Google releases Nano Banana 2 Lite, its fastest and cheapest AI image generator yet
Google releases Nano Banana 2 Lite, its fastest and cheapest AI image generator yet

Google on Tuesday released Nano Banana 2 Lite, the fastest and cheapest model in its Nano Banana family of AI image generators. The model produces images in four seconds and costs under four cents per thousand images, making it the company’s most aggre…

Anthropic launches Claude Sonnet 5, a cheaper way to run agents
Anthropic launches Claude Sonnet 5, a cheaper way to run agents

Anthropic has launched Claude Sonnet 5, its most agentic mid-tier model yet. It runs close to the flagship Opus 4.8 on many tasks, but costs less than half as much. Anthropic said on June 30, 2026 that Sonnet 5 is available today across every plan. The…

Schneider Electric buys industrial-AI firm Cognite for $3.1bn
Schneider Electric buys industrial-AI firm Cognite for $3.1bn

Schneider Electric is buying Cognite, a Norwegian-founded industrial AI company, for $3.1bn in cash. The French group wants software that can make factories and power grids think for themselves. Schneider Electric said on June 30, 2026 that it had agre…

Anthropic launches Claude Science, an AI workbench for the lab
Anthropic launches Claude Science, an AI workbench for the lab

Anthropic has launched Claude Science, an app that pulls a researcher’s scattered tools into one place and lets AI agents run large parts of the work. It is the company’s biggest push yet into the lab. Anthropic said on June 30, 2026 that Claude Scienc…

Enterprise AI’s Missing Foundation: Why Content Governance May Matter More Than the Next AI Breakthrough
Enterprise AI’s Missing Foundation: Why Content Governance May Matter More Than the Next AI Breakthrough

Rob Hanna observes that many enterprise AI initiatives may be losing momentum because organizations continue to treat language like structured data while overlooking the systems that make knowledge reliable. The co-founder and CEO of Precision Content,…

AWS is spending $1bn to put its engineers inside customers’ offices
AWS is spending $1bn to put its engineers inside customers’ offices

Amazon Web Services is committing $1bn to embed its own engineers inside customer companies. It is the first cloud giant to copy a playbook that Palantir built and that OpenAI and Anthropic have since adopted. Amazon Web Services said on June 30, 2026 …

Meta paid contractors to pose as teens and probe rival AI chatbots
Meta paid contractors to pose as teens and probe rival AI chatbots

The project ran under the internal name Cannes, and a Meta contractor called Covalen managed it. WIRED reported that hundreds of contractors created dummy under-18 accounts. They sent prompts and images to competitors’ chatbots, then logged the replies…

Chamath’s AI coding startup 8090 raises $135M, and he’s CEO
Chamath’s AI coding startup 8090 raises $135M, and he’s CEO

Salesforce led the Series A, which 8090 announced this week. The pitch behind it is blunt. AI can already write code. The hard part is stopping enterprise software from falling apart as dozens of agents and engineers change it every week. TechCrunch fi…

AI shopping just beat search at its own game on Prime Day
AI shopping just beat search at its own game on Prime Day

Amazon built Prime Day to keep shoppers inside its own marketplace. This year, AI shopping sent its best customers in from outside: a chatbot made the recommendation. US shoppers spent a record $26.4bn across retail sites during the four-day Prime Day …

X launches hosted MCP server so AI tools can plug into its API directly
X launches hosted MCP server so AI tools can plug into its API directly

X has launched a hosted Model Context Protocol server that lets AI tools like Claude, Cursor, and Grok Build connect directly to its API using a user’s own account permissions. The move eliminates the integration work developers previously had to do on…