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The venture capital machine is running hot again. Nearly ninety new unicorn companies have been minted so far this year, with artificial intelligence driving much of the frenzy. Investors are pouring money into startups at a pace that's starting to feel familiar — for better or worse — to anyone who lived through the last boom cycle.
Shifting now to a story that touches on the growing tension between American and Chinese AI firms. Alibaba has banned its employees from using Anthropic's Claude Code, effective July tenth, after security researchers alleged the coding tool contained hidden logic designed to detect whether users were located in China or connected to Chinese AI labs. Alibaba has directed staff to switch to its own internal tool, and the episode signals just how fragile the trust between these two tech ecosystems has become.
On the hardware front, memory prices have made building or buying a capable PC genuinely painful lately, but there's a modest bright spot for gamers. The Acer Predator Helios Neo sixteen S is currently three hundred dollars off, landing at one thousand eight hundred ninety-nine dollars and ninety-nine cents — not cheap, but a meaningful discount for a machine carrying Nvidia's latest RTX fifty seventy Ti graphics.
That's your Tech Beat for today. Keep surfing. Tech Beat out.
