Morning Scan

Monday opens with platforms rearranging their money pipes and courts rearranging accountability. X killed its creator payout scheme (again), a judge took Meta to task in blunt terms, and Anthropic keeps making Claude Code the default dev teammate. Elsewhere: AI compute diplomacy reaches Armenia, and Russia's biggest retailer is bleeding inventory to drone strikes.

$5B — That's how much inventory Russia's Wildberries has lost to Ukrainian strikes, on top of $10B+ owed to Russian banks. (Wall Street Journal)

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Connected World

X shuts down revenue sharing on September 7. The replacement only pays for original content.

Ad-revenue splits for engagement-bait are out; paying only for "original content" is an admission the old model got gamed into oblivion. (The Next Web)

X replaces its revenue-sharing program with 'Original Content Rewards'

Buried in the fine print: X now also wants to monetize recycled handles — extracting value from accounts on the way out too. (The Verge)

Monopoly Round-Up: A Judge Condemns Facebook for Enabling Mass Sexual Exploitation of Kids

Stoller's read on a ruling that's unusually blunt for a federal court — and a reminder that antitrust cases keep surfacing the ugliest version of "engagement." (Matt Stoller)

Hong Kong educators want a social media ban for under-16s. The government says it has no plans to legislate.

Same fight as Australia and the EU, different venue — and the same government shrug so far. (The Next Web)

Rights groups warn Turkey's new cybersecurity law gives the presidency sweeping powers over online services (paywall)

A law with "cybersecurity" in the name that critics say is really a content-control lever. (Financial Times)

Machines & Minds

Armenia just opened the region's biggest AI factory. It exists because Washington signed a licence.

Compute is now foreign policy — this facility exists only because the US government said it could. (The Next Web)

Anthropic says auto mode will be the default in Claude Code, starting Aug. 14

Anthropic is betting its safety net is good enough to let agents run unsupervised by default — a meaningful trust escalation. (Simon Willison)

Claude Code Adds Cross-Session Messaging on macOS

Multiple coding agents now talk to each other directly — the orchestration layer for AI teams is assembling itself. (MacRumors)

5 Rules for Building AI Agents That Work in Production

Linear's internal agent playbook, from a $1.25B company that's actually shipped one at scale rather than just demoed it. (The Creator Economy)

Connected World

Data Insight: Russia's Wildberries owes $10B+ in loans and has lost up to $5B in inventory to Ukrainian attacks (paywall)

A retail giant squeezed by war and debt simultaneously — a rare case where the balance sheet and the battlefield are the same story. (WSJ)

Cape Town's Moment raises $22M Series A to scale African payments

Total funding now $55M — steady proof that African B2B fintech infrastructure is still attracting real capital. (FinTech Global)

iPhone 17 faces potential price hike before iPhone 18 Pro launch

Memory costs are getting passed to customers a month before the new flagship even arrives — a transparent move, if an unflattering one. (AppleInsider)

Connected World

Four died after a military exercise took GPS away over New Mexico

A sobering one to end on: a medevac crash tied to GPS jamming during a training exercise — a reminder that electronic warfare drills have real-world consequences. (Boing Boing)

This BMW-Backed Solar EV Makes More Energy Than It Uses

BMW and Clemson built a car that's a net energy exporter — still a prototype, but a direct rebuttal to "solar cars don't work." (BMWBLOG)