Today’s lead · thehackernews.com
North Korea-linked PolinRider campaign plants 108 malicious packages and extensions
The Hacker News reports that North Korean actors tied to Contagious Interview published 108 packages and browser extensions across npm, Packagist, Go modules, and Chrome, with payloads also triggered through developer tooling such as VS Code task files. The campaign has compromised public GitHub repositories and is delivering DEV#POPPER RAT and OmniStealer variants.
Top signals
3 more
Alibaba reportedly bans Claude Code inside the company
TechCrunch reports that Alibaba will ban employees from using Anthropic's Claude Code from July 10 after classifying it as high-risk software. The report says Anthropic already prohibits Chinese companies and their foreign-owned entities from using its models, while Alibaba is directing staff toward its own Qoder tool.
Wafer claims GLM 5.2 inference on AMD MI355X reaches about 80% of B200 throughput
Wafer says its engineers served GLM 5.2 on AMD MI355X at 2,626 tokens per second per node and 213 tokens per second single-stream, claiming about 80% of B200 throughput at more than 2x lower cost. The claim is presented as an AI inference benchmark rather than a general model release.
Midjourney asks Hollywood studios to disclose more of their own AI usage
In its copyright dispute with Disney, Universal, and Warner Bros., Midjourney is seeking broader discovery into how the studios use generative AI, including internal use for storyboarding or ideation and prompts used in Midjourney. A judge had previously limited disclosure to AI use that produced consumer-facing videos and images.
Tools & repos
5 selectedChromeDevTools/chrome-devtools-mcp
Chrome DevTools MCP exposes browser debugging context to coding agents, giving them a structured way to inspect pages, diagnose frontend behavior, and use DevTools signals during implementation.
alibaba/page-agent
Page Agent is a TypeScript in-page GUI agent for controlling web interfaces with natural language. It is useful for teams experimenting with browser agents that operate inside existing web apps rather than through external screenshots alone.
shadcn/improve
Improve is an agent skill that audits a codebase and writes implementation plans for cheaper agents or humans to execute. The useful pattern is separating high-intelligence planning from lower-cost implementation instead of letting one expensive model do the whole loop.
Skills Manager
Skills Manager is a native macOS app for discovering, installing, testing, and updating agent skills across Claude Code, Cursor, Codex, Gemini CLI, Qwen Code, Roo Code, Continue, OpenHands, and other coding agents. It helps teams standardize reusable skills instead of hand-copying them across agent-specific directories.
JuliusBrussee/caveman
Caveman is a Claude Code skill that claims to reduce token use by forcing terse, minimal communication. It is intentionally gimmicky, but the underlying problem is real: coding-agent teams need repeatable ways to cut context bloat and spend.
Blogs worth your time
1 reads
Simon Willison ships sqlite-utils 4.0rc2 with Claude Fable and cross-model review
Willison walks through using Claude Fable to find release-blocking sqlite-utils transaction bugs, then using GPT-5.5 to review Fable's work and catch more edge cases around db.query() and INSERT RETURNING. The post is useful because it shows a concrete agentic maintenance workflow: let the model inspect design risk, review generated docs first, and use a second frontier model as a practical code reviewer.
Funding & acquisitions
4 moves
Kapture CX
Kapture CX, described by Entrackr as an agentic AI platform, raised $10 million in a pre-Series B round led by Bajaj Finserv Ventures. The round stands out in a week where Indian AI startups and ecommerce startups each recorded six deals.
Data Science Wizards
Data Science Wizards raised $5 million in a pre-Series A round, with Inc42 listing the company under enterprise tech and horizontal SaaS. For Indian AI and data teams, it is another signal that B2B data tooling is still finding early-stage capital despite a slower funding week.
Clairva AI
Clairva AI raised $500,000 in a pre-seed round from Venture Catalysts. Inc42 categorizes the company as B2B AI infrastructure and development, making it more relevant than the week's consumer AI app rounds for teams building AI systems.
Crib App
AI-powered property management platform Crib App acquired rent financing startup CirclePe, according to Entrackr's weekly funding and acquisitions report. The deal pairs property operations software with embedded rent-financing capability.
Bengaluru radar
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