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AI Daily Brief — 4 August 2025

A charged Monday loading the fuse. Cloudflare picked a fight with Perplexity. Tencent shipped small open Hunyuans. Pre-GPT-5 anticipation peaked. Funding week opened — Anaconda + Polymarket + Clay.

Top stories

  • Cloudflare accuses Perplexity of stealth, undeclared crawlers. Research alleges Perplexity ignores robots.txt blocks and impersonates a generic Chrome-on-macOS user agent from rotating off-list IPs to scrape tens of thousands of domains. Cloudflare delisted Perplexity from verified bot program and added blocks. High-profile fight over AI crawling norms. via Cloudflare
  • TechCrunch covers Perplexity stealth-crawler accusations. Same-day writeup framing public escalation of AI-vs-publisher dispute over content scraping. Drove the day’s news cycle around AI content rights. via TechCrunch
  • Tencent open-sources four Hunyuan small models. 0.5B, 1.8B, 4B and 7B parameter scales with instruction-tuned versions targeting on-device and AI-agent use cases on phones and edge devices. Each model supports native 256K context window. via AI News
  • Pre-GPT-5 anticipation peaks. Coverage amplified late-July documentation leak (a “/docs/guides/gpt/” path that briefly appeared in Google’s index), with Reddit and outlets predicting GPT-5 launch within 1-2 days. Altman teased GPT-5 outputs on X. Model formally launches three days later on Aug 7. via TechieSupreme
  • Anaconda closes $150M Series C at ~$1.5B. Austin-based Python distribution underpinning enterprise data science — led by Insight Partners with Mubadala Capital. Earmarked for enterprise AI features, M&A, and global expansion. Disclosed >$150M ARR and profitability. via Anaconda

Who shipped

Cloudflare shipped a blog post and a delisting. Tencent shipped small Hunyuans. Anaconda, Polymarket and Clay shipped capital.

Open-source pulse

Anticipation builds for OpenAI’s first open-weight LLMs since GPT-2 — gpt-oss-120b and gpt-oss-20b ship next day. 120b approaches o4-mini reasoning while fitting single 80GB GPU; 20b runs in 16GB.

Money, infra & hardware

Polymarket raised $135.4M during week — decentralized prediction-market operator. Clay closed $100M Series C at $3.1B led by Alphabet’s CapitalG — AI-powered sales-automation underscored continued enterprise GTM-AI demand on eve of GPT-5. via Tech Startups

Quiet corners

Sirius XM hit with class-action AI-discrimination lawsuit. Arshon Harper filed Title VII class action in U.S. District Court for E.D. Michigan alleging AI-powered applicant-screening tools produced systemic race-based hiring discrimination. One of first major AI hiring-tool discrimination suits filed under Trump administration’s deregulatory turn. Anthropic Claude Opus 4.1 lands tomorrow.

By the numbers

  • 4 / 256K — Tencent Hunyuan small models / context window
  • 0.5B / 1.8B / 4B / 7B — Hunyuan param sizes
  • $150M / ~$1.5B — Anaconda Series C / valuation
  • $100M / $3.1B — Clay Series C / valuation
  • $135.4M — Polymarket round

Compiled by AI Feed’s editor from verified web sources for 4 August 2025.