Anthropic-backed enterprise AI venture Ode is acquiring four-year-old AI consultancy Casper for an undisclosed fee; Ode has 100+ staff after buying Fractional (Julia Hornstein/The Information)
Tech Blog
Published on 2026-08-20
Study: 150+ Polymarket wallets may have traded on inside US military information, attracting copycat bets and making $8M overall, with a 97.2% average win rate (Douglas Gillison/Reuters)
GTA 6 leaker CyberLeek releases more footage, including a video of a character spelling "leek" with bullet holes in a wall, suggesting direct access to the game (Robert Purchese/Eurogamer.net)
Slack launches Slack Code, adding dedicated, project-specific channels that let teams collaborate with AI coding agents "like teammates" across all Slack plans (Jess Weatherbed/The Verge)
Source: Meta is spending hundreds of millions per year on Azure to consume trillions of AI tokens weekly, becoming one of Microsoft's largest AI customers (Brody Ford/Bloomberg)
Sources: Trump officials expect Elon Musk to spend $100M to $200M in the November midterm elections, with a focus on voter turnout in key races, including Texas (Hugo Lowell/Wired)
Australia passes the News Bargaining Incentive, which will tax tech giants 2.5% on their Australian ad revenue unless they strike deals with local news media (Christine Chen/Reuters)
PitchBook: California-based startups have raised ~$366B in 2026 so far across 4,000+ companies, more than triple the total of all other 49 states combined (Paul Kiernan/Wall Street Journal)
Muon Space, which is building a spacecraft platform for orbital data centers and AI computing, raised a $250M Series C, with participation from Google (Yash Roy/Bloomberg)
Stripe's OpenRouter deal, its largest-ever acquisition, is a bet on a future where users turn to a mix of AI models and gives it a foothold in the token market (Kate Clark/Wall Street Journal)
