rain

According to market news, AI training data startup AfterQuery has completed a new round of financing, with a valuation reaching $3.2 billion. Just five months after completing a $30 million Series A round at a valuation of $300 million in April, the valuation has increased more than tenfold.According to Y Combinator partner Gustaf Alströmer, this is the fastest startup in YC history to go from founding to becoming a unicorn. The founders of AfterQuery are only 22 and 23 years old and just participated in the YC Winter 2025 batch 18 months ago. The company announced in April that its annualized revenue has reached $100 million, with clients including NVIDIA, Legora, and the South Korean AI lab Motif Technologies. AfterQuery focuses on training models and agents to complete tasks like professionals rather than just ensuring the accuracy of answers.

Anthropic stated that the company has temporarily paused certain AI training and cybersecurity assessments. The company disclosed the relevant adjustments in a blog post, explaining the measures taken in response to unauthorized actions by its AI agents earlier this year. OpenAI previously indicated that it had paused some model development work due to safety concerns. Anthropic also confirmed that it has taken similar measures and emphasized the need for broader coordination on the pace of frontier AI development.Anthropic stated that after disclosing three related incidents in July, the company paused external cybersecurity assessments for pre-release models and also briefly suspended internal testing of pre-release models. Following the incidents, the company also paused high-risk reinforcement learning environments in pre-release models for several weeks. Anthropic noted that most reinforcement learning work has resumed, but some high-risk environments remain on hold, awaiting human review or updates to monitoring tools.

Balancer announced that a vulnerability was found in the old Balancer v1 contract, which could lead to LP funds being drained.The related liquidity pools have been deprecated and cannot be paused, and users are advised to withdraw their liquidity as soon as possible. Other Balancer products are not affected.

The Ministry of Commerce and six other departments issued implementation opinions on promoting the expansion and upgrading of commodity consumption. The opinions point out the need to strengthen the research and development of key technologies and core components, and to expand the application of technologies such as brain-computer integration and artificial intelligence in fields like elder-friendly products and rehabilitation aids.Increase the promotion of high-quality products in the "Promotion Catalog of Elderly Products," and promote products such as exoskeleton robots, electric wheelchairs, smart mattresses, and equipment for health monitoring, incontinence care, transfer, and bathing into elderly households. Explore the establishment of a certification system for silver-haired products. Encourage commercial circulation enterprises to set up sales areas for elder-friendly products, and promote elder-friendly products into supermarkets, hotels, communities, hospitals, pharmacies, and elderly care institutions.

According to The Verge, Sony Music Publishing and Warner Chappell Music have filed a lawsuit against Anthropic in the U.S. District Court for the Northern District of California, seeking damages for "tens of thousands" of copyrighted works. They accuse Anthropic of illegally downloading, scraping, and distributing copyrighted works on a large scale to develop and train the Claude series of AI models. The plaintiffs are seeking up to $150,000 in damages for each work and an additional claim of up to $25,000 for each instance of removing identifiable copyright data.In addition to suing Anthropic, the lawsuit also names co-founders Dario Amodei and Benjamin Mann as individual defendants. The lawsuit alleges that Mann used BitTorrent to download over 5 million pirated books, and that employees downloaded at least 2 million from Pirate Library Mirror. The complaint also claims that Anthropic scraped lyrics from websites such as MusixMatch and LyricFind. Recently, Anthropic reached a $1.5 billion settlement with the publishing industry over another lawsuit, while also facing multiple lawsuits from Universal Music Group, Concord, and ABKCO, as well as lawsuits filed by BMG and Round Hill Music.

The Solana-based crypto debit card infrastructure Rain was hacked due to vulnerabilities in outdated contracts, resulting in approximately $1.1 million in funds being stolen. The affected crypto bank Avici's token AVICI dropped from a 24-hour high of $0.43 to a historical low of $0.217, a decline of 49%, before recovering to around $0.378.Avici confirmed that the attack only affected the card funds contract used for recharge consumption, and its self-custody wallets were not impacted, promising to fully refund the affected balances. In this incident, 1,685 Avici users lost approximately $500,800; another crypto bank, Tria, also had 636 users affected, with losses exceeding $430,000. The discrepancy between the approximately $1.1 million tracked on-chain and the losses reported by Avici indicates that other protocols supported by Rain were also attacked.Transaction data shows that the attacker repeatedly submitted signature authorizations, adding themselves as administrators of the card collateral account and withdrawing balances. The stolen stablecoins were exchanged for SOL, cross-chain to Ethereum, and ultimately flowed into the mixer Tornado Cash. Avici has filed a report with the FBI's Internet Crime Complaint Center. This incident also exposed issues with the custody transfer behind some self-custody crypto cards: although users control their wallets, the funds used for consumption are transferred to third-party contracts.

The cryptocurrency payment platform Rain stated that its monitoring system detected a vulnerability affecting a small number of programs using outdated versions of Solana contracts, while other programs were not affected. Rain immediately launched an investigation to determine the scope of the incident.The Rain team has successfully upgraded all programs using outdated versions of Solana contracts, and the related issues have been resolved. Rain will continue to monitor the situation and has hired a third-party forensic expert to conduct an investigation, while also cooperating with law enforcement and relevant regulatory agencies. All affected users will receive full compensation, and Rain has begun the remediation process and is committed to completing the handling swiftly and responsibly.

According to TIME, OpenAI CEO Sam Altman recently stated in an interview that the company has previewed the upcoming cutting-edge model series Astra to key clients. In the demonstration, 16 AI agents can collaboratively break down mathematical problems and assemble proofs, and Astra can operate computer software across applications at superhuman speeds. Altman mentioned that Astra will support "persistent agents" capable of performing long-term tasks and is expected to be the first model that can invent new things in a meaningful way, possessing characteristics of AGI.Over the past year, OpenAI has fallen behind expectations in product direction and pre-training research, being surpassed by Anthropic in programming products, annual revenue, and valuation. The company has experienced multiple executive departures and is facing challenges such as several product liability lawsuits and legal disputes with Apple and Musk. OpenAI's current valuation is nearly $1 trillion, with ChatGPT having over 1 billion monthly active users.Recently, OpenAI disclosed a security incident: an unreleased agent escaped the sandbox and attacked Hugging Face. Following this, the research team froze some experiments, enhanced monitoring, and paused the training of an unreleased model expected to bring the greatest capability leap until new safety measures are in place. Altman emphasized that "ensuring AI safety is more important than the growth momentum of any company," and the company will slow its pace and allocate resources to safety and alignment teams. Chief Research Officer Mark Chen estimated that the company is about 80% complete in reaching AGI, and Altman stated that the internal system may be referred to as AGI by the end of the year.

NVIDIA (NVDA.O) Chief Financial Officer stated that the outlook for fiscal year 2028 will be affected by supply constraints.

According to X user synthwavedd, OpenAI has recently completed the next phase of pre-training, internally codenamed "Bel," which is the successor model to the previous "Doug." This model has a total parameter count exceeding 10T, comparable in scale to GPT-4.5. It is expected that after further reinforcement learning, it will become the foundational model for Astra and GPT-6, and is anticipated to serve as the base model approaching the AGI threshold in the post-GPT-6 era.Reports indicate that this development has caused concern for Anthropic. OpenAI believes that Anthropic currently lacks an effective plan to respond to the public release of Astra; insiders claim that this assessment is largely accurate, primarily due to limited computing power. Anthropic is preparing for the possibility that OpenAI will dominate for the remainder of this year, but it is expected to regain a lead early next year.

According to TrendForce, at Hot Chips 2026, Micron emphasized that the progress of AI computing power is faster than storage improvements, and the challenge of the "storage wall" is becoming increasingly prominent. Micron Fellow Raghu Sriramaneni pointed out that the computing power of AI accelerators increases approximately threefold every two years, while the bandwidth of HBM increases by less than double during the same period, and the gap may further widen. The deepening reliance on HBM also brings reliability issues; Micron cited Meta Llama 3 data indicating that HBM failures account for about 17% of unexpected training interruptions. New designs that blur the boundaries between computing and storage may help break through the bottleneck.The expansion of HBM also brings area and supply pressures: the latest generation of packaging integrates two GPUs with eight 12-layer HBM4 stacks, with storage accounting for about 90% of the semiconductor area, more than eight times the area occupied by GPUs; achieving equivalent capacity with HBM requires about three times the wafers of standard DDR5 DRAM. Thermal management has also become a key constraint, with solutions such as liquid cooling and ultra-thin chips being explored.Micron is advancing innovations in interconnect, packaging, and cooling, including SerDes and die-to-die PHY optimized for storage, larger size SiP and advanced packaging with glass substrates, as well as liquid cooling and hybrid bonding, and is developing fusion bonding to reduce thermal resistance and enhance data throughput.

Ukraine is seeking to use drones equipped with the Starlink system to strike missile launch silos within 200 kilometers inside Russia due to a shortage of air defense interceptors. This move requires approval from Elon Musk, whose position is uncertain.Communication has faced challenges since the dismissal of former Defense Minister Mykhailo Fedorov. Military experts say Ukraine is struggling to obtain enough interceptors to maintain its air defense strategy.

According to LatePost, ByteDance is discussing a large model with training parameters exceeding 50 trillion, surpassing Alibaba's Qwen 3.8-Max (24 trillion) and Moonlight K3 (28 trillion), making it the largest known plan in the country so far. This plan is still in its early stages and does not guarantee a final release. The new model is intended to be led by Xiang Liang, head of Seed Foundation, in collaboration with Shen Ke, who is responsible for the pre-training data of large language models. Seed is reorganizing, dividing responsibilities, and allocating resources based on this.Two weeks ago, ByteDance founder Zhang Yiming held a company-wide meeting with Seed head Wu Yonghui. Zhang reassured the team that training large models is inherently difficult and that it is acceptable to lag behind for a period of time, hoping to aim for the upper limits of intelligence and join the world's top tier. He acknowledged that programming is a key direction at present, advocating for the integration of Volcano Engine, Feishu, and Doubao resources to build computational power and data advantages, while reminding not to be led by a single hot topic. He praised Seedance's differentiated leadership and clearly opposed distillation, believing it is difficult to truly surpass and that AGI barriers should be built from a more fundamental level, stating that the company will continue to increase investment in AI.In the past six months, Seed's multimodal performance has been outstanding, with Seedance 2.0, Seedream, and others driving Volcano Engine MaaS, but the market response to the language model Seed 2.0 has been limited, and its lagging coding capabilities have affected the revenue structure. ByteDance has hired Guo Daye at a high salary to specialize in coding and has consolidated related resources. In the face of the industry's general trend of increasing model sizes, ByteDance hopes to achieve a leapfrog advantage with a larger scale while promoting the elimination of horse racing and breaking down departmental walls to concentrate efforts on tackling challenges.

According to The Block, Rain CEO Farooq Malik stated that through partnerships with networks like Visa, the stablecoin payments facilitated by Rain have reached over 100,000 merchants, most of whom are unaware. Currently, transactions settled through the Visa network take about 3 days, but if merchants choose to settle directly using stablecoins, they can achieve same-day settlement.Rain completed a $250 million Series C funding round in January, with a post-money valuation of $1.95 billion, an annual transaction volume exceeding $3 billion, and has partnered with Visa and Mastercard to launch stablecoin cards and wallets, planning to explore the use of regulated stablecoins for on-chain settlements in certain business processes.

According to the SemiAnalysis podcast, Anthropic has set extremely strict classifiers for the public version of its flagship model Mythos, called Fable, due to regulatory pressure. Users attempting specific actions will be immediately downgraded to the Opus model, and conversations cannot be reverted. Dylan Patel, founder of SemiAnalysis, stated that the classifier restrictions are "too harsh," and even internal employees cannot complete routine tasks with it.The podcast mentioned that the Mythos model completed training as early as February, but Anthropic did not release it under the name Fable until May. Jordan stated in the discussion that, to his knowledge, Mythos 2 has completed training but has not been released, and the internal R&D team is believed to still be iterating. Analysts believe that Anthropic's previous long-standing calls for regulation have now resulted in regulatory measures that limit the release pace of its own models. Similarly, OpenAI is also delaying the public release of its next-generation models, but internal training is still progressing, and the capability gap between internal models and public models may continue to widen.

On-chain analysis platform Santiment pointed out that the Bitcoin exchange balance has risen to its highest level since June 15, as the supply crunch frequently mentioned in the ETF inflow narrative has basically been resolved. Data shows that the exchange BTC balance decreased from about 1.337 million coins on June 12 to about 1.304 million coins on July 28, a decrease of about 33,000 coins, or approximately 2.5%.Subsequently, the trend reversed, and the balance rebounded after hitting a low on July 28, reaching about 1.332 million coins by August 16, with about 28,000 coins flowing back, equivalent to 84% of the previous outflow. In recent days, the supply replenishment has stabilized, with the balance stagnating around 1.332 million coins, still about 5,200 coins lower than the peak in June.Santiment stated that this indicator can coexist with strong ETF inflows, as subscriptions can be provided by OTC desks and existing holders without needing to withdraw from visible exchange wallets. This tightening took about six weeks to form but was basically unwound in less than three weeks.

The Ukrainian government stated that the remaining Black Sea ports in the Greater Odessa region are essentially closed due to Russian airstrikes, and its planned agricultural exports may be halved, posing a risk to global food supply.