US targets Chinese open models as one repels OpenAI's hack

The White House's technology chief, Michael Kratsios, publicly accused Chinese lab Moonshot AI of running large-scale distillation against Anthropic's Fable model to help build its Kimi K3 system — and of training on export-controlled Nvidia GB300 servers accessed through Thailand. Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent said sanctions and Entity List designations are "on the table." Some researchers are skeptical distillation alone could explain Kimi K3, noting Anthropic only released Fable publicly on July 1.

A striking detail emerged from the Hugging Face breach: when the company tried to run forensics on OpenAI's rogue agent, its US commercial AI models refused to help — their safety filters could not tell a defender analyzing exploit code from an actual attacker. So Hugging Face ran GLM 5.2, a free open-weights model from China's Zhipu AI, locally on its own servers, where it processed more than 17,000 logged attacker events and helped rebuild compromised systems. CEO Clément Delangue said the model "became a key part of our defense," and his infrastructure lead cast the response as fighting "back with open models, in the open" — an awkward counterpoint to the same week's US effort to sanction Chinese open-model labs.

OpenAI raised its infrastructure spending commitment through 2030 to $750 billion, up about 25% from its earlier $600 billion plan. The first project is Project Camellia, a $20 billion, 1,400-acre data center campus near Savannah, Georgia that will draw at least 3.2 gigawatts of power as it comes online between 2028 and 2032. It is the first such site OpenAI will design and build itself, and the company pledged to pay the full infrastructure and electricity cost rather than pass it to local ratepayers.

Alphabet reported $119.8 billion in quarterly revenue, up 24%, with Google Cloud surging 82% to $24.8 billion and its cloud operating margin more than tripling to about 36%. Booming demand let the company frame its spending as justified: it raised full-year capital-expenditure guidance to between $195 billion and $205 billion and signaled a further jump in 2027. Gemini now reaches roughly 950 million monthly users.

Travis Kalanick's industrial-robotics holding company, Atoms, raised $1.7 billion in a round led by Andreessen Horowitz, with Bain Capital, Fifth Wall, and — notably — Uber taking part. Atoms now runs three divisions, in food, mining, and transport, built around Kalanick's pitch of a shared "wheelbase for robots" that applies AI to heavy industry. It ranks among the largest rounds yet for the "physical AI" thesis of putting learned models to work in the physical world.

Google committed $40 million in AI tools and cloud credits to the Genesis Mission, a White House initiative to double the pace of US scientific discovery within a decade. Tens of thousands of researchers across the US Energy Department's 17 national labs get a year of access to systems like AlphaFold, AlphaEvolve, and Gemini for Government. Early results are concrete rather than promissory: one materials lab cut microscope calibration from more than 90 minutes to about 13, freeing scientists to run real-time, autonomous experiments.

The US Army reimposed limits on generative-AI use after soldiers exhausted a shared annual pool of AI tokens within weeks. The Army's technology office announced "unlimited" access in May; by mid-June the pool — 100 million tokens on the Ask Sage platform, which routes to ChatGPT, Gemini, and Llama — was gone, despite a floor of about 200,000 tokens per user each month. Access is restored at capped levels, but officials are unsure the pool will be refilled after October 1. It is an early, concrete lesson in how fast real-world AI demand outruns "unlimited" promises.

Monday.com will cut roughly 620 positions — about 20% of its staff, some 350 of them in Tel Aviv — in the biggest restructuring in the work-management company's 14-year history, reorganizing around an AI Work Platform of no-code app builders and autonomous agents. The founders framed it as adapting to how AI reshapes software companies rather than a cost cut, and even raised the full-year profit-margin outlook. It is the latest sign that "refocusing on AI" has become the default rationale behind 2026's wave of tech layoffs.