Technology

➚ MOVE FAST: Warning light. Chinese AI startup Manus is hiring staffers in Singapore, laying off employees on the mainland, and building up in the US, Bloomberg reported. It’s unclear if that will be enough to satisfy critics after Benchmark Capital’s investment drew scrutiny, but Manus has moved relatively fast to address naysayers.

➘ BREAK THINGS: Lights out. AI’s demand for energy will be a key factor in a capacity auction today for the largest US power grid, which covers an area that has the most data centers in the world. PJM Interconnection customers could see a 20% increase in costs this summer and new energy projects are lagging, causing a political backlash.

Replit, the AI-powered software creation platform, has formed a strategic partnership with Microsoft, offering businesses a new product to dabble in the “vibe coding” craze that has upended the tech industry.

The deal gives Replit, founded in 2016, a new conduit to Microsoft’s vast customer base, while the software giant can enable enterprise customers to build and deploy applications using natural language.

Microsoft pioneered AI-powered coding with its GitHub Copilot, which started out as a simple autocomplete feature. Replit and other startups are taking AI coding to its logical destination: The ability to create entire apps from simple written descriptions.

Replit users can create a web application in minutes by describing what they want to build. Amjad Masad, the company’s CEO, said some companies are using Replit to create simple, customized software at a fraction of what it would cost to build in-house or pay for via SaaS subscriptions.

It was almost two years ago that I wrote about the “rise of the novice coder,” focusing on Microsoft’s “low-code” solutions for development. The deal with Replit is symbolic of an insatiable shift to purely language-based processes for software development.

X CEO Linda Yaccarino announced Wednesday she is leaving the Elon Musk-owned social media platform. Yaccarino did not give a reason for her departure, which comes days after Grok, a chatbot run by X’s parent company, posted a litany of antisemitic and threatening messages on the site.

The company has not yet announced a replacement, though it is possible Musk will regain the top spot — he held a monthslong tenure as CEO after acquiring the company and currently serves as chief technology officer. The billionaire, however, would be taking the helm of a much different company than the first time around, and with a much more polarizing personal reputation.

His political rise and descent has put him in the crosshairs of both Democrats and Republicans. And Tesla, of which he is also CEO, has taken the brunt of the antagonism. With X, Musk won’t have to worry about a volatile share price or protestors torching the product (in the physical sense), but the app’s advertising business remains shaky. While companies could once do business with a seasoned advertising executive with whom many had existing relationships, Musk’s return would upend any semblance of formality Yaccarino contributed.

Sen. John Fetterman, (D) Pennsylvania, will join Semafor’s Solving the Youth Wellbeing Challenge at The Gallup Building in Washington, DC, on July 16 to address the growing crisis of depression, anxiety, and loneliness among young people.

Register now to join Semafor editors for a timely conversation on what’s fueling this crisis — and how we can begin to restore connection and resilience in the next generation.

July 16, 2025 | Washington, DC | RSVP

Silicon Valley has historically shied away from building technologies for slow, fragmented local governments. But with a staffing crisis and work overload, city and county administrators are among the customers who could use them the most.

New York-based startup Polimorphic, which is trying to fill that gap by creating chatbots and other AI-powered support services for local governments, has raised $18.6 million in Series A funding, the company exclusively told Semafor. Venture capital heavyweight General Catalyst led the round, with additional contributions from early stage investment firms M13 and Shine.

“Folks underestimate how critical a lot of local government and state agency work is,” Polimorphic co-founder and CEO Parth Shah told Semafor. “It’s not the public servant’s fault. They’re trying their best. They just haven’t had the right systems.”

The new round brings the startup’s total investment to $28 million. Polimorphic did not disclose its valuation, but PitchBook estimates it around $70 million. The funds will go towards hiring salespeople and support staff for Polimorphic’s expansion into new states, Shah said.

— Rachyl Jones

We are ramping up our investment in the Gulf: Matthew Martin — the veteran, stellar Bloomberg business and finance reporter — has joined Semafor as Saudi Arabia Bureau Chief and Global Head of Sovereign Wealth Fund Coverage.

Martin brings deep expertise and sharp analysis to unpack money flows, and dive into Gulf wealth funds’ roles in revamping their economies and projecting soft power internationally, including in Africa and elsewhere. He’ll lead our growing team in Riyadh, which is focused not just on the region but its impact on the world beyond — from South Africa to Silicon Valley, and from Lagos to London.

As global policymakers wrestle with how to best govern artificial intelligence, some tech CEOs gathered at the RAISE Summit honed in on one point: regulation is not the best path to achieving safe AI right now.

Paddy Srinivasan, CEO of cloud service provider DigitalOcean, said companies still need three to five years to innovate before governments should start cracking down on them. “At this point, we just need to let the free market ecosystem play itself out,” he told Reed during an on-stage interview. “Of course, there needs to be just enough regulation to make sure that we’re not going off the reservation, but I feel this is not the time to really clamp down.”

The EU’s AI Act is aimed at promoting safety and responsible development by categorizing systems by the level of risk they pose and applying rules to those categories. Requirements for general-purpose AI models like ChatGPT go into effect next month.

Illia Polosukhin, an ex-Google researcher who co-founded AI blockchain platform NEAR Protocol, said lawmakers can’t outrun the pace of AI development, so they end up trying to hit a moving target. “Regulation by government is probably not the right instrument” for AI safety, he said. Decentralization, encryption, and confidential computing — which protects data during processing — offer a more reliable security framework than what governments provide, like certifications and model reviews from external committees, he said.

— Rachyl Jones

There’s no cushion in law. Two attorneys for MyPillow CEO Mike Lindell have been fined $3,000 each for using AI to write legal filings that were riddled with errors and cited nonexistent cases, the Colorado Sun reported. The punishment sends a message that AI’s promise to automate work can turn into a nightmare when workers rely wholly on the technology without fact-checking.

New York University researchers have trained an AI system to track cells that have been damaged and don’t reproduce normally, according to a report published in the Nature Communications journal on Monday. Having more information about the effects of injury, age, and disease on human cells can help researchers understand how cancers and other illnesses form, potentially contributing to new therapies.

Using high-resolution imaging and machine learning, researchers tracked mice with chemically damaged cells replicating what aging looks like in humans. They found the AI could look at changes in the nucleus to determine where and how many cells are damaged in a particular area. They plan to recreate the experiment on humans and make the method free for other researchers to use, the school said.

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