Technology

➚ MOVE FAST: Case law. A US court ruling that backed Anthropic’s use of purchased books to train AI models has significant implications for the industry. A judge found such instances are legal, comparing it to a human learning from copyrighted works — a meaningful conclusion as AI agents become more prevalent.

➘ BREAK THINGS: Burden of proof. Sam Altman revealed on X that Iyo CEO Jason Rugolo pitched a sale to OpenAI before suing over trademark infringement. Altman’s firm, which passed on the offer, had to scrap a blog post on its deal acquiring Jony Ive’s io startup after a judge’s order favored Rugolo.

Network giant Cisco is making a strategic investment in quantum networking firm Qunnect, Semafor has learned, the latest move in a broad effort to bolster the security of online communication and enable powerful quantum computers that may one day transform everything from medicine to materials science to fundamental physics.

The Brooklyn-based firm is raising a modest $10 million in new funding from existing backers, but the addition of Cisco as a strategic investor is part of an effort to deploy the technology commercially in the private sector and the defense industry.

Qunnect CEO Noel Goddard told Semafor the next step is to prove its technology can work in real-world use cases and begin ramping up sales within the next two years.

In the short term, Qunnect hopes to use its technology with existing fiber-optic networks to make them more secure.

The ability to create completely secure lines of communication with quantum principles is an incredible achievement. If those advances continue and it becomes possible to network vast clusters of quantum computers, the possibilities are vast.

Predicting what it might enable would be like a radio operator in World War I imagining that one day that same technology would lead to Uber and TikTok.

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The valuation that betting marketplace Polymarket is seeking in a funding round of more than $200 million led by Peter Thiel’s Founders Fund, Bloomberg reported. A Biden-era agency accused it of running an unregistered trading platform and blocked it from operating in the US, though Thiel’s on-again, off-again relationship with Trump — and mentorship to Vice President JD Vance — could support Polymarket’s return to the US.

Google DeepMind has a new breakthrough in biology called AlphaGenome. Less than a year ago, the company won a Nobel Prize in chemistry for its breakthrough in predicting protein folding, but it continues to use AI to unlock new secrets about how the human body works.

This time, the company found a way to decipher some of the mysteries of DNA. While we think we know a lot about DNA, the genome is just the tip of the iceberg. If DNA is the instruction set of the cells, it’s kind of like Ikea instructions. AlphaGenome gets us closer to something like a YouTube tutorial.

That could be a hugely valuable tool for scientists looking for cures to diseases by cutting down on research time, allowing them to do some of the work in a computer instead of in the lab. This MIT Tech Review article does a great job of capturing the significance of the new tool, which is free for non-commercial uses like academic research.

Semafor is partnering with RAISE Summit, one of the world’s leading AI events, gathering over 5,000 global innovators in Paris July 8-9. Semafor Tech Editor Reed Albergotti will moderate exclusive on-stage conversations with top executives, including Varun Mohan, Anton Osika, and Olivier Pomel.

This year’s edition of RAISE features SUPERNOVA by Cerebras, a premier spotlight on the future of AI computing, live from the Carrousel du Louvre. Register now for SUPERNOVA by Cerebras, hosted at RAISE Summit 2025 here.

July 8-9 | Paris, France | Learn More

We’re on the verge of another wave of wealth creation, and there’s a looming question: Who will benefit? When it comes to the public markets, only those who were heavily invested in a small handful of tech companies saw the kinds of gains that private market investors enjoyed. In fact, in the history of the stock market, the majority of companies lost value while 2% of companies drove 90% of the returns, as Marc Andreessen recently pointed out. Those companies have been tech companies (of their era).

But more recently, the biggest financial gains have come from private tech companies, which only a very small number of individuals are able to invest in. In the early stages, it’s difficult to get invited into exclusive funding rounds. In later stages, only wealthy individuals can invest. But a new company called Republic is testing a potential loophole, allowing people to bet on the value of privately held companies without actually buying shares. It is essentially a stablecoin but pegged to the secondary market price of private company stock.

This idea has obvious challenges. It allows gambling on a wildly volatile asset based on companies that don’t disclose their financials. And it is an easier and more liquid way of investing in private companies. It might even be possible to short them, which could end up driving down the price of shares on the secondary market. But there’s got to be a way for regular people to invest because the stock market is no longer sufficient.

“If we do get to a serious ceasefire, which I think is not impossible at this time, what is the big investment opportunity in the Middle East? It could be Iran.”

Admiral James Stavridis, the former Supreme Allied Commander of NATO, told Semafor’s Liz Hoffman he sees a “two-in-three” chance of a substantive end to hostilities in which Iran’s abandonment of its nuclear program could usher in an economic reopening of the country. “It could look like the reconstruction of the Korean peninsula after the end of the Korean War,” he said.