Nikhilesh De / CoinDesk:
Filing: the US SEC settles with Tron founder Justin Sun over a 2023 case that alleged securities fraud; Tron-affiliated company Rainberry will pay the $10M fine  —  Rainberry, a company affiliated with the Tron network, will pay a $10 million fine.  Charges against Sun will be dismissed.

Zeyi Yang / Wired:
Heavy Seedance 2.0 demand is straining ByteDance's compute capacity, creating a bottleneck that is causing the AI model to take hours to generate a single video  —  ByteDance's new Seedance 2.0 AI video model seemed unstoppable—until heavy demand strained the company's compute capacity and copyright complaints began piling up.

Maxwell Zeff / Wired:
Sources: OpenAI employees claim the DOD tested Microsoft's Azure version of OpenAI's models before OpenAI lifted its blanket ban on military use in January 2024  —  Sources allege the Defense Department experimented with Microsoft's version of OpenAI technology before the ChatGPT-maker lifted its prohibition on military applications.

Anna Washenko / Engadget:
The US Senate passed COPPA 2.0 again, which would create new protections for young users online; the bill now heads to the House, where it has struggled to pass  —  The measure for protecting children and teens' personal data could once more fail in the House.

New York Times:
A look at Seattle-based Cloverleaf, which signs deals with utility companies and secures land for AI companies' data center needs; the startup has raised $300M  —  Brian Janous, a former Microsoft executive, and his firm Cloverleaf have become modern-day land men, packaging electricity and land for data centers.