IMPULSE

A year of selective non-enforcement on AI chip exports, energy repriced as the hottest business in America, a million-satellite IPO bet, robotics money racing ahead of the rules, fabricated citations corrupting the medical literature, and Brad Carson's case for treating AI as a machine, not a person. The connective tissue: action keeps running ahead of the ledger. BIS guidance reveals Chinese subs...

Two AI labs are funding rival super PACs to pick your next member of Congress. SoftBank pledges seventy-five billion euros to power France while a federal regulator decides who pays for the grid. A Trump-linked startup ships humanoid robots toward the front line in Ukraine. A Big Four firm gets caught publishing hallucinated citations. And the week ends with investors, a Pope, and the White House...

Five stories, one nerve: the distance between a claim and anyone's ability to check it. SpaceX takes a $4.16B contract to put America's airborne-threat tracking in orbit on its own Starshield platform. A Reuters investigation finds Tesla's "10x safer" math inflated by roughly three, and its robotaxi zones pre-mapped after all. OpenAI hands governments a life-sciences model it once warned could hel...

Anthropic prints a $965 billion valuation on a $47 billion run rate, while Elon Musk publicly contradicts SpaceX's own S-1 about the Anthropic Colossus lease terms. JD Vance tells Air Force cadets that life-and-death decisions in war must stay with humans, not machines — putting the vice president on Anthropic's side of a fight with his own defense secretary. Brussels prepares emergency powers to...

A day where the physical and financial base of AI keeps concentrating — and a few counter-currents push the other way. Jonas walks through Nvidia's tenfold bet on Taiwan, China's two-track answer, the autonomous-weapons red line nobody can hold, OpenAI's tip-sized labor fund, an open protein-biology model given away under an MIT license, and the verification layer that the new laws quietly depend...

SpaceX raised the Pentagon's Starlink bill mid-war and won a $2.29B Space Force contract the same day — a clean lesson in who sets the terms when you own the only network that works. Plus: China restricts travel for its top AI researchers, CISA gets gutted as AI-enabled hacking gets cheap, Chris Olah's "mysterious" models at the Vatican, humanoid robots off the line every fifteen minutes, and the...

A central bank did something central banks almost never do — it named a private AI model in a financial-stability warning. That, plus a research lab turning mathematical proofs into a few-hundred-dollar line item, the surveillance state pointed inward, and the physical ceiling under the whole boom. The Tuesday call: The European Central Bank summons eurozone banks to discuss Anthropic's Mythos by...

The White House approves a secret $9 billion request for spy-agency AI chips and finalizes a classified contract keeping the NSA on Anthropic's model — three weeks after the Pentagon ejected the company as a supply-chain threat. Jonas Vale walks the arc from "any lawful use" to the carve-out the administration wants to standardize. Also: the compute shortage as a national-security choke point and...

The AI executive order President Trump didn't sign now has a paper trail — the draft text and the names of the people who talked him out of it. Jonas Vale traces a day where the public's hand kept reaching for the controls and kept getting waved off, while the physical bills came due. Early Access — the killed executive order: the 90-day preview window, the cyber machinery, and who got Trump on th...

The US government moved hard into AI this week almost everywhere — except the one place it promised to. Trump postponed the executive order that would have forced labs to hand over frontier models for pre-release security review, citing the race with China. The same day, a UK safety body warned the tools we use to watch these systems are eroding. Jonas Vale follows the leverage across one Thursday...

OpenAI says one of its general-purpose models disproved a Paul Erdős conjecture standing since 1946, and Sam Altman admits to "complicated feelings." Anthropic agrees to pay xAI $1.25 billion a month — over $40 billion across three years — for compute at Colossus 1, with the price disclosed in SpaceX's S-1. Google runs through a hundred I/O announcements while a thousand DeepMind staff in London v...

Tuesday gave us four different markets trying to price the same thing: who has access to AI and on what terms. METR opened the kitchen of four frontier labs. A federal appeals court grilled the Pentagon over its blacklisting of Anthropic. Anduril priced at $61B on a bet about Pentagon procurement speed, and Ukrainian drones with $442 AI modules began hunting Russian soldiers. Former OpenAI staffer...

Year two of the AI-exposed jobs print comes in soft. Americans in five states are cutting down Flock surveillance cameras with vice grips. The EU is drafting cloud restrictions while The Register documents the computer beneath the computer — Intel's Management Engine, AMD's Platform Security Processor, and the silicon-layer gap European sovereignty frameworks were never designed to close. A comput...

Tomorrow in Camden, the Metropolitan Police will turn live facial recognition cameras on people walking to a political rally — the first time the technology has been authorized at a UK protest. A parallel Nakba Day march on the same day won't face the same surveillance. Two days earlier, the Met published its Croydon pilot results: 470,000 faces scanned, 173 arrests, 99.96% with no criminal connec...

Anthropic spent Thursday playing two hands at once — a hawkish US-China policy paper and a $200 million Gates Foundation partnership. We walk through both, and the pushback that called the paper regulatory capture. Then: a class action that accuses OpenAI of wiring ad-tech tracking into ChatGPT, the fight over a data center moratorium as half of 2026's planned capacity slips, an alleged sale of Mi...

Wednesday's IMPULSE: ProPublica names the algorithm — EviCore's "dial" — that turns prior-authorization scores into denials for one in three insured Americans, and walks through the death of a 61-year-old welder twice refused a heart catheterization. Anthropic's Mythos is now inside the largest US banks; tens of thousands of vulnerabilities have surfaced and Treasury and the Fed are calling CEOs a...

Tuesday, May 12, 2026. A California family files a wrongful-death suit against OpenAI over their 19-year-old son's overdose, with an unauthorized-practice-of-medicine count that could reshape how courts treat chatbot conduct in regulated work. Google opens talks with SpaceX to launch orbital data centers as part of Project Suncatcher, just as SpaceX prepares its summer IPO. Hoover fellow Eyck Frey...

Sanders welcomes U.S.-China AI talks while a16z makes the moral case for autonomous warfare and the production gap behind it. OpenAI launches a 4-billion-dollar Deployment Company with 150 forward-deployed engineers. A Harvard ER triage study and the FDA's drug-repurposing docket point in the same direction. The Lancet reports a twelvefold rise in fabricated citations. Schneier turns his attention...

Sunday, May 10, 2026. Maryland's Office of People's Counsel went to the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission this week asking who really pays for the AI buildout — a complaint that lands the same week Florida's governor signed a statute pointed at the same question and David Sacks posted the consensus payback math for a gigawatt-scale data center. Also on the desk tonight: the Pentagon's May 1 con...

Saturday's IMPULSE: a Palisade paper on models that can replicate themselves onto other machines by exploiting weak credentials, Tim Gowers grading GPT-5.5 Pro on PhD combinatorics and finding a novel proof, Tesla's vision-only ADAS back in front of NHTSA, Anthropic's compute deal that routes through SpaceX, Meta tracking employee mouse movements to train models, a 25% document corruption rate in...

Friday, May 8th. Google DeepMind announces a co-mathematician that scored 48 percent on FrontierMath Tier 4 in autonomous mode, and stands up an AGI Economics team under Shane Legg. Brussels opens its consultation on Article 50 of the AI Act — chatbot disclosure, watermarks, deepfake labeling — with the rules going live August 2nd. A new arXiv paper proposes Compute-Anchored Wages as the theoretic...

Thursday, May 7, 2026. Today the news lined up along a single seam: who is willing to build, who is willing to wait, and who is writing the rules in between. Texas wants a fab. SpaceX's Grimes County tax-break filing puts the Terafab plant at $55B initial, $119B at full build-out. A third pole of US leading-edge silicon, privately controlled. The Verge. The Energy Secretary picks his pillars. Chri...

Today on IMPULSE: Anthropic signs a reported $200 billion deal with Google Cloud for roughly five gigawatts of capacity, and Larry Fink tells investors compute is heading toward futures markets. Coinbase cuts 14% of its workforce and hands the press an AI rationale, even though revenue and crypto cycle math tell a more familiar story. Elon Musk's xAI rents the entire Colossus 1 cluster — about 220...

IMPULSE — May 5, 2026. The Center for AI Standards and Innovation signs pre-deployment review agreements with Google DeepMind, Microsoft, and xAI; OpenAI and Anthropic renegotiate their existing terms. Pennsylvania sues Character. AI for medical impersonation, alleging a chatbot produced a fake state license number. Perplexity connects consumer search to NEJM and BMJ. Mindgard publishes a 25-turn...

Today on IMPULSE: the White House quietly weighs whether the federal government should vet frontier AI models before they ship; healthcare exchanges in the United States have been caught funneling citizenship and race data to ad tech; Tesla crosses ten billion miles of supervised autonomy without a public safety report; Nvidia's CEO declares the China market effectively closed to US chips; a Harva...