Google said that it is adding Venmo as a payment option today on Google Play for purchases including games, apps, add-ons, and other digital content.

The company said that users can use Venmo’s wallet or other linked payment methods, such as bank accounts and cards, to pay for subscriptions or tip creators within different content-based apps.

Users can go to payment methods within their account’s settings to link a Venmo account. Google Play already offers other digital payment methods including PayPal and Cash App along with cards from American Express, Visa, Mastercard, Discover and JCB in the United States.

Outside the U.S., the company has also experimented with allowing users to pay for digital purchases using cash at a nearby store.

People are spending more money on apps and games across the world. In 2025, user spend across iOS and Play Store was over $167 billion for in-app purchases, up 10.6% year-on-year, according to a report from analytics firm Sensor Tower.

Situational Awareness may have had to sell off the majority of its public portfolio last month, but the AI-focused hedge fund is still making some big bets.

This week, the fund invested $400 million into Source Foundry, a startup founded by Stanford researchers aiming to make chip manufacturing faster and cheaper, according to The Wall Street Journal. That brings its total investment in Source Foundry to $500 million.

Situational Awareness was founded by Leopold Aschenbrenner, a former OpenAI researcher in his mid-twenties who had no trading experience when he launched the fund in 2024. Early returns were reportedly strong, but the fund faced steep losses in recent months amidst the decline in AI infrastructure stocks.

At the end of July, Situational Awareness sold off the majority of its public portfolio to Ken Griffin’s Citadel, although the fund held on to its Anthropic shares. Its assets under management reportedly fell from $20 billion to $10 billion.

On the bright side, Aschenbrenner didn’t let those setbacks get in the way of his wedding.

Programming with Claude Code will soon require even less human oversight, as Anthropic says it’s making auto mode the default for Pro, Max, and Team accounts, starting on August 14.

The company first unveiled a test version of auto mode in March, pitching it as a way to balance speed and control. As Anthropic explained in its announcement on Friday, when Claude Code is in auto mode, instead of presenting prompts asking for human approval at each step, it will proceed unless an action is determined to be “irreversible, destructive, or aimed outside your environment.”

Anthropic also said that in testing, auto mode proved safer than manual review — in a study with 1,053 paid testers, auto mode caught 89% of harmful actions, while human review only caught 13.6%. (Perhaps that’s because “manual review can become habitual: users approve 97% of permission prompts in Claude Code.”)

In a post on X, Claude Code Head Boris Cherny said, “The team and I use Auto mode exclusively, and have been for many months. I couldn’t imagine going back to permission prompts!”

The company also said it’s been adding new safety features like prompt injection screening and customizable hard deny rules to prevent things like data exfiltration.