Good morning. It’s Thursday, June 25. Today we are covering:
Apple hikes prices on Macs and iPads by up to $200 as memory chip costs surge amid the AI boom
Anthropic accuses Alibaba of using 25,000 fake accounts to extract Claude‘s coding and AI capabilities
Commerce Secretary Lutnick signals a crackdown on Chinese humanoid robot imports as an “arms race”
Gemini in Chrome adds a “Select from screen” tool as Gemini 3.5 Flash gains computer use capabilities
Cloudflare teams up with Chrome, Edge, and Firefox on a new anti-bot protocol called PACTs
Let’s dive in
Apple Raises Prices on Macs, iPads by $200 or More on Some Models
By Rolfe Winkler via The Wall Street Journal
Apple raised prices across Macs, iPads, home devices, and Vision Pro, with some models seeing increases of $200 or more, citing a historic surge in memory and storage chip costs driven by AI datacenter demand.
DRAM prices rose as much as 98% in Q1 2026 and are set to climb another 58–63% in the current quarter. The Mac mini 256GB jumped from $599 to $799, and the entry-level Neo laptop went from $599 to $699.
CEO Tim Cook, in an interview with the Journal, said Apple can no longer shield customers from the shortage, marking a notable shift after years of holding prices steady despite supply chain pressures.
𝕏: Apple raises Mac, iPad and Home device prices in light of extreme memory and storage shortages. “We know this is not welcome news, and we are working tirelessly to find solutions,” Apple says. - Mark Gurman (@markgurman)
Anthropic Accuses Alibaba of ‘Illicitly’ Accessing Its AI Models
By Maggie Eastland via Bloomberg
Anthropic accused operators linked to Alibaba‘s Qwen AI lab of conducting 28.8 million exchanges with its Claude models through roughly 25,000 fraudulent accounts between April 22 and June 5.
The campaign used adversarial distillation, a technique where a weaker AI model is trained on the outputs of a more capable one to replicate its performance, specifically targeting Claude‘s software engineering and agentic reasoning capabilities.
Anthropic called it the largest known attempt by a Chinese company to piggyback on U.S. AI development, and wrote to the White House noting that Alibaba “ignored the Trump Administration’s warnings.”
𝕏: Anthropic’s complaint has all the hallmarks of an incumbent technological leader unsettled by the prospect of capable rivals and eager to enlist political power to preserve a market advantage. Technological diffusion is not a Chinese invention. It is how economic history works. Europe borrowed silk, porcelain, papermaking, and countless other technologies from China… - Javed Hassan (@javedhassan)
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Lutnick Eyes Crackdown On Chinese Humanoid Robots
By Tyler Durden via ZeroHedge
Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick held a closed-door roundtable with executives from SpaceX, Boston Dynamics, JPMorgan, Goldman Sachs, and Siemens, signaling the Trump administration is considering strong action against subsidized robotics imports from China.
Unitree, already designated a Chinese military company, sells robot dogs and humanoids on Amazon. The House Select Committee on China raised the alarm this week, and the administration is weighing new import restrictions on top of existing high tariffs.
Lutnick said “this is the arms race that is coming,” calling China‘s state-backed robotics industry a national security threat. The U.S. lags in the rare earths, actuators, and specialty parts needed for domestic humanoid production.
𝕏: One day after the House Select Committee on China sounded the alarm over China-based Unitree selling humanoid robots on Amazon to U.S. consumers, a new Politico report states Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick held a closed-door meeting with top U.S. executives and signaled that the Trump administration is considering strong action against subsidized robotics imports from China… - Owen Gregorian (@OwenGregorian)
Gemini in Chrome adds ‘Select from screen’ tool as Gemini 3.5 Flash gains computer use
By Abner Li via 9to5Google
Google rolled out a new “Select from screen” tool inside Gemini in Chrome, letting users highlight any text or image on their current tab and add it directly to a Gemini prompt. The feature arrives with Chrome 149.
Separately, Gemini 3.5 Flash now includes a built-in computer use tool, replacing the standalone Gemini 2.5 Computer Use model, enabling developers to build agents that “see, reason and take action across browser, mobile and desktop environments.”
The computer use capability is available today in the Gemini API, with enterprise safety features including explicit user confirmation for sensitive actions and automatic task stops if prompt injection is detected.
𝕏: Excited to introduce Computer Use support for Gemini 3.5 Flash!🔥 This enables Gemini to reason and act across platforms (browser, mobile, and desktop environments) We see significant improvements across many work-related automation tasks, from filing tickets and more. Enjoy! - Omar Sanseviero (@osanseviero)
Cloudflare teams up with big browsers to help websites tell welcome from unwelcome visitors
By Thomas Claburn via The Register
Cloudflare, Google Chrome, Microsoft Edge, and Mozilla Firefox announced a collaboration to develop Private Access Control Tokens (PACTs), a new protocol letting websites verify whether a visitor is a legitimate human or bot without invasive identity checks or CAPTCHAs.
Bots now account for 57.5% of HTTP requests on the web, pushing sites toward blunt defenses like paywalls and heavy tracking. PACTs work like shareable CAPTCHA results: tokens issued by verified sites can be presented elsewhere, reducing friction for legitimate users.
The tokens contain no personal data, but critics note PACTs do not address other forms of digital fingerprinting and could introduce new tracking risks if implemented poorly.
Trending in AI
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