What's up: Linda Yaccarino departs X; Nvidia hits $4 trillion market cap; there’s a riot over robots at Wimbledon.

Good morning. Publishers are more and more on the defensive against AI scraping tools—attempting to protect their websites from tech companies that hoover up content for new AI tools.

Media companies are stepping up their efforts, suing, forging licensing deals to be compensated for the use of their material, or both. Many asked nicely for AI bots to stop scraping. Now, they are working to block crawlers from their sites altogether, The Wall Street Journal’s Isabella Simonetti and Robert McMillan report.

Scraping activity has jumped 18% in the past year, according to Cloudflare, an internet services company.

“People who create intellectual property need to be protected or no one will make intellectual property anymore,” said Neil Vogel, the CEO of Dotdash Meredith, whose brands include People and Southern Living.

The media company has a content licensing deal with OpenAI and is working with Cloudflare to choke off what Vogel called “bad actors” who don’t want to compensate publishers.

Read the full story here. 

Linda Yaccarino stepped down as CEO of Elon Musk’s X. Yaccarino’s future at the company had been uncertain for months. Musk merged X with Grok chatbot maker xAI this spring, fusing two of his technology bets and making the social-media platform part of a broader AI-focused company, WSJ reports.

Her tenure was marred by her boss’s erratic behavior, which often made it harder to bring back the very advertising customers she was hired to woo. She was effectively demoted in X’s merger with xAI.

The Grok chatbot published a series of antisemitic posts. In a series of viral posts on X, Grok started to call itself “MechaHitler.” The chatbot suggested that an account called @Rad_Reflections was a person named Cindy Steinberg, who was celebrating the death of dozens of children who went missing at Camp Mystic in Texas because of her last name, WSJ reports.

After setback, tech firms renew push for federal AI regulation. After a proposed 10-year moratorium on state-level AI laws was stripped from an earlier version of the One Big Beautiful Bill Act, tech firms continue to push for federal AI regulation, which they say is critical to avoid a patchwork of state-by-state requirements, WSJ reports.

Microsoft touts $500 million in AI savings while slashing jobs. Bloomberg reports that during a presentation this week, Chief Commercial Officer Judson Althoff said AI tools are boosting productivity in everything from sales and customer service to software engineering, according to a person familiar with his remarks.

OpenAI to release a web browser in challenge to Google Chrome. OpenAI is close to releasing an AI-powered web browser that will challenge Alphabet's Google Chrome, three people familiar with the matter told Reuters. The browser is slated to launch in the coming weeks, those people said, and aims to use AI to fundamentally change how consumers browse the web.

Perplexity launches its own AI-powered web browser called Comet. At launch, Comet will be available first to subscribers of Perplexity’s $200-per-month Max plan, as well as a small group of invitees that signed up to a waitlist, TechCrunch reports.

Meta AI researcher warns of ‘metastatic cancer’ afflicting company culture. In a more than 2,000-word essay that has circulated inside Meta in recent days, research scientist Tijmen Blankevoort painted a bleak picture of cultural and organizational dysfunction inside the company that he argues has stymied its progress in AI, The Information reports.

Google’s unloved stock makes it a Big Tech bargain. Alphabet’s future has become so murky that analysts are starting to suggest the Google parent voluntarily break itself up. But a look under the hood shows surprising upside potential, WSJ’s Asa Fitch writes.

Nvidia hit a $4 trillion market cap, making it the first company to do so. The chipmaker is the first company to ever achieve this market value and is trading at the highest market cap ever recorded for a publicly traded company, beating out Apple’s previous record from December, CNBC reports.

Was that amazing video in your feed real, or AI? Meta, YouTube and TikTok are grasping for ways to protect users’ trust as their platforms fill with AI-generated photos and videos of events that never happened, The Wall Street. Journal reports. But their patchwork of imperfect tools and voluntary policies sometimes inadvertently punishes “real” content and leaves plenty of AI work unlabeled.

Sequoia investor Shaun Maguire’s anti-Mamdani posts set off a Silicon Valley storm. Maguire on Friday chimed in on the New York City mayoral candidate, a democratic socialist who is Muslim, calling Mamdani an “Islamist” who “comes from a culture that lies about everything.” He has spent the days since sparring with X posters and Silicon Valley types, WSJ reports.

Vie Ventures launches to bankroll autoimmune-disease biotechs. Two veteran life-sciences investors have launched Vie Ventures, which plans to fund biotechnology startups targeting autoimmune diseases and connect them with nonprofits that might accelerate their drug development, WSJ reports.

• The U.S. will charge a 50% tariff on Brazilian goods starting on Aug. 1, President Trump announced in a letter to the Latin American country’s government on Wednesday, citing legal action against its former President Jair Bolsonaro and U.S. tech firms as justification for the levies.
• America’s emergency-warning infrastructure still isn’t getting enough people out of harm’s way. Federal, state and local authorities share responsibility for alerting citizens that they are in danger. But despite continued technological advances, the country’s patchwork of digital and physical emergency-alert tools is often a step behind Mother Nature, with deadly consequences.
• Russia’s factories have begun churning out vast quantities of attack drones over the past year, producing a deadly fleet that is now taking to Ukrainian skies in record numbers almost daily.

The WSJ CIO Journal Team is Steven Rosenbush, Isabelle Bousquette, and Belle Lin.

The editor, Tom Loftus, can be reached at thomas.loftus@wsj.com.