How Schneider Electric is using AI in call centers and manufacturing to complement employees' work and boost productivity, rather than to replace them (Patricia Cohen/New York Times)

SoftBank's PayPay, Japan's dominant payments app, says it will take a 70.2% stake in T&D Financial Life Insurance for $840M, expected to close in October 2027 (Mayumi Negishi/Bloomberg)

Kepple: seed-stage startup funding in Japan fell 42% YoY in 2025 to a 10-year low of $124M, as the Tokyo Stock Exchange moves to reduce small listings (Ami Yamada/Nikkei Asia)

Sources and docs detail defense tech startup Shield AI's struggles to overcome years of technical hitches and safety concerns with its V-BAT autonomous drone (David Jeans/Reuters)

Sources: Apollo and Blackstone finalized a $35B package for Anthropic to lease TPUs; Broadcom is backstopping payments on the debt's largest senior portions (Bloomberg)

Source: OpenAI and White House are discussing a government stake in the company, to seed something like the "Public Wealth Fund" that OpenAI outlined earlier (CNBC)

In an internal message, Satya Nadella rebuked an internal memo that said Microsoft needs to "make people addicted" to its new AI agent product called Scout (Aaron Holmes/The Information)