Tech Pulse Daily

🍎 Apple Intelligence Wins China Approval, Powered by Alibaba's Qwen

China's Cyberspace Administration has cleared Apple Intelligence for the mainland, powered by Alibaba's Qwen rather than Apple's own models — ending a nearly 22-month wait and sending Alibaba shares up about 4%. Read Deep Dive →

☁️ Amazon Races to Fix an AWS Billing Bug That Showed Charges in the Billions

A billing-portal bug briefly displayed wildly inflated charges to some AWS customers — one estimate hit roughly $2.5 billion. Amazon blamed a recent change to its billing subsystem and said the figures do not reflect real usage. Read Deep Dive →

🚗 Zoox Recalls Robotaxi Software After a Car Was Confused by Heavy Smoke

After a June 20 incident where a robotaxi braked hard and swerved in heavy smoke at a fire scene, Zoox pushed an over-the-air update to its 105-vehicle fleet — landing a day before NHTSA warned AV firms not to interfere with first responders. Read Deep Dive →

🛡️ San Francisco Orders Apple and Google to Pull 'Nudify' Apps

City Attorney David Chiu ordered both companies to purge apps that fabricate non-consensual nude images, citing California law. They have 28 days to respond and face potential civil penalties. Read Deep Dive →

⚛️ Nuclear Startup Valar Atomics in Talks to Raise $1B at a $6B Valuation

The small-modular-reactor maker is reportedly tripling its valuation with Sequoia expected to lead, betting that AI's real bottleneck is megawatts, not chips. Read Deep Dive →

💾 The First GPU Financiers Are Now Backing Inference Chips in a $400M Deal

Upper90 lent $400 million to General Compute — reportedly the first deal to use inference chips as loan collateral — signaling capital fragmenting beyond Nvidia GPUs toward inference-optimized silicon. Read Deep Dive →

🤖 Patreon Starts Blocking AI Scraper Bots Instead of Just Asking Them to Stop

Using Cloudflare's AI Crawl Control, Patreon cut weekly AI-crawler attempts from thousands to zero. “Consent shouldn't depend on whether a scraper chooses to behave,” the company said. Read Deep Dive →

🔎 More Interesting News

• SpaceX suddenly aborts second Starship V3 launch after ignition — TechCrunch
• FBI arrests man accused of using Steam games to drain victims' crypto wallets — TechCrunch
• Microsoft is reportedly training salespeople to talk down OpenAI and Anthropic — TechCrunch
• Parents want safer phones for kids. These companies are answering the call — TechCrunch
• reMarkable's new Paper Pure is a genuinely good e-ink writing tablet — TechCrunch
• Google's Gemini 3.5 Pro reportedly targets July 17 for general availability (specs unconfirmed) — Tech Times
• Building a Custom Metrics Exporter for Kubernetes — Kubernetes Blog
• .NET and .NET Framework July 2026 servicing updates — .NET Blog
• Elastic leads the AV-Comparatives Business Security Test 2026 with a perfect score — Elastic Blog