Tech News · 2026-07-28

AI Compute

Nvidia backs Ilya Sutskever's SSI, and won't say how much¹

Nvidia's own newsroom announced a "long-term strategic partnership" with Ilya Sutskever's Safe Superintelligence on July 27, giving the alignment-focused lab access to Nvidia's next-generation Vera Rubin platform to "increase its compute by an order of magnitude."¹ The release quotes Jensen Huang and Sutskever directly, and states no dollar figure and no valuation anywhere in its text.¹ Bloomberg, relayed by TechCrunch, puts the investment at about $5 billion. TechCrunch's own reporting only ventures that the check "stretches into multiple billions."² PitchBook data cited by TechCrunch puts SSI's post-money valuation at $32 billion, on $7 billion raised to date from investors including Andreessen Horowitz, Alphabet, Lightspeed Venture Partners, GV, and Sequoia Capital Partners.²

AI Policy

China's Commerce Ministry calls a US sanctions threat "AI hegemony"³

China's Ministry of Commerce said on July 27 that the actions "lack factual and legal grounds and constitute a typical form of AI hegemony," a statement China's own Xinhua wire carried and Bloomberg corroborated word for word the same day.³⁴ Bloomberg's account adds a further line: China "will take all necessary measures to firmly safeguard its legitimate rights and interests" against any action that harms its interests, a sentence that did not appear in the Xinhua dispatch.⁴ The rebuttal answers a threat Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent made five days earlier. He posted that firms conducting "covert, industrial-scale distillation attacks that cross the line into IP theft" from American AI models face "sanctions and Entity List designations."⁵ White House science and technology policy chief Michael Kratsios named that firm as Moonshot AI and added a separate export-control claim: that Moonshot "acquired Nvidia GB300-equipped servers and accessed additional units in Thailand."⁵ Neither government statement documents which weights or outputs changed hands.⁵ Unnamed experts TechCrunch cited flag a timeline problem of their own: Anthropic's Fable, the model Moonshot is accused of distilling, "only became publicly available July 1, 2026," weeks before Moonshot's own Kimi K3 shipped on July 27.⁵

Quantum Computing

D-Wave claims a 240-fold speedup for AT&T, the day it debuts on Nasdaq⁶

D-Wave and AT&T's joint release says a network-optimization task that used to take AT&T's engineers about an hour now finishes in under 15 seconds on D-Wave's quantum annealer, close to a 240-fold reduction.⁶ D-Wave CEO Alan Baratz and AT&T data science director Lucus Haugen are both quoted in the release, and the two companies plan to extend the annealer to outage detection, technician routing, and network build planning.⁶ The release does not name what classical method AT&T used before, or whether a tuned classical solver ran the same problem for comparison.⁶ The announcement landed on D-Wave's first day trading on Nasdaq under the ticker QBTS, after it transferred its listing from the NYSE, and the stock rose about 7 percent that day, lifting IonQ and Rigetti with it.⁷ Forbes contributor John Koetsier, writing the same day, called the 240-fold figure something that "sounds suspiciously like quantum advantage to me," then published without checking the missing baseline himself.⁷ D-Wave says more than 100 organizations across commercial, government, and research work now use its systems.⁷

Biotech

MapLight's schizophrenia drug hits its primary endpoint on one dose, misses on the other⁸

MapLight's Phase 2 ZEPHYR trial randomized 307 schizophrenia patients across 25 US sites to one of two doses of ML-007C-MA, a non-dopaminergic antipsychotic, or placebo.⁸ The twice-daily 210/3 mg dose met the trial's primary endpoint, change in PANSS total score from baseline at week five.⁸ It beat placebo by 4.5 points in the modified intent-to-treat population (Cohen's d 0.37, p=0.015), and by 6.0 points among patients who completed the full course (d 0.50, p=0.002).⁸ The once-daily 330/6 mg dose did not reach statistical significance on that same endpoint, a result MapLight's own release states plainly.⁸ Treatment-emergent adverse events hit 74.7 percent of patients on the working dose, against 48.1 percent on placebo, though MapLight reports no serious drug-related events and 19.9 percent all-cause discontinuation in both active arms.⁸ CEO Chris Kroeger said the results "show that ML-007C-MA delivered clinically meaningful antipsychotic efficacy alongside a favorable tolerability profile."⁸ MapLight shares closed Friday at $36.56, up 3.78 percent. By Monday's premarket session they traded at $16.00, down 56.25 percent from that close.⁹

ZEPHYR Phase 2 effect sizes by dose arm, from MapLight's own release.⁸
Endpoint	BID 210/3 mg	QD 330/6 mg
PANSS total, primary (mITT)	d 0.37, p=0.015	not significant
PANSS total, completers	d 0.50, p=0.002	not reported
CGI-S severity	d 0.48, p=0.002	not reported
PANSS Positive Marder Factor	d 0.39, p=0.012	not reported
Cognitive performance, impaired subgroup	d 0.51, p=0.041	not reported

Nvidia backs Ilya Sutskever's SSI, and won't say how much1

China's Commerce Ministry calls a US sanctions threat "AI hegemony"3

D-Wave claims a 240-fold speedup for AT&T, the day it debuts on Nasdaq6

MapLight's schizophrenia drug hits its primary endpoint on one dose, misses on the other8

Sources

Nvidia backs Ilya Sutskever's SSI, and won't say how much¹

China's Commerce Ministry calls a US sanctions threat "AI hegemony"³

D-Wave claims a 240-fold speedup for AT&T, the day it debuts on Nasdaq⁶

MapLight's schizophrenia drug hits its primary endpoint on one dose, misses on the other⁸