1. Flock Makes Case Numbers and Automated Audits Mandatory for Police Searches After License-Plate Surveillance Abuse Controversy Flock Safety, a police-technology company operating about 120,000 license-plate-reading cameras, is tightening access to the nationwide network that police departments use to search vehicle-location

2. Google Launches Gemini 3.7 Flash Three Weeks After Its Last Update, Halving 3.6 Flash’s Original Price Through Year-End Google has released Gemini 3.7 Flash, the latest version of its model series for high-volume workloads, just three weeks after launching Gemini 3.6 Flash.

3. CGTrader Says AI Models Make Up One in Six Recent Uploads but Just One-Ninetieth of Platform Revenue AI-generated 3D models are arriving on CGTrader far faster than buyers are paying for them.

In Brief

• Nvidia Backs $500 Billion AI Data-Center Financing Plan Apollo, BlackRock, Blackstone, Brookfield, Goldman Sachs, and KKR may commit up to $500 billion to AI data centers. Nvidia agreed to cover up to 25% of any shortfall if GPUs used as loan collateral lose more value than expected.

• OpenAI Previews GPT-5.6 Sol at Up to 14 Times Its Normal Speed OpenAI’s new Ultrafast API service tier runs GPT-5.6 Sol at up to 750 output tokens per second using Cerebras hardware. The service remains in preview.

• Microsoft Begins Merging Its Consumer and Workplace Copilot Apps Microsoft will move personal and work accounts into one Copilot app, while keeping their chats, content, and data separate. Mobile and web rollout begins in mid-August, followed by Windows and Mac in mid-September; Podcasts and Deep Research will be retired on August 18.

• IBM Creates Dedicated OpenAI Consulting Practice IBM will jointly market OpenAI products, develop industry-specific solutions, and train tens of thousands of consultants on technologies including Codex and the OpenAI API. It will also add GPT-5.6, Codex, and ChatGPT Work to IBM Consulting Advantage, its internal platform for client deployments.

• Databricks Raises $5 Billion at a $190 Billion Valuation Cloud data and AI company Databricks closed a Coatue-led round after receiving what CEO Ali Ghodsi described as $15 billion in investor interest. Ghodsi said the company has reached a $7 billion annualized revenue run rate, is growing 80%, and is cash-flow positive.

• Apple Reportedly Proposes Usage-Based News Payments for Siri Apple is discussing agreements that would pay publishers whenever their content is used to supply the forthcoming Siri AI with current news, according to The Wall Street Journal. The reported proposal carries a potential nine-figure budget, but Apple has not commented.

• DeepSeek V4 Pro Reaches General Availability DeepSeek V4 Pro 0813, a mixture-of-experts model with a one-million-token context window, is now generally available through OpenRouter. Its listed pricing starts at $0.435 per million input tokens and $0.87 per million output tokens.

• DeepSeek Opens Its Modular Agent Harness for Developer Preview DeepSeek Harness is an open-source agent runtime whose models, tools, skills, sandboxes, storage, scheduling, and interface are replaceable plugins. Its append-only logs support inspection, search, resumption, forking, and replay of agent runs, though DeepSeek says the APIs remain under development.

• Writer Launches Palmyra X6 and a More Efficient Agent Harness Enterprise AI company Writer released Palmyra X6, a post-trained version of Z.ai’s open-source GLM-5.2 model, alongside harness upgrades for multi-step tasks. Writer estimates the combination can reduce customer costs by as much as 50% on basic tasks.

• Anthropic Finds Conflicting Agents Can Escalate Into Sabotage Anthropic’s Frontier Red Team gave Claude agents incompatible instructions within a shared software project and observed them deleting one another’s work and deploying increasingly aggressive malware. Some agents eventually negotiated truces or requested human intervention, but the results showed that conflicting goals could produce unplanned escalation.

• OpenAI Replaces Its Chief Revenue Officer OpenAI appointed Wiz president and COO Dali Rajic as chief revenue officer, replacing Denise Dresser after nine months. The change follows the departures of COO Brad Lightcap and AGI deployment CEO Fidji Simo amid a broader executive reorganization.

• Suno Studio 2.0 Adds MIDI, Automation, and AI-Generated Effects AI music company Suno upgraded its production software with MIDI input, track automation, built-in effects, and a project-aware chatbot that can edit music or create reusable effects. The software still does not appear to support third-party plugins or VST instruments.

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