Good morning. Heartbreak abounds in China this week as new rules take effect to keep AI chatbots squarely in the friend zone.
Beijing policymakers have no problem with citizens using chatbots for light companionship, but the operative word is “light.” AI ‘bots may no longer encourage emotional reliance or enter virtual relationships with minors, according to the “Interim Measures for AI Anthropomorphic Interactive Services” issued in April. (Just rolls off the tongue, really.)
The regulation is believed to be the world’s first tackling the emotional link between man and artificially intelligent machine. It’s also leaving a trail of jilted virtual lovers in its wake—especially as Alibaba and ByteDance nerf their chatbots rather than draw the government’s ire.
Our relationship with AI in 2026: It’s complicated!
More tech news follows. —Andrew Nusca
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Stripe, Advent make a joint offer to acquire PayPal
Here’s a headline that will make you go hmm: Stripe and the private equity firm Advent have reportedly made a joint offer to acquire PayPal.
The pair is offering a bank-financed $60.50 per share, according to Reuters, valuing PayPal at more than $53 billion, or about a 28% premium to its price before the news broke.
(Stripe, founded by the Collison brothers in 2010 and still privately held after all these years, is valued at about $159 billion.)
What would a combined Stripe-PayPal look like? In a word: huge. It would be one of the world’s largest online payments companies, process about $3.7 trillion in transactions, and earn a combined $53 billion in annual revenue. With more transactions inside the house, so to speak, it would also likely see reduced fees paid out to Visa, Mastercard, et cetera.
According to the Reuters report, Stripe first approached PayPal in April without a response. I’m sure they’ve got the attention of CEO Enrique Lores and the board now, based on the 15% spike in PayPal’s share price Wednesday.
It’s been a tough slog for PayPal in recent years. During the lockdowns of the Covid-19 pandemic, the company—which still owns Venmo, by the way—rode a massive wave of e-commerce transactions to untold highs. But all that subsided by mid-2022.
Since then, PayPal has failed to keep up with stiff competition from an array of competitors large and small: Apple, Google, Shop, Affirm, Klarna, Block, and yes, Stripe. Longtime customer eBay’s 2018 transition to Adyen didn’t help.
Investors haven’t been keen: PayPal lost 40% of its market value in the trailing year. Lores, a 30-year HP veteran who took the top job in March, is in the early stages of a turnaround plan. —AN
Apple Intelligence is registered for use in Chinese iPhones
With China and the U.S. engaged in a ferocious AI arms race, a persistent question has been: How much latitude will American companies like Apple have in selling to Chinese customers?
The answer is beginning to take shape.
Chinese regulators said Wednesday that Apple’s embattled generative AI suite, Apple Intelligence, had been registered for use on iPhones sold in China, with a twist: The service will reportedly be powered, in part, by AI models developed by Chinese tech titans Alibaba and Baidu. (No sign of ByteDance or Tencent…yet.)
Six other companies received approval for their AI services alongside Apple: Huawei (Xiaoyi), Oppo (AndesGPT), Nubia (Doubao), Samsung (Galaxy), Vivo (BlueOS), and Xiaomi (Pengpai).
A date for an Apple Intelligence debut in China hasn’t yet been set, and it could be several months before it actually materializes. Still, Alibaba says the rollout will eventually go beyond iPhones to include iPads, Macs, and even Vision Pro headsets.
Apple has been waiting for this moment for quite some time. The company debuted Apple Intelligence in the U.S. in 2024 and in Europe the following year, but China requires all AI services to obtain a license prior to release. The nation’s stance on foreign AI tools certainly hasn’t become more accommodating in the time since.
At any rate, this regulatory approval is timely. Apple is readying its iPhone 18 family for release in September, and Greater China, as multinational corporations like to call it, accounts for upwards of 20% of Apple’s global revenue. —AN
Thinking Machines Lab debuts an AI model called Inkling
Something has finally emerged from Mira Murati’s lab.
The former OpenAI CTO’s startup, Thinking Machines, on Wednesday announced the release of its first AI model, dubbed Inkling.
It’s an open-weight model (meaning others can freely download it, run it on their own GPU clusters, and more easily modify it with their own data) with 975 billion parameters (meaning it’s more compact, ergo faster and cheaper to run, than competing models from, say, Anthropic and OpenAI). It's still not small enough though to run on a single GPU, so in most cases will need to be run on cloud infrastructure, not on device.
“Inkling reasons natively over text, images, and audio, and balances cost with performance through efficient and controllable thinking effort,” the company wrote in a blog post. “We trained it to be a broad, balanced foundation model: strong across many domains, flexible enough to adapt.”
Inkling “is not the strongest overall model available today,” its maker acknowledges. But its particular mix of qualities—it can reason over text, images, and audio—makes it a good base “for fine-tuning.”
In an unsigned manifesto of sorts published last week, the startup writes that centralized AI structures risk serving the provider over the people.
“We envision … an ecosystem of AIs raised in different places, disagreeing, competing, and learning from each other,” the document reads. “We believe in keeping the weirdness alive.” Right on. —AN
More tech
—Apple is reportedly on the hunt for server chip companies to acquire.
—China’s OnePlus will reportedly exit the U.S. and Europe, with India to come.
—Intel taps ASML and its next-gen High NA EUV machines for its Panther Lake laptop chips.
—Google will add third-party app stores within Google Play in the U.S. on July 22.
—Ode is the name of the new Anthropic-Blackstone-Hellman & Friedman AI services firm.
—Uber and Waymo battle in Washington. A lobbying dispute that pits Uber’s human-machine hybrid model vs. Waymo’s all-in robotaxi scheme.
—Hyundai auto workers go on partial strike. Hanging in the balance: wages, AI, and humanoid factory robots in South Korea.
—More than two dozen Meta veterans sue the company for allegedly using AI to unfairly lay off workers with disabilities and other protections.
—Elon Musk bought APR Energy, a gas turbine operator in Florida, for about $1 billion.
