The AI Moat Just Moved Down the Stack. AMD's $5 Billion Anthropic Bet Is the Tell - Moonshot AI unveiled Kimi K3 at the World AI Conference in Shanghai: a 2.8-trillion-parameter, open-weight model that beat Anthropic's Claude Opus 4.8 and OpenAI's GPT-5.5 on coding and agentic benchmarks, at roughly 40% less cost than Opus. - Five days later, AMD announced it will invest up to $5 billion in Anthropic and sell it up to 2 gigawatts of Instinct MI450 GPUs — tens of billions of

Coinbase co-founder and CEO Brian Armstrong sat for a episode of Nikhil Kamath's People by WTF (Ep. 24, released July 16, 2026) — India's biggest business podcast, hosted by a founder who opens by admitting he has "never bought any crypto." Brian Armstrong: "I think it's fair to say at this point that Bitcoin has succeeded as a store of value, and I don't think it has become a medium of exchange."

This Week Overview (July 20 - July 24, 2026): • Meshy raised nearly $400M Series B at a $1.5B valuation, the largest round to date for a company built specifically on AI-powered 3D generation. • Augustus raised $180M Series B led by Tiger Global at a $1B valuation to build a federally chartered “Global Dollar Bank”. • Glow emerged from stealth with $180M Series A at a $1.2B valuation, building AI-native endpoint security. • Movement Labs filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy,

• Fireworks AI closed a $1.505 billion Series D at a $17.5 billion valuation. • Emergent, an Indian AI-coding startup barely a year old, raised a $130 million Series C led by Creaegis, becoming a unicorn at a $1.5 billion valuation. • Glacis Labs raised a $6.8 million seed for ZeroDelta, its multichain crypto clearinghouse, backed by Franklin Templeton and Coinbase Ventures. • Binance launched U.S. equities trading and previewed bStocks, tokenized U.S. stocks designed f

Humanity Protocol built its business on palm-scan biometrics and "proof of personhood" credentials, a Worldcoin-style bet that verifying humans, would become critical infrastructure. In June 2026 attackers compromised a developer's laptop via a phishing email and made off with private keys tied to a Humanity Foundation member, draining roughly $36 million from the project's treasury. The H token collapsed as much as 89% within a day.

This Week Overview (June 30 – July 3, 2026): Joulent secured $1.75 billion from National Grid Ventures, which takes a 35% stake, to build a 2.67-gigawatt gas power plant in West Texas ("Project Kilby"). Together AI closed an $800 million Series C led by Aramco Ventures at an $8.3 billion valuation. Venice AI raised its first-ever outside round: $65 million at a $1 billion valuation. Five federal regulators proposed KYC rules for stablecoin issuers under the GENIUS Act.