Larry Dignan

Home Depot's second quarter results included a bevy of items focused on customer experience. Sales in the second quarter were $47.9 billion, up 5.7% from a year ago. CFO Richard McPhail said the company's customers continue to engage in home improvement projects, but are refraining from big projects.

What Home Depot can control is its experience. Here's a look at the takeaways:

• Magic Apron is evolving. Associates are using the Magic Apron app to navigate stores, find products and answer questions quickly.
• Home Depot is stepping up Express Delivery efforts.
• Digital sales in the second quarter were up 11% from a year ago.

Klarna said CFO Niclas Neglén and CMO David Sandström will leave the company in early 2027. The company also cut its outlook for the third quarter due to weakness in Germany. Klarna's second quarter results were solid.

Weave, a healthcare software provider, is going private in a deal valued at $650 million. Under the terms of the deal, Francisco Partners will pay $7.40 a share for Weave. Weave was founded in 2008 and offers customer experience and payments software for medium-sized healthcare businesses.

With Francisco Partners, Weave said it will expand its AI platform plans. Weave reported second quarter revenue of $67.5 million, up 15.5% from a year ago. In the second quarter, Weave launched an AI Receptionist built on Google Cloud's Gemini Agent Platform and added integrations in athenaOne.

Google announced Operation Blue Skies, a project to re-route North Atlantic aircraft to cut contrail-induced warming using the company's AI forecasts. In a blog post, Google said contrails account for a third of the airline industry's global warming impact. The pilot includes Google UK, NATS, an air navigation service provider, Contrails.org, Imperial College London & University of Cambridge and Met Office.

Anthropic's annual revenue run rate is $65 billion as of the end of July. The company is talking to investors, but its IPO filing remains confidential. Bloomberg originally reported the news. Anthropic's second quarter revenue was about $11.5 billion.

Cursor launched a new feature called Origin on all paid plans. Repos, pull requests, code browsing and GitHub sync are available in an early beta. SpaceX recently closed its Cursor acquisition.

According to Bloomberg, Stripe will acquire OpenRouter for more than $7 billion. On the surface, the deal is a bit of a head scratcher, but does validate the importance of model routing.

Anthropic will start putting watermarks in content where Claude played a role. If Claude generated a sentence or paragraph there will be a watermark. In some cases, Claude editing a file can have a watermark. The move has raised a bit of a ruckus and you can follow the comments and storylines at Techmeme.

Hugging Face released its open model report and it's a must read. One big headline is how Qwen-based models account for more than 151,000 derivatives.

According to the report, which is a must read:

"Qwen has become one of the largest foundations in the open model ecosystem. Qwen-based models now account for 151,448 derivatives on the Hub, 2.6× Meta’s total footprint and 4.7× the Llama repositories specifically. Google follows with 82,506 derivatives. The third-largest source is Unsloth, a community account publishing quantized and fine-tuning-ready builds, many of which further extend the Qwen ecosystem.

Qwen derivatives have increased at roughly 180–210 new repositories per day throughout the first seven months of 2026, showing that adoption is not driven only by individual launches. Qwen has become part of the default workflow for developers deciding what models to fine-tune and deploy."

Z.ai released GLM-5.3, a model post-trained on GLM-5.2 to get better coding and cybersecurity capabilities.

In a blog post, Z.ai revealed that GLM-5.3 outperformed GLM-5.2 on multiple benchmarks. The company said every advance in GLM-5.3 was due to post training.

"For GLM-5.3, we pushed environment scaling toward tasks that look less like coding exercises and more like real units of expert work. The environments now cover a much broader range of production workflows, with tasks designed around how engineering and research work is actually carried out in practice."

Reuters is reporting that Silver Lake is in talks to acquire Workday in a deal valued at about $43 billion. The talks are ongoing and there's no guarantee that a deal will be done. The report set off a mini-run in SaaS shares. If Workday looks good to private equity firms, there are dozens of other SaaS vendors that could be for sale.

Google released Gemini 3.7 Flash, its flagship workhorse model. Gemini 3.7 Flash is designed for coding, knowledge work and agents.

The company outlined the usual benchmarks, but the biggest takeaway is the frontier models are competing on price now as enterprises freak out over AI budgets.

Note that Google's pricing in the chart below is introductory. But until Jan. 1, 2027, Gemini 3.7 Flash aims to undercut rivals.