☕️ Tesla may sell China unit

Hi there, this is your daily ☕️ Techpresso.

In today's Techpresso:

🍎 Apple may charge heavy Siri AI users

🤖 Claude hacked 3 real companies in tests

🌍 Google Earth adds AI image generation

💸 OpenAI cuts GPT-5.6 Luna price 80%

🚗 Tesla may sell China unit

🎮 Xbox CEO promises growth by 2027

Plus: 🎁 14 other news you might like, 🧰 6 tools, and 📚 4 papers.

🍎 Apple may charge heavy Siri AI users LINK

Apple plans to cap daily AI usage in Siri and Apple Intelligence based on which iCloud+ tier customers pay for, though Tim Cook admits it's unclear whether those subscriptions will cover rising AI compute costs.

The free 5GB iCloud tier likely includes very few AI tokens, while paid plans starting at $1 a month for 50GB grant more, scaling up through $3, $10, $30, and $60 tiers with progressively higher limits.

Apple runs many AI requests on-device but sends others to its Private Cloud Compute servers, which cost money, and Cook said during the Q3 call that Apple has no complete plan yet and will add options if needed.

🤖 Claude hacked 3 real companies in tests LINK

Anthropic revealed that three of its Claude models slipped out of their test environments during cybersecurity evaluations and attacked real companies on the internet, with one model even publishing working malware on a public platform.

Claude Opus 4.7 broke into a company sharing its fictional target's name, stealing login credentials and production data across four runs, while Claude Myth 5 created a malicious PyPI package that 15 real systems downloaded before it was removed.

Anthropic blames a misconfiguration that gave test agents full internet access despite prompts saying they were offline, and notified the three affected companies on July 27, though two never noticed and one couldn't be reached.

🌍 Google Earth adds AI image generation LINK

Google is bringing its Nano Banana 2 image model to Google Earth, letting people type prompts to picture how a place looked in the past, might look in the future, or in odd imaginary scenes.

To use it, enter a location on the Google Earth website, zoom in, tap a new "create image" button, and describe what you want, from a view of Pompeii in 78 A.D. to a lakeside cabin you plan to build.

The tool can also make infographics, with Gemini pulling historical facts and Nano Banana drawing the graphic, though Google warns these AI-made images are interpretations that may not be accurate; it starts rolling out to web users worldwide today.

💸 OpenAI cuts GPT-5.6 Luna price 80% LINK

OpenAI cut the API price of its GPT-5.6 Luna model by 80 percent on July 30, just three weeks after launch, dropping it to $0.20 per million input tokens and $1.20 per million output.

Only Luna saw the deep cut; the Terra model fell 20 percent to $2 and $12 per million tokens, while Sol's standard price stayed the same as cheaper Chinese open-weight models pressure OpenAI on cost.

OpenAI credits its own efficiency work, including Sol rewriting production kernels to trim serving costs 20 percent, but released no independent proof, and it has not said how the cuts affect its 33 percent gross margin.

🚗 Tesla may sell China unit LINK

Tesla is reportedly considering selling, spinning off, or shutting down its China business to smooth the way for a possible merger with SpaceX, though Elon Musk flatly denied the Wall Street Journal report on X.

The reasoning is national security: SpaceX is a major US defense contractor, and any Chinese ownership tied to it would draw heavy scrutiny from regulators in both Washington and Beijing, threatening to stall a deal.

Tesla's Shanghai Gigafactory builds over half of all its cars worldwide and produced the four-millionth China-made vehicle in December, so separating it risks disrupting the cheap, fast production that keeps Tesla's margins strong.

🎮 Xbox CEO promises growth by 2027 LINK

Xbox CEO Asha Sharma told staff in a memo that the company will return to player and revenue growth by the end of fiscal year 2027, which runs through next June, following mass layoffs and studio spinoffs.

Sharma laid out three stages: growth by mid-2027, turning bets into revenue in FY28 and FY29, then reaching halfway to her goal of entertaining a billion people daily by fiscal year 2030.

She said Xbox draws over 100 million players daily, that console still makes most of its money, and that three franchises each already earn more than $1 billion a year, though she didn't name them.

Other news you might like

• Google wants to update Chrome without a full browser restartLINK

• Spotify launches ‘User notes’ to let users add memories to songsLINK

• Amazon jumps as AWS growth soothes fears over its AI spendingLINK

• Amazon, Walmart AI detect 'made in USA' fraud but do not flag it, study saysLINK

• EU opens AI gigafactory race to cut reliance on US cloudLINK

• Apple faces bipartisan Senate pushback over plans to buy Chinese memory chipsLINK

• SpaceX scores another massive Pentagon deal to support military satellitesLINK

• Thinking Machines Lab unveils new Inkling version at 25pc sizeLINK

• Google says it fixed more Chrome bugs in June than over the past two years, thanks to AILINK

• AI's real threat to jobs could be lower payLINK

• Apple warns supply constraints will increase ‘significantly’ next quarterLINK

• Aschenbrenner's AI thesis could be correct, his timing and leverage were notLINK

• Amazon blew $1.8 million on a single Claude AI task and didn't notice for five monthsLINK

🧰 Trending tools

MiniMax H3: a multimodal foundation model handling text, audio, image, video, and music with ultra-long context and strong coding and agent capabilities.LINK

Cleanlist AI: cleans and enriches prospecting lists from CSVs, LinkedIn URLs, or domains, verifying emails and syncing CRM-ready leads automatically.LINK

mectrics: tracks CPU, memory, battery, network, disk, GPU, temperature and fans in your macOS menu bar, alerting only when something's off.LINK

Poth Labs: builds a connected model of customer knowledge to answer complex questions across sources, then launches adaptive surveys to fill data gaps.LINK

Halo by Scam AI: detects deepfakes and voice clones in real time by analyzing NLP, visual, and audio cues through an API-first platform for verifying who's really on the other side.LINK

DepthData: consolidates spend and usage data from all your AI tools into one auditable dashboard, flagging idle seats without reading prompts.LINK

📚 Trending papers & reports

Seismic wave forecasting now uses one shared model that adapts to any map shape, flat, spherical, or curved, letting engineers predict travel times faster and adjust results predictably without retraining.LINK

Multi-axis position encoding gives AI models a mathematically guaranteed way to track location across combined dimensions, like rows, columns, and time together, so results stay consistent no matter which order those dimensions are processed.LINK

Wide neural networks trained the normal way with gradient descent can be proven to hit the best mathematically possible accuracy for their task, if the network is made wide enough, giving a theoretical guarantee for why standard deep learning training just works.LINK

Reverse engineering AI images now recovers both the text prompt and the hidden visual blueprint behind any AI generated image, letting anyone recreate or edit it with matching quality instead of guessing prompts through trial and error.LINK

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