📰Delete that📰 

TL;DR 💥A new report claims 26 of America's 35 largest media companies rolled back DEI commitments after President Trump's anti-DEI executive orders in early 2025. The authors argue this wasn't simply a change in HR policy it represents a broader retreat from public commitments to representation, inclusion and accountability across the media industry.

What happened? 📰 Free Press, a U.S. media advocacy organisation, has published a report titled COMPLICIT, analysing how major media and technology companies responded to the Trump administration's campaign against diversity, equity and inclusion (DEI).

According to the report, 26 of the 35 largest U.S. media companies either removed, scaled back or quietly abandoned DEI initiatives following Trump's executive orders in January 2025. Some companies including Amazon, Disney, Google, Meta and X had already begun retreating from diversity commitments shortly after the 2024 election.

The report argues these moves go far beyond internal workplace policies. It contends that many of the companies responsible for shaping news, entertainment and public discourse are simultaneously reducing their public commitments to representation while facing increasing political pressure from Washington.

Why it matters 🎯

Whether you agree with the report's conclusions or not, it captures something we've been tracking in this newsletter for months.

The conversation has shifted.

Companies are no longer asking "How do we strengthen our DEI work?"

They're asking "How much political risk are we willing to tolerate?"

What's striking isn't that some organisations have changed their policies—companies do that all the time. It's the speed and synchronisation with which many large firms moved after the political landscape changed.

That suggests DEI has become less of a long-term business strategy and more of a political weather vane.

You can read more here

TL;DR🇬🇧 The UK Just Scrapped Its Tech Department

TL;DR The UK Government has abolished the Department for Science, Innovation and Technology (DSIT), folding its responsibilities back into a larger business department just three years after creating it. Ministers argue technology is now "embedded across government." Critics worry the UK's fastest-growing sector has just lost the one department whose sole job was championing it. 🤔

What happened?

The UK Government has quietly abolished DSIT, the department created in 2023 to give technology, AI, science and innovation their own seat at the Cabinet table.

Its responsibilities now sit inside a new Department for Business, Innovation and Science, while digital policy returns to DCMS.

Nobody is suggesting technology suddenly matters less.

But symbolism matters.

Governments around the world are creating institutions, semiconductor strategies and sovereign technology funds whilst Britain has abloshed the department tasked with doing that

Why it matters 
When DSIT was created, the logic was simple:

Technology had become too important to be treated as one policy area among dozens.

That argument hasn't become weaker.

Quite the opposite.

Since then we've seen:

🤖 The explosion of generative AI

🌍 Competition over chips, compute and digital sovereignty

💰 Record investment into frontier AI

⚡ Technology become central to industrial policy and national security

Supporters argue tech is now embedded across government.

It always was (They use teams right)

The purpose of DSIT wasn't to own every technology decision.

It was to ensure someone woke up every morning thinking only about Britain's long-term technology competitiveness.

The bigger picture This isn't really about departmental names (Although we shudder to think of the cost rebranding everything, updating T&C's and all other things that come with a reorg).

It's about focus.

Technology policy will now compete alongside industrial strategy, trade, manufacturing, tariffs (yes tarrifs), employment relations and economic growth.

They're all important.

The question is whether technology remains a priority when it's no longer anyone's only priority.

Whitehall reorganisations are often sold on promises of greater efficiency and lower costs. They themsleves arent even bothering to make an argument that this saves, time, money or is more efficent so from the outside, it's difficult to identify what problem this actually solves.

Meanwhile, everyone involved from ministers to officials to industry is spending months rebuilding reporting lines, relationships and momentum instead of shipping policy.

One bright spot... with an asterisk There is one genuinely positive development.

Kanishka Narayan MP has become the UK's first Cabinet-level AI Minister. That's deserved. Few ministers understand the technology ecosystem better and have the support of their entire industry on this (We even like him, he was one of the few to actually come to our events) 

The irony? He now has a Cabinet seat...but no dedicated department.

It's a bit like being promoted to captain after someone has taken away your ship. 🚢

So yes People joke about how many Prime Ministers Britain has had. The UK's technology sector knows the feeling. Since 2016, we've had 17 Cabinet Secretaries responsible for technology in one form or another, more than 19 junior ministers with digital and AI briefs, and the person actually leading day-to-day tech policy has, on average, lasted little more than 8–10 months. So by that account we'll be back before Wimbledon next year to do it all again!

🧠So what?
£200bn to the economy and sits at the centre of almost every future growth strategy. Defence, Health, Education. Cyber. Quantum.

Semiconductors. Digital infrastructure.

These aren't niche policy areas anymore.

They're economic infrastructure. Just unlike water, energy, housing, transport etc this one doesn't have a department

Perhaps this reshuffle will prove the sceptics wrong.

We hope it does. Because while Whitehall reorganises itself, the rest of the world isn't waiting.

📚 Read More

www.colorintech.org

🚪Open up🚪

TL;DR Apple and Google have been ordered to remove AI “nudify” apps that create non-consensual sexual images, while the EU is forcing Google to open Android and search data to competitors. The message in both cases is simple: if you control the gates to the digital economy, you cannot only intervene when it suits your business model. 

What happened? San Francisco has ordered Apple and Google to remove dozens of apps capable of digitally “undressing” people in photographs.📸

These tools can turn an ordinary public image into non-consensual intimate content with a few clicks.

California law already criminalises knowingly facilitating the creation of this material, and victims can pursue third parties that help distribute or monetise it.

Yet both companies continued hosting some of the apps and processing their payments despite repeated warnings.

San Francisco City Attorney David Chiu said Apple and Google had likely earned millions of dollars in fees while the apps exploited women and girls.

Apple says it has removed several apps and is reviewing others.

Google says it has suspended hundreds of violating apps and restricted related searches.

Apparently, the “swift action” starts once the city attorney sends a letter. 📬

Why it matters

Deepfake pornography was once framed primarily as a threat to celebrities.

“Nudify” apps industrialise it.

Anyone with a photograph online can now be targeted:

📸 Students

👩🏾‍💼 Colleagues

🎨 Creators

💔 Former partners

🧒 Children and teenagers

The harm is not virtual simply because the image is fake.

Victims can experience harassment, reputational damage, blackmail and profound distress.

And these apps do not operate in some obscure corner of the internet.

They are distributed through trusted stores, take payments through mainstream platforms and benefit from the credibility of appearing beside legitimate products.

That makes Apple and Google more than neutral shop windows. They are distributors, payment processors and profit participants.

The bigger picture This arrives as regulators are challenging Google’s gatekeeping power from the opposite direction.

The European Commission has ordered Google to give rival AI assistants greater access to Android and share search data with competing search engines and AI services.😮

Under the changes, alternative assistants could eventually use voice activation and perform system-level tasks currently reserved largely for Google’s own Gemini services.

Google must begin sharing search data in January 2027, with the wider Android requirements taking effect in July 2027.

So Google is simultaneously being told to open the gate.

🗑️ Stop letting harmful applications stroll through it.

That is not contradictory.

It is what responsible gatekeeping looks like.

The problem is not that Apple and Google exercise control over their ecosystems.

It is that their control can appear incredibly strict when protecting their commercial interests and strangely reactive when protecting users.

So what?🧠 For years, technology platforms have presented themselves differently depending on the situation.

When criticised for harmful content, they are merely neutral intermediaries hosting millions of independent developers.

When defending their commissions and platform rules, they are trusted curators protecting users from dangerous software.

They cannot be both only when convenient.

If Apple and Google review apps, process payments, recommend downloads and collect fees, they also inherit responsibility for what those systems enable.

And when the product being sold is essentially automated sexual abuse, “we removed it after somebody reported it” is not a safety strategy.

It is moderation by scandal.😖

📚 Read More

🚨 TechCrunch: Apple and Google ordered to purge ‘nudify’ apps from App Stores

https://techcrunch.com/2026/07/17/apple-and-google-ordered-to-purge-nudify-apps-from-app-stores/

📱 CNET: EU Orders Google to Open Android to AI Rivals and to Share Search Data

https://www.cnet.com/tech/mobile/eu-dma-regulation-google-android-ai-search-data/

🇨🇳 The chinese are back🇨🇳

TL;DR Chinese companies have released another wave of powerful, cheaper and increasingly open AI models, prompting fresh declarations that America has been caught by surprise. Again. But China is no longer simply chasing US labs on performance. It is competing on price, openness, infrastructure and the rules governing AI worldwide. At some point, it stops being a surprise and starts becoming a strategy. 🛰️

What happened?

Chinese AI companies Moonshot AI and Alibaba have released new models—Kimi K3 and Qwen3.8—that they claim can compete with some of the most capable systems from OpenAI and Anthropic.

The response followed a now-familiar script:

📉 Technology stocks wobbled

😱 Commentators declared Silicon Valley shocked

🏁 Policymakers warned of an AI arms race

🛰️ Someone called it another “Sputnik moment”

DeepSeek, of course, was also described as a Sputnik moment when it rattled the industry last year.

America is beginning to accumulate Sputnik moments at quite an impressive rate.

The genuinely surprising part is that anyone remains surprised.

China has spent years investing heavily in AI talent, infrastructure and domestic alternatives to US technology. Its developers have also been operating under semiconductor restrictions that were supposed to slow their progress.

Instead, those constraints appear to have encouraged many Chinese labs to become more efficient, producing increasingly capable models at substantially lower prices.

Why it matters?

The AI competition is no longer simply about who produces the smartest model.

Chinese companies are increasingly competing on:

💰 Cost: offering capable models at lower prices

🔓 Openness: releasing model weights that businesses can download and customise

⚡ Efficiency: achieving strong results using fewer computing resources

🌍 Accessibility: appealing to countries and businesses priced out of premium US systems

That creates a difficult question for Western AI companies.

What happens when a model does 90 per cent of what the market leader can do, costs significantly less and can be run on infrastructure the customer controls?

For many businesses, the answer may be: that is more than good enough.

Some European and American companies are already experimenting with Chinese open models because they offer lower costs, more control and less dependence on a small group of US suppliers.

America may still lead at the absolute frontier.

The market does not always need the absolute frontier.

The bigger picture? China is also making a play for something more enduring than benchmark scores: the rules of the global AI economy.

At the World Artificial Intelligence Conference in Shanghai, China launched the World Artificial Intelligence Cooperation Organization, or WAICO, with support from 29 countries.

President Xi Jinping positioned China as a champion of open technology, international cooperation and wider access for developing nations.

China has promised thousands of AI training opportunities, regional cooperation centres and greater access to AI tools for countries across Africa, Asia and the wider Global South.

The pitch is fairly clear:

The US offers advanced proprietary models, export restrictions and access on its terms.

China offers cheaper open models, infrastructure partnerships and a seat at the governance table.

That framing is obviously self-serving. China’s own technology sector remains heavily regulated, censored and aligned with state priorities.

But geopolitics is rarely a competition between altruists.

It is a competition between offers.

And China is making one that many countries may find attractive.

Meanwhile, in Britain, many of the civil servants responsible for technology policy are probably still having coffee chats with their new colleagues after Whitehall's latest departmental reshuffle.

While Beijing is deciding who writes the rules for the AI age, Whitehall is still deciding who sits where.

The cyber catch
There is, however, an important downside to increasingly powerful open models.

The UK’s AI Security Institute says the cybersecurity gap between leading Chinese open-weight models and US frontier systems has narrowed dramatically—from an estimated six to ten months in 2025 to as little as four months today.

Models including China’s GLM-5.2 are becoming better at identifying vulnerabilities and conducting broader cyberattacks, while remaining significantly cheaper to operate.

Once an open model is released, its developer cannot withdraw it, limit access or prevent malicious users from modifying it.

That openness creates genuine benefits for research, competition and privacy.

It also means powerful cyber capabilities can spread far beyond the companies that created them.

The same feature that makes these models commercially attractive also makes them considerably harder to contain.

So what🧠? Western policymakers keep treating each Chinese breakthrough as an isolated shock.

But the pattern is now difficult to ignore.

China is simultaneously:

🤖 Closing the performance gap

💸 Undercutting Western providers on price

🔓 promoting open-weight models

🏗️ Building domestic chips and infrastructure

🌍 Courting the Global South

📜 Creating institutions to influence global AI governance

This is not another sudden arrival.

It is the result of a long-term industrial and geopolitical strategy unfolding in public.

The question is no longer whether China can produce competitive AI.

It can.

The question is whether the West can respond with something more substantial than surprise, stock-market panic and another Cold War metaphor.

Because after the third or fourth Sputnik moment, perhaps the problem is not the satellite.

Perhaps nobody was looking up. 🛰️

📚 Read More

🧠 The Verge: America needs to stop getting shocked by Chinese AI

https://www.theverge.com/ai-artificial-intelligence/968136/chinese-ai-models-another-sputnik-moment

🔐 Financial Times: Chinese AI models narrow cyber gap with US rivals

https://www.ft.com/content/21c10336-61bc-4743-82e3-acabfc7d540d

🌍 Türkiye Today: Shanghai AI summit ends with new global governance body

https://www.turkiyetoday.com/business/shanghai-ai-summit-ends-with-new-global-governance-body-3224311

🌐 Decode39: China uses AI to project global influence

https://decode39.com/15777/china-uses-ai-to-project-global-influence/

🇨🇳 Modern Diplomacy: Xi Jinping’s 2026 World AI Conference Speech

https://moderndiplomacy.eu/2026/07/19/xi-jinpings-2026-world-ai-conference-speech-what-it-means-for-china-and-the-future-of-ai

💰 M&A is back in fashion

TL;DR Two of the biggest deals of the year landed within hours of each other. Stripe and private equity giant Advent have reportedly made a $53bn bid for PayPal, while Uber has agreed a €13bn acquisition of Delivery Hero. Different industries, same trend: after years of building, tech's biggest players are buying growth instead.

What happened? It has been a busy week for corporate development teams.

First came reports that Stripe and Advent International had made a $53 billion bid for PayPal potentially the largest fintech acquisition in history.😮

If completed, it would also be one of Silicon Valley's most symbolic moments: a venture-backed startup acquiring an S&P 500 incumbent.

The deal would instantly give Stripe access to one of the world's largest payments businesses, while bringing Venmo into its ecosystem a consumer product Stripe has never really had. Its a huge fall from grace At its absolute peak in July 2021, PayPal was valued at a massive $360 billion, with its stock hitting an all-time high closing price of $305.88 per share More than 80% of that peak market value has completely evaporated with its mar cap now sitting in the the $40 billion to $50 billion range, putting it at a lower valuation than its former parent company, eBay and Private money valuations that have stripe worth ~$160bn💰

Then came Uber.

The ride-hailing giant agreed a €13 billion acquisition of Delivery Hero, further consolidating the global food delivery market following DoorDash's purchase of Deliveroo and Prosus' acquisition of Just Eat Takeaway.

For Uber, it's another step towards becoming what CEO Dara Khosrowshahi has long envisioned: the everything app🛫

Why it matters? These aren't just big acquisitions.

They're a sign that technology has entered a new phase.

For much of the past decade, growth came from building new products and expanding into new markets. Now, many of the biggest opportunities lie in buying scale instead.

Payments. Food delivery. Financial services. Consumer wallets.

They're all becoming markets dominated by fewer, much larger players. (Sounds a lot like monopoly)

The result? Bigger customer bases. More data. Lower operating costs. And increasingly difficult conditions for challengers trying to compete (Watch this space EU)🇪🇺

The bigger picture; There's another interesting trend hiding beneath the headlines.

Both deals are about ecosystems rather than products.

Stripe doesn't just process payments anymore.

It offers banking infrastructure, identity, billing, tax, fraud prevention and financial operations.

Adding PayPal and Venmo would move it even closer to becoming the operating system for internet commerce.

Uber is making a similar play.

It started with taxis.

Then food.

Then grocery delivery.

Then freight.

Now hotels trains and planes

And with Delivery Hero, it expands into dozens more markets while strengthening its position across Europe and the Middle East.

Everyone wants to become the platform customers never need to leave📲

🧠 So what? For years, the biggest question in tech was:

"What's the next startup?"

Increasingly, the better question might be:

"Who's buying it?"

As capital becomes more expensive and IPO markets remain selective, acquisitions are once again becoming the fastest route to growth.

That means founders should expect fewer competitors...

...and more potential acquirers.

Because we're entering another era where the largest technology companies aren't just competing on product.

They're competing on scale.

And sometimes, the quickest way to get bigger isn't to build.

It's to buy.

📚 Read More

💳 Axios: Stripe and Advent make $53bn bid for PayPal

https://www.axios.com/2026/07/15/paypal-bid-stripe-advent

🚗 Financial Times: Uber agrees €13bn deal to acquire Delivery Hero

https://www.ft.com/content/c15115ea-7386-4f44-9643-f95f58187514

📈 The tools behind the tech📉

📦Product📦

• How Anthropic runs large-scale code migrations with Claude Code
• Guide to data tools landscape for developers
  

📏Design📏 

• Clocks.dev 

👩🏿‍💻Code👩🏿‍💻

• Command Line Interface Guidelines
  

• The git history command deserves more attention
  
• Job queues are deceptively tricky
  

🏢The business behind the tech🏢

• Salary info is coming for jobs
• AI agents in enterprises
• Are You Biased Toward Job Candidates Who Reply Quickly?

Did somebody say... LGBTQ+ inclusion? 

Well, we did! We are collaborating with Just Eat Takeaway to celebrate the LGBTQ+ community through a panel discussion and workshops designed to help you challenge limiting thoughts so you can become your most fearless self.
We have an incredible panel lined up including: 

 MNEK: Music artist with over 3.8 billion streams and written for superstars like Beyoncé, Zara Larsson and Flo.

 Belton Flournoy: Managing Director of Protiviti and named Top 10 Inspirational Business Leaders at the British LGBT Awards 2020

 Malika: Female popstar who has written for superstars like Leigh-Anne Pinnock and Ayra Starr

The event will also feature workshops, giveaways and time to network with people from Just Eat and the Colorintech community.

Date: Thursday 6th August
Time: 15:30 - 18:30 (with time for networking) UK Time
Where: Central London

 Register to secure your free ticket here (spaces are limited and subject to availability) 

Whether you identify as LGBTQ+ or are an ally who believes in the power of inclusive spaces, you don't want to miss this event! 🌈

😃What we are consuming😃

🚘 Bolt is coming for Zipcar

📱 The Social media ban curbs

😮 Patreon stops asking nicely

📲Tiktok is investigated

😅FAANG life simulator