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AI Daily Brief — 18 July 2025

A regulatory-rebellion Friday. Meta refused to sign the EU GPAI Code of Practice, calling it “overreach”. The story landed against ICML workshops day 1, Mistral’s Voxtral push, OpenAI’s ChatGPT Agent still rippling, NVIDIA H20 reverberations and Stockholm’s Lovable closing Sweden’s largest-ever Series A.

Top stories

  • Meta refuses to sign the EU’s AI Code of Practice. Chief global affairs officer Joel Kaplan called it “overreach” introducing legal uncertainty beyond the AI Act’s scope. Two weeks before the August 2 GPAI deadline. Meta is the only major lab to break ranks — OpenAI signed; Microsoft signaled it would. via TechCrunch
  • Bloomberg: Meta calls EU AI Code “overreach”. Kaplan: “Europe is heading down the wrong path on AI”. Framed as a direct challenge to the European Commission’s voluntary compliance framework weeks before GPAI obligations kick in. via Bloomberg
  • Euronews: Meta rebuffs EU Code of Practice. The Code requires participants not to train on pirated material, to honor opt-outs from creators, and to provide regularly updated training-data documentation. Non-signers face heavier regulatory scrutiny once enforcement begins. via Euronews
  • Lovable becomes Sweden’s first AI unicorn. Stockholm vibe-coding platform closed a $200M Series A led by Accel at a $1.8B valuation, eight months after launch — Sweden’s largest-ever Series A. Investors included Creandum, Klarna’s Sebastian Siemiatkowski, ElevenLabs’ Mati Staniszewski and Synthesia’s Victor Riparbelli. 2.3M users, $75M ARR. via TechCrunch
  • ICML 2025 workshops day 1 in Vancouver. Day 1 of workshops at the Vancouver Convention Center. Notable Friday workshops: Assessing World Models, Tiny Titans on-device foundation models (TTODLer-FM), TokShop on tokenization, Multi-Agent Systems, and programmatic representations for agent learning. via ICML

Who shipped

Meta shipped a refusal. Lovable shipped a unicorn round. ICML shipped a workshop day.

Open-source pulse

Mistral’s Voxtral open-weight audio models (24B + 3B, Apache 2.0) continued spreading — “open audio for business” positioning carried into Friday with framing as the new SOTA open speech baseline beating Whisper large-v3, GPT-4o mini Transcribe and Gemini 2.5 Flash.

Money, infra & hardware

Continued fallout from Tuesday’s Trump-administration reversal allowing NVIDIA to resume H20 GPU sales to China. By Friday Jensen Huang was in Beijing meeting officials, and analysts were quantifying the multi-billion revenue swing for both NVIDIA and AMD. NVIDIA shares testing new highs above a $4T market cap.

Quiet corners

OpenAI’s Thursday ChatGPT Agent launch continued dominating Friday coverage — usage guides, safety analyses and developer write-ups published across TechCrunch, TechRadar and trade press. The Cognition-Windsurf-Google-OpenAI four-way coding-tools shakeup continued reshaping the agent IDE landscape.

By the numbers

  • Aug 2 / T-15 — EU AI Act GPAI obligations enforcement date / days remaining
  • $200M / $1.8B — Lovable Series A / valuation
  • 2.3M / $75M ARR — Lovable users / annual revenue
  • 8 months — Lovable time from launch to unicorn status
  • 1 — frontier lab refusing to sign the EU Code (Meta)

Compiled by AI Feed’s editor from verified web sources for 18 July 2025.