🍏Apple's Big AI Board Meeting

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Happy Thursday! A wise old Silicon Valley saying goes: “It’s not who gets there first—it’s who gets there best.” That might as well be stitched onto Tim Cook’s office chair this week. Catch this story and more in this week’s top AI news.

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📣 TOP AI NEWS

Tim Cook Rallies Apple Troops on AI Mission

During Apple’s recent Q3 2025 earnings call, CEO Tim Cook announced plans to “significantly” ramp up AI investments. In a subsequent all-hands meeting, he reportedly reaffirmed that commitment, telling employees that “AI is ours to grab” and framing it as a top priority. While acknowledging Apple’s pattern of entering some markets later than competitors, Cook reminded staff of the company’s track record of redefining entire product categories — and made it clear that Apple aims to do the same with artificial intelligence (read more).

ElevenLabs Enters the AI Music Arena

ElevenLabs has launched Eleven Music, a new AI model that generates music with vocals, instrumentals, and full compositions in seconds. Marking its first major move beyond text-to-speech, the company says all outputs are cleared for nearly all commercial uses — including film, television, podcasts, social media, advertising, and gaming. The launch positions ElevenLabs in direct competition with AI music startups like Suno and Udio, both of which are already facing lawsuits over copyright concerns (see ElevenLabs’ announcement).

ChatGPT Surges Toward 700M Weekly Users

ChatGPT is on track to reach 700 million weekly active users this week, marking a major leap from 500 million at the end of March. According to OpenAI Vice President Nick Turley, the app has grown fourfold over the past year. A major driver of this growth was the upgraded image-generation feature launched in March, which led to over 700 million images created in just a few days. ChatGPT now also boasts 5 million paying business users, up from 3 million in June (see Turley’s announcement).

🛠️ THIS WEEK’S AI COMBO: 1 PROMPT + 1 TOOL

⚡️ MIND SPARK

👗 Too Perfect to Be Real? Vogue’s AI Controversy: Vogue’s July print issue sparked debate after featuring a Guess ad with an AI-generated model who appeared “overly” aligned with traditional beauty standards, accompanied by only a discreet AI label. Critics argue the shift threatens real-world opportunities for diverse human models, especially in commercial and e-commerce fashion (read more).

🏛️ Europe’s AI Rules Just Kicked In: As of August 2, 2025, the EU AI Act applies to general-purpose AI models with systemic risk. Companies like Google, Meta, and OpenAI have until August 2027 to comply, while new entrants must do so immediately. The staggered rollout began in 2024 and runs through 2026, with penalties of up to €35 million or 7% of global turnover. Despite industry pushback, the EU is holding firm on its timeline (see the EU’s official statement).

🔒 Anthropic Blocks OpenAI: Anthropic has blocked OpenAI’s access to its Claude models after discovering they were used for internal GPT-5 benchmarking, calling it a “direct violation” of its terms. OpenAI called the practice “industry standard” but confirmed it no longer has API access. Meanwhile, Anthropic just released its newest model, Claude Opus 4.1 (see Anthropic’s announcement).

🕵️‍♂️ AI Crawlers or Digital Trespassers? Cloudflare has accused AI search engine Perplexity of evading bot-blocking measures to access websites, even when explicitly disallowed via robots.txt. The company claims Perplexity used a stealthy browser setup mimicking Chrome to bypass restrictions — behavior it likened to tactics used by hackers (see Cloudfare’s statement).

🎥 Grok Imagine Goes "Spicy": Elon Musk’s xAI has launched Grok Imagine, a text-to-image and video generator now available to all SuperGrok and Premium+ subscribers on X’s iOS app. The tool includes a “spicy mode” that allows users to generate mature or explicit content, though some prompts are still blurred or moderated (see Musk’s post).

🛠️ Chip Wars Incoming? The Trump administration is preparing to announce new tariffs on semiconductors and chips as early as next week, potentially shaking up the already fragile global supply chain. This move follows significant federal investments through the 2022 CHIPs and Science Act, which aimed to reduce U.S. reliance on foreign chipmakers (read more).

🎨 AI ART

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