AI & Web3 News 7/17/2025

AI & Web3 News 7/17/2025

Author

Stylianos Kampakis
July 17, 2025

AI News

  1. Grok 4 unlocks “frontier intelligence.” xAI’s newly released Grok 4 ships with a 256 K-token context window, native web/X search, tool use, and a “Heavy” tier that pushes ARC-AGI V2 to 15.9 % and becomes the first LLM to break 50 % on Humanity’s Last Exam - doubling the previous best. xAI

  2. Grok-2 already on the runway. Elon Musk says the next-gen Grok-2 model will debut in August, highlighting “significant scaling and open fine-tuning hooks” aimed at enterprise developers. Aibase News

  3. Grok for Government launches. xAI introduced Grok for Government, a secure on-prem and classified-cloud suite targeting U.S. agencies that need controlled fine-tuning and audit trails. xAI

  4. Controversial companions hit Grok. A July update added “Ani,” a sexualized anime persona, and “Bad Rudi,” a profanity-prone red panda - both accessible even in kids mode—igniting safety backlash while xAI sealed a $200 M DoD deal. TIME

  5. Tesla may weave Grok into its robots. Analysts argue Grok’s multimodal reasoning pairs with Tesla’s real-world data pipelines to create an “AI apex predator” spanning vehicles, robotics, and energy. Klover.ai

  6. Google’s Gemini makes calls for you. A new Duplex-plus-Gemini feature in U.S. Search can phone local businesses, gather quotes, and text results; AI Pro and Ultra users get higher usage limits. The Verge

  7. EU AI Act countdown begins. Legal briefings urge firms to map high-risk systems ahead of the August 2025 compliance trigger as Brussels publishes its first Codes of Practice. The National Law Review

  8. Dell readies Blackwell servers. Dell’s PowerEdge XE9712, packing NVIDIA GB300 NVL72 GPUs, lands in H2 2025 with an eight-fold inference boost for corporate GenAI stacks. Artificial Intelligence News

Web3 News

  1. MiCA enforcement ramps up. Google now blocks non-licensed crypto ads across the EU, and national deadlines start as early as July 1 2025, pushing DeFi front-ends and stablecoin issuers to register or geofence. HackenTatum

  2. $42 M GMX hack ends in near-full refund. A re-entrancy exploit drained GMX V1 before the attacker returned most funds for a bounty, spotlighting upgrade-switch protections in permission-less DeFi. Halborn

  3. DAO security under the microscope. Researchers flag flash-vote manipulation and cross-chain governance loopholes as 2025’s top DAO attack vectors, urging formal verification of voting modules. medium.com