It's the final countdown… England and Spain are set to face off in the FIFA Women's World Cup Finals on Sunday, sealing weeks of heart-stopping matchups. A record 1.7M+ tickets were sold for the tournament, up from 1M for the 2019 Cup. A third of women's-soccer fans are new to the sport, boosting visibility for Women's World Cup sponsors like Budweiser and Coke. 

• Nike's limited Martine Rose designer collab, which featured gender-neutral fits worn by the US women's team, sold out most pieces ahead of the tourney. FYI: Nike sponsors England (among other teams). 

• Adidas has seen over a fifth of its women's team products sell out this tournament — nearly 3X as many as in 2019. Adidas sponsors Spain (among others).

• Visa, Frito-Lay, Adobe, Dove maker Unilever, and Roblox have jumped onto the sponsors' list as more corporations support women's sports. 

Behind the goal line… For years, women's-sports pay and sponsorships have trailed men's, and women's games don't usually get as much ad spend. That's starting to change: last year, the US women's national soccer team won a $24M equal-pay settlement. Media biggies are also catching up: CBS aired the National Women's Soccer League finals on prime-time TV for the first time last year. Meanwhile, ESPN could cough up $100M to renew its NCAA Women's Basketball broadcast rights next year as popularity booms.

Gettin' in the game can pay off… Women's-sports fan bases are growing twice as fast as the broader sports-fan community. Experts say fans of women's teams tend to watch longer and are more brand loyal. Now more brands are hoping to score the benefits. Ally Bank said it would spend the same amount on ads for men's and women's sports over the next five years. Google last year signed a multiyear deal with sports site The Athletic to double its women's-sports coverage.

May AI approach the bench?... Lawyers for The New York Times are considering a copyright suit against ChatGPT maker OpenAI, NPR reported. The concern: that the bot is using NYT reporting to train products that could draw readers away from their media platforms. If NYT does sue, it would be the most notable AI-copyright battle yet, and likely create precedents around the legality of genAI's data-scraping ways.

• Pay-to-mine: For months, media publishers have been talking to companies like OpenAI, Google, Microsoft, and Adobe, trying to establish licensing deals that would allow AI to use publishers' work — for a fee.

• Ctrl+Alt+Del: Negotiations between NYT and OpenAI appear to have soured. If a judge were to rule that OpenAI illegally used NYT's work to train ChatGPT, OpenAI could be forced to destroy its dataset and start over. 

• Not just NYT: Other publishers could join the suit too. Wall Street Journal parent News Corp, Axel Springer, and IAC have reportedly discussed forming a coalition to sue AI companies.

The "shiny new toy" luster is fading… and it's making companies rethink how they use AI. Fear that the tech could eliminate jobs (and its prominent focus in Hollywood strikes) has created a culture of backlash. In one of the biggest examples involving photographers, Getty Images sued Stability AI earlier this year, accusing it of copyright infringement on a "staggering scale" (Getty says it copied 12M images).

Choose your fighter: trust or productivity… With AI's status as a reputational (and legal) risk, companies have to make tough decisions about how to use it. Levi Strauss faced criticism earlier this year after announcing plans to use AI to generate models for its jeans. Audiences decried the AI-made opening credits of Disney+'s "Secret Invasion." Last week, Zoom got pushback over its apparent ability to train AI on customer calls (the company updated its terms of service to clarify it will not).

🌶️ Spicy… Small to midsize exchanges like Huobi and KuCoin are snatching market share from 800-pound gorilla Binance. The world's largest crypto exchange is being squeezed by regulator suits in the US and license-application rejections in the EU.

🤹‍♀️ Quirky… Traders poured $450K+ into Coca-Cola's Masterpieces NFT offering, lapping up digi-tokens tied to bottle-themed art. Meanwhile, prices for "blue chip" NFTs like Bored Apes and Doodles have sagged 40% over the past few months.

🤔 Sus… Scammers are riding Worldcoin's crypto coattails in early-adopter Kenya (350K+ signups), conning new users out of coins. The biz behind the eye-scanning orb has been met with growing concern over privacy risks since its July launch.