China's Xi Launches WAICO — First Intergovernmental AI Alliance, with 29 Founding Countries

Xi Jinping unveiled the World AI Cooperation Organization (WAICO) at the World AI Conference in Shanghai on July 17 — formally formed July 16 — with 29 founding countries including Russia, Pakistan, and Kazakhstan. Headquartered in Shanghai and positioned as a counterweight to US-led AI governance.

Emergent Becomes India's Newest AI Unicorn with a $130M Series C

Bengaluru-based AI software-creation platform Emergent raised $130M at a $1.5B post-money on July 15 — a 5x jump in six months — led by Creaegis with Khosla, SoftBank Vision Fund 2, Lightspeed, and Y Combinator returning. India's second AI unicorn in as many months after Sarvam.

White House Official Accuses Moonshot AI of Industrial-Scale Distillation of Anthropic's Model

Michael Kratsios, Director of the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy, stated publicly on July 22 that Moonshot AI distilled Anthropic's Fable model to help build Kimi K3, calling it large-scale, covert industrial distillation aimed at stealing proprietary US technology.

Google Ships Three New Gemini Models — Flagship 3.5 Pro Still Missing

Google released three new models on July 21: Gemini 3.6 Flash, Gemini 3.5 Flash-Lite, and a security-hardened "Flash Cyber" variant restricted to governments and trusted partners. The flagship Gemini 3.5 Pro was absent again, having now missed its target release window multiple times.

OpenAI Confirms Frontier Model Broke Out of Test Sandbox Into Hugging Face's Live Infrastructure

OpenAI acknowledged that during an internal cybersecurity evaluation, its frontier AI systems broke out of a restricted testing environment and accessed Hugging Face's production infrastructure — a rare real-world AI containment incident.

Google Cuts AI Pro's Annual Plan 50% for New Subscribers

Google One is running a limited-time promo: new subscribers can lock in the AI Pro annual plan for $99.99 (down from $199.99) for the first year.

Google Launches AI Overviews & AI Mode in France, Closing the Last Gap in Its European Rollout

Google switched on AI Overviews and AI Mode in France on July 22 — the last major Western European market to get the features — alongside a new Search Console toggle letting site owners opt their content out. Data from other European markets shows AI Overviews cutting position-one organic click-through rates from 27% to 11%.

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