The Brief: PayPal’s silence, IBM’s worst day in 115 years

The Brief is new here: eight stories a day that moved tech but didn’t get one of our full treatments. What happened, who did the original reporting, one line on what we think it means. The links go to the people who did the work.

1. PayPal’s board lets the clock run. Day two of the $53 billion Stripe–Advent bid, first reported by Reuters via CNBC, and PayPal trades at $55.41, about 8 percent under the $60.50-a-share offer. The board hasn’t responded; Polymarket traders put an acquisition by end of 2027 at 82 percent, per TradingKey’s day-two roundup. The read: that gap is the price of everything the offer can’t promise, starting with regulators. PayPal reports earnings July 28, and silence until then is a negotiating position.

2. IBM had its worst day in 115 years. Shares fell 25 percent after the company warned that second-quarter results came in short, per Fortune. CEO Arvind Krishna: “We did not adapt and move quickly enough, and numerous large deals failed to close on the timelines we expected.” The read: analysts want this to be a story about AI eating enterprise budgets. Krishna’s own words describe an execution miss wearing a macro excuse. Full results land July 22.

3. ASML raised guidance and fell anyway. Second quarter: €9.3 billion in net sales, €2.9 billion net income, full-year forecast lifted to €43–45 billion. It was the company’s second raise this year, and still the shares dropped, CNBC reports. ASML is also planning a 30 percent expansion of low-NA EUV capacity for 2027. The read: when a monopoly raises twice in six months and still gets sold, the market’s argument isn’t with the quarter. It’s with 2027.

4. A frontier lab is building an Accenture. TechCrunch has the first real look at Ode, the $1.5 billion services venture backed by Anthropic, Blackstone, Hellman & Friedman and Goldman Sachs, now 100 engineers strong after absorbing Fractional AI. CEO Chris Taylor told TechCrunch it’s “pretty easy to imagine this as a trillion-dollar company someday if we execute well.” The read: for two years the labs’ pitch was that models would compress implementation work away. Somebody priced that claim and chose consultants.

5. Thinking Machines shipped its first open model, with a disclaimer. Inkling is a 975-billion-parameter mixture-of-experts system (roughly 41 billion active per task), open-weight, multimodal, and by the company’s own admission “not the strongest model available today, closed or open.” The claimed win is efficiency: matching Nvidia’s Nemotron 3 Ultra on coding at a third the tokens, a number nobody outside the lab has verified yet. The read: from Mira Murati’s shop, the candor is the strategy. The bet is that a model you can reshape beats a stronger one you can’t.

6. Anthropic wants a desk in every classroom. Claude for Teachers is free for verified US K-12 educators, ships with academic standards from all 50 states, and pilots in Detroit’s public schools next school year, Chalkbeat reports. Google already got Gemini adopted statewide in Utah. The read: free-for-teachers is the oldest platform play in edtech. Google Docs walked this exact road, and the district contracts came later.

7. Twelve countries say the FSB is in the routers. The fix is exploitable too. A joint advisory from the US and eleven allies says FSB Center 16 actors are camped in poorly secured network gear across energy, government and healthcare, partly through a Cisco bug patched in 2018, SecurityWeek reports. Days later SonicWall confirmed two SMA 1000 zero-days under active exploitation, one scoring a perfect 10.0 on CVSS. Patches exist for all of it. The read: the appliance you buy to harden the edge is now the edge. If you run SMA 1000 boxes, today’s task list writes itself.

8. OnePlus is leaving the West. The phone maker plans to wind down US and European operations this week and exit India by 2027, Bloomberg first reported, via TechCrunch, part of a restructuring at parent Oppo. China stays; the Nordics get Realme instead. The read: a smartphone market forecast to shrink more than 13 percent this year has no room left in the middle. Twelve years after the invite-only launch that made scarcity a marketing strategy, the exit arrived as a leak.