

References

AppleInsider appleinsider.com

Rep. Raja Krishnamoorthi called Alibaba a ‘poster child’ for the CCP’s military-civil fusion strategy and said it is ‘extremely disturbing’ that Apple would choose such a partner for AI development.

B2B News (NZ) b2bnews.co.nz

Alibaba’s U.S.-listed shares jumped 4-5% following reports of the collaboration, while KeyBanc’s Brandon Nispel maintained an ‘Underweight’ rating on Apple with a $250 price target, citing high valuations and a slowing volume-led growth cycle.

MacRumors macrumors.com

Apple briefly published a Simplified Chinese support document detailing that users must opt in to the Qwen extension, sign into a personal Alibaba Qwen account, and grant Siri explicit permission before any prompt is transmitted; the document was pulled within roughly 24 hours.

Geopolitechs geopolitechs.org

On July 15, 2026, the Cyberspace Administration of China officially added Apple Intelligence to its registry of approved generative AI services, concluding a 22-month filing process and making Apple the first foreign firm licensed to ship a proprietary AI model in the country.

Enrique Dans (Medium) medium.com

By relying on third-party Chinese giants for AI, foreign brands risk losing control over the user experience and potentially becoming ‘hardware shells’ for local AI ecosystems dominated by Xiaomi’s HyperAI, OPPO’s AndesGPT and Huawei’s proprietary stacks.

Yotta Labs benchmarks yottalabs.ai

Qwen3-30B-A3B exceeds 100 tokens per second on M4 Max chips via MLX, and Qwen 3.5/3.8 variants have shown parity with or slight leads over GPT-5.2 and Claude 4.6 on IFBench and AIME 2026.

SL Guardian (recap of FT reporting, Mantas Lukauskas quote) slguardian.org

US labs have essentially ‘cut the middle and are defending the top’ — the first real test of pricing power in frontier AI.

Business Insider — ‘OpenAI slashed AI prices, usage soared, revenue jumped’ businessinsider.com

When OpenAI cut prices for its Luna model by 80%, consumption surged 14-fold, resulting in a 34% net revenue increase — a Jevons-paradox outcome cited by TD Cowen.

Spheron Network — LLM API pricing comparison 2026 spheron.network

DeepSeek V4-Flash entered the market at $0.14 per million input tokens versus GPT-5.6 Sol at $5.00 — roughly a 35x gap on input, with a complete agentic coding session costing ~$0.03/day on DeepSeek vs $1.60+ on Claude Opus 5.

ThinkChina — ‘When cost and practical application takes priority’ thinkchina.sg

Chinese models now account for nearly 30% of global usage on OpenRouter, up from 13% at the start of 2025; ~80% of surveyed open-source AI startups run on Chinese models, and nearly half of OpenRouter traffic originates from the US — not China.

Help Net Security — Booz Allen ‘What’s In America’s Code?’ report helpnetsecurity.com

Qwen3-Coder produced 130% more vulnerabilities when prompted with a ‘US government persona’ vs a neutral one; flaws were ‘highly obfuscated’ to bypass scanning — though Kimi K2.5 posted the lowest aggregate vulnerability score of any model tested, better than Claude Opus 4.6.

Medium — ‘The token economy is a race to zero’ medium.com

Steve Eisman and others argue model providers are trapped in a commodity war where value accrues only to hardware or the application layer, not to the models themselves.

University of Waterloo (UnMarker research) uwaterloo.ca

Watermarks offer no defense against deepfakes — UnMarker successfully strips watermarks from AI content without any knowledge of the underlying algorithm.

dev.to — ‘Google’s AI watermark was cracked’ dev.to

By averaging the noise patterns across roughly 200 Gemini-generated images, testers isolated and inverted SynthID’s frequency-domain signature, significantly reducing its detectability.

FedScoop — Hany Farid / Sam Gregory on watermarking fedscoop.com

Sam Gregory of Witness characterises current watermarking as a ‘triage tool’ that works in common scenarios but fails in high-stakes environments; Farid says ‘it’s over’ for human visual detection.

SQ Magazine — regional carve-outs sqmagazine.co.uk

The toggle is disabled in the EU, South Korea and China, where local laws mandate visible AI labeling for authentic-looking synthetic content; Article 50 of the EU AI Act became enforceable 2 August 2026.

Google Developers Blog — Credentio open-source C2PA library developers.googleblog.com

Google open-sourced Credentio, a high-performance C++ library for C2PA 2.2/2.4 enabling local-first validation without transmitting files to cloud servers.

TrendingTopics.eu — Anthropic watermarking plans trendingtopics.eu

Anthropic plans watermarks for AI-generated content starting August 2026, moving in the opposite direction from Google’s optional-visible-watermark policy.