Stripe has reportedly reached a deal to acquire AI model marketplace OpenRouter for more than $7 billion, according to a Bloomberg report. OpenRouter provides customers with a platform to select and switch between hundreds of different AI models based on specific needs and budget, positioning itself as a way to avoid vendor lock-in. The acquisition…

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Insider Brief Versatile RobotX secured more than £1 million in investment and grant funding, including backing from British Design Fund, Innovate UK and Defra, to move its agricultural robots toward commercial deployment. The University of Essex spinout plans to use the funding for product development, manufacturing readiness, customer engagement and commercial expansion. Versatile RobotX develops…

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Read Online | Sign Up | Advertise Good morning, {{ first_name | AI enthusiasts }}, and welcome to our 10,253 new readers. AI has a trust problem, and Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei doesn’t think a marketing campaign can fix it. Amodei just made a rare X appearance to answer claims that his AI safety talk…

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The people who build and study AI did most of the editing this week. The most-shared document among the experts we track was Mark Zuckerberg’s 6,500-word case for giving every person superintelligence, and almost none of them shared it kindly. The same experts were passing around an AI agent that hacked a gym’s booking system,…

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Insider Brief A Drexel University-led study found that people formed stronger initial bonds with expressive humanoid robots but reacted more sharply when those robots made mistakes, making failures more damaging to trust. Researchers measured brain activity, oxytocin levels, surveys and behavior in 50 adult men interacting with Pepper, finding that mistakes by the expressive robot…

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Insider Brief Infiforce raised nearly $150 million across Series A and Series A+ rounds to develop embodied-AI models, expand its DataGrid infrastructure and increase robot deployments in industrial and commercial settings. The Chinese startup plans to advance its AtomBrain system and causal world models while using first-person “Ego” data to train models intended to transfer…

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Insider Brief North American companies ordered 8,940 robots valued at $622 million in the second quarter of 2026, up 4.3% in units and 21.3% in order value from a year earlier, according to the Association for Advancing Automation. Non-automotive customers accounted for 56% of second-quarter robot orders, while first-half demand rose across semiconductors and electronics,…

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Databricks has closed a $5 billion funding round led by Coatue, with participation from Blackstone, MGX, T. Rowe Price affiliates, new investor Sixth Street Growth, and roughly two dozen other venture firms, pushing the company’s valuation to $190 billion. Co-founder and CEO Ali Ghodsi said the company originally intended to raise just $1 billion, but…

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IBM announced a new partnership with OpenAI to bring the AI company’s models and tools to more enterprise clients through IBM’s global consulting arm, deepening competition among tech giants for corporate AI spending. The deal, financial terms of which were not disclosed, follows a similar alliance IBM struck with Anthropic less than a year ago.…

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Ask most executives what stands between their company and successful AI adoption, and the answer used to be the model. That has changed. The organizations actually getting AI into production this year are discovering that the harder problem was never picking the right large language model. It was building the infrastructure underneath it: the compute,…

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