Good morning. It’s Thursday, July 30. Satya Nadella spent Microsoft’s earnings call telling Wall Street not to trust any single AI model, including the ones from OpenAI and Anthropic that Microsoft itself helped fund, while pitching Microsoft’s own homegrown alternative.
Today we are covering:
Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella pitches Microsoft’s own MAI models as a hedge against relying on OpenAI or Anthropic, after a $90 billion quarter
Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg says billions of people will have a personal AI agent within five years, even as Meta stock falls on weak guidance
The US bans Chinese made robots, from humanoids to robot vacuums, in one of the biggest tech security actions in years
Elon Musk settles a two year legal fight with advertisers over an alleged boycott of X
Google’s new Lyria 3.5 music model turns a rambling prompt into an oddly catchy, oddly bad song
Let’s dive in
Microsoft Is Openly Competing With OpenAI, Anthropic More Than Ever
By Julie Bort via TechCrunch
Microsoft posted $90 billion in quarterly revenue and $35.8 billion in net income, capping a fiscal year with $331.8 billion in revenue, and CEO Satya Nadella used the earnings call to openly pitch Microsoft’s own AI stack as an alternative to OpenAI and Anthropic, both of which Microsoft has invested in.
Nadella told Wall Street that enterprises should keep their AI “harness” separate from any single model so it stays swappable, pointing to the Hugging Face hack as proof: when a private frontier model refused to help investigate, engineers turned to the Chinese open source model Z.ai GLM 5.2 instead.
Microsoft is pushing its own MAI model family, including its first reasoning model MAI Thinking One, on its own Maya AI chips, and touted a new security model, MAI Cyber One Flash, that it says beats a larger rival model at half the cost.
𝕏: Microsoft $MSFT stated that Azure revenue surpassed $100 billion for the first time, while Azure growth accelerated to 43% YoY in FQ4, up from 40% in FQ3. - Beth Kindig (@Beth_Kindig)
Meta Q2 2026 Earnings: Zuckerberg Bets on Personal AI Agents
By Jay Peters via The Verge
Meta reported $60.8 billion in second quarter revenue, up 28% year over year and ahead of estimates, but adjusted earnings of $6.18 per share missed forecasts, partly due to a $2.4 billion legal charge, and shares fell after hours.
CEO Mark Zuckerberg told investors that within five years, “billions” of people will each have a personal AI agent handling health, finances, relationships and careers, calling it the foundation for Meta’s next wave of products and revenue.
Meta Business Agent is now live globally on WhatsApp and Messenger, with more than 1 million businesses using one weekly, while Meta guided to $130 to $145 billion in 2026 capital expenditures, largely for AI infrastructure.
𝕏: Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg: “We’re getting a lot of offers for compute at a significant premium over what we paid for it” - tae kim (@firstadopter)
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Who Wins and Who Loses After US Bans Foreign Robots?
By Jeremy Hsu via Ars Technica
The FCC’s new ban on Chinese made robots covers humanoids, quadrupeds, research platforms and many robot vacuums, and extends to some allied countries including Japan, South Korea and Germany, while carving out an exemption for the federal government itself.
Supporters like Standard Bots CEO Evan Beard call it one of the strongest tech security actions in modern US history, and companies including Agility Robotics, 1X Technologies, Figure AI and Boston Dynamics could benefit as domestic manufacturing scales up.
Critics, including analysts at Interact Analysis, warn the ban could backfire by cutting US startups and researchers off from affordable Chinese hardware like Unitree’s robots before comparable domestic alternatives exist, echoing how a prior ban on Chinese drones mostly pushed companies toward rebadged DJI technology.
Elon Musk Settles Legal Battle Over X Advert Boycott
By Dan Brunskill via Capital Brief
Elon Musk and X Corp settled a two year legal dispute with the World Federation of Advertisers over an alleged boycott of the platform following his 2022 takeover, with both sides saying in a joint statement they are putting the litigation behind them.
The terms of the settlement were not disclosed, and WFA reaffirmed its commitment to free speech while agreeing not to revive its Global Alliance for Responsible Media initiative or anything similar.
The case had sought billions of dollars in damages, with Musk alleging advertisers unlawfully coordinated to withhold ad spending from X, denting its revenue.
𝕏: These are the antitrust lawsuit accusing major brands and the World Federation of Advertisers of coordinating an illegal boycott after Elon bought Twitter. In March 2026 there was a Court dismissal on the broader case. And individual settlements with companies like Unilever and Twitch had been known. - AleXandra Merz (@TeslaBoomerMama)
Help! I Generated a Song With Google’s New Music Model and I Kind of Like It
By Mike Pearl via Gizmodo
Google rolled out its new music model, Lyria 3.5, through Google Flow Music, promising richer melodic structures, lyrics that stick closer to prompts, more expressive vocals and more user control over tempo and song length.
Testing the chatbot style interface, the author fed it a rambling, indirect description of a band’s style instead of naming it, and the tool turned that entire block of text into a full song, “The Cartographer’s Lung,” without any further prompting.
The result was an odd, unpolished song that reminded the author of the wilder, more unpredictable AI products of 2022, a contrast to the now common, polished AI generated music quietly filling streaming platforms today.
𝕏: Google shipped Lyria 3.5 into Flow Music with vocals that no longer sound like drowning robots and lyrics that scan. Five upgrades at once, from coherent verses to controllable instrumentation. Does this close the gap with human producers or merely narrow it? - Murtuza J Merchant (@murtuza_merc)
Trending in AI
Today’s big AI theme: AI’s financial reckoning is spreading, from a star hedge fund manager’s scramble for cash to Amazon’s own runaway internal AI bills.
Leopold Aschenbrenner’s Situational Awareness Seeks to Raise Capital After AI Rout
Amazon Finds Cases of AI Causing Runaway Spending on Tech Projects
ChatGPT, Roblox to Fall Under Strictest EU Rules for Platforms
OpenAI Triples GPT-5.6 Sol’s ARC Score by Preserving Its Memory
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