Tech News Digest for July 30, 2025
A roundup of today’s top stories, featuring Anthropic’s massive new funding round, the emergence of powerful open-source AI from China, and significant progress in the fields of quantum computing and autonomous systems.
Artificial Intelligence & Machine Learning
Anthropic Reportedly Raising $5B at a Staggering $170B Valuation
Generative AI company Anthropic, known for its AI assistant Claude, is reportedly in the process of closing a $5 billion funding round that would value the company at $170 billion. This new valuation would place Anthropic ahead of Elon Musk’s xAI, though still behind OpenAI. The round is said to be led by Iconiq Capital, with potential participation from the Qatar Investment Authority and Singapore’s GIC. This funding surge highlights the intense investor interest in the generative AI space and the escalating valuations of its key players.
Sources: Crunchbase News
Cognizant Launches AI Training Data Services
Cognizant has introduced new AI Training Data Services to assist enterprises in building, fine-tuning, and deploying AI models at scale. The service aims to address the critical need for high-quality, accurately annotated training data, which is often a bottleneck in developing machine learning models. It combines data engineering and AI training with deep industry knowledge to process multi-modal data for both generative and agentic AI systems.
Sources: Cognizant
US Government Appoints First Federal Chief AI Officer
The U.S. government has designated its first Federal Chief Artificial Intelligence Officer, a role taken on by Gregory Barbaccia, who is also the Federal Chief Information Officer. This move coincides with a new report from the Government Accountability Office (GAO) indicating that generative AI use cases in federal agencies have increased ninefold in the past year. The appointment and the GAO’s findings underscore the federal government’s increasing focus on adopting and managing artificial intelligence.
Sources: FedScoop
MIT Researchers Develop Efficient Algorithm for Symmetric Data in Machine Learning
Researchers at MIT have created a new, provably efficient method for machine learning with symmetric data. This development could enhance AI models used in fields like drug and materials discovery. The algorithm combines algebraic and geometric concepts to simplify and solve problems involving symmetric data, where an object’s fundamental structure remains the same under transformations like rotation.
Sources: MIT News
Robotics & Autonomous Vehicles
AiMOGA Humanoid Robot Autonomously Opens Car Door
AiMOGA Robotics has announced that its humanoid robot, Mornine, has successfully opened a car door autonomously in a Chery dealership. The robot utilizes onboard sensors, full-body motion control, and end-to-end reinforcement learning to perform the task without human intervention. This marks a significant milestone in the real-world application of embodied AI in commercial settings.
Sources: Laotian Times
Reliable Robotics to Assist US Air Force with Autonomy Architecture
The U.S. Air Force has partnered with flight automation startup Reliable Robotics to develop its Autonomy-Government Reference Architecture (A-GRA). This open standard architecture is designed to be adaptable and scalable for various autonomous and uncrewed aircraft systems. Reliable Robotics will provide its expertise in autonomous flight control systems to ensure compatibility with commercial UAS capabilities.
Sources: Aviation International News
Exail Secures Contract for 100 Inertial Navigation Systems for UUVs
Robotics and navigation specialist Exail has been awarded a contract to supply 100 Phins Compact inertial navigation systems (INS) to a US-based defense company for use in unmanned underwater vehicles (UUVs). These systems provide highly precise and resilient navigation, even in environments where external signals are disrupted. This contract marks a significant expansion for Exail into the U.S. market.
Sources: European Security & Defence
Generative AI
Muck Rack Launches ‘Generative Pulse’ to Manage Brand Visibility in AI
Muck Rack has released Generative Pulse, a new tool designed to help brands monitor and influence how they are portrayed in generative AI responses. The platform allows users to identify the sources that shape AI narratives, engage with key journalists and outlets, and measure the impact of their PR efforts on AI models like ChatGPT, Claude, and Gemini. This new service addresses the growing importance of “Generative Engine Optimization” for brand reputation.
Sources: GlobeNewswire
DevOps, Kubernetes, & Cloud Infrastructure
SUSE Named a Leader in Multicloud Container Platforms
SUSE has been recognized as a leader in “The Forrester Wave™: Multicloud Container Platforms, Q3 2025” for its SUSE Rancher Prime. The report highlights SUSE’s strengths in serverless, DevOps automation, and cost management. SUSE Rancher Prime is praised for its flexibility and composability, making it a good fit for enterprises managing cloud-native technologies across various environments.
Sources: GlobeNewswire
Quantum Computing
CERN Researchers Demonstrate First Antimatter Qubit
Physicists at CERN have successfully created and manipulated a qubit using a single antiproton. They were able to maintain the coherent spin oscillations of the antiproton for nearly a minute. While this breakthrough is not aimed at building an antimatter quantum computer, it opens up new possibilities for high-precision comparisons between matter and antimatter.
Sources: The Quantum Insider
D-Wave Announces Advanced Cryogenic Packaging Initiative
D-Wave Quantum Inc. has launched a new initiative focused on developing advanced cryogenic packaging for its quantum processors. This project aims to scale both gate model and annealing quantum computers by improving multichip packaging capabilities. The company is collaborating with NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory to leverage their expertise in superconducting interconnects.
Sources: InsideHPC
Software Engineering & Open-Source
New Open Source AI Model from China’s Z.ai Challenges Western Dominance
Beijing-based Zhipu AI (Z.ai) has released its new GLM 4.5 family of AI models, which the company claims outperform Anthropic’s Opus 4.0 on several benchmarks. The release of these powerful open-source models, along with others from China, suggests a shifting landscape in AI development, potentially challenging the lead of Western companies like OpenAI and Meta. The GLM-4.5 models are based on a Mixture of Experts (MoE) architecture and are designed for strong reasoning and coding capabilities.
Sources: Analytics India Magazine
Google Releases ‘LangExtract’, an Open-Source Information Extraction Library
Google has launched LangExtract, a new open-source Python library that uses large language models like Gemini to extract structured information from unstructured text. The library is designed to be lightweight and flexible, allowing developers to process large volumes of text with custom instructions while ensuring traceability. LangExtract aims to help unlock valuable data from documents such as medical reports and financial summaries.
Sources: Google for Developers
Lazarus Group Intensifies Cyber Espionage Using Malicious Open-Source Packages
A new report from Sonatype has revealed that the North Korea-backed hacking group Lazarus is increasingly embedding malware into open-source packages to conduct cyber espionage. Between January and July of this year, Sonatype detected and blocked 234 malicious packages linked to the group, which have potentially affected over 36,000 developers. The campaign leverages the trust in open-source repositories to infiltrate development pipelines and steal sensitive information.
Sources: SiliconANGLE