Microsoft has formed a new team called Xbox Labs to explore the recent wave of decompilation, recompilation, and AI-assisted game porting; Xbox CEO Asha Sharma says its mission is to let game makers, engineers, and scientists turn new ideas into things players and developers can experience.
Amazon says it will no longer use NDAs when negotiating data center deals with local governments, following a similar move by Microsoft earlier this year. The secrecy fueled community backlash against AI infrastructure, with hundreds of pause proposals or laws emerging from New York to San Francisco. TechCrunch’s Equity podcast also discusses why personal AI startups treat trust as the real product.
AWS explains how the international standard ISO/IEC 42005:2025 guides AI system impact assessments, including integrating it into existing enterprise risk, privacy and security impact assessment processes. The standard’s Annex D offers a streamlined process to avoid duplicate assessments, while Annex E provides standalone templates.
TrendForce released a monthly report based on its Data Center Tracker (covering nearly 2,000 facilities), with AWS adding the most MW this month, contributed largely by the Susquehanna campus accounting for nearly half; Google adjusted across three countries, led by 330 MW of new air permits in Omaha.
OpenAI disclosed a distillation theft campaign targeting its models' reasoning content: from July 24-25, more than 16,000 requests were made by over 4,000 users, involving more than 15,000 linked accounts. OpenAI said it shut them all down on July 28 and linked the core group to people associated with Moonshot AI (developer of the Kimi model), while noting these were attempted extractions.
Microsoft Research Asia – Singapore (MSRA – Singapore), which opened on July 24, 2025, is Microsoft's first research lab in Southeast Asia.
Steve Yegge announced he is shutting down Gas Town after spending thousands of dollars a month on coding agent subscriptions, admitting it was the only output. Databricks rolled out GPT-6 Astra to about 3,500 engineers; it clearly outperforms Opus 5 / Sol 5.6 on complex long-horizon tasks but raised total coding spend by about 60%, prompting a dedicated sub-budget. OpenAI released a framework for disclosing model misalignment incidents plus six case reports from the past six months.