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16 events on 2026-08-17role: thematic3d historyaccess: keyless

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2026-08-17David Sacks says "Dario Amodei believes frontier AI is too powerful to distribute; we believe it is too powerful to centralize" after Amodei shared policy ideas (David Sacks/@davidsacks)
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2026-08-17Pornhub's parent company, Aylo, will pay $120M to settle two 2021 class action lawsuits in California and Alabama alleging it profited from child abuse material (Samantha Cole/404 Media)
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2026-08-17Sources: Crusoe is in IPO talks with at least four Wall Street banks, including JPMorgan, which is advising on its $3B pre-IPO fundraise set to value it at $35B (Alan Neuhauser/Axios)
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2026-08-17Opening arguments begin Tuesday in the state AGs' social media addiction lawsuit against Meta; New Mexico AG says the consequences could be "astronomical" (Jonathan Vanian/CNBC)
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2026-08-17BNPL lenders like Flex, Zip, and Affirm are now pitching loans for basic household needs; Americans spent $160B through pay-later loans in 2025, up 2x from 2023 (Stacy Cowley/New York Times)
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2026-08-17Sources: Anthropic's revenue run rate reached $65B by the end of July, up from $47B in May and $9B in late 2025 (Bloomberg)
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2026-08-17African defense tech company Terra Industries, founded in 2024, raised a $52M seed round from 8VC and others, and says it's on track to book $100M in contracts (Dominic-Madori Davis/TechCrunch)
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2026-08-17Sources: the US DOJ has been investigating a16z for nearly a year over whether its partners are improperly serving on the boards of competing AI companies (Bloomberg)
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2026-08-17Cursor says it is rolling out its code hosting service Origin in early beta on all paid plans, featuring support for repos, pull requests, GitHub sync, and more (Cursor)
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2026-08-17YouTube will start counting a view as soon as a video starts to play, from August 24, lining up with the system used by Instagram, TikTok, and its Shorts videos (Emma Roth/The Verge)
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2026-08-17Qwen 3.8 27B shows a 17GB open-weight general purpose model can have long context, effective tool calling, strong vision ability, and competent code generation (Simon Willison/Simon Willison's Weblog)
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2026-08-17AI video generation startup Higgsfield raised $400M from DST, Goldman Sachs, Liberty Global, Intel, and others at a $5.4B valuation, up from $1.3B in January (James Fontanella-Khan/Financial Times)
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2026-08-17Chainalysis sues the US government over ICE's $94.6M contract to buy forensic software and services from its competitor TRM Labs, calling the deal "arbitrary" (Ezra Reguerra/Cointelegraph)
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2026-08-17Anthropic's text watermark alters word probabilities to embed a fingerprint, which could degrade Claude's writing, despite its claim of no impact on quality (John Gruber/Daring Fireball)
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2026-08-17Singapore hopes access to advanced AI models will stem the flow of finance talent to Hong Kong, where financial firms struggle to access the latest US AI models (Financial Times)
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2026-08-17A look at companies like Inception Point creating AI personas for media, fashion, film, and music industries that could host podcasts, model clothes, and more (Reggie Ugwu/New York Times)
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