A web crawler is an automated program that discovers and visits web pages by following links. Search engines use crawlers to build indexes, while AI applications may use them to collect permitted public information for retrieval, monitoring, or analysis. The crawler requests a page, extracts links and metadata, schedules new URLs, and avoids revisiting the same content unnecessarily. Responsible crawling follows robots directives, rate limits, copyright rules, access restrictions, and site terms. Dynamic pages, duplicate URLs, traps, and constantly changing content make large crawls difficult. Collected material also requires provenance, security screening, and quality checks before it is used to train or ground an AI system.
Demis Hassabis is becoming Alphabet chief scientist as Koray Kavukcuoglu takes operational control of DeepMind and four Google veterans launch Discovery Loop.
Meta has launched Muse Code, a terminal coding agent powered by Muse Spark 1.2, targeting long-running software projects and established rivals Codex and Claude Code.
AI startups captured 53% of global venture funding in July, their lowest share since December, even as total investment reached $65 billion in a record month for mega-rounds.
More than 1,200 employees from leading AI companies are asking the U.S. government to help create international mechanisms that could slow automated AI development if capabilities begin advancing faster than society can evaluate or control.
Elon Musk says xAI plans to release Grok 4.6 around August 7 and follow it with the larger Grok 4.7 several weeks later, extending the company’s rapid model rollout.
Anthropic researchers used Claude Mythos Preview to develop stronger attacks on the HAWK post-quantum signature scheme and a reduced-round version of AES, demonstrating research-level cryptanalysis without threatening current production systems.
Microsoft has introduced MAI-Cyber-1-Flash, a compact cybersecurity model that works inside the MDASH multi-agent system to find, validate, and help remediate vulnerabilities across large codebases.
NVIDIA has formed a long-term partnership with Ilya Sutskever’s Safe Superintelligence, reportedly investing $5 billion and giving the secretive AI lab access to Vera Rubin systems that will expand its computing capacity tenfold.
Moonshot AI has released the full weights for Kimi K3 on Hugging Face, making its 2.8 trillion-parameter multimodal model available for independent deployment, research, and further development.
NVIDIA has formed the Open Secure AI Alliance with Microsoft, IBM, Palantir, CrowdStrike, and more than 35 other organizations to build open-source defenses for AI agents and software.