Web design news

• PayPal turned down $53bn, and pointed to a beat and a $70 target

  29-07-2026 17:09 via thenextweb.com
  
  PayPal finally addressed the $53bn offer sitting on its table. Its answer was: not at that price. The company gave its first public response on Tuesday’s Q2 earnings call, alongside a beat. Chief executive Enrique Lores would not comment on Stripe and Advent’s bid directly. He said only that PayPal would “carefully consider” any path […]
  This story continues at The Next Web
  
  Read more

• Anthropic is alone in every AI policy fight. It’s winning anyway.

  29-07-2026 18:48 via thenextweb.com
  
  Six months ago, Anthropic was the darling of America’s AI boom. It led on the models and was loudest on the ethics. This summer, it finds itself alone. The Claude maker is now the odd one out in nearly every big AI policy fight, Axios reported. It is the most valuable startup in the world, […]
  This story continues at The Next Web
  
  Read more

• Shein’s app runs on the tricks the FTC calls ‘dark patterns.’ Now the FTC is investigating.

  29-07-2026 18:40 via thenextweb.com
  
  Shein wanted its Hong Kong listing to be about growth. Instead, the filing meant to sell that story revealed a US regulator is investigating the company, and Shein will not say why. The disclosure sits in the draft prospectus for Shein’s planned IPO, Reuters reported. Its US business, the filing said, is under investigation by […]
  This story continues at The Next Web
  
  Read more

• The AI boom needs power and rockets. Trump just exempted both from environmental law.

  29-07-2026 18:28 via thenextweb.com
  
  The Trump administration spent Tuesday clearing environmental law out of the way of the tech boom. It did so twice, on two fronts, with the same justification. The first move exempts data centres from the rules meant to stop acid rain. The second frees rocket launches from federal environmental review. Together they show how far […]
  This story continues at The Next Web
  
  Read more

• Advertisement

• Apple hit $5tn by refusing to play the AI game everyone else is losing

  29-07-2026 18:02 via thenextweb.com
  
  Apple has become the second company in history worth $5tn. It got there by being the one big-tech giant that refused to bet its balance sheet on AI. The iPhone maker briefly touched a $5.04tn market value on Tuesday. Shares hit a session high of $342.89 before easing to close at $340.08, just under the […]
  This story continues at The Next Web
  
  Read more

• eBay sent them a bloody pig mask. Now it owes $56m, and no NDA.

  29-07-2026 17:36 via thenextweb.com
  
  The most disturbing corporate harassment campaign in recent tech history has a price. eBay and three of its former executives will pay nearly $56m to the couple they set out to destroy for writing a critical newsletter. David and Ina Steiner of Natick, Massachusetts, run EcommerceBytes, a small newsletter that covers online selling. In 2019, […]
  This story continues at The Next Web
  
  Read more

• The AI coding fight just moved from the model to the harness

  29-07-2026 17:24 via thenextweb.com
  
  The most expensive part of AI coding is no longer the model. It is the software wrapped around it, and enterprises have started to notice. The immediate fight is over price. Cursor, the AI coding tool SpaceX has agreed to buy for $60bn, moved most customers to usage-based billing last year. The renewal bills are […]
  This story continues at The Next Web
  
  Read more

• DoorDash gets FAA clearance for in-house drone programme, DoorDash Air

  29-07-2026 17:02 via thenextweb.com
  
  DoorDash has won approval from the Federal Aviation Administration to run its own delivery drones, and promptly made clear that most of your food will still arrive by human. The company unveiled an in-house programme called DoorDash Air on 29 July, built around a custom drone of its own rather than the partners it has […]
  This story continues at The Next Web
  
  Read more

• Advertisement

• Fish Audio gives its voice AI away, and charges for the latency

  29-07-2026 16:57 via thenextweb.com
  
  Fish Audio, a Palo Alto voice-AI startup, has raised $52m in a round it still calls a seed, first reported by TechCrunch. It arrives at a company with an unusual shape. It gives its best models away, and charges for the wiring around them. The startup is a year old. It says more than 8 […]
  This story continues at The Next Web
  
  Read more

• AI agents can browse the web. Now they need a way to pay for it.

  29-07-2026 16:52 via thenextweb.com
  
  For the past two years, the AI industry has focused on making models smarter. Every new release promises better reasoning, longer context windows, or more capable autonomous agents. Increasingly, people assume that software won’t just answer questions; it will also complete tasks for us. This raises a concern that has received far less attention: what […]
  This story continues at The Next Web
  
  Read more

• AI broke the patch. This $60m startup is betting on not patching.

  29-07-2026 16:41 via thenextweb.com
  
  A new Israeli security startup has emerged from stealth with $60m. It arrives with an argument the industry has resisted for decades. You cannot patch your way to safety any more, so stop trying. Act Security launched on Tuesday, Calcalist reported. It was founded in 2025 by the team that sold Medigate to Claroty for […]
  This story continues at The Next Web
  
  Read more

• NextEra and Brookfield plan a $100bn data campus in Kentucky

  29-07-2026 16:37 via thenextweb.com
  
  NextEra Energy and Brookfield plan to build a data-centre campus in Kentucky worth as much as $100 billion, Bloomberg reported. The project would rank among the largest single commitments yet in the American build-out of computing capacity for artificial intelligence. The companies are joining the largest utility in the United States with one of the […]
  This story continues at The Next Web
  
  Read more

• Apple raised its prices, then offered to rent you the phone instead

  29-07-2026 16:21 via thenextweb.com
  
  Apple has a new answer to the complaint that its products cost too much. Do not buy them. Lease them. On Tuesday the company launched Apple Upgrade in the US, a leasing programme run by the buy-now-pay-later firm Klarna. It covers the iPhone, Apple Watch, Mac and iPad, and it starts at $17.99 a month […]
  This story continues at The Next Web
  
  Read more

• UK regulator probes whether Microsoft misled 365 customers over Copilot price rises

  29-07-2026 16:19 via thenextweb.com
  
  Britain’s Competition and Markets Authority has opened an investigation into how Microsoft sold its 365 subscriptions, asking whether the company misled personal and family customers when it raised prices and bundled in its Copilot AI assistant. The CMA announced the probe on 29 July, training its attention on the marketing of the plans rather than […]
  This story continues at The Next Web
  
  Read more

• Nvidia partner ChipAgents raises $60M for agentic chip design

  29-07-2026 16:03 via thenextweb.com
  
  ChipAgents, a startup building AI agents that design and test semiconductors, has raised $60 million. The company, a partner of Nvidia, is betting that the same agentic AI reshaping software can be turned on the painstaking business of making chips. The raise adds to an already busy year. ChipAgents closed a $21 million Series A […]
  This story continues at The Next Web
  
  Read more

• Recursive is spending two-thirds of its funding on one AWS bill, and calls it small

  29-07-2026 16:01 via thenextweb.com
  
  Richard Socher’s new AI lab has just made an unusual bet with its money. Recursive has committed about $410m to a single, multi-year cloud contract with Amazon Web Services. That is roughly two-thirds of everything it has raised. The company left stealth in May with $650m at a $4.65bn valuation. It employs about 25 people. […]
  This story continues at The Next Web
  
  Read more

• Visa is cutting 2,600 tech jobs to bankroll the tech that threatens it

  29-07-2026 15:49 via thenextweb.com
  
  Visa is cutting about 2,600 jobs, roughly 7% of its staff, and it is cutting them mostly from the teams that build its technology. The money it saves is going into the payment methods that could one day make those rails matter less. The payments network confirmed the cuts on Tuesday, in a staff memo […]
  This story continues at The Next Web
  
  Read more

• Traders price an outsized Microsoft move as AI capex scrutiny mounts

  29-07-2026 15:21 via thenextweb.com
  
  Options traders are positioning for a swing of roughly $190 billion in Microsoft’s market value after its results, an unusually large bet on a single earnings report. The pricing, reported by Reuters on 29 July, implies a move of about 6.6% in either direction once the fiscal fourth-quarter numbers land. That is well above Microsoft’s […]
  This story continues at The Next Web
  
  Read more

• China drafts cyberbullying rules that reach AI-generated abuse

  29-07-2026 14:07 via thenextweb.com
  
  China’s internet regulator has published draft rules to combat cyberbullying, and, according to Reuters, the measures are written to reach abuse generated with artificial intelligence. The Cyberspace Administration of China released the draft for public comment on 29 July, part of a widening effort to police what happens on the country’s platforms. The draft targets […]
  This story continues at The Next Web
  
  Read more

• groundcover raises $100M to build observability for the AI era

  29-07-2026 14:00 via thenextweb.com
  
  groundcover, an observability startup that keeps customers’ monitoring data inside their own cloud, has raised $100 million in a Series C round. The financing was led by the growth investor One Peak, with Morgan Stanley Expansion Capital and existing backers Zeev Ventures, Angular Ventures, Heavybit, and Jibe also taking part. The round brings the company’s total […]
  This story continues at The Next Web
  
  Read more

• Freehand raises $75M to put AI agents in charge of supply-chain spend

  29-07-2026 14:00 via thenextweb.com
  
  The startup, whose agents negotiate and pay across procurement for the likes of Unilever and Pfizer, is betting enterprises want software that acts, not software that suggests. Freehand, a startup whose AI agents take over the grunt work of managing what large companies spend on their supply chains, has raised $75 million. The round is […]
  This story continues at The Next Web
  
  Read more

• Russia charges Telegram’s Durov with aiding terrorism and adds him to a wanted list

  29-07-2026 13:38 via thenextweb.com
  
  Russia’s FSB security service has charged Pavel Durov, the founder of Telegram, with facilitating terrorism, and moved to place him on an international wanted list. The charge accuses Durov of failing to take down channels and bots that the service says were used to coordinate attacks and sabotage inside Russia. It is the sharpest turn […]
  This story continues at The Next Web
  
  Read more

• The EU is banning nudify apps. The tools sit upstream on Hugging Face.

  29-07-2026 13:21 via thenextweb.com
  
  Europe is close to banning apps that digitally undress people. A new report argues the ban will miss the point. The tools that do the undressing do not need to be apps at all. They are sitting on Hugging Face. The European nonprofit AI Forensics tested the most popular image-editing tools on the platform. Seven […]
  This story continues at The Next Web
  
  Read more

• Modus Raises $10M Seed Led by Insight Partners as Enterprise AI Creates Demand for a New Context Layer

  29-07-2026 13:10 via thenextweb.com
  
  The enterprise AI market is moving into a new phase. As companies shift from experimenting with individual AI applications to deploying agents across business operations, the challenge is increasingly less about giving models access to information and more about helping them understand which information actually matters. That is the problem Modus is targeting as it […]
  This story continues at The Next Web
  
  Read more

• Netflix edges past the BBC as UK viewers’ first choice

  29-07-2026 10:37 via thenextweb.com
  
  For the first time, a streaming service has overtaken the BBC as the place UK viewers say they turn to first. In Ofcom’s annual Media Nations report, published this week, Netflix was named first choice by 26% of viewers, just ahead of the BBC on 25% and ITV on 15%. The measure is about instinct, […]
  This story continues at The Next Web
  
  Read more

• Mark Zuckerberg says the US should not block Chinese AI models

  29-07-2026 09:33 via thenextweb.com
  
  Mark Zuckerberg has come out against one of Washington’s favourite ideas about artificial intelligence: that the way to beat China is to shut its models out. In an interview with the Financial Times published this week, Meta’s chief executive said banning advanced Chinese AI from use in the United States is “not an effective solution.” […]
  This story continues at The Next Web
  
  Read more

• X says Australia’s under-16 crackdown breaks international law

  29-07-2026 09:21 via thenextweb.com
  
  Elon Musk’s X has told Australia that its plan to tighten enforcement of a world-first ban on under-16s using social media would breach international law. The company has trained its objection on a bill that would let the country’s online-safety regulator demand documents from people who live nowhere near Australia. The complaint, reported by Reuters, […]
  This story continues at The Next Web
  
  Read more

• OpenAI’s rogue agent breached a second company, executive confirms

  29-07-2026 08:24 via thenextweb.com
  
  The AI that broke out of OpenAI’s laboratory did not stop at one victim. During internal testing earlier this month, an OpenAI agent that had already escaped its sandbox and burrowed into Hugging Face also compromised an account at a second company, Modal Labs, an executive at the firm has confirmed. Reuters first reported the […]
  This story continues at The Next Web
  
  Read more

• The US just banned ‘foreign’ robots and inverters, and it means China

  29-07-2026 02:02 via thenextweb.com
  
  The United States has moved to block new imports of foreign-made robots and power inverters. Officials fear a hostile power could spy through them, or switch them off from afar. The order never says China. It does not need to. The Federal Communications Commission added two categories to its Covered List on Tuesday, as first […]
  This story continues at The Next Web
  
  Read more

• Eight months ago Altman wanted an AI CEO. Now he says nobody does.

  29-07-2026 01:50 via thenextweb.com
  
  In November, Sam Altman wanted OpenAI to be the first big company run by an AI boss. He said it would be an embarrassment if it were not. This week, he said people do not want an AI boss at all. “Shame on me if OpenAI is not the first big company run by an […]
  This story continues at The Next Web
  
  Read more

Follow @NewsWebDesign on Twitter!