U.S. Secretary of State Rubio said keeping the Strait of Hormuz open is a core term of the memorandum of understanding but Iran has failed to comply, targeting international navigation via international waters; he warned international waters must remain free. The Strait remains strategically important, carrying about 20% of global energy shipments.

Google on Tuesday launched three lower-cost GEMINI "Flash" models focused on efficiency as usage of lower-cost open-source models surges. GEMINI 3.6 Flash is a faster, cheaper upgrade to 3.5 Flash; Google says it cuts output tokens by up to 17% while improving coding, reasoning and multimodal performance. GEMINI 3.5 Flash-Lite is a lower-cost model aimed at high-frequency AI agents and document-processing workloads. GEMINI 3.5 Flash Cyber targets cybersecurity use cases to identify and remediate software vulnerabilities and is currently available only to government agencies and select partners via Google’s CodeMender platform.

Russian inflation expectations rose to 14.7% in July.