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Wednesday, July 29, 2026
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Today’s top story
FUNDING
Moonshot AI raises $3.5 billion at $35 billion valuation
Bloomberg
Moonshot AI closed a $3.5 billion round at a $35 billion valuation, far above the $1-2 billion it originally sought, days after publishing the weights for its 2.8-trillion-parameter Kimi K3 model. China's National Artificial Intelligence Industry Investment Fund, also a DeepSeek backer, was among the lead investors. The company is already sounding out backers for a further round at a $50 billion pre-money valuation ahead of a possible Hong Kong listing this year.
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Why it matters
State-linked capital is now flowing to Chinese open-weight labs at valuations that rival well-funded U.S. startups, right as Washington debates whether to restrict those models. It also shows an open-weight release converting directly into fundraising leverage rather than lost revenue.
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More headlines
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INDUSTRY
AMD signs Core Scientific deal for up to 2.5 gigawatts
Core Scientific agreed to supply AMD with more than 500 megawatts of U.S. data-center capacity beginning in 2027, anchored by 15-year leases on 529MW that the company says could generate over $14 billion in base contracted revenue. AMD holds rights to reserve up to 1.9GW more through 2028, taking the total to 2.5GW, and received warrants for up to 30 million Core Scientific shares at $23.47.
Business Standard
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RELEASE
MCP ships stateless rewrite in largest spec change since launch
The 2026-07-28 Model Context Protocol specification drops the initialize/initialized handshake and moves the core to plain HTTP request/response, letting servers run on serverless and edge infrastructure. Apps and Tasks now ship under a versioned extensions framework alongside hardened OAuth and OIDC authorization; the change is breaking but opt-in, and Anthropic is rolling out support across Claude.
Model Context Protocol Blog
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RELEASE
Microsoft launches Project Perception and its first cybersecurity model
Microsoft unveiled Project Perception, an agentic security platform built around red, blue and green agent teams that find attack paths, triage risk and write and deploy patches, plus MAI-Cyber-1-Flash, its first in-house cybersecurity model. Microsoft says pairing the model with GPT-5.4 scores 95.95% on the CyberGym benchmark versus roughly 83% for competing systems; public preview opens August 3.
Axios
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FUNDING
CXMT jumps 466% in Shanghai debut, Asia's biggest IPO
Memory maker ChangXin Memory Technologies raised 57.92 billion yuan ($8.6 billion) and closed its first STAR Market session up 466%, valuing it near $480 billion and making it mainland China's most valuable listed company. CXMT holds roughly 7.7% of global DRAM and has gained pricing power as Samsung, SK Hynix and Micron shift capacity toward high-bandwidth memory for AI servers.
CNBC
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INDUSTRY
Anduril rolls first YFQ-44A off its Ohio production line
Anduril produced the first YFQ-44A Fury autonomous fighter at its $1 billion Arsenal-1 plant in Pickaway County, Ohio, four months after the line opened and 557 days after the facility was announced. The aircraft is Anduril's entry in the U.S. Air Force Collaborative Combat Aircraft program, and the site is configured to build up to 150 airframes a year.
Military Times
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This week in benchmarks
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vs. Wednesday, July 22, 2026
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Intelligence
GPT-5.6 Sol (high) fell from #5 to #9
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Intelligence
Claude Opus 4.8 (Adaptive Reasoning, Max Effort) fell from #6 to #10
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Intelligence
GPT-5.6 Sol (xhigh) fell from #3 to #6
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Intelligence
Kimi K3 fell from #4 to #7
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Coding
Claude Fable 5 (Adaptive Reasoning, Max Effort, Opus 4.8 Fallback) fell from #5 to #8
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Coding
GPT-5.6 Sol (medium) fell from #6 to #9
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Read past briefs and the live benchmarks at
ai-newsletter-eta-lemon.vercel.app.
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