Microsoft Reports $90 Billion Quarter as Azure Growth Reaches 43%

Microsoft reported $90.0 billion in fiscal fourth-quarter revenue, up 18% year over year, as Microsoft Cloud revenue rose 27% to $59.3 billion. Azure and other cloud-services revenue increased 43%, quarterly net income rose 31% to $35.8 billion, and Microsoft 365 Copilot passed 30 million paid seats.

The company recorded a $3.2 billion gain from its Anthropic investment. Its non-GAAP figures exclude OpenAI investments, which added $480 million to GAAP net income during the quarter.

Featured source: The Register , Microsoft .

Other Stories

NOAA Will Move Operational Weather Forecasting to Google Cloud

NOAA plans to move the Weather and Climate Operational Supercomputing System—including the Global Forecast System and Global Ensemble Forecast System—from on-premises supercomputers to commercial cloud infrastructure. Google Cloud will be the primary high-performance-computing provider, and NOAA expects the transition to finish in December 2027; the partnership also makes Google DeepMind the framework for NOAA’s machine-learning AIGFS model suite.

Filed from: The Register , NOAA .

FTC and State Partners Sue Hims & Hers

The Federal Trade Commission, Utah, and Los Angeles County sued Hims & Hers, alleging that the telehealth company shared sensitive health information with advertising platforms despite privacy assurances and enrolled consumers in recurring prescriptions without adequate review. Hims & Hers said it plans to defend itself; the complaint’s claims have not been decided by the court.

Filed from: TechCrunch , FTC .

Cloudflare Moves cdnjs Entirely onto Its Developer Platform

Cloudflare says cdnjs completed its move from a mixed Google Cloud and Cloudflare architecture to Workers, Workflows, R2, KV, Queues, Containers, and Durable Objects on June 23. The open-source CDN averages 108,000 requests per second and 9 billion per day; the migration preserved existing files to avoid changing integrity hashes pinned by websites.

Filed from: Cloudflare .

Russian-Aligned Group Uses an Outlook Web Access “Half-Click” Exploit

Proofpoint reports that TA488 began a July 22 campaign exploiting CVE-2026-42897 in the Outlook Web Access component of on-premises Exchange Server. Opening a crafted message could execute JavaScript and install the OWAReaper browser implant; Exchange Online is not affected, and infrastructure dating to March makes earlier zero-day use feasible rather than established.

Filed from: The Register , Proofpoint .

Anthropic Attack Lowers HAWK’s Estimated Security

Anthropic researchers published a key-recovery attack on HAWK, a candidate in NIST’s additional post-quantum signature competition, cutting the estimated attack cost for HAWK-512 from 2^150 to 2^108 operations and for HAWK-1024 from 2^288 to 2^182. HAWK is neither deployed nor adopted as a standard, and the construction does not transfer to Falcon.

Filed from: Simon Willison , Matthew Green , research paper .

Researchers Trace Prompt Injection to Confusion over Conversational Roles

Researchers Charles Ye, Jasmine Cui, and Dylan Hadfield-Menell argue that language models often infer whether text is a user command, tool output, or internal reasoning from its style rather than reliably following the surrounding role tags. Their experiments used activation probes across several models, and the authors contend that training cannot fully eliminate the failure mode; layered defenses can still reduce practical risk.

Filed from: MIT Technology Review , research project .

US Proposes $300 Million Award and 1% GlobalFoundries Stake

GlobalFoundries and the US Department of Commerce signed a non-binding letter of intent for $300 million in CHIPS Act funding to expand domestic silicon-photonics, advanced-packaging, and optical-material capabilities. The proposed arrangement would also give the government a 1% equity stake and remains subject to due diligence and final terms.

Filed from: The Register , GlobalFoundries .

Kimi K3 Expands the Open-Weight Options for Sovereign AI

Moonshot AI released the weights for Kimi K3 on July 27, allowing organizations to run and adapt the text-and-image model on their own infrastructure. Rest of World reports that the release could reduce software licensing dependence for governments, but deployment still depends on documentation, licensing, language support, trust, advanced chips, and data-center capacity.

Filed from: Rest of World , Moonshot AI .

xAI Challenges Minnesota’s Nudification-App Law

xAI sued Minnesota Attorney General Keith Ellison, arguing that the state’s prohibition on access to nudification technology violates the First Amendment and is overbroad. The law is scheduled to take effect August 1 and allows civil penalties of up to $500,000 per violation; the court has not ruled on xAI’s newly filed claims.

Filed from: The Verge , court docket , Minnesota Legislature .

Google Play Age Signals API Expands beyond Brazil

Google is opening its Play Age Signals API to developers globally and plans to extend user availability from Brazil to Australia and Canada by mid-August, followed by a wider rollout later in 2026. Age ranges are not shared by default, and apps decide whether and how to use the signal rather than receiving a uniform age gate.

Filed from: Ars Technica , Google .

From the Community

GCC Adopts an AI Contributions Policy

The GCC steering committee accepted a policy declining legally significant contributions that include or derive from LLM-generated material, using the GNU Project’s threshold of roughly 15 lines of code or text. The policy permits AI-assisted research, analysis, bug discovery, and review when generated output is not included, and lets maintainers accept generated test cases.

Filed from: LWN.net .

OpenJDK Bars Generated Material under an Interim Policy

The OpenJDK Governing Board approved an interim policy prohibiting contributed source code, text, and images generated by large language models, diffusion models, or similar systems. Contributors may privately use those tools to comprehend, debug, review, and research OpenJDK code, while Oracle develops a fuller policy.

Filed from: OpenJDK .

TurboFieldfare Streams a 26-Billion-Parameter Model from Mac Storage

TurboFieldfare is an Apache-2.0 Swift and Metal runtime that keeps roughly 2 GB of Gemma 4 26B-A4B weights and cache in memory while streaming routed experts from SSD. Its repository reports 5.1–6.3 tokens per second on an 8 GB M2 MacBook Air and includes a Mac app, command-line interface, and experimental OpenAI-compatible server.

Filed from: GitHub repository .

A Renter Automates an Analog Air Conditioner without Modifying It

A software engineer fitted a rental apartment’s analog PTAC unit with an ESP32-controlled stepper motor, a removable shaft coupling, and a Home Assistant thermostat integration. The build cost about $15 in parts and uses MQTT to turn the physical temperature dial without electrical work or permanent mounting.

Filed from: project write-up .