AI Daily: Sunday, July 19, 2026

My Daily AI & Markets Briefing · Jul 19, 2026 · 9m

SOXL cratered ~25% on the week to ~$135 as semiconductor stocks were hammered by AI capex doubts and Chinese open-model competition; QQQ, VGT, and VUG each fell 2–4%. • China's AI insurgency accelerated with Moonshot AI's open-source Kimi K3 matching U.S. frontier models and Alibaba's Qwen 3.8 set to go open-weight imminently, pressuring OpenAI and Anthropic on cost and accessibility. • Xi Jinping personally endorsed open-weight AI development at China's World AI Conference, framing it as an explicit geopolitical strategy to break U.S. dominance in the field. • Apple sued OpenAI in a landmark…