AI News: July 2, 2026

1. Cloudflare Moves to Make AI Crawlers Pay Per Use for Publisher Content

Cloudflare. The infrastructure company expanded its content-access controls, evolving Pay Per Crawl into a Pay Per Use model that lets publishers charge AI companies when their content generates value rather than merely when it is fetched, with options to allow access free, charge per crawl, or block. Starting September 15, Cloudflare’s defaults will block “mixed-use” crawlers from ad-bearing pages, forcing companies like Google to split bots into separate search and AI-training roles, and the changes apply to new customers, new sites, and all existing free-tier accounts. CEO Matthew Prince framed the move as necessary after bot traffic surpassed human internet traffic, with Ceramic.ai and You.com among the initial partners. Source

2. Venice AI Hits $1B Valuation With $65M Series A on Privacy Pitch

Venice AI. The privacy-focused platform, which routes queries across more than 200 models while encrypting input client-side and storing no data on its own systems, raised a $65 million Series A at a $1 billion valuation led by crypto firm Dragonfly, with Coinbase Ventures and North Island Ventures participating. It is the company’s first external raise, and Venice says it is already profitable with roughly $70 million in annualized revenue, 3 million active users, and 1.7 million daily API calls. Founded by crypto veteran Erik Voorhees, the startup hosts uncensored open-source models in its own data centers and will use the funds for GPU purchases and infrastructure. Source

3. Ashton Kutcher Leaves Sound Ventures to Start AI Infrastructure Fund

Sound Ventures. Investor and actor Ashton Kutcher is departing Sound Ventures, the firm he co-founded with Guy Oseary 11 years ago, to launch a new early-stage VC firm with Morgan Beller, formerly a general partner at NFX and co-lead of Meta’s Libra crypto project. The still-unnamed fund will focus on early-stage bets in AI infrastructure, energy, and deep tech, a return to seed investing as Sound Ventures drifted toward later-stage deals. Kutcher will remain an adviser to Sound Ventures, and Oseary and partner Effie Epstein will advise the new firm. Source

4. LeapXpert Raises $180M to Extend AI Into Governed Enterprise Messaging

LeapXpert. The governed-communications company raised a $180 million growth round led by Riverwood Capital to bring enterprise governance and AI to consumer messaging channels including WhatsApp, iMessage, Signal, and WeChat. Its platform captures and structures business conversations in real time for regulated sectors, and hundreds of financial-services, government, and Forbes Global 2000 firms use it daily. The funding will fuel expansion into Europe, Latin America, and Asia and deepen the company’s AI capabilities for turning chat into actionable, compliant data. Source

5. Higharc Raises $95M Series C to Scale AI for Homebuilding

Higharc. The homebuilding software company raised a $95 million Series C led by Insight Partners, with Wellington Management and existing backers including Fifth Wall, Spark Capital, and Lux Capital, bringing total funding past $170 million. Higharc generates homes as 3D spatial data so builders and suppliers can design, estimate, sell, and construct more efficiently, and it announced a new AI Estimating product alongside a partnership with US LBM, the largest private US lumber and building-materials distributor. The round pushes AI deeper into the physical construction supply chain. Source

6. Acti Raises $5.3M to Embed AI Agents in the Smartphone Keyboard

Acti. The startup launched an AI keyboard for iOS and Android that embeds agents directly into the typing interface, letting users invoke AI across email, messaging, and social apps without switching context, and closed a $5.3 million seed round led by BITKRAFT Ventures. Its “Skills” feature lets users build natural-language shortcuts, such as one-keystroke translation or meeting-link generation, and personal data stays on-device by default unless cloud processing is invoked. Founder and CEO Young Wang previously grew Baidu’s Facemoji Keyboard to 300 million daily users, and the product runs on Google’s Gemini models. Source

7. SpaceX Shows Investors a Slim AI Phone Prototype Running xAI Tech

SpaceX. The company demonstrated to investors a thin, smartphone-like prototype built around a Qualcomm Snapdragon chip and its own operating system, integrating AI from Elon Musk’s xAI as part of a broader “everything app” ambition modeled on Chinese super-apps. The device could reduce Musk’s reliance on Apple and Google, which currently host his xAI chatbot, and lands as OpenAI pursues its own AI-first hardware. SpaceX cautioned the project is in early development and may never ship. Source

8. Internet Pioneer Vint Cerf Retires, Warns Agent Economy Needs Standards

Google. Vint Cerf, the 83-year-old TCP/IP co-creator known as a father of the internet, is retiring from his longtime role as Google’s chief internet evangelist about a week after the announcement. Speaking at the Open Frontier conference, Cerf argued that the emerging agentic economy will require formal standards for agent-to-agent interaction, drawing a parallel to the protocol work that made the open internet durable. His departure closes a defining chapter in internet history just as AI agents raise fresh interoperability questions. Source

9. Meta Builds a Cloud Business to Rent Out Spare AI Compute

Meta. Following SpaceX’s playbook, Meta is standing up a cloud business to rent its excess GPU capacity, and potentially model access, to outside customers, aiming to offset AI infrastructure spending that has reached as much as $145 billion this year. The move implies Meta has provisioned more compute than its own model development currently consumes, and its stock rose about 10 percent on the news. SpaceX pioneered the model, reselling GPU capacity bought for xAI training and reportedly earning over $1 billion a month from Anthropic and hundreds of millions more from Google. Source

10. Stathera Raises $55M Series B for AI Data Center Timing Chips

Stathera. The Montreal-based chipmaker raised a $55 million Series B led by Maverick Silicon to scale its MEMS-based silicon timing components aimed at AI data center infrastructure. The technology targets the synchronization and power-efficiency demands of dense accelerator clusters, an increasingly critical bottleneck as training and inference workloads grow. The round adds to rising investor interest in the unglamorous hardware layer beneath the AI boom. Source