Tech Brew Ride Home

Pope Leo XIV released his AI encyclical alongside Anthropic co-founder Chris Olah. Huawei claims it can match 1.4nm chips by 2031, China imposed travel restrictions on AI talent, cybersecurity hiring surged amid the AI "bug-pocalypse," and American Airlines picked Starlink for in-flight Wi-Fi. Pope Leo XIV presents Magnifica humanitas, his encyclical on AI, calling for AI regulation, protection fo...

Chris is back! Hear about how he uses AI personally, and how I've been up at 3 am every day for the last month churning out my own vibecoding experiment. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Quantum computing stocks surged after the US announced $2B in grants with equity stakes. Spotify jumped 13% on 2030 guidance targeting $100B in revenue. Anthropic expects $10.9B in Q2 revenue and its first-ever operating profit, while Trump pulled back an AI executive order after calls with Musk and Zuckerberg. Shares of quantum computing companies surged Thursday after the US government announced...

SpaceX filed publicly for its IPO on Nasdaq, revealing $18.7B in 2025 revenue, billions in losses, and Musk's 85.1% voting control. Anthropic pays SpaceX $1.25B per month for compute. Nvidia beat estimates again, Spotify launches Reserved ticketing, and Waymo suspends service over flooding. SpaceX files publicly for its IPO, choosing Nasdaq to make its debut under the symbol SPCX; Elon Musk's shar...

Google dominated I/O with Gemini 3.5 Flash, its fastest agentic model yet, plus Gemini Spark as a 24/7 personal agent. It also launched Gemini Omni for video generation, overhauled its search box, shipped Antigravity 2.0, and added Street View to Project Genie. Google rolls out Gemini 3.5 Flash, its "strongest agentic and coding model yet", for tackling long-horizon agentic tasks, in the Gemini ap...

The Musk v. Altman jury unanimously rejected Musk's claims on statute of limitations grounds. Andrej Karpathy joined Anthropic's pre-training team. Polymarket partners with Nasdaq on private company markets, Blackstone and Google form a TPU venture, and KPMG embeds Claude into tax advisory. Musk v. Altman: the jury unanimously rejects Elon Musk's claims against OpenAI and Sam Altman, as he filed t...

OpenAI debuted personal finance tools via Plaid for Pro users. AI startups generate ~$80B in annualized revenue, with Anthropic and OpenAI capturing 89%. ArXiv cracks down on AI slop, Apple's Siri relaunch may still be a beta, and SF vibes are frenetic. OpenAI debuts personal finance tools for US ChatGPT Pro users, partnering with Plaid to give access to 12K+ financial institutions to analyze spen...

Musk v. Altman went to closing arguments, with Musk's lawyer hammering Altman's credibility while OpenAI says Musk has no evidence. Google tests cutting free Gmail storage to 5GB, Meta opens Ray-Ban Display to developers, OpenAI brings Codex to mobile, and xAI launches Grok Build. ⁠Musk v. Altman: in closing arguments, Musk's attorney doubled down on claims of Altman's untrustworthiness, while Ope...

OpenAI is weighing legal action against Apple over a Siri integration it says fell far short. Cerebras opened at $350 in the largest US tech IPO since Uber. Mythos helped researchers crack macOS security, Anthropic restores OpenClaw access with Agent SDK credits, and 71% of Americans oppose local data centers. Sources: OpenAI is weighing legal action against Apple after expectations that ChatGPT's...

Google unveiled Googlebook, merging ChromeOS and Android into a unified laptop OS shipping this fall. WhatsApp launches Incognito Chat for private AI conversations. Anthropic's revenue run-rate is on track to hit $50B by end of June, and Anduril raised $5B at a $61B valuation. Google unveils Googlebook, its new laptop lineup featuring a unified OS merging ChromeOS and Android, with devices from De...

Instructure cut a deal with ShinyHunters to return stolen Canvas data, without disclosing the terms. eBay rejected GameStop's $56B bid as "neither credible nor attractive." OpenAI launches Daybreak for cybersecurity, Amazon employees game AI usage targets, and Mira Murati's first model drops. Instructure reaches a deal with hackers who breached its Canvas edtech platform to return stolen data and...

Google reported the first known case of hackers using AI to discover and weaponize a zero-day vulnerability. OpenAI launched a $4B+ deployment company and acquired Tomoro. Apple plans Liquid Glass refinements for macOS 27, TikTok rolls out an ad-free tier in the UK, and Ben Thompson argues agentic inference will reshape compute. Google's TIG reports the first known example of hackers using AI to d...

Nintendo raised the Switch 2 price to $500 amid a global memory shortage. ShinyHunters forced Canvas offline during finals season. Researchers found 5,000+ insecure vibe-coded apps, Mozilla credits Mythos for 423 Firefox bug fixes in April, and France escalates its Musk probe. Nintendo says it will increase the price of the Switch 2 globally on September 1, from $450 to $500 in the US, and the pri...

Dario Amodei revealed Anthropic could grow 80x in 2026, and the company signed a deal with SpaceX for 300MW of compute from Colossus 1. Musk dissolved xAI into SpaceX. Google launches the $100 Fitbit Air, and HubSpot's founder coins "strategic illegibility." At Code with Claude, Dario Amodei said Anthropic had planned to grow ~10x in 2026 but could grow 80x, calling its growth rate "crazy" and "to...

Corning and Nvidia partnered to open three optical manufacturing plants in the US, with Nvidia investing up to $2.7B. Morgan Stanley launched crypto trading on ETrade, Google tests a personal agent called Remy, and Meta builds an OpenClaw-inspired agent called Hatch.* Corning and Nvidia partner to open three advanced manufacturing plants in North Carolina and Texas dedicated to optical tech for Nv...

The Trump administration discussed an EO to form an AI oversight working group, a stark reversal from its hands-off approach. Apple explored using Intel and Samsung to make chips in the US, Coinbase cut 14% of its workforce, and OpenAI fast-tracks an AI phone for 2027. Sources: the Trump administration is discussing an EO to form an AI working group that would examine AI oversight procedures, like...

GameStop made an unsolicited ~$56B bid for eBay as Ryan Cohen eyes a commerce empire. Anthropic finalizes a $1.5B JV with Blackstone and Goldman Sachs, Amazon opens its logistics network to outside companies, and a Harvard study finds AI outperforms ER doctors at triage. GameStop makes an unsolicited ~$56B offer to buy eBay after building a ~5% stake, offering $125/share in cash and stock, a ~20%...

Apple beat Q2 estimates and forecast strong Q3 growth as the MacBook Neo and Mac Mini sell out. The Senate unanimously banned prediction market trading for senators, Intel closed its best month ever at +114%, and Musk admitted xAI "partly" distilled OpenAI models. Apple forecasts Q3 revenue above estimates, with sales expected to rise between 14% and 17%, and says memory expenses will climb "signi...

Big Tech earnings landed — Alphabet soared on cloud growth while Meta dropped 10% after hiking capex to $145B. SoftBank plans an AI/robotics IPO called Roze, Anthropic weighs a $900B+ round, and Musk called himself a "fool" for backing OpenAI. Microsoft says Q3 Intelligent Cloud revenue was $34.68B, vs. $34.27B est., with Azure and other cloud services up 40% YoY; Microsoft 365 Copilot has 20M+ se...

The EU escalated its DSA probe against Meta over child safety failures on Instagram and Facebook. OpenAI has effectively abandoned its Stargate JV, China suspended new robotaxi licenses after a Baidu outage, and the Musk v. Altman trial kicked off with opening arguments. The European Commission issues preliminary DSA findings against Meta, saying Instagram and Facebook fail to prevent under-13 use...

The Musk v. Altman trial seated a jury in California, with opening arguments set for today. Microsoft and OpenAI amended their partnership, removing the AGI clause. OpenAI missed internal user and revenue targets, Google launches Ask YouTube, and March saw 45,800 tech layoffs. A US judge seated a nine-person jury in the Musk v. Altman trial at a federal courthouse in California; Sam Altman and Gre...

China blocked Meta's $2B Manus acquisition and ordered both sides to unwind the deal, closing the "Singapore washing" loophole for Chinese AI startups. OpenAI is developing smartphone chips with Qualcomm and MediaTek, Google controls ~25% of global AI compute, and SaaS pricing shifts to usage-based. China blocks Meta's $2B Manus acquisition, after reviewing whether it violated investment rules, an...

DeepSeek dropped V4 Pro and V4 Flash, undercutting US labs on price by roughly 5x. OpenAI fired back with GPT-5.5, reclaiming benchmark crowns from Claude. Meta confirms 8,000 layoffs on May 20, and Google plans to invest up to $40B in Anthropic. DeepSeek releases its new flagship models V4 Pro and V4 Flash in preview, saying V4 Pro trails the performance of state-of-the-art models by about 3 to 6...

Microsoft considered buying Cursor but didn't pull the trigger before SpaceX's deal. Microsoft launches its first-ever voluntary retirement program, Anthropic's secondary market valuation hits $1T on Forge Global, and SpaceX's S-1 reveals plans to manufacture its own GPUs. Sources: Microsoft considered buying Cursor in recent weeks but didn't make an offer; Microsoft has been working to boost GitH...

SpaceX struck a deal giving it the option to acquire Cursor for $60B or pay $10B, as xAI scrambles to catch up in AI coding. Google unveiled new TPUs and an agent platform, OpenAI shipped ChatGPT Images 2.0, and Mythos got accessed by unauthorized users. SpaceX says it's working with Cursor to build "the world's most useful models" and it has the right to acquire Cursor for $60B or pay $10B for th...