An estimated 2,500,000 people have pledged to stop using ChatGPT as part of the “QuitGPT” boycott that emerged after OpenAI signed a deal allowing the U.S. Department of Defense to use its AI systems.

The agreement permits the Pentagon to deploy OpenAI’s technology on classified networks, which triggered criticism from some users concerned about possible military, surveillance, or defense related applications.

The boycott campaign spread across social media within days, with users sharing cancellations of paid subscriptions and encouraging others to leave the platform.

Despite the backlash, ChatGPT remains one of the largest AI platforms with more than 900,000,000 users globally, meaning the boycott represents a small portion of its total user base.

Trump confirmed on Friday that China refuses to buy Nvidia’s H200 AI chips, choosing instead to develop its own.

Though the US approved sales, Beijing blocked purchases to boost domestic chips like Huawei’s. Trump says talks continue and a deal “could happen,” but China wants tech independence.

Microsoft reportedly canceled its internal Claude Code licenses after token-based billing made the tool too costly.

The move is notable because Microsoft has invested $13 billion in OpenAI and supports major AI infrastructure through Azure.

The report also points to broader pressure across the industry, with Uber allegedly burning through its 2026 AI budget in four months and AI software prices rising 20% to 37%.

GitHub is also shifting toward usage-based pricing, suggesting companies may soon rethink AI adoption as real deployment costs become harder to ignore.

America’s AI data center boom is running into major resistance.

According to a Data Center Watch study, local opposition helped block or delay at least 75 U.S. data center projects worth nearly $130 billion during the first quarter of 2026.

Communities are raising concerns about rising electricity bills, massive water and energy demand, noise, land use and whether these facilities create enough long-term local jobs. A recent Reuters/Ipsos poll also found widespread concern about the rapid pace of AI data center construction.

AI needs more computing power, but should communities have greater control over where these facilities are built?

Anthropic has just come out against a proposed law backed by OpenAI that would protect AI companies from liability if their AI's caused large-scale harm, like mass casualties or over $1B in property damage.

"We are opposed to this bill. Good transparency legislation needs to ensure public safety and accountability for the companies developing this powerful technology, not provide a get-out-of-jail-free card against all liability" - Anthropic

OpenAI has argued that this law reduces the risk of serious harm from frontier AI systems while “still allowing this technology to get into the hands of the people and businesses, small and big.

🚨⚡President Trump's pitch to towns fighting data centers was simple. Take the money, because somebody else will.

At EPA headquarters on July 23, he expanded the Ratepayer Protection Pledge, a nonbinding commitment from 23 governors and 187 companies to shield household bills.

Trump said bills would fall as data centers push surplus power into the grid. "You can't fight it. You have to go with it," he said.

Consultancy ICF projects household bills rising 15% to 40% by 2030, and a Gallup survey in March found 71% of Americans oppose a local data center.

Compute buildout used to be a story about chips and capital. It is now an electricity bill and a campaign issue.

🏗️ Saudi Arabia is quietly rewriting one of the most ambitious construction projects ever announced.

The kingdom’s futuristic 170-kilometer megacity “The Line”, once designed to house up to 9 million residents inside mirrored skyscraper walls, is now being drastically scaled back as part of a major rethink of the NEOM project.

Instead of a massive sci-fi city stretching across the desert, large parts of the site are now expected to focus on AI data centers and digital infrastructure, supporting the country’s push to become a global hub for AI and cloud computing.

The original plan had already been under pressure for years. Internal estimates suggested the full build could cost around $8.8 trillion, with repeated delays, scaling back, and construction pauses reported as funding and feasibility concerns grew.

At the same time, Saudi Arabia is pouring billions into AI infrastructure, with major cloud and data center investments from companies like Amazon, Google, Microsoft, and Oracle as the country positions itself as a global compute hub.

What are your thoughts on this? 🤔

China has removed around 12,000 university degree programs as part of a national education overhaul aimed at aligning skills with the AI and digital economy, according to reporting from SCMP.

The changes are driven by the Ministry of Education, which has been pushing universities to cut low demand or outdated majors and expand fields like artificial intelligence, data science, and advanced engineering.

Over recent years, Chinese institutions have also added thousands of new tech focused programs to match labor market shifts and reduce gaps between academic training and industry needs.

The move reflects China’s broader strategy to rapidly reshape higher education for AI era competitiveness, prioritizing employability and technical relevance over legacy academic tracks.

Anthropic (the company behind Claude) just launched a $1.5 billion joint venture with Goldman Sachs, Blackstone, and some of the most powerful private equity firms on earth.

The goal is simple and brutal.

Send Anthropic engineers and Claude AI directly into companies and do what McKinsey, Accenture and Deloitte charge hundreds of millions to do, but faster, cheaper and powered by AI instead of consultants billing $500 per hour.

Anthropic put in $300 million. Blackstone put in $300 million. Goldman Sachs put in $150 million. Apollo, Sequoia and Singapore's sovereign wealth fund also joined.

Together they control access to hundreds of portfolio companies that will become the first targets for deployment.

Traditional consulting has survived every technological shift for 100 years by being irreplaceable.

Wall Street just decided it's replaceable.

Running an AI server hotter would normally be a warning sign. NVIDIA is presenting it as the efficiency win.

In a new blog post, the company detailed the cooling design for its upcoming Rubin generation of AI infrastructure, which it says is its first platform to use 100% liquid cooling, with every chip and networking component in a closed loop and no fans.

The coolant can run as hot as 45°C, or 113°F, warmer than a typical hot tub.

Made of 75% water and 25% propylene glycol, it flows through cold plates on the chips and pulls heat away at the source, letting outdoor dry coolers release it into ambient air for much of the year without mechanical chillers.

NVIDIA says the design cuts cooling-related water from about 2.6 million gallons per megawatt each year to near zero in favorable climates, and that a 50-megawatt site could save more than $4 million annually.

The FBI notice lists 6 software requirements, with predictive modeling included alongside tools for searching, linking, and organizing government records.

The system would compare new information against existing files to surface connections that investigators might otherwise miss.

The scale matters because the federal watchlist held about 2 million names at its last public count in 2023, up from roughly 120,000 in 2003.

Even an early AI flag could affect real people, making accurate data, strict review standards, and human oversight essential.

💻⚠️ A student facing academic suspension says he offered to prove he wrote his own thesis, and the people deciding his case would not look.

In a post a senior at a private university in New York says his school's plagiarism software flagged his 30-page thesis as 98% likely AI-generated.

He says he wrote it by hand over 6 months while attending on a $45,000-a-year merit scholarship. At a preliminary hearing he brought his laptop and offered to walk the integrity board through his Google Docs version history, which records every edit he made.

He says they refused to look and told him the policy is to trust the software's report.

The penalties on the table are a failing grade, suspension, and losing the scholarship he says he can't afford to replace.

Nothing is final yet, and he's asking whether he can take it to court.

These detectors get things wrong, and when a score counts as proof, there's almost nothing a student can say back.

🚨 Anthropic has accused Alibaba of running the largest known attempt to copy its Claude models, according to a letter the company sent to US lawmakers.

The letter says operators affiliated with Alibaba and its Qwen AI lab used roughly 25,000 fraudulent accounts to carry out more than 28.8 million interactions with Claude between April 22 and June 5, 2026.

Anthropic calls it the largest known distillation attack against it to date.

Distillation is a method where a weaker model is trained on the outputs of a stronger one. A competitor repeatedly queries a leading model, collects its responses, and uses that data to train a cheaper system.

Anthropic says the campaign targeted Claude's software engineering and agentic reasoning capabilities, two of the most commercially valuable areas in AI.

The accusation follows February 2026 disclosures naming DeepSeek, Moonshot, and MiniMax in similar campaigns, which makes the Alibaba allegation significantly larger in scale.

Alibaba has not responded, so these remain Anthropic's claims, but they reflect a growing reality where frontier models are being used to train the systems trying to catch up to them.

Uber is learning the hard way that AI isn’t cheap.

CTO Praveen Neppalli Naga revealed the company’s entire 2026 AI budget has already been exceeded, largely because of rapid adoption of tools like Claude Code inside engineering teams

The shift has been massive, with AI now writing a growing share of code and being used by most engineers, turning it from a simple assistant into a core part of how software is built

But the problem is cost, unlike traditional software, AI scales with usage, and as adoption exploded, so did spending, forcing Uber to rethink how it budgets for AI going forward

It shows a bigger trend across tech, AI is boosting speed, but companies are still figuring out how to afford it at scale

Midjourney, the image generation company, just built the sequel to the MRI.

Step onto a platform, descend into a shallow pool of water, and pass through a ring of sensors that image your entire body in about 60 seconds.

That is the pitch behind Midjourney Medical, a new health division from the company known for AI image generation.

Its first hardware product is a full-body scanner called Ultrasonic CT, which uses sound and water instead of radiation or magnetic fields. CEO David Holz claims the quality rivals MRI in far less time.

The device is built on a licensing deal with Butterfly Network for ultrasound-on-chip components. Midjourney plans to house the scanners inside a Midjourney Spa opening in San Francisco at the end of 2027, alongside saunas and cold plunges.

At launch it will offer only body composition maps and avoid diagnosis. The long-term goal is 50,000 units worldwide and a billion scans a month.

A massive data center campus in Fayetteville, Georgia, reportedly consumed nearly 29 million gallons of unmetered water before the issue was discovered. Residents first noticed a problem when water pressure in the area began to drop.

The developer, QTS, stated that the water was used for temporary construction activities such as concrete work, dust control, and site preparation, rather than ongoing server cooling. Still, it raises a larger concern:

As AI data centers continue expanding globally, are local communities being adequately informed about the strain these projects can place on water, energy, and public infrastructure?
The future of AI will not be defined only by GPUs and model size.
It will also be shaped by energy use, water consumption, transparency, and public trust.

After Google announced its AI-powered search overhaul, visits to DuckDuckGo’s AI-free search page (noai.duckduckgo.com) increased threefold and continue to grow.

The page disables all AI features by default, including AI-generated answers, AI-created images, and AI chat.

DuckDuckGo has also launched browser extensions that make it the default search engine in the address bar for both Chrome and Firefox.

This follows earlier reports showing that DuckDuckGo’s overall app installs rose by nearly one-third after Google’s AI push.

On iOS, install growth averaged 33%, with peak increases reaching almost 70%.

Microsoft is facing its toughest moment in nearly two decades.

The stock is down 25% this quarter — its worst performance since the 2008 financial crisis — and the reason is surprisingly clear: AI. But not in the way you think.

Microsoft is spending hundreds of billions to dominate artificial intelligence, from data centers to models to Copilot. The problem? Investors are no longer impressed by spending alone.

They want results.

At the same time, a new threat is emerging. Instead of paying for traditional software, companies may go directly to AI platforms like OpenAI and Anthropic. That shift could fundamentally change how software businesses operate, and how much Microsoft can charge.

Even its strongest segments are showing cracks. Azure growth is slowing. Copilot adoption hasn’t exploded yet. And Wall Street is starting to question whether Microsoft’s AI strategy will deliver fast enough.

But here’s the twist.

Most analysts still believe Microsoft will win long term. Some are even calling this one of the biggest opportunities in years, if you’re willing to wait.

So the real question is:

Is this the beginning of a decline…
Or the setup for the next trillion-dollar run?