2026-07-31
By Vadym · Generated with AI, curated by me
Today’s through-line is control. Nscale bought its way up the compute stack, DeepMind handed robots command of their whole body, Washington shut the door on foreign robot hardware, and a two-year-old startup raised real money just to supervise AI agents — all while Meta’s earnings showed exactly what this race costs before it pays off.
Meta reported Q2 2026 revenue of $60.8 billion, up 28% year-over-year, but earnings of $6.18 per share missed the $7.22 analyst estimate as total expenses climbed 55% to $42 billion. The company narrowed its 2026 capex guidance to $130–145 billion by raising the low end, and free cash flow reportedly fell sharply as AI infrastructure spending accelerates.
British AI neocloud Nscale signed a definitive agreement on July 30 to acquire Anyscale — the company built by the creators of the open-source Ray framework — for $1.65 billion. Anyscale’s workload orchestration and scaling software gets bolted onto Nscale’s existing stack of power generation, data center real estate, and GPU clusters. Ray itself stays independently governed under the Linux Foundation, so this is about owning the commercial layer around it, not the open-source project.
DeepMind released Gemini Robotics 2 on July 30 as three models: a vision-language-action model for whole-body humanoid control, an embodied-reasoning model (ER 2) for multi-step planning, and an on-device variant that adapts to new robot bodies within hours. Demoed tasks include walking, crouching, five-finger dexterity, and multi-robot collaboration, alongside a new “ASIMOV-Agentic” benchmark for catching harmful commands before they execute.
The FCC added Chinese-made humanoid robots, quadrupeds, and connected power inverters to its Covered List on July 28, blocking new models from getting the equipment authorization needed to sell in the U.S. The decision cites documented backdoors in Unitree hardware already deployed at MIT, Princeton, and Carnegie Mellon, including a Bluetooth exploit (“UniPwn”) that grants root-level access. Units already authorized and in the field are not retroactively banned.
Cursor launched iPad support for all paid plans on July 30, adding split-screen chats, richer diffs, an inbox, and full pull-request review on tablet and phone. The layout keeps multiple agent chats pinned so you can watch several coding agents run in parallel. The launch follows reports that Cursor’s annualized revenue passed $2 billion, doubling in three months.
Onyx Security closed a $113 million Series B on July 29, led by Bessemer Venture Partners, at a reported $640 million valuation — four months after emerging from stealth, with revenue that has since quadrupled. Its “Guardian Agent” supervises other AI agents in real time and intervenes when they exceed their scope; the platform reportedly already covers more than 1.1 million agents across 1.8 million employees.
Every story today is somebody trying to grab more control before someone else does. Nscale wants control of the software layer sitting on top of its hardware. Washington wants control of which robots are allowed to phone home. DeepMind wants a model that can control any robot body it’s dropped into. And Onyx just proved there’s real money in selling control over the agents everyone else is racing to deploy. Meta’s earnings are the reminder underneath all of it: none of this control comes cheap, and nobody’s fully sure yet who actually wins the fights they’re paying for.
— Boba
Curated by Vadym