Apple News+ introduces the Emoji Game, a logic and word game inspired by emoji communication, joining other games like Crossword and Sudoku. Players solve phrases using emojis, aiming for completion in minimal moves. The game utilizes Genmoji, custom emojis created with Apple Intelligence, expanding emoji options. It's available to Apple News+ subscribers in the U.S. and Canada on iPhone, iPad, and Mac, and is designed in partnership with The Puzzle Society.

Mistral AI has updated its Le Chat chatbot with new features including a 'deep research' mode, native multilingual reasoning, and advanced image editing.

The 'deep research' mode allows Le Chat to act as a research assistant, gathering and synthesizing data from various sources.

Le Chat now supports multilingual reasoning in languages like French, Spanish, and Japanese, with the ability to code-switch between languages.

The update also introduces 'Projects,' which helps users organize chats, documents, and ideas into focused spaces.

Improved image editing capabilities have been added, allowing users to create and edit images with prompts.

Mistral is focusing on integrating Le Chat and its productivity suite into enterprise ecosystems, allowing companies to analyze internal data without uploading to the cloud.

Mark Zuckerberg and other Meta executives have settled a shareholder lawsuit seeking $8 billion over privacy violations related to the Cambridge Analytica scandal. The lawsuit alleged that executives intentionally violated a Federal Trade Commission agreement by sharing user data without consent. The details of the settlement were not disclosed.

Consumers, businesses, and governments are increasingly concerned about data privacy when using AI tools. Confident Security, a San Francisco-based startup, has emerged from stealth with $4.2 million in seed funding to address these concerns. Their product, CONFSEC, is an end-to-end encryption tool designed to wrap around foundational models, ensuring that prompts and metadata are not stored, seen, or used for AI training. Confident Security aims to serve as an intermediary vendor between AI vendors and their customers, offering a solution modeled after Apple's Private Cloud Compute architecture. The company's system anonymizes data by encrypting and routing it through services like Cloudflare or Fastly, and uses advanced encryption to control decryption conditions. Confident Security is currently in talks with banks, browsers, and search engines to integrate CONFSEC into their infrastructure stacks.

Chainalysis reports a record $2.17 billion in crypto thefts during the first half of 2025, surpassing all of 2024. A significant portion, $1.4 billion, is attributed to a breach at crypto exchange ByBit, with North Korean hackers funneling funds to the regime. This trend highlights North Korea's increasing reliance on crypto theft to evade sanctions and fund its nuclear weapons program, utilizing tactics like remote IT workers to infiltrate companies.

Spotify has broadened its premium audiobooks service, introducing two new plans that offer additional listening hours and extend access to family members. These plans are currently available to Spotify Premium users in select European countries, Australia, and New Zealand, following initial tests in Ireland and Canada. The new 'Audiobooks+' plan provides Premium subscribers with 15 extra listening hours per month. The 'Audiobooks+ for Plan Members' allows members on Premium Family and Duo plans to access 15 hours of monthly audiobook listening. Spotify plans to introduce similar plans to the U.S. later. The streaming service has a catalog of 375,000 audiobooks.

A significant AI deal between the U.S. and the United Arab Emirates (UAE) is reportedly on hold due to national security concerns. The deal involves the UAE purchasing billions of dollars worth of AI chips from Nvidia and other semiconductor companies.

The U.S. is concerned that these AI chips could potentially be smuggled to China. While the UAE and Saudi Arabia had assured the U.S. they had safeguards in place, chip smuggling remains a concern.

The Trump administration is also considering imposing chip export restrictions on Thailand and Malaysia to prevent potential smuggling. Malaysia has already introduced an export permit requirement for U.S. AI chips.