the daily brief

• Trump said he would declare the Strait of Hormuz US territory after "defeating" Iran; a senior White House official later said he was joking and hadn't discussed the idea with advisers — al jazeera
• Shipping traffic through the strait has fallen to just 17% of pre-conflict levels, with only 151 ships transiting in the past week; an ADNOC vessel was attacked Friday evening and two oil slicks appeared in Iranian waters — cnn
• A US carrier group is headed to the Middle East to replace the USS Lincoln — cnn
• More than 27 Houthi fighters were killed and 19 injured over three days of strikes on Yemen's Taiz province, according to Yemen's government-aligned forces — aa
• Ukrainian drones struck Russia's major Ust-Luga oil port on the Baltic Sea and destroyed drone relays and five command posts; Russia rejected ceasefire proposals and warned Ukrainians "you'll get freeze this winter" — rbc-ukraine
• Russia struck Kramatorsk with guided bombs, killing one and injuring 15; Ukraine has hit nearly a third of Russia's major oil refineries in two weeks and struck 240 Russian energy nodes in 13 days — rbc-ukraine
• France's Constitutional Council overturned a ban on social media for children under 15 — aa
• In China, AI adoption is displacing workers at a scale outpacing the US, and some Chinese courts have begun ruling such displacement unlawful — euronews

• Anthropic published a technical explainer on how Claude's text watermark works — anthropic
• OpenAI cut pricing on GPT-5.6 Luna substantially, and Anthropic priced Claude Opus 5 at roughly half of Fable 5, as both respond to pressure from cheaper Chinese rivals DeepSeek and Moonshot AI — tipranks
• The Riot Platforms–Anthropic compute lease at its Rockdale, Texas campus could reach $16.1 billion in total value, including two five-year extension options — aiweekly
• Analysts say the AI boom is entering a more consequential phase — a widening contest over chips, data centers, energy, autonomous systems and capital, beyond just model capability — aiweekly

• US stocks dipped Friday after July retail sales fell sharply, snapping the week's record run, though major indexes stayed near highs: the Dow rose 0.1% to 53,839.99, the Nasdaq gained 0.8% to 26,803.03, and the S&P 500 added 0.7% to 7,800 — eurasia business news
• Nu Holdings surged nearly 12% after a record Q2 in which quarterly net income topped $1 billion for the first time — yahoo finance
• Reddit jumped 10.4% after S&P Dow Jones Indices said it will join the S&P 500 before the opening bell on August 18 — yahoo finance
• Globant sank 12.6% after a disappointing Q2 earnings report — yahoo finance
• Overseas markets were mixed: a semiconductor-led rally in South Korea and gains in Japan were offset by declines in Hong Kong, mainland China, Australia and India — stl.news
• Türkiye's annual airport passenger traffic has surged from 55 million to nearly 400 million over 24 years, climbing from 18th to 7th globally — aa

• Stanford researchers found large numbers of immune cells from the blood enter the aging human brain, suggesting it is far less isolated from the rest of the body than long believed — sciencedaily
• Researchers identified a class of support cells called astrocytes that respond to damaged brain tissue, suggesting the adult brain may repair itself better than scientists once thought — sciencedaily
• Physicists built the first cyclic quantum heat engine, converting heat near absolute zero into useful work — sciencedaily
• Scientists detected a residual antineutrino "glow" from spent nuclear reactor fuel long after shutdown for the first time — sciencedaily
• A modeling study found a proposed constellation of giant orbital mirrors would cause severe light pollution — a single satellite could appear four magnitudes brighter than the full moon — sciencedaily
• Fenerbahçe beat Sturm Graz 1-0 (3-0 on aggregate) to reach the Champions League playoff round, setting up a tie with Lyon — aa

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