IN THE SPOTLIGHT
Safer, faster and wiser!

After a lawsuit tied a chatbot interaction to a teen suicide, OpenAI is rolling out new parental controls designed to give families more oversight. Within the next month, parents will be able to link accounts with their teens, disable chat history, and receive alerts if the system detects moments of acute distress. They will also have default age-appropriate behavior rules in place and see sensitive conversations routed to stronger reasoning models like GPT-5. These updates follow last week’s announcement of new mental health guardrails as concerns grow over vulnerable users being pushed toward harmful decisions. The bigger picture: AI companies are being forced to navigate a new frontier where safety features are not just product upgrades but matters of life and death.

Microsoft just pulled an interesting move in the AI race. After years of leaning on OpenAI, it’s now flexing its own muscle with two in-house models: MAI-Voice-1, which can spit out a minute of audio in under a second, and MAI-1-preview, a giant text model trained on roughly 15,000 Nvidia H100 GPUs. The voice model already powers Copilot’s daily recaps and podcasts, while the text model is being tested in Copilot and benchmarked on LMArena with a small circle of trusted API testers. Microsoft has poured billions into OpenAI, but with these launches it’s signaling a shift from dependency to rivalry… because in the AI game, even your closest partner can quickly become your sharpest competitor.

A crypto giant just woke up as a long-dormant Bitcoin whale suddenly moved $1.1B in BTC, right after scooping up $2.5B worth of ETH last week. Onchain data points to Hyperliquid as the playground, with the whale offloading BTC while stacking nearly 641,000 ETH (~$2.94B). Some think it is one big player, others suspect multiple institutions, but the market shift is clear: Bitcoin has slipped 8% in the past month while Ethereum climbed 14%, fueled by ETF inflows expected to hit $4B this August. The takeaway is simple: this is not just a whale making waves, it is institutional-sized capital tilting the scales, and ETH is quickly cementing its role as both a growth bet and a yield engine. For builders and investors, that means buckle up because liquidity and volatility in ETH are only heading higher.

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SUBSTRATES
What else is on the radar?

AI

• Anthropic raises $1.3 billion at an $18.3 billion valuation, bolstering its Claude model development and enterprise push while tightening its race with OpenAI in the GenAI market.

• Nvidia acquires developer tools startup Solver to expand its software ecosystem and make GPU programming more accessible to a wider pool of developers.

• OpenAI acquires product testing startup Statsig, appointing its founder as CTO of Applications and reshuffling other leadership roles.

• ElevenLabs launches version 2 of its AI sound effects model, offering 30-second clips, 48 kHz fidelity, seamless looping, and full text-prompt generation via web app or API for easier production integration.

• Amazon rolls out Lens Live, an AI-powered tool on its iOS app that lets shoppers buy products by pointing their camera at them.

WEB3

• MetaMask now supports social logins, letting users create and recover wallets using their Google or Apple accounts.

• Tron slashes network fees by 60% as stablecoin activity surges.

• Pudgy Party, Pudgy Penguins’ new game, topped Apple’s racing charts days after launch, using blockchain to bring players into crypto seamlessly.

• Bitcoin’s BRC-20 team launched BRC 2.0, adding EVM compatibility and programmability, sending transactions spiking to 168K and teasing a new DEX with upcoming airdrops.

FROM THE REPOSITORY
Check this out!

• The 5th edition of the Top 100 Gen AI consumer apps by a16z.

• How’s the crypto policy under Trump’s administration going so far? Overview by Galaxy.

• Satya Nadella shares his top 5 ChatGPT-5 favorite prompts in Microsoft 365 Copilot.

Use now or save for later:

• Streamline and optimize your prompts with PromptGround.

• Onlook is the open-source cursor for designers.

• Create professional motion design from a single prompt with Gomotion.

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Visual of the week: The most popular AI chatbots so far

SCOOPS OF THE WEEK