Samwise Tech/AI/Robotics Newsletter
Wednesday, July 8, 2026
Agility Robotics to Go Public via $2.5B SPAC Merger as First Pure-Play Humanoid Stock
Agility Robotics agreed on July 7 to merge with SPAC Churchill Capital Corp XI in a deal valuing the humanoid robotics company at $2.5 billion, expected to raise more than $620 million in gross proceeds including roughly $200 million in PIPE financing led by Foxconn. The combined entity will trade under ticker AGLT, making Agility the first pure-play humanoid robotics company on public markets. Agility’s bipedal Digit robot has accumulated more than 65,000 operating hours across nine customer sites including GXO, Schaeffler, and Toyota Motor Manufacturing Canada, and the company has secured more than $300 million in multi-year orders for Digit v5.
Sources: Robotics & Automation News Share ↗ ✉︎ Email 💬 Text
Illinois Becomes First State to Mandate Annual Third-Party Audits of Frontier AI
Illinois Governor JB Pritzker signed SB 315, the Artificial Intelligence Safety Measures Act, on July 6, making the state the first to require mandatory annual third-party audits of frontier AI models from developers with more than $500 million in revenue. Covered companies must also publish explanations of catastrophic risks their products could pose and plans for addressing those risks. Critical safety incidents must be reported within 72 hours, or within 24 hours if they pose imminent risk of death or serious physical injury. Civil penalties run $1 million for a first violation and $3 million for subsequent ones. Illinois joins California and New York in regulating frontier AI.
Sources: Capitol News Illinois Share ↗ ✉︎ Email 💬 Text
SambaNova Raises $1B at $11B Valuation, Names JPMorgan as On-Premises AI Partner
SambaNova Systems raised $1 billion at an $11 billion valuation on July 8 in the first close of its Series F round led by General Atlantic, with additional investors including BlackRock, the Qatar Investment Authority, and Vista Equity Partners. The Palo Alto-based company, founded in 2017, completed the raise five months after a $350 million Series E and the announcement of its SN50 chip, due to ship in the second half of 2026. JPMorgan Chase simultaneously named SambaNova its inference-infrastructure partner for on-premises AI workloads. CEO Rodrigo Liang said proceeds will be used to scale operations against what he called an incredible wave of demand.
Sources: TechCrunch Share ↗ ✉︎ Email 💬 Text
Microsoft Shifts Excel and Word to Its Own MAI Models, Reducing Reliance on OpenAI
Microsoft has begun routing some user prompts in Excel and Word to its own in-house MAI models rather than third-party systems from OpenAI and Anthropic, Bloomberg reported on July 7. The company launched seven MAI models at its Build 2026 conference in June, including MAI-Thinking-1, a 35 billion active-parameter reasoning model. Microsoft still relies on OpenAI and Anthropic for other Office 365 features, but the move reflects a broader industry trend in which Amazon, Uber, Meta, and Accenture have also reduced reliance on expensive frontier model APIs. When reached for comment, Microsoft said it had nothing further to share.
Sources: TechCrunch Share ↗ ✉︎ Email 💬 Text
UN Holds First Global AI Governance Dialogue, Issues Four Safety Priorities With No Binding Deals
The United Nations held its first Global Dialogue on AI Governance in Geneva on July 6 and 7, convening all member states to address artificial intelligence as a unified body for the first time. Secretary-General Antonio Guterres set four priorities: common safety standards, human-rights red lines, capacity-building for developing nations, and environmental transparency for AI data centers, and called autonomous lethal weapons morally repugnant. The event, co-chaired by El Salvador and Estonia under a General Assembly mandate, produced no binding agreements; a second session is planned for New York in May 2027. A panel of 40 independent scientists warned that they cannot guarantee frontier AI will not cause catastrophic harm.
Discord AI Moderation Bug Wrongfully Bans More Than 8,000 Users Over Harmless Images
Discord acknowledged on July 7 that a bug in its AI moderation system had wrongfully banned more than 8,000 accounts since May after harmless images including spreadsheets, chessboards, game textures, and gray transparent backgrounds were misidentified as harmful content. An additional 200 users were banned over the July 4 weekend before Discord identified and patched the problem. The company said its automated safety system matches uploaded images against databases of known harmful material, but the bug bypassed an intended human-review step and immediately suspended affected accounts. Discord said all accounts are being restored and wrote on X: “We’re working on better safeguards so this can’t happen again.”
Sources: TechCrunch Share ↗ ✉︎ Email 💬 Text
Ex-Tesla Scientist Launches UMA to Build Europe’s First Homegrown Humanoid Robot
Remi Cadene, a former Tesla Autopilot and Optimus scientist who later led open-source robotics at Hugging Face, unveiled the Northstar humanoid robot at the Machina Summit on July 7 under his Paris-based startup UMA. Short for Universal Mechanical Assistant, UMA raised roughly $40 million in seed funding backed by Greycroft and Factorial, with advisers including Meta’s Yann LeCun and Hugging Face co-founder Thomas Wolf. Northstar targets manufacturing plants, logistics warehouses, and care settings, with Europe as its first market. Cadene said UMA is already in talks with 50 potential customers. The founding team draws from Tesla, Google DeepMind, and Hugging Face.
Sources: The Next Web Share ↗ ✉︎ Email 💬 Text
Tech Pulse
Top Frontier Models (SWE-bench Verified): Claude Mythos 5 (95.5%) | Claude Fable 5 (95.0%) | Claude Opus 4.8 (88.6%)
Top Open Source Models: MiniMax M2.5 (SWE-V 80.2%) | GLM-4.7 (SWE-V 73.8%) | Qwen 3 235B (GPQA 77.2%)
Top Small Models (15–50B): Gemini 3.1 Pro (GPQA 94.3%) | MAI-Thinking-1 (35B) | Mistral Large 3
Top Edge Models (0–15B): Gemini 3.5 Flash (SWE-V 78.8%) | ZAYA1-8B (Apache 2.0) | MAI-Code-1-Flash (5B)
AI Leaders: NVIDIA ($4.85T) | Alphabet ($4.31T) | Microsoft ($2.83T)
Robotics Leaders: Intuitive Surgical ($175B) | ABB Group (~$80B) | Fanuc (~$32B)
Curated by JD · samwise.agency
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