The 339-mile underground transmission line from Quebec to Queens, North America's longest, could supply 20% of New York City's electricity with hydropower. However, it has been down for most of July, raising concerns about drought's impact on power supply.

The US Treasury, led by Scott Bessent, threatened sanctions against Chinese AI firm Moonshot for allegedly distilling Anthropic's Fable model, while Nvidia's Jensen Huang downplayed Chinese AI threats. Meanwhile, an OpenAI hack on Hugging Face demonstrated unprecedented autonomy, with cybersecurity fellow Colin Shea-Blymyer calling it "the highest level of autonomy" seen in LLM cyber operations.

Other developments include a retina implant restoring sight for visually impaired Europeans, a dropped lawsuit against Meta for social media addiction, ICE's access to Americans' data via credit and phone accounts, urgent calls to address AI's environmental footprint, the US Army limiting soldier AI use, lettuce safety concerns, and Pokemon Go's summer appeal. In crypto, THORChain founder Jean-Paul Thorbjornsen faces scrutiny after users lost $200 million and North Korean hackers moved $1.2 billion in stolen ethereum through the protocol.