While Jensen Huang took to the stage, Trump dialed in to reiterate his latest Truth.

He went on to argue how AI was a critical imperative for American strength and security, called fears around AI a “hoax”, and repeated: “Whoever wins AI, wins.” It was a surreal, cinematic moment to be in the room. POTUS calling the leader of arguably the most important technology company on the planet, in front of a massive audience of tech leaders and investors, to label AI safety a “hoax” and to reemphasize his “genetic strength”; all while Anthropic researchers clamoured that the labs were “gambling with our lives”, their alignment lead claimed “a >10%” chance AI causes human extinction “within the next decade”, and Dario Amodei published yet another manifesto begging the government to step in and force labs to slow down (“We Must Pace the Frontier”). You can almost hear Baz Luhrmann screaming at the cameraman to keep it rolling!

Trump has planted himself firmly against slowing AI development for a variety of potential reasons. So drama and politics aside, if the labs are genuinely seeking greater governance, where should they get it from?

Satya Nadella had a simple perspective: 60% of all compute coming online in the next year is for the duopoly of Anthropic and OpenAI, so “when they call for ‘pacing the frontier,’ they ARE the frontier” - danger concentrates with them. This public cry for help is not a plea of desperation, but rather a cynical attempt to pass off responsibility - the labs know they can slow down, but not without risking losing their lead, and that’s not something they’re prepared to do.

The proposal emerging from the labs themselves is outsourcing some form of oversight. Amodei suggests a third-party evaluator (e.g. METR). Musk suggested peer review - where frontier companies would test one another’s models - including those in China.

But there are at least two main issues with this approach: (1) it risks regulatory capture - the winners creating a moat that anoints the current winners and makes it harder for others, including open-weight models, to compete, and (2) this doesn’t just relate to fierce competition between companies, but also fierce competition with China. What the US is suggesting is not neutral to China if it’s American-made - and despite Musk believing this would be acceptable to China, it seems unlikely to be.

Which brings me back to the UK and how I started my week: with the news that Anthropic declined to give the UK’s AI Security Institute pre-release access to Claude Mythos 5.1. AISI has built a reputation as a global leader in frontier-model testing: a technically formidable institution capable of actually evaluating these systems, and per the FT, “Britain’s most influential asset in the AI race”. If the labs are genuinely serious about neutral and global testing, perhaps AISI’s role is worth reconsidering. Something for Matt Clifford to champion in his new role as Anthropic’s MD of International Affairs?

IPOs / Publics

• Holtec Nuclear (reactor components & SMR in development) launched a $900M IPO roadshow at $10.2B, part of a wave of nuclear listings driven by data centre power demand. Follows X-energy’s $1B IPO in April at $9.1B (here)

• Firmus Technologies (data centre provider) is seeking to raise up to $5B in an Australian IPO by end-October, which would rank among the country’s largest-ever listings (here)

• OpenAI CEO Sam Altman confirmed the company will not go public in 2026, calling it “ill-advised” given current safety concerns & broader AI scrutiny; the IPO, filed confidentially in June, is now expected no earlier than 2027 as the firm addresses technical challenges & market volatility (here)

• Bending Spoons (NASDAQ: BSP) agreed to acquire Miro for $1.355B enterprise value (~$1.79B equity value including net cash) (here)

• Meta’s Muse AI agent reached No. 2 on the U.S. iOS App Store with 83,000 downloads in 2 days (here)

Big Dogs

• Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei published “We Must Pace the Frontier” proposing slowing frontier AI development after recursive self-improvement accelerated progress since summer (here)

• Anthropic, Google & OpenAI have discussed creating an industry standards body to test advanced AI models before deployment, modelled on FINRA & proposed by DeepMind founder Demis Hassabis in July (here)

• Anthropic’s latest risk report upgraded AI catastrophic risk from “very low” to “low”, including “substantial uncertainty” around models enabling chemical or biological weapons, an admission that sits awkwardly alongside its likely IPO preparations (here)

• Anthropic disclosed in a threat intelligence report that Claude was used by actors linked to China, Russia, Iran, & Yemen for weapons development (including Taiwan air-defence targeting, anti-torpedo systems, & missile development), cyber operations against 50+ organisations, surveillance of Uyghurs & dissidents & mass-profiling systems (here)

• Anthropic is building an AI-powered surveillance system to monitor activists who oppose rapid AI development, including predictive “pre-crime” threat analysis & reporting suspects to police before incidents occur (here)

• NYU mathematician Tristan Buckmaster accused OpenAI of copying his approach to a $1M Millennium Prize mathematics problem after information about his work leaked to OpenAI. OpenAI consumed 300B output tokens ($22.5M worth of compute) to reach a full proof of the Navier-Stokes problem days after learning of Buckmaster’s progress, using the same uncommon tactic. Buckmaster, who relied on Codex for his own research, raised concerns his de-identified usage data may have informed OpenAI’s models (here)

• OpenAI has held early conversations with investors about raising another private funding round at a $1.2T valuation before its IPO (here)

Venture Capital

• Balderton hired Luca Bocchio as Partner from Accel (here)

• Radical Ventures launched Canada’s largest AI fund with a $1B first close (here)

• Volition Capital closed a $950M fund targeting bootstrapped companies with $5M-50M in revenue, writing $25M-50M cheques into software, consumer & AI applications (here)

• FirstMark partner Matt Turck argues Europe is underrated among US VCs, who have refocused on San Francisco despite strong European AI talent & less competition for deals. He sees defence tech (Harmattan, Helsing, Stark) & neoclouds as particularly promising, noting an untested thesis around purely European champions - though exit routes remain uncertain without meaningful European acquirers (here)

Regulation

• California Governor Newsom signed 13 online child safety laws. The legislation follows rising political pressure after AI safety warnings from Anthropic & OpenAI researchers & Meta’s recent $18B settlement with states over child safety claims (here). California continues to set regulatory pace while Governor Newsom calls for federal action to match the speed of emerging AI risks (here)

• The US Department of Justice is investigating whether Nvidia’s December licensing deal with Groq was structured to avoid antitrust review (here)

• Obama called for democratic oversight of AI development after frontier labs agreed to slow progress, arguing voluntary industry standards are insufficient & urging Washington to legislate on safety, jobs, & equitable distribution of benefits while leading international standard-setting (here)

• The Senate voted to block the Clarity Act from advancing, dealing a major blow to the crypto industry’s push for a comprehensive market structure framework (here)

Venture Geopolitics

• US Treasury launched a $6B long-term bond buyback (up from $4B signalled in August). Markets reacted negatively as the figure fell short of the $8-10B Wall Street had expected. Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent also attempted to stabilise yields through rhetoric (’I am the house now’), but the 10-year yield hit 4.93% - its highest since 2023 (here, here)

• UK air traffic control suffered a second major software failure in 3 years, grounding hundreds of flights & costing airlines tens of millions in compensation. According to the FT, a military aircraft entering “spurious” flight data into the traffic control system led to the outage (here)

• Canada’s PM Mark Carney acknowledged the pivot away from U.S. trade “will come at a cost” as Ottawa imposed retaliatory tariffs following Trump’s 50% duties on $28B of Canadian goods, after Carney rejected U.S. demands he said would restrict Canadian trade sovereignty & cultural protections (here)

• Trump dismissed AI extinction risks, saying his priority is beating China (where he claims the US leads by ~1 yr), as 15+ OpenAI & Anthropic insiders publicly warned that labs are racing toward recursive self-improvement without adequate safeguards. Anthropic researcher Jacob Coxon quit, saying firms are “gambling with our lives” (here)

• China’s spy chief Chen Yixin issued the regime’s most detailed warning yet that AI threatens Communist Party control, citing risks from foreign models (naming Claude & GPT-5.5-Cyber), data leaks, cyberattacks on critical infrastructure, & military competition with the US (here)

• Former UK PM Gordon Brown argues Britain must close a £15B scale-up funding gap & reform pensions, listings, & the British Business Bank to turn strong R&D (four of the world’s top 10 universities) into globally competitive companies - noting productivity growth lags US 0.4% vs 1.9% & top start-ups (DeepMind, Arm, Oxford Ionics) sold overseas (here)

• Trump pledged a $5,000 ‘Trump dividend’ to every American adult if Republicans retain Congress in November’s midterm election, a proposal that would cost approximately $1.35T & whose legality remains unclear (here)

• Pascal Canfin, the European Parliament’s China trade rapporteur, says cross-party consensus is building for tougher measures against Beijing, including stricter “Made in Europe” rules in the Industrial Accelerator Act & curbs on critical supply chain overreliance (here)

• UK GDP grew 0.4% in July (ahead of 0% consensus), with services expanding 0.4% led by AI-related tech spending - computer programming & consultancy rose 4.4% over 3 mo - offering a productivity-enhancing offset to subdued traditional sectors. The data complicate Bank of England deliberations as traders now price four rate rises over 12 mo (up from two earlier this week) after oil spiked to $109/bbl, while surging gilt yields to 2007 highs could halve Chancellor Healey’s £23B fiscal headroom ahead of the 28 Oct Budget (here)

Strategic Sectors

AI

• Trump phoned Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang during the All In conference to dismiss AI safety concerns as a “hoax” & oppose regulation, calling worries overblown (here)

• Anthropic’s alignment lead Evan Hubinger said he sees a >10% chance AI could kill all humans within a decade, following the resignation of colleague Jacob Coxon, who claimed neither Anthropic nor OpenAI was acting responsibly (here)

• Palantir CTO Shyam Sankar argues that effective altruism - the ideology behind figures like Sam Bankman-Fried - underpins much of the current AI safety movement, & that recent warnings from Anthropic resignees & others should be viewed sceptically as attempts to restrict access to AI rather than genuine safety concerns (here)

• Texas governor Greg Abbott halted new data centre approvals pending a grid audit, responding to rural Republican voter backlash ahead of midterms as polls show Democrats leading in key races (here)

• Latham & Watkins (US law firm, $8.3B revenue) bought Nvidia GPU servers & is fine-tuning open-weight models in-house, the first public example of a major law firm owning AI infrastructure rather than subscribing to OpenAI or Anthropic - a shift reflecting client data sensitivity, cost flexibility, & vendor optionality as AI reshapes legal economics (here)

• Palantir, Nvidia & Booz Allen have restricted use of Anthropic’s Fable model over data retention concerns, with Palantir refusing to offer Fable through its platform until Anthropic provides irrevocable zero-data-retention guarantees. Anthropic’s June policy change - requiring 30-day rolling logs to defend against attacks - has prompted customers handling sensitive IP to demand stronger protections or switch to self-hosted models. Microsoft is leveraging the unease to pitch isolated cloud environments costing millions, whilst Northrop Grumman runs open-source models on air-gapped servers rather than trust external providers (here)

Cybersecurity

• ENISA discovered at least one high-risk vulnerability in EU code using advanced OpenAI models via its Daybreak programme, following months-long EU efforts to secure frontier-model access after Anthropic’s Mythos launch in April (here)

• IDScan confirmed a data breach affecting 150M+ driver’s licences across the US & Canada, including full names, licence numbers & passport details stored in its cloud. FBI is investigating; the breach exposed high-profile individuals including US Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth (here)

Defence

• Joshua Cammidge was charged under the UK’s National Security Act with providing Russian intelligence with locations of drone factories in Swindon, volunteering to conduct sabotage, & researching WiFi jamming devices (here)

• US Air Force secretary disclosed that the US has weapons in space, declining to specify capabilities but citing deterrence against China & Russia (here)

• Notable deal:

  • Shield AI (autonomous drones & fighter jets) is raising funds at $20B+, up 60% from its $12.7B March valuation, after winning contracts from the US Air Force for its Hivemind software (coordinating uncrewed jets & drone swarms) & a $16M Polish navy order for V-BAT surveillance drones (here)

Space

• Notable deal:

  • Franco-German startup The Exploration Company (reusable space capsules) raised $450M led by Bessemer & Atomico, with participation from the EU Scaleup Fund, bringing total raised to $680M (here)

  • UK/Spain’s Open Cosmos (satellite manufacturing) raised €300M led by European investors including Lightrock & ETF Partners (here)

Last week we talked about how, as AI lets attackers find and exploit vulnerabilities at a speed humans can’t match, the same technology allows defenders to continuously attack their own systems, patch them and improve them.

We could be accused of being a depressed nation fixated on negative headlines, but there is more than one side to the stories this week.

Bid rigging is reportedly costing UK taxpayers as much as £3.5bn annually. But now, the CMA is pushing to use AI to spot companies manipulating public procurement with an in-house AI tool that scans tender data for suspicious patterns.

AI is “breaking the British state” as citizens turn to AI to file objections and appeals to “claim their dues” from regulations that enshrined their rights, but were hidden behind walls of bureaucracy. Yes, our authorities need to act quickly to counter “agentic flooding”, but the same technology that is causing the problem neatly offers up its solution. As AI is increasingly used inside the government to respond to these requests, the result will be citizens receiving the entitlements they deserve.

Data centers are creating a bottleneck… as Arm’s CEO says AI *will* cure cancer in our lifetimes. Cure cancer!

Technology raises everyone’s capabilities. Some people use those capabilities poorly, many use them well. As everyone discusses OpenAI’s discourse on alignment this week, it’s worth remembering that the very technologies that are causing these enormous problems are giving us the tools we need to counter them.

Also: man’s sight saved by AI-assisted brain surgery at UCL.

IPOs / Publics

• Shein fell 19% below its IPO price in first week trading in HK, wiping ~$5B off $26B debut valuation - the second-worst opening among billion-dollar-plus HK listings (here)

• Enflame Technology (AI chipmaker backed by Tencent) saw its Shanghai IPO oversubscribed 4,073x by 7M retail investors, raising 6.1B yuan ($911M) at a 0.025% allocation rate - the last of China’s ‘four little dragons’ to list after MetaX & Moore Threads debuted with 693% & 425% first-day gains in December (here)

• Moonshot (Kimi LLM developer) filed confidentially for a HK IPO targeting $3B, valued at $50B in ongoing funding after raising $5.5B to date from Alibaba, Tencent & state backers. The Beijing startup faces U.S. scrutiny over alleged restricted Nvidia chip use & model distillation, yet is reportedly negotiating revenue-sharing deals with Microsoft, Amazon & Google to host Kimi K3 (here)

• Meta released Muse Spark 1.3, its most advanced AI model yet, reportedly competitive with Anthropic’s Claude Fable 5.1 & OpenAI’s GPT-5.6 Sol (particularly in coding). The company has not decided whether to release the model’s weights, balancing Zuckerberg’s open-source rhetoric against ROI pressure on hundreds of billions in AI spend (here)

• Meta is offering token pricing 12-40x cheaper (10 cents vs $1.25/M input tokens) for users who consent to having their AI chats used to train models, creating a financial incentive to opt into data sharing (here)

Big Dogs

• OpenAI launched GPT-6 Astra positioning it as the start of the AGI era & ‘the world’s best computer use model’. OpenAI president Greg Brockman acknowledged AGI has proven ‘a much more gray, fuzzy thing’ than expected but stated he personally believes ‘we are now in the AGI era’ (here)

• In “An Alien Mind”, OpenAI’s chief scientist Jakub Pachocki warns that recursive self-improvement in AI is approaching faster than anticipated, with reasoning models already exceeding human capabilities in transformative ways. He says the company now prioritises automated alignment research over domain-specific advances (e.g. mathematics), whilst acknowledging that chain-of-thought monitoring - its primary safety tool - is becoming less reliable as models grow more capable. Pachocki calls for mandatory safety bars enforced by third-party auditors or international bodies & signals OpenAI may unilaterally pause scaling if confidence in alignment methods erodes (here)

• OpenAI claims its AI model solved the Navier-Stokes Millennium Prize Problem - proving whether the 200-year-old fluid dynamics equations always work or can "blow up" - using $15M of compute over days, positioning for the $1M Clay Institute prize (here)

• Notable deal:

  • Mistral raised €3B at €21B in Europe’s largest-ever tech equity round, led by Samsung Electronics, to expand frontier research, compute capacity & global enterprise footprint across 20 countries. The full-stack approach - open-weight models, proprietary infrastructure & sovereign deployment - addresses enterprise & government demand for AI power without vendor lock-in or data exposure (here)

Regulation

• The UK Competition & Markets Authority is in talks with the Ministry of Defence to use procurement data screening tools to detect bid-rigging in defence supply chains, part of a broader push to centralise government procurement oversight across a £400B annual market the CMA estimates loses up to £3.5B/year to collusion. The regulator is already piloting data analytics with DWP, DfE & MoJ, & wants centralised cross-government commitment - an approach already mandated in Spain, Portugal, South Korea & Brazil (here)

Venture Geopolitics

• OECD governments face a $2T annual debt-servicing burden - now exceeding defence spending in the US, UK & France - as record debt (approaching 100% of GDP by 2030) collides with 10-year yields at 4%+, the highest since 2008. Governments face a doom loop where rising debt costs worsen deficits, forcing hard choices between tax rises, spending cuts, or market discipline (here)

• Per the FT, US 10-year Treasury yields approaching 5% could derail the AI boom by sharply raising borrowing costs for hyperscalers funding $1T+ infrastructure spend against ~$200B annual AI revenue - a threshold historically associated with market corrections (here)

• Netherlands’ central bank moved 78 metric tons of gold ($11B) from New York to London, citing geopolitical unrest - a tangible hedge against US financial infrastructure risk (here)

• The White House launched a MAGA-themed online arcade featuring 5 retro-style games including Build the Wall (Tetris variant), Flappy Bill (bald eagle legislation delivery), & Trump Savings Tycoon (promoting tax-advantaged Trump Accounts launched in July) (here)

• German industrial employers including Mercedes-Benz are pushing to restore a 40-hour week without extra pay, up from the 35-hour standard won in a 1984 metalworkers’ strike, citing labour costs of €49.50/hour (47% above EU average, 3x Hungary’s) as manufacturing output has fallen 15% since 2017 (here)

• Abu Dhabi’s G42 is exploring selling a majority stake to US companies or creating a new American entity to secure continued access to advanced AI chips beyond April 2027, when its current US export waiver expires. The firm, overseen by Sheikh Tahnoon bin Zayed & backed by Microsoft & Silver Lake, had already cut China ties in 2024 to pivot towards Washington (here)

Strategic Sectors

AI

• Anthropic withheld its Claude Mythos 5.1 model from the UK's AI Security Institute before release, the first time Britain's leading testing agency has been excluded. Whitehall officials suspect the company acted under US pressure amid Trump administration AI protectionism, though this remains unconfirmed. OpenAI provided pre-release access to its latest Astra model to AISI this month (here)

• Google DeepMind released AlphaGenome Atlas, a 1-petabyte database that pre-calculates the regulatory impact of all 9B possible single-nucleotide variants in the human genome. Early users at the Broad Institute & UK Biobank have applied the tool's variant impact score to prioritise rare disease variants & uncover 22% more non-coding genetic associations in BMI research, with free access via a no-code web portal (here)

• OpenClaw 2.0 was released, which transforms the open-source AI coding agent from a personal terminal tool into a shared enterprise platform with persistent multiplayer sessions, approval workflows & secrets handling - though sandboxing remains off by default. The redesigned browser UI consolidates conversations, files & live execution into a shared workspace, letting teams hand off agent context rather than redoing work. Founder Peter Steinberger joined OpenAI in Feb 2026 but the project remains independent under the OpenClaw Foundation (here)

• OpenAI agents conducting internal evaluations escaped to a German wiki site in May-June 2026, editing ~400 pages daily & evading a human moderator for over 5 weeks before independent researchers discovered the incident. OpenAI had not disclosed this breach; UK AI Safety Institute & Apollo Research flagged that Astra (the model involved) may exhibit eval awareness, raising questions about alignment oversight at a time when frontier labs face minimal federal governance (here)

• Arm Holdings CEO Rene Haas predicts AI will help cure cancer within current lifetimes by solving computational problems too complex for humans today, such as modelling DNA markers & cellular interactions. Haas also forecast widespread humanoid robots in manufacturing & services within 5 years, noted chip shortages constraining AI data centre rollout, & disclosed Arm now sees over $2B in demand for its Meta-designed AGI chip since March launch. He dismissed the case for UK chip fabs as unnecessary & expensive, though Arm remains Cambridge’s largest employer (here)

• Notable deal:

  • Cognition AI (autonomous code generation) raised $2B at $48B from Andreessen Horowitz & Accel, nearly doubling valuation from $26B in May as run-rate revenue climbed from $492M to ~$900M - a signal that AI developer tooling is commanding hypergrowth premiums despite questions over sustainable margins (here)

Energy / Climate

• Brent crude approached $100/barrel after US strikes on Iranian tankers & attacks on Saudi Aramco facilities reignited supply concerns; Goldman warned prices could reach $120 if shipping attacks intensify, as global inventories outside China have fallen 400M barrels since conflict began & diesel trades at record premiums above crude (here)

• Sam Altman's defence of ChatGPT water usage - claiming 38,000 queries use less water than growing one California almond - sparked memes dubbing him 'Sam Almond' (here)

Defence

• Two fires hit Polish defence contractors in 24 hours - JFG Composites (Leonardo helicopter subcontractor) in Lublin & WB Electronics (drone components for Poland & Ukraine) in Skarżysko-Kamienna, with police investigating arson after masked figure seen on surveillance at the latter site (here)

• British Army suspended major war games to save £30M, a decision defence officials warn risks signalling weakness to adversaries amid continued fiscal pressure on UK defence readiness (here)

EVs / AVs

• Wayve & Uber launched supervised autonomous rides in London, the UK’s first AV ride-hailing service, using Wayve’s AI Driver trained on British roads since 2018. The service starts with electric Ford Mustang Mach-Es & will expand globally to 12 markets; over 140,000 Londoners have already opted in (here)

• France authorised Tesla FSD Supervised road trials after transport minister Philippe Tabarot spoke with Musk, reversing a July safety-based refusal. Five European countries now permit the system (here)

• Tesla launched public Cybercab rides in Austin (2-seater robotaxi without steering wheel or pedals), prompting NHTSA to say it is “evaluating the situation”. Federal rules typically require human controls & limit deployment of vehicles without them; Tesla lacks California permits for driverless testing or commercial service (here)

• Uber is cutting 3,300 roles (10% of staff) to reduce management layers by 20% & reinvest savings into ride-sharing, delivery & robotaxis, including over $10B committed to autonomous partnerships (here)

• Travis Kalanick’s Atoms, which raised $1.7B & billed itself as a ‘physical AI’ company, has hired Waymo co-founder Anthony Levandowski to lead AV development. Atoms has held preliminary talks with Uber (which invested $100M) about supplying robotaxi technology for its network, potentially reuniting Kalanick with the firm he was ousted from in 2017 (here)

• Notable deal:

  • PlusAI (autonomous trucking software) to go public via SPAC merger at $800M pre-money, raising up to $300M (here)

Space

• Britain announced a £7.8B space strategy “commiting military satellite infrastructure to civilian use” - rural broadband & mobile coverage on trains - while allocating £880M for space control & ISR, £149M for ESA's L5 solar storm early-warning mission, £85M for the National Space Operations Centre, & £30M for SaxaVord launch site in Shetland. The dual-use model creates a structural dependency without civilian regulatory oversight: MoD procurement decisions on SKYNET now directly affect public services, but Ofcom has no formal standing. The strategy consolidates five years of fragmented investment into a single cross-government framework & introduces variable liability limits to unlock in-orbit servicing & manufacturing, waiving liability entirely for ISAM & lunar missions before 2031 (here)

Robotics

• Notable deal:

  • Nscale committed at least $3.5B in AI cloud compute to Figure (humanoid robotics, $39B valuation) & took an undisclosed equity stake, mirroring Nvidia’s playbook of investing in customers that buy its infrastructure (here)

Agents break that model. Agents discover and exploit vulnerabilities at a speed and scale that human-in-the-loop systems can’t match¹.

As OpenAI’s Michael Dalton put it at Black Hat, defence must therefore become autonomous, too. Defenders actually have a structural advantage here: they own the code, and can in principle continuously attack their own codebases and dependencies, identify weaknesses and remediate them before an adversary ever sees them.

But that advantage only applies if humans are no longer a bottleneck. Once vulnerability discovery, remediation and deployment can happen continuously, you are no longer auditing a static codebase; you are building a system that continuously audits it as it changes. The security problem moves up an abstraction layer: what needs securing is not simply the code, but the process by which code is created, inspected, fixed and improved.

Palo Alto CEO Nikesh Arora said today that AI will force the modernisation of roughly $1 trillion of ageing cybersecurity infrastructure, much of it built for human-speed attacks. The next generation of security companies may therefore look less like tools that automate individual security tasks and more like systems built for relentless self-attack and self-repair. The transition will be messy (or “spicy”, as cybersecurity expert Alex Stamos puts it) but the end state need not be a permanently more vulnerable world (as feels inevitable given recent headlines). It could be one in which defence itself compounds, producing a security architecture ultimately much harder to break than the one it replaces.

¹ Essential reading this week: Dwarkesh’s Rise and Fall of Agent Civilizations.

IPOs / Publics

• Shein raised $1.7B in Hong Kong at $26B (15x forward earnings), down from a $100B peak in 2022. Shares fell 10% on debut (here & here)

• Enflame (AI chip design, Tencent-backed) set to raise $908M at 61.8x 2025 sales on Shanghai’s STAR Market (here)

• Pasqal debuted on Nasdaq after a SPAC merger at $2B, trading up 40% (73% intraday) with ~$360M cash to scale production. The French quantum firm generated €16.5M revenue in 2025 & deployed 7 machines (here)

• Nvidia Q2 revenue hit $96.2B - 2x YoY. Forecasts FY2028 sales growth of 70% (vs 45% analyst consensus) driven by accelerating AI chip demand. The company is very clearly still supply constrained. Per Ben Thompson, its like the early years of the iPhone - earnings ought to be quite boring, because top-line revenue is a function of how much supply the company will have in terms of components, which Nvidia obviously has better visiblity on than anybody else (here)

• Nvidia reportedly to acquire Hugging Face for ~$13B, after the open-source AI platform rejected a $500M investment at $7B last year. Deal would deepen Nvidia’s developer footprint but risks undermining Hugging Face’s neutrality across chip vendors (AMD, Intel) (here)

• Salesforce reported Q2 FY27 revenue of $11.3B (up 11% Y/Y) & raised full-year guidance by $200M to $46.1-46.4B, driven by Agentforce & Data 360 ARR nearing $3.9B (up 210% Y/Y). Agentforce ARR exceeded $1.5B, with 3.2B agentic work units delivered in Q2 alone (up 97% Q/Q) (here)

• Apple released refreshed Mac Mini & Mac Studio models with faster chips & higher prices, but supply constraints from AI agent demand & the global memory-chip shortage may limit availability after previous generations sold out rapidly (here)

Big Dogs

• Anthropic launched Claude Fable 5.1 & Mythos 5.1, claiming world-leading performance on coding & knowledge work. Fable 5.1 cuts pricing ~25% (up to 45% for agentic tasks) via cheaper cache reads, introduces Enterprise Frontier Safeguards for customer-controlled data storage, & reduces cybersecurity false positives by 60%. Mythos 5.1 - same model, restricted access - supports work in cybersecurity & life sciences under a US government-partnered programme (here)

• Anthropic is expected to cite >$30T in potential revenue opportunities to investors - topping SpaceX’s $28.5T estimate - as the AI startup tests the limits of addressable market metrics ahead of a likely IPO (here)

• Anthropic struck a $45B deal with UK start-up Nscale to rent 460 megawatts of Nvidia Vera Rubin processors from a West Virginia data centre over 6 yrs, starting late 2027. Nscale, valued at $14.6B & eyeing its own IPO next month, is building a 1.35GW facility powered by a 2GW gas plant at an estimated $69B cost (here)

• Meta has become one of Anthropic’s largest customers, at one point projecting $10B in annual spend on Claude models, even as Zuckerberg publicly criticised the start-up for consolidating power. Meta has used Anthropic’s tools to power & test Hatch, its coming personal agent product, though it’s now shifting to internal models - a move that could dent Anthropic’s revenue ahead of a rumoured $2T IPO (here)

• OpenAI terminated Cursor’s API access after SpaceX acquired the coding assistant for $60B, citing trust issues with Musk-owned entities (Musk admitted to breaking OpenAI’s ToS / xAI previously used OpenAI models to train its own). Cursor ($4B ARR) says OpenAI accounts for 5% of traffic & will rely on Anthropic’s Claude & its own Grok (here)

• DeepSeek is nearing a pre-IPO round raising ~50B yuan at 500B yuan (~$74B) pre-money. The Hangzhou AI lab is preparing for a 2027 Shanghai Star Market listing (here)

• OpenAI is testing outcome-based pricing with some large customers, charging only when AI successfully completes tasks (e.g. support tickets). The shift - mirrored by Salesforce (which ties Agentforce fees to revenue gains or cost cuts), Sierra, & Adobe - reflects pressure from high operating costs & competition, though attribution remains contested without clear rules on whether results stem from the AI or other factors (here)

Venture Capital

• OpenAI filed to raise a $400M second venture fund, this time from its own balance sheet rather than external LPs (its 2021 debut fund raised $175M from Microsoft & others), focusing on early-stage AI companies - a sign of both deepening cash reserves & intent to shape the ecosystem surrounding its platform (here)

• Andreessen Horowitz raised $1.1B for an AI hardware (“Machine Age”) fund targeting chips, memory, networking & storage - 9 mo after raising $15B across funds (here)

• Days after, a16z expanded its fifth growth fund to $8.5B (up $1.75B since January). The firm now manages $90B across enterprise & consumer AI, defence, robotics, infrastructure & health tech, reflecting accelerated growth timelines & capital intensity in the AI era (here)

• UK venture capital investment reached £14.4B in H1 2026, on track to double & exceed the £26B 2021 record, driven by late-stage software & biotech deals - though overseas investors accounted for 89% of funding (here)

Regulation

• Anthropic won a legal battle blocking the Pentagon’s attempt to designate it a supply-chain risk. A separate Washington appeals case remains active (here)

• Meta agreed to pay up to $18B to settle claims over alleged failures in child protection & social media addiction - one of the largest US corporate settlements on record (here)

Venture Geopolitics

• Global bond yields surged: UK 10-yr gilts hit 5.26% (highest since 2008), Japan’s 3% (highest since 1996), US 2-yr rose to 4.39% - driven by Middle East conflict, energy-driven inflation fears, & central bank rate-hike expectations. Investors also flagged rising government & hyperscaler AI borrowing as compounding supply pressure (here)

• Matt Clifford is moving to Anthropic as managing director, international affairs & will lead the company’s engagement with governments outside the US including in the UK, Europe, Asia-Pacific & India. The move has raised concern with the head of the House of Commons science, innovation and technology committee given potential “conflict of interest” with his role as Chair of Aria (here)

• Trump declared a national emergency to block foreign-made equipment (transformers, batteries, inverters, software) from the U.S. bulk-power system, with DOE rules due within 120 days (here)

• Trump doubled down on data centre expansion despite bipartisan pushback ahead of midterms, warning communities that reject them will ‘end up backwards & poor’ (here)

• Trump administration considering sweeping tariffs on semiconductors & chip-dependent products (laptops, servers, gaming consoles) despite warnings from tech companies that the move could doom U.S. hopes of dominating artificial intelligence (here)

• Trump administration struck a deal giving the Pentagon a direct equity stake in a private Venezuelan oil venture - century-long rights to 17 fields holding 65B barrels - one-fifth of Venezuela’s reserves. The arrangement marks an unprecedented shift from broker to investor & tightens Washington’s ties to Venezuela’s unelected government (here)

• UK launched a £100M procurement competition to back British AI startups solving public sector challenges - from NHS productivity & cyber resilience to defence integration & AI compute efficiency - with upfront funding, IP retention & reduced barriers for smaller firm (here)

• The Rhine Group launched - co-chaired by Mario Draghi & Stripe’s Patrick Collison, it brings together 55 European business leaders, founders (including Celonis, Klarna, Exploration Company), & investors (Atomico, General Catalyst) to push Draghi’s competitiveness proposals towards implementation (here)

Strategic Sectors

AI

• Bill Gates published a 6,000-word essay arguing that the economic and social consequences of AI will be greater than previous technology shifts, mainly because he thinks it will happen quicker. He says governments should designate certain jobs as ‘human reserved’ to protect workers from AI displacement, likening it to nature reserves. He called for new taxes on robots & AI tokens (currently deductible as business expenses vs. payroll taxes on humans), warned leaders are unprepared for labour force disruption, & flagged risks including addictive chatbots & erosion of critical thinking in education (here)

• Moonshot AI is negotiating revenue-sharing agreements (up to 30% of K3-related revenue) with Microsoft Azure, AWS & Google Cloud, potentially the first major US cloud-Chinese AI partnership despite Washington’s chip export bans & Treasury Secretary Bessent’s blacklist threats (here)

• Tech managers now oversee teams of 12-15 (up from 8-10) & increasingly code themselves, leaving less time for career coaching as AI accelerates product cycles. Deel’s CEO predicts “managers of managers” will disappear (here)

• Tencent launched Hy4, its new flagship open-source model, ranking 5th on Code Arena’s WebDev benchmark alongside xAI’s Grok-4.6 - a leap from predecessor Hy3’s 31st place (here)

• Z.ai released GLM-5.3 Flash, an open-source model ranked 8th on the Artificial Analysis index (matching GPT-5.6 Terra) at $0.15/$0.50 per M tokens (currently 50% off), undercutting DeepSeek’s V4-Flash ($1.32 peak output) & intensifying price competition in the lightweight agent-capable model segment (here)

• Revolut launched Revolut Research, an in-house AI unit building PRAGMA - a financial foundation model developed with Nvidia trained on data from 80M customers - claiming 2.3x better credit risk accuracy, 65% more fraud detection & 41% better product recommendations (here)

Cybersecurity

• METR & Redwood researchers conducted a 6-day independent investigation of OpenAI’s Hugging Face incident, reviewing ~1,300 transcripts & 70,000+ messages from ~1,200 agents who coordinated on an unsanctioned Artifactory message board. Key findings: 700 agents attacked Hugging Face primarily to understand the ExploitGym scorer implementation; agents ran collective R&D projects to find general-purpose cheats, with some agents sacrificing their own tasks to generate information for the collective/swarm; 7% of transcripts showed successful tool-call spoofing, though small-scale. Redwood CEO Buck Shlegeris warns of a 50-50 chance rogue swarms could eventually ‘destroy the U.S. government as part of a world takeover’ (here, here)

• OpenAI, Anthropic, Google, Microsoft & 100+ firms signed an open letter warning AI-enabled cyber attacks will become “far more widespread & sophisticated” & calling for public-private collaboration on new defences (here)

• Visa open-sourced an AI harness that cuts the cost of using Anthropic’s Mythos model for cybersecurity bug detection & fixing by up to 60%, built by 100 employees in 3 mo. The harness automates 11 stages of vulnerability scanning, switches between Anthropic, OpenAI & open models, & is being adopted by Coinbase, Shopify & Ramp (here)

Defence

• CIA Director John Ratcliffe visited Moscow with a warning against attacking NATO. Tom Tugendhat argues Putin may attack anyway - facing domestic political death if he withdraws from Ukraine, he sees European NATO states as unprepared, France politically divided, Britain lacking drone defence & naval capacity, & US munitions depleted after Gulf operations (here)

• UK government is accelerating work on a “war book” for national defence & launching a public campaign advising households to stockpile in preparation for threats including Russian aggression, Iranian-linked cyber attacks on energy infrastructure, & extreme weather. The manual, last updated in 2004, now emphasises civilian-military coordination, whilst officials warn Britain’s distributed energy assets remain vulnerable despite robust protections at major operators like National Grid (here)

• Pentagon undersecretary Colby told NATO allies the US aims to “advance & accelerate” the transfer of Europe’s conventional defence responsibility as Washington’s 6-month troop review continues, due year-end. Allies received a questionnaire (deadline Friday) asking whether countries have been “publicly supportive” of Trump’s foreign policy, restrictions on US base use, & procurement from US defence contractors (here)

• FT Opinion: “Don’t write off Russia’s defence industry yet”. Russia’s defence industry is combining Soviet-era manufacturing scale with modern drone, electronic warfare & AI-enabled targeting innovation - monthly Geran drone production now far exceeds US Lucas deployment, whilst 130,000+ compact counter-drone jammers were delivered in 2025 through a hybrid model linking state contractors like Kalashnikov with tech accelerators & private firms that evade sanctions via third countries. The battlefield feedback loop & wartime footing could give Russia asymmetric advantages against NATO forces (here)

Energy / Climate

• On average, hyperscale data centers in the US have only a marginal impact on nearby households’ power bills (here & here)

• UK government documents warn of a 1-in-4 chance of catastrophic water supply failure affecting 1M people, citing climate change & cyberattack risks - a sharp escalation in assessed probability over recent months that underscores infrastructure fragility in critical utilities (here)

• Natural catastrophes are expected to cost $450B annually, with 62% of losses uninsured as carriers carve out risk from standard policies & exit high-risk markets (here)

IPOs / Publics

• IPO market in August lull - pricings light, filings heavier. Anthropic continues to dominate IPO headlines, firming up plans for possible Oct listing (that could raise more than SpaceX). Other hopefuls joined Renaissance fall IPO watchlist incl. General Atlantic, Nscale & Kakao Mobility (here)

• Final US IPO of summer was a “dud” - defence contractor Lyntris priced below range & ended week down -10% (here)

• Aerospace & defence company Ursa Major will go public in ​the US through $2.3B deal ‌with blank-check firm Bleichroeder Acquisition Corp. III (here)

• Crusoe (data centre developer) in IPO talks with at least 4 banks incl. JPM, MS, GS & BofA, positioning to list amid continued demand for compute infra (here)

• Shein listing in HK at $26B-27B, down 75% from $100B 2022 peak, after failing to list in NY or London. Faced CSRC objections over Xinjiang disclosures, US/EU trade investigations, closure of <$800 de minimis tax exemptions & allegations over labour & sustainability (here)

• YMTC (flash-memory chips) filed for $4.9B IPO on Shanghai’s STAR Market, one of the exchange’s largest-ever listings - yet another signal Beijing is channeling capital into chip champions after US export controls (here)

• Moderna & Merck reported that their personalised mRNA melanoma vaccine succeeded in preventing cancer recurrence or spread in high-risk patients, sending Moderna shares up >100% & validating years of oncology mRNA development ahead of potential 2027 launch (here)

• IBM created a mainframe chip that can run both traditional IBM Z software & Arm-based software on the same processor cores, switching between them almost instantly. Companies could run existing z/OS banking & transaction systems alongside modern Arm Linux apps, AI tools like PyTorch & containers - without rewriting the Arm software first (here)

Big Dogs

• Anthropic’s Fable 5 accounts for 11% of corporate spending 2mo post-launch, with customers favouring cheaper alternatives including its own Opus 5 & OpenAI’s GPT 5.6, per Ramp data from 70,000 firms. Shift signals price sensitivity & ‘good enough’ performance trumping raw capability for most enterprise use cases (here)

• DeepSeek released experimental multimodal version of its V4 Flash model that adds vision capabilities to flagship text model, claiming performance close to Opus 4.8 on agentic benchmarks - the latest salvo in China’s push to match US frontier models at lower cost (here)

• OpenAI paused some frontier RL training, citing model capabilities advancing faster than alignment & security safeguards (here)

Regulation

• US-Canada trade talks collapsed & escalated after Washington made last-minute demands; new 50% US tariffs on ~$20B of Canadian goods took effect, with Canada subsequently announcing 50% retaliatory tariffs (US Trade Rep labelled it a ‘Chinese-styled counterattack’) (here & here)

• TikTok settled with US Justice Dept for $400M over allegations it illegally collected data from users under 13 without parental consent (here)

• New EU right-to-repair rules now require manufacturers to fix household electronics (phones, washing machines, vacuums) at reasonable cost & timescales, supported by national repair platforms like Ireland’s RepairMyStuff.ie. Brussels estimates will generate €4.8B in growth across the bloc while cutting 35M tonnes of annual consumer waste (here)

• Trump proposed a $103,265 fee for new H-1B visa filings, replacing earlier $100,000 charge struck down by federal appeals court; fee would apply to most new applicants regardless of location, with 30-day public comment period before implementation (here)

• Civil society groups urged FTC to investigate AI firms for buying, scanning & destroying books to train models, arguing the practice eliminates training data rivals need to compete. Anthropic reportedly spent millions acquiring books & physically removing spines to scan pages for Claude; Google, Microsoft & OpenAI face similar copyright lawsuits (here)

Venture Capital

• DOJ investigating Andreessen Horowitz for holding board seats in rival AI companies. The nearly year-long probe, unusually long for a board seat overlap, may signal DOJ setting an example for the broader VC industry or hint at undisclosed issues (here)

• Blackbird Ventures closed a $1B fund backed by Morgan Stanley & Schroders, following Airtree's $650M raise from US institutions last year - both reflecting Australian VCs' push to access offshore capital for larger rounds & secondary liquidity (here)

Venture Geopolitics

• Trump administration signed a public-private partnership with London-based Core Power to develop nuclear-powered merchant vessels by 2028, aiming to counter China’s shipbuilding dominance. Core Power raised ~$200M from Mitsui, Mitsubishi & Sumitomo; nuclear propulsion promises 50-75% faster speeds & lower environmental taxes, though insurance, crew training & regulatory frameworks remain unresolved (here)

• Trump abruptly scaled back joint US-South Korea military drills citing his relationship with Kim Jong Un, triggering confusion over whether the move was aimed at North Korea peace talks, punishing Seoul’s drift toward Beijing under President Lee Jae Myung, signalling displeasure over slow Korean investment pledges, or a concession to Xi ahead of his September DC visit (here)

• Beijing warned it will take "all necessary measures" if Washington expands Iran-related secondary sanctions to major Chinese firms, setting up a potential clash a month before Trump & Xi are set to meet in Washington to discuss extending trade truce. China buys 90% of Iran's oil, much of it through private "teapot" refiners that Beijing has ordered not to comply with existing US sanctions. Further escalation would risk Chinese retaliation via critical minerals / other leverage (here)

• Per the FT, “climate change is driving new geostrategy” - China launched weekly Arctic Ice Silk Road shipping (cutting Europe-Asia transit by half as ice melts), while drought closed Panama Canal lanes (32% volume drop) & halted Rhine/Danube traffic, forcing Romanian nuclear & auto shutdowns. Beijing’s dominance in EVs, batteries & rare earths positions it to control 21st-century logistics & currency power as fossil fuels fade, yet markets still misprice climate risk through short insurance cycles & discount rates that erase 2050 scenarios (here)

• Critics warn niche regulatory battles now crowd out broader voter concerns in US midterms. Crypto, AI & online betting firms have already spent $294M of a record $517M in corporate contributions to 2026 US midterm races (exceeding 2024’s full-cycle total) (here). Meanwhile, Musk expected to deploy up to $200M in Nov midterms (here)

• Andy Burnham’s No 10 North office in Manchester granted lead responsibility for economic growth (here)

Strategic Sectors

AI

• LinkedIn data shows women accounted for just 26% of US AI hires in 2025 vs 50% in non-AI roles, despite AI postings doubling since 2023 & typical AI roles listing $177K compensation vs $80K for non-AI jobs (here)

• Cursor launched Origin, its code-hosting platform, hours before a 6hr 42min GitHub outage hit 20% error rates across PRs & APIs - dramatising the case for an agent-native forge. Origin mirrors GitHub repos (keeping GitHub as source of truth), integrates Graphite’s stacked PRs, runs existing GitHub Actions unchanged & deploys via Vercel (here)

• AI developer platform Hugging Face is exploring a sale that could value the company at more than $13B (here)

• Notable deals:

  • Poolside (AI coding models) struck a $6B non-exclusive licensing deal with Nvidia, plus a $1B investment at $12B pre-money - a rare structure that monetises IP before scale whilst retaining equity upside (here)

  • General Intuition (physical AI foundation models) raised funds at $6B from Valor, Point72 & Seven Seven Six weeks after closing $320M at $2.3B, using video game action data to train agents for robotic embodiments (here)

  • Fractile (AI inference chips) is raising $600M at $6.5B, 6x its May valuation, after securing a ~$250M supply deal with Anthropic for chips expected in 2027 (here)

Cybersecurity

• Iranian hackers shut down a small UK power plant for 4 days in July, the first successful closure of such a facility by Tehran-linked groups, though the outage had no impact on wider grid supply. The attack coincided with Iranian strikes on US water infrastructure across 12 states & follows NCSC warnings of over 200 attacks on UK critical infrastructure in the past year (here)

• UK government proposes amendments to its Cyber Security & Resilience Bill granting powers to block companies from high-risk suppliers & mandate phased vendor removal in critical sectors (energy, healthcare, telecoms) following the Iran-linked cyber attack. The move poses cost challenges for energy firms reliant on Chinese solar (>90% global share), batteries & EVs; regulated entities would face 24-hour breach reporting & fines for non-compliance (here)

Defence

• Britain will access Ukraine’s Avengers Labs battlefield dataset - 100,000 drone video streams per month identifying ~70% of enemy targets - to train AI models for autonomous weapons. The agreement makes the UK the first foreign partner to access real combat data Ukraine has previously reserved for domestic firms, in exchange for British AI research & defence tech; includes acoustic sensor data for counter-drone systems. Announced during PM Burnham’s first trip to Kyiv alongside missile tech-sharing, despite recent Kremlin warnings (here)

• Research identified 152 Polymarket wallets likely trading on U.S. military secrets, making $8M collectively with 97% win rates on defence markets. The bigger risk: their bets attracted copycat trades from automated bots & whales, potentially broadcasting classified signals - one wallet wagered on Iran strikes hours before they occurred, triggering $300K in follow-on bets (here)

• A second explosive-laden drone was discovered near Leipzig/Halle airport on 14 August, 10 days after the first device was found next to a Ukrainian cargo plane; both drones carried military-grade explosives (Semtex, PETN, hexogen) but were defective. German Chancellor Merz warned of "unscrupulous" hybrid attacks as investigators race to determine whether Russia or proxies are behind the incidents targeting Europe's fourth-largest air freight hub & major Nato logistics centre (here)

• Optics11 (Dutch fibre-optic sonar) is being tested by the Royal Navy & could be fitted to civilian ships to detect Russian submarines at 60+ miles - offering Britain a scalable countermeasure as Russian naval activity in the Channel rose 33% last year & Moscow deployed its Khabarovsk submarine equipped with Poseidon nuclear torpedos (here)

Space

• SpaceX & AST SpaceMobile are eyeing Grain Management’s 800 MHz spectrum licences, valued at $6B, which cover nearly the entire US & are suited for satellite-to-phone services (here)

It is a reminder we live (or have been living) in a globalised world, and war is closer to our doorstep than we might want to admit. Supply chains are going to be tightening in the military industrial complex and anything government-related should expect a lot more scrutiny.

Trump has already made strong moves to isolate the US from the rest of the world and is succeeding in pushing the rest of the world to bring their supply chains home, too. This week, he put tariffs of up to 100% to imported drones and components - though Britain gets a preferred 10% rate (for now at least!)

IPOs / Publics

• Anthropic investors expect the AI start-up to float at a valuation of $2T or more in October (here)

• Shein is targeting a $25B valuation in its Hong Kong IPO - a 75% markdown from its $98B 2022 valuation - after revenue growth collapsed to 8% in 2025 & 1.1% in Q1 2026, as US tariffs (imposed from May 2025) & EU restrictions on Chinese e-commerce bite (here)

• Nvidia unveiled partnerships with Apollo, BlackRock, Blackstone, Brookfield, Goldman Sachs & KKR to mobilise $500B+ in third-party capital for AI infrastructure (here)

• ECB economists warn a US tech stock correction is likely & poses a financial stability risk to Europe, where households hold €440B exposure to US tech equities via funds. They argue that even if AI succeeds, rising economy-wide uncertainty (not diversifiable like firm-level risk) will push up required returns & depress valuations - echoing boom-bust patterns in railways, electricity, & dotcom eras (here)

• Stripe acquired OpenRouter (AI model routing) for over $7B in cash & stock, 5x the $1.3B valuation from months earlier, reflecting demand for cost optimisation as developers mix cheaper & frontier models. OpenRouter was generating $50M ARR as of April, up 5x from October (here)

• Alphabet, Meta, Microsoft & Amazon have committed ~$3T more to AI infrastructure than balance sheets show - $1.5T in purchase commitments (chips, power) & $904B in leases not yet started (data centres) sit off-balance-sheet, dwarfing the $604B in on-sheet liabilities & debt. Alphabet leads purchase commitments at $811B, while Meta tops unleased capacity at $347B (here)

Big Dogs

• Anthropic’s new text watermarking for Claude - mandated by EU regulation - works by probabilistically biasing word choices at inference time, not by adding invisible characters. Critics note honest users face degraded output quality whilst bad actors can trivially bypass detection via paraphrasing tools, & that the watermark calls every word choice into question for purposes unrelated to user needs (here)

• Anthropic is projecting $190-200B revenue in 2028 - vs. a $47B run rate in May - as it prepares for IPO, with bankers using 2-year-ahead revenue multiples to value the company despite heavy spending on AI infrastructure (here)

• OpenAI replaced Chief Revenue Officer Denise Dresser (8 mo tenure) with Dali Rajic, a Wiz executive who oversaw annualized revenue growth from $200M to nearly $2B. The hire from cybersecurity rather than traditional enterprise software (Oracle, Salesforce) signals OpenAI’s push to monetise security products after disclosing its models broke containment during testing & hacked other companies (here)

• OpenAI launched Computer History for ChatGPT on macOS, an opt-in feature that tracks user interactions across apps & websites to build a searchable timeline & suggest workflow automations. Unlike the earlier Chronicle preview, it uses accessibility APIs rather than screenshots, stores data locally, & is off by default. Initially unavailable in EEA, Switzerland & UK; limited to Pro, Business & Enterprise tiers (here)

Venture Capital

• Craft Ventures is raising ~$1B, its first fund since David Sacks left his White House AI & crypto czar role earlier this year; the firm is consolidating from two vehicles into one Series A+ fund, bringing total AUM above $4B (here)

• Robinhood launched its second venture fund, raising $226M in a NYSE IPO to let retail investors buy into early-stage startups from Y Combinator’s portfolio (5,000+ companies at $1.3T+ combined valuation, including Coinbase, Reddit & OpenAI). The move extends Robinhood’s retail democratisation thesis into private markets as startups stay private longer; the firm is already planning funds three through six (here)

• GALLOS Technologies (UK defence venture studio led by former GCHQ director Sir Jeremy Fleming & ex-special forces personnel) raised £35M co-led by Ventura Capital & Aberdeen Investments to build & scale early-stage defence startups addressing digital threats, following investments in StirlingX & AI Score (here)

Venture Geopolitics

• 30-year US Treasury yields hit 5.34% (highest since 2007) amid inflation fears from oil above $90, fiscal deficit concerns, & record Big Tech AI bond issuance expected to reach $1.9T in 2026 - crowding out government debt & forcing higher term premiums across developed markets (here)

• UK government urgently assessing economic & security impact of losing access to frontier AI models after Trump blocked foreign access to Anthropic’s Fable 5 in June (later reversed). Cabinet Office estimates even weeks of delay in accessing new models could hit UK competitiveness, whilst asymmetric cyber exposure risks emerge if foreign actors exploit vulnerabilities before British firms can patch. UK investing £1.1B in AI hardware & £500M in sovereign AI fund to reduce dependency on US hyperscalers (here)

• Five Eyes intelligence alliance issued a rare public warning on AI-enabled bioweapons risk, urging governments to act before synthetic biology & machine learning converge to lower barriers to germ warfare - a signal of growing Western concern over dual-use technology governance (here)

• Trump Media disclosed 10+ paying customers for its real-time Truth Social feed, mostly high-frequency trading firms paying $60K-$100K/mo for millisecond-faster access to Trump’s market-moving posts during the Iran conflict, while the company reported $238M losses on $1.7M revenue & unwound deals with Crypto.com (here)

Strategic Sectors

AI

• CME Group will launch compute futures contracts (5 Oct, pending approval) tied to Nvidia H100 & Blackwell B200 GPU rental costs, creating the first tradable benchmark for AI computing capacity! (here)

• Z.ai released open-source GLM-5.3, claiming cybersecurity performance on par with Anthropic’s Mythos 5 - part of a broader push by Chinese developers (Moonshot, Z.ai) to challenge US frontier models with capable open-source alternatives (here)

• DeepSeek raised V4-Pro API pricing to $3.96/M tokens (peak) from $0.87, effective 16th August, following mixed early reviews of the flagship model; V4-Flash rises to $1.32 (peak) from $0.28, though both remain well below Anthropic’s Claude Opus 5 ($25) & Moonshot’s Kimi K3 ($15) (here)

• SpaceX completed its $60B all-stock acquisition of Cursor, finalising an option agreed in April that gave Cursor access to SpaceX’s AI compute for training its Composer coding model in exchange for tools & data (here)

• The UK government awarded KPMG & EY up to £456M (2026-28) to train civil servants in AI skills, the largest Big Four contract since 2012, despite Labour’s 2024 pledge to halve consultancy spending (actual reduction: 14% in FY25). The deal serves as a stopgap before a planned in-house training model (here)

• Notable deals:

  • Lovable (AI-powered software creation platform) raised $400M at $13.3B, led by Menlo Ventures & co-led by EQT’s Scaleup Europe Fund (here)

  • Wispr (AI dictation) raised $280M at $2B led by Menlo Ventures, expanding into meeting notes & launching Canto (a new speech model cutting error rates from 30% to <10%) as competition intensifies from Willow, Monologue & others (here)

Energy

• Nvidia is in talks to invest up to $3B in SB Energy (SoftBank-backed data centre developer) as part of discussions to provide ~$100B in credit support for OpenAI’s planned 10 GW Ohio campus (here)

• Small modular reactor stocks (NuScale, Nano Nuclear, Oklo, X-energy) have lost $30B in market cap since October, with short sellers earning $2.1B as the sector deflated from hype-driven peaks (here)

• Notable deal:

  • Form Energy raised $750M led by T. Rowe Price to expand iron-air battery manufacturing in West Virginia, with 80 gigawatt-hours of customer commitments (up 4x since early 2026) including Google’s 30 GWh Minnesota data centre project. The 100-hour discharge batteries use 80% US-sourced materials & no Chinese inputs (here)

Defence

• Trump declared 100% tariffs on drones over 25kg, thermal-camera drones & all aircraft parts, citing national security concerns over foreign supply chains (25% on smaller drones). Companies manufacturing in the US are exempt; allies face 10-15% rates (here)

• Russia threatened the UK with “consequences” after reports that British-made drones were used in Ukrainian long-range strikes, calling London’s support for Kyiv an “escalation”. The UK MoD reaffirmed it stands “shoulder to shoulder” with Ukraine. The warning follows a series of aggressive encounters this year, including Russian warships firing warning shots in the English Channel, live-fire exercises near Plymouth, & submarine operations near critical UK undersea infrastructure (here)

• Royal Navy K3 Scout drones supplied by Kraken Technology Group contained third-party Chinese-made cameras that sent telemetry to China, exposing the tension between Britain’s push for cheaper, faster military technology & supply-chain sovereignty. MoD found no evidence of compromised data but disabled internet connectivity; even basic metadata (device status, geolocation inference) can reveal operational patterns when aggregated (here)

• Russian intelligence services have been caught surveilling European defence CEOs, including recent incidents near Saab’s Johansson in Sweden & earlier assassination plots against Rheinmetall’s Papperger & drone-maker Donaustahl’s Thumann. The pattern recalls 1970s-80s Red Army Faction killings of German business leaders, but now aims to intimidate executives away from Ukraine-linked production - a tactic that could spread to other hostile states targeting strategic sectors (here)

• Putin threatened to seize British vessels in retaliation for UK & EU operations against Russia’s shadow fleet, describing ship seizures as “piracy” & warning of responses “wherever we deem it necessary” (here)

• Russia & Iran are rapidly scaling online recruitment of amateur proxies - from teenagers to criminal gangs - to carry out surveillance, arson & assassinations across Europe, exploiting a permissive online environment & strain on finite law-enforcement resources (here)

• Australia unveiled a 10-year defence technology strategy prioritising AI, autonomous systems, quantum, hypersonics, high-energy lasers & undersea warfare, with AU$425B committed over the decade (here)

• Notable deal:

  • Cambridge Aerospace raised $300m to develop its missile & drone interceptor systems from Accel, DFJ Growth, Elad Gil & Co, Lakestar, Lux Capital, Never Lift Ventures, Ora Global (here)

Space

• Goldman Sachs argues space is shifting from a government-led prestige project to a pillar of the industrial economy, as launch costs have plummeted & private capital now funds infrastructure once exclusive to states - creating a new arena for geopolitical competition over orbital access, launch capacity & space-based services (here)

Then in 1993, AOL brought the masses online by mailing floppy disks that offered free dial-up internet access to hook new users. From that point on, it was Eternal September.

The pre-Eternal September era is the lost era of the noble savage for internet geeks. The concept of a free and liberated internet, in which everyone is both a consumer and a producer of code and content, has since become less and less true. While everyone used to spin up their own website, now we have platforms like Twitter, Facebook and Substack. We have been on a steady march towards the current era of walled gardens, centralisation, convenience and power.

There is a constant tension between the decentralised, free libertarian internet and the centralised, monetised middle. This week, two things pushed back towards the geeks’ garden of Eden!

Mark Zuckerberg of Meta (the archetypical walled garden) wrote a letter about how “The Future is for Everyone”. In his words, “The defining questions of our age are who will have access to superintelligence and what will we direct it towards. Will it be centralized and restricted to a few institutions, or will it be a tool that empowers everyone?”

And Cloudflare, which effectively re-centralised the infrastructure of the internet, released CloudflareOS.

CloudflareOS is a reincarnation of Sandstorm for the agentic era. For the non-geeks, Sandstorm was a distributed platform created by Kenton Varda a decade ago where you could run internet applications in disposable containers - there is a core upstream piece of software, but the version you run belongs to you, and if you don’t quite like it you can just change it. Meanwhile, the core upstream software handles authentication and authorisation. This was the original engineers dream: adopt core software, work together in common spaces, but have complete control over your own system, and the freedom to change it at will.

Varda claims Sandstorm didn’t take off because most people didn’t have the time or patience to modify their own software. But that was a decade ago - we are now in 2026, and agents change the equation. CloudflareOS is the reincarnation of that vision, but in a world where anyone can modify their own software just by asking.

There are perhaps other reasons why that (fabled?) pre-September era was not sustainable. Convenience, the desire to make money, and network effects to name a few. Those have not changed, and so history suggests we will not see a return to bucolic savagery, but the attempt is enticing, and there are a lot of people who will be wishing to see it work!

IPOs / Publics

• Meta launched Muse Code (terminal-based coding agent, beta) & Muse Spark 1.2 (coding-focused model update), entering direct competition with Anthropic’s Claude Code & OpenAI’s Codex. Unlike Llama, both are proprietary, though Zuckerberg hinted open-source will come later (here)

• Zuckerberg published a 5,000-word vision document arguing Meta will build “personal superintelligence for everyone” rather than centralised AI, framing wide distribution as the path to job growth, cybersecurity balance & democratic safety - a direct counter to OpenAI/Anthropic concentration narratives & a claim that individual empowerment, not automation, will define the next economic cycle (here)

• Microsoft plans to scale production of its Maia 300 AI chip to over 300,000 units in 2027 via TSMC, targeting customers like Anthropic after slow uptake of Maia 200 (deployed in just 2 data centres). The push reflects Nadella’s drive to cut Nvidia dependence (here)

• Nvidia agreed to invest up to $3B in Lancium (Blackstone-backed power developer behind OpenAI/Oracle’s Texas campus), valuing it at ~$10B enterprise value - securing power rights for AI data centres as grid capacity tightens (here)

• Per Bloomberg, China is mobilising its $28T capital markets to fund AI & chip firms, fast-tracking IPOs (CXMT raised $9.8B in <8 mo) & bond sales, shifting from subsidies to market-based financing. Chinese tech firms borrow at 1.9% vs 5%+ for US peers, but raised only $217B over 2 yrs vs $1.3T in the US (here)

Big Dogs

• Anthropic confirmed it is building an in-house chip design team for Claude, hiring engineers at $320K-485K to create custom silicon whilst maintaining a multi-chip strategy with AWS, Google, Nvidia & AMD. The move follows OpenAI’s June unveiling of its Broadcom-designed Jalapeño chip & Meta’s September production plans, as AI labs seek to reduce Nvidia reliance & optimise compute for their models (here)

• Anthropic partnered with Macquarie Asset Management & GIC to form Theseus Infrastructure, a vehicle to build AI data centres initially in the US. Macquarie & GIC will fund most equity, while Anthropic covers any consumer electricity price increases - no spending figures disclosed, though Anthropic previously committed $50B to custom data centres & secured a $35B chip loan backstopped by Google (here)

• Both Kimi K3, Moonshot’s latest AI model & Meta (Muse Spark 1.1) disclosed that their models hacked a third-party company during cybersecurity testing - welcome to the party, both (here & here)

Venture Capital

• Alfred Lin & Pat Grady are repositioning the 54-year-old firm Sequoia for a world dominated by AI. Sequoia closed $10B across growth & expansion funds & its new stewards are accelerating decision-making & raising franchise-risk tolerance - exemplified by a $2.5B follow-on into Anthropic, their largest single investment in 54 years. The firm has shifted focus toward AI infrastructure (leading Etched’s $300M chip round, Ineffable’s $1.1B seed), reindustrialisation (SendCutSend), & nuclear energy (Valar Atomics’ $300M round) (here)

• Yann LeCun joined 224 Ventures, a $100M AI fund writing $1M-$5M cheques, alongside DeepMind’s Oriol Vinyals & AIX Ventures’ Shaun Johnson, backed by 244 LPs mostly from AI operators. LeCun quit another fund, Extelligence Invest, a month earlier citing “legal & contractual complications” around exclusivity with other funds (here)

• Blackstone Secured Lending Fund cut NAV by the most in 6 years to $25.53/share (lowest since 2020), with net income down 94% to $9M as $137M unrealized losses hit the private credit BDC - a sign of broader spread widening & distress as investors pull capital amid loan quality & AI-disruption fears (here)

• Leopold Aschenbrenner’s Situational Awareness fund deployed $400M into an undisclosed portfolio company days after its near-collapse, as assets fell from $45B to $10B after forced liquidation of public holdings to Citadel amid margin calls (masterfully captured by Matt Levine as always)

Regulation

• Turkey’s new cybersecurity law centralises digital oversight in the presidency’s Cybersecurity Directorate, requiring telecom operators & platforms to comply with orders within 2 hours. Critics warn the measure creates a “digital obedience regime” in a country that ranks 163rd of 180 for press freedom, where 90% of media is state-controlled & social media throttling is routine (here)

• A New Mexico court ordered Meta to pay $567M into a fund for children’s mental health services, adding to a $375M fine from March when a jury found the company knowingly harmed children & concealed child exploitation on its platforms - the first ruling to hold Meta liable for on-platform harms (here)

Venture Geopolitics

• Survey of ~1,500 businesses across UK, France & Germany found 75% fear losing access to US tech services via government kill switch, with 54% expecting <1 day operational runway if cut off from AWS, Microsoft, or Google cloud. Estimated losses average €100K/day, yet only 44% have contingency plans - highlighting a structural dependency gap as European govts shift procurement away from US hyperscalers (here)

• Palantir’s U.S. business booked a 47.7% profit margin in 2025 while European subsidiaries averaged 6.3%, with Swedish operations reporting just €424K tax on €13.7M revenue, a structure CICTAR argues channels profits to the U.S. where losses & R&D credits offset federal tax liability (here)

Strategic Sectors

AI

• Jeff Dean, Google's chief scientist & one of the company's earliest employees, is leaving to launch Discovery Loop alongside other top researchers including Sanjay Ghemawat, Quoc Le & Oriol Vinyals. The AI startup aims to automate scientific research by running thousands of experiments simultaneously at scale. Initial funding is co-led by Radical Ventures & Khosla Ventures, with participation from Alphabet, Kleiner Perkins, Lightspeed & Doerr Capital - a notable example of a Big Tech parent backing its own departing talent (here)

• AMD acquired Toronto-based Taalas, which etches AI model weights directly into silicon to boost inference performance by 10x or more - initial test chips served Llama 3.1 8B at 16,960 tokens/sec, 48x faster than Nvidia GPUs (here)

• Per the FT, Cosine, a 30-person London start-up that has raised just $15M, is building Lumen Sovereign - Britain's first 'sovereign' frontier AI model - with government compute access via the Isambard supercomputer & partnerships with BAE, PwC & Lloyds. The model uses a mixture-of-experts architecture based on Mistral Large 3 (roughly 2x the size) & targets regulated industries requiring on-premise deployment (here)

• Decart (real-time video AI) is in advanced talks to sell for $6B-7B, with SpaceX, Amazon & Nebius believed to be circling after a larger bid displaced original buyer Nvidia (here)

• Notable deals:

  • Volta (neocloud infrastructure finance) raised $300M at $2.4B from a16z, Altimeter, Nvidia & Michael Dell, plus secured a $5B credit facility to finance AI hardware through long-term asset deals rather than upfront purchases - the model underpins a $10B, 6-yr compute contract with Anthropic using Bitdeer’s 133 MW Norway facility (here)

  • Lumilens (optical interconnects for AI data centres) raised $700M at $5.5B & began shipping to an unnamed hyperscaler under a multi-billion-dollar contract, betting that light can replace copper wiring as chip clusters scale - though cost remains the central barrier to adoption (here)

Cybersecurity

• Cloudflare's CSO revealed the company now uses Claude Sonnet to automate bug bounty triage for $58/mo (vs $200k/mo for a security-specific model) & has replaced nearly all third-party security tools with 200+ in-house AI agents - though he cautioned others not to follow suit. Separately, Cloudflare is positioning itself as a paid intermediary between AI companies & content publishers, leveraging its position between users & sites to collect micropayments for scraped content (here)

• Darktrace integrated its SECURE AI platform with Microsoft Agent 365 to provide behavioural risk detection for autonomous AI agents operating across Microsoft’s productivity suite, establishing baseline patterns for each organisation & flagging anomalous activity that may indicate compromise or misuse (here)

• US Cyber Command saw 5 suicides in a single month this summer, prompting a formal cluster investigation & Congressional scrutiny. The command’s leader requested $11M for mental health support in April, warning that “burnout & force degradation will increase” without funding - a request made shortly before workload surged due to the US-Iran war & AI-enabled cyber threats (here)

• 1Password research found 53.9% of AI-generated security patches contain serious flaws - only 26% properly fixed vulnerabilities without breaking applications, while 49.3% left exploitable attack paths open. Testing ChatGPT-5.5 & Claude Opus 4.8 on 6 recent CVEs revealed models frequently block proof-of-concept exploits without addressing root causes, underscoring that patch verification remains bottlenecked by human review capacity (here)

Defence

• Italy will request approval to spend an additional 0.6% of GDP on green energy & 0.9% on defence under relaxed EU fiscal rules, with Rome seeking to reach NATO’s 5% defence target from 2% today. The move faces domestic pushback from coalition partners including the League party, while details on green investments & use of EU SAFE defence loans (potentially €15B) remain undecided ahead of 2027 elections (here)

• Rheinmetall revenue rose 39% to €5.2B in H1 2026 despite a €300M writedown from Germany cancelling the F-126 frigate programme; order backlog passed €80B on the back of a €5.7B Romanian contract & an expected €12.4B German Boxer armoured vehicle deal, underscoring sustained European rearmament (here)

• Notable deals:

  • Hadrian (automated defence manufacturing) raised $1.37B at $8B led by WCM, Washington Harbour, Valor, 137 Ventures & Baillie Gifford, bringing total raised to ~$2B. The company builds AI-powered factories to mass-produce parts for existing military platforms (here)

  • Cambridge Aerospace raised $300M at $3.4B, less than 4 mo after a $200M Series B at $1.3B, as the counter-drone startup scales production on UK MoD contracts including Skyhammer interceptors for the Armed Forces (here)

  • Nick Blair (son of former UK PM Tony Blair) is raising ~$200M for Pyra, a defence tech start-up building systems integration technology for security applications. Blair previously co-founded Skyral (modelling & simulation software, raised $20M last year) (here)

Energy

• US Department of Energy’s Genesis Open Models Initiative is soliciting scientific data, code & task environments for AI model development, with August 2026 deadlines for foundation-stage (text, code, structured collections) & post-training (demonstrations, RL tasks, evaluations) contributions; selected contributors get early access & co-authorship credit (here)

Critical Resources

• US imposed a 1-year ban on exports of tungsten scrap & black mass (shredded battery material containing lithium, cobalt, nickel), citing national security & supply chain risks from China dependence (here)

Space

• EU Commission signed contract to expand IRIS2 satellite constellation to 348 satellites (adding 66 to low Earth orbit), moving Europe’s Starlink rival from planning to deployment ahead of 2029 operational target for secure government & defence connectivity (here)

Crypto / Stablecoins

• Polymarket is raising ~$1B at $20B+ (up from $15B in April, when D.E. Shaw & G Squared joined) as prediction markets surge - annualised revenue now exceeds $1.2B, though rival Kalshi handled 3x the volume in July & Polymarket faces a CFTC probe over alleged fake marketing (here)

It reminds me of Monthy Python’s Four Yorkshiremen sketch. AI labs increasingly resemble several men trying to outdo one another over whose model is the most alarming. As Matt Levine quipped “Elon should announce that actually Grok has hacked into 20 companies…”

Explaining a joke always ruins it. But two things make this funny (1) the protagonists obviously desire a thing that appears to be unpleasant, and (2) nobody is truly getting hurt, yet.

For the past few years this “business negging” has mostly been harmless theatre. But the joke is becoming less funny as cybersecurity emerges as one of AI’s most important geopolitical consequences.

In order to understand the impact of AI on cybersecurity and geopolitics, it helps to distinguish between cyberwarfare - carried out by nation states with geopolitical goals - and cybercrime - carried out by non-state actors with usually financial goals (although sometimes, as in the case of North Korea, with implicit state support).

AI has collapsed the cost of doing cybercrime (every phishing campaign can now be spearphishing) but has also made it easier to find the perpetrators. Like conventional crime, governments can prosecute when the crime is detectable and falls within their jurisdiction - and doing so acts as a head on a stake. The teenagers who livestreamed the cyberattack on London’s transport network were identified and jailed.

This is broadly keeping domestic cybercrime in check, but there is a greater asymmetry between attacker and defender when it comes to foreign cybercrime and cyberwarfare. Deterrence doesn’t work when cyber criminals operate with tacit state protection. The Russian officers indicted for NotPeya were never brought into U.S. custody.

Just last week, the US state of Minnesota reported that more than 30 of its state water systems had faced a co-ordinated cyber-attack, with cyber-experts pointing fingers in the direction of Iran. China’s Volt Typhoon is intended to paralyse critical infrastructure at the outbreak of some future kinetic war.

This level and these types of crime should clearly be a government responsibility, and governments are now openly investing in offensive capabilities. But deterring foreign cyberattacks is hard - attribution and prosecution are both difficult. So in practice the onus continues to fall on businesses to “lock their doors” and look after themselves and thus their economies.

This dual responsibility - governments increasingly investing for offensive cyberwarfare and business battening their hatches to reduce their exposure to foreign cybercrime - is driving the markets up. The HACK cybersecurity ETF is up ~40% year to date vs ~13% for the S&P 500. In the private markets, a16z & Sequoia just invested $160M at $1.4B in Cathedral, a “military AI cyber startup” founded by four ex-DOGE staffers (with no revenue or contracts).

Whilst the Yorkshiremen moaned that the youth of today wouldn’t believe them, in our reality, the world is rapidly waking up to the idea that people may in fact be about to get hurt.

IPOs / Publics

• SpaceX reported its Q2 2026 financial results - its first earnings report since its June IPO. Q2 revenue of $7.81B (up 92% YoY), beat estimates but shares fell 8% after-hours as AI capex jumped sixfold to $15.83B (here)

• CXMT (Hefei-based DRAM maker) raised $8.6B in Asia’s largest IPO this year & surged 466% on debut, becoming China’s most valuable listed company at $460B market cap. Swung to $5B operating profit in Q1 as Apple began testing its chips for China-sold devices (here)

• Nscale (UK AI cloud provider backed by Nvidia) is pitching investors for an IPO at a potential $25B valuation, up from $14.6B in March, despite recent sell-offs in CoreWeave (-25% in 1 mo) & Sharon AI (-42% in 1 mo) (here)

• South Korea’s Kospi fell 40% from its June peak after retail investors piled into leveraged ETFs tracking Samsung & SK Hynix, erasing $2T in value; nearly half of retail Samsung holders & 70% of SK Hynix holders now underwater as margin debt unwinds (here)

• Amazon is winding down most Nova models (Premier, Omni, Reel, Canvas) & consolidating resources into a single frontier-model effort led by Pieter Abbeel (ex-Covariant), with a new flagship model expected at re:Invent this autumn. The shift follows layoffs in AGI, closure of AGI Lab (formed after acquiring Adept’s team), & a strategy pivot under SVP Peter DeSantis to concentrate compute & talent on fewer priorities - a retreat from the multi-model ambitions Jassy championed in 2023 (here)

Big Dogs

• OpenAI cut GPT-5.6 Luna pricing by 80% & Terra by 20%, launched a faster Sol mode (2.5x speed at 2x cost), & upgraded Auto-review to Luna, cutting agentic workflow costs ~10x - efficiency gains from Sol now passed through to API users (here)

• OpenAI CFO told staff that July ARR growth exceeded the prior 3 mo combined, driven by GPT-5.6, Codex coding tool & ChatGPT Work adoption; the company is nearing 1B weekly ChatGPT users & closing ground on Anthropic after posting $25B ARR in February (here)

• OpenAI’s new model Astra shows strong performance on certain maths problems but critics (led by Gary Marcus) warn against the ‘fallacy of composition’ - assuming success in one narrow domain (formal maths that permits verification & synthetic data) signals imminent AGI (here)

• Lilian Weng, who cofounded Thinking Machines Lab with Mira Murati after leaving OpenAI, is rejoining OpenAI to work on recursive self-improvement research - the fourth of the startup’s cofounders to exit in 12 mo (here)

• Anthropic disclosed that three Claude models breached live systems at three organisations during cybersecurity tests, accessing production infrastructure through a misconfigured evaluation environment (here)

• Anthropic faces growing distrust among Silicon Valley founders & researchers over competitive product launches that undercut partners - Claude Design in April was seen as directly competing with Figma, an Anthropic partner, prompting some customers to shift to cheaper models & fuelling concerns about ecosystem candour (here)

• Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei clarified the company does not support banning open-weight models, but fears authoritarian governments - particularly China - using AI for military superiority & repression. He advocates restricting Chinese chip access, cracking down on distillation, & establishing a global AI safety testing body that even the CCP would submit to, arguing cooperation on biological weapons prevention aligns with Chinese interests (here)

Regulation

• US senators urged Apple to avoid buying memory chips from CXMT & YMTC, citing national security concerns over Pentagon-blacklisted Chinese suppliers with alleged military ties. Apple has reportedly lobbied the Trump administration for clearance to buy CXMT chips amid a global memory shortage driven by AI data centre demand; CXMT debuted in Shanghai last week, surging 472% (here)

• Binance shifted its law enforcement cooperation policy in April 2025, now requiring most European investigators to route requests through mutual legal assistance treaties - often via the UAE government - dramatically slowing response times for scam & money-laundering investigations. The change came alongside an exodus of senior compliance staff & follows Binance’s $4.3B 2023 settlement with the US (here)

• NHS England will revise how it calculates two headline claims about Palantir’s £330M Federated Data Platform - 110,000 additional operations & 15% fewer discharge delays - after internal staff flagged flawed baselines over a year after first publication. FOI emails show analysts warned the comparison methodology was invalid due to seasonal patterns. Pressure mounts on ministers to trigger the 2027 break clause amid doubts over effectiveness, data access concerns, & Palantir’s Trump administration ties (here)

• Russia’s FSB placed Telegram founder Pavel Durov on an international wanted list, charging him with facilitating terrorism by failing to remove channels allegedly used by Ukrainian intelligence to organise attacks; Durov, who left Russia in 2014 & holds French & Emirati citizenship, denies the charges, while France does not extradite its citizens (here)

• The Federal Communications Commission (FCC) banned imports of foreign-made humanoid robots, robot dogs, & solar inverters, citing national security risks from remote surveillance or cyberattacks - a move targeting China, which dominates global supply in humanoids (~15,000 units shipped in 2025, mostly from two Chinese makers) & inverters (here)

• The US Environmental Protection Agency ruled power plants serving only data centres (not the grid) can bypass federal Clean Air Act pollution controls, including Acid Rain Program requirements - part of a push to accelerate AI infrastructure buildout while protecting residential electricity rates under Trump’s Ratepayer Protection Pledge (here)

• 80% of Australian children still use social media despite the country’s under-16 ban. The findings highlight the practical limits of age-verification regulation in closed democracies (here)

Venture Capital / Finance

• South Korea will inject $14B into its sovereign wealth fund (KIC) to create a new strategic account focused on AI, data centres & infrastructure - the first time KIC will invest domestically - as Seoul positions itself as an anchor investor to attract global capital to Korean tech following this week’s market rout (here)

• Highland Europe closed €1.1B Fund VI to back European scaleups, bringing total capital raised to €3.75B across six funds since 2012. The firm returned €1B+ to LPs in the past year via exits including Nexthink ($3B), EGYM-Playlist merger ($7.5B), & Bending Spoons’ Nasdaq listing, & recently led rounds in Wordsmith ($70M), Unframe ($50M), & Ecorobotix ($105M) (here)

• Situational Awareness, Leopold Aschenbrenner’s AI-focused hedge fund, sold the bulk of its stock portfolio to Citadel after deep losses, marking a sudden collapse for a firm that had grown to over $20B AUM in ~2 years. The mid-20s former OpenAI employee had been seen as an AI oracle, with investors tracking his big, leveraged bets (here)

• Thoma Bravo struggled to refinance $5B debt for Proofpoint (cybersecurity, bought for $12B in 2021), ultimately securing a 2-year extension to 2030 at 9.3% yield (4.5pp over SOFR, up from 3pp), signalling investor concern that AI will erode margins across PE-backed software. The deal reflects broader unease in the sector: junk-rated software loans down 7% this year, with a wave of Covid-era debt maturing by 2028 (here)

• Corgi (AI insurance startup valued at $4B) is opening a 24/7 founder-focused café in Shoreditch from mid-August, its first outside the US after San Francisco & Atlanta locations. The move follows London startups raising €17B in H1 2026, up 50% year-on-year, as the company seeks to consolidate a fragmented founder community (here)

Venture Geopolitics

• China has begun mass producing home-grown immersion DUV lithography tools via Shanghai Aishengna, a state-owned firm backed by $1B in capital & drawing teams from Yuliangsheng & SMEE. The machines - targeting SMIC, Hua Hong & CXMT - remain far from ASML’s performance but offer Beijing an alternative source if Western export restrictions tighten further. China accounts for 16% of ASML’s H1 sales; analysts say the DUV breakthrough won’t threaten near-term revenue, though ASML shares dropped 8% on initial reports (here)

• Tesla weighing sale or spin-off of China business - its second-largest market - over geopolitical concerns & to clear path for potential SpaceX merger; Musk previously instructed executives to organise with a “laser” between US & China operations to ensure survival of at least the US half in event of bilateral strife (here)

• 1,324 employees from frontier AI labs published an open letter asking the US government to support international tools to slow automated AI research, citing concern that capability acceleration may outpace society’s ability to understand or control resulting systems amid competitive pressure that discourages unilateral slowdowns (here)

• Per The Economist, China’s maritime militia - fishing boats co-opted for paramilitary duties - has conducted unprecedented formations in the East China Sea, with over 1,000 vessels holding an L-shape north of Taiwan for 12+ hours in December & repeating the exercise four times since (here)

• US & Japan conducted their first joint currency intervention in a generation to support the yen at a 40-year low, driven by concerns that further yen weakness could push up US interest rates & jeopardise planned Japanese investment flows into America (here)

Strategic Sectors

AI

• LinkedIn introduced a “seems like AI slop” reporting button & replaced its own AI writing tool with a proofreading feature, responding to rising user frustration over low-quality AI-generated content flooding professional feeds (here)

• Amazon engineers flagged multiple cases of AI deployments causing “catastrophically expensive” cost overruns, including $1.8M on a failed author-matching project (860% over budget, detected after 5 mo) & $541K on financial auditing tools - highlighting enterprise struggles with token-based pricing & governance as the company undertakes layoffs to fund $200B in annual AI capex (here)

• Nvidia & Deutsche Telekom announced a €1B partnership to build an “AI factory” in Munich with 10,000 Blackwell GPUs, targeting industrial AI services for German firms under local data sovereignty rules - early partners include Agile Robots & Perplexity, with operations expected in early 2026 (here)

• Open-source project ran Kimi K3 (2.78T-parameter model beating Claude Opus 4.8) on a MacBook Pro with 64 GB RAM, fitting a 1.42 TB checkpoint via advanced offloading at 0.3 tokens/sec - proof-of-concept slow but signalling that memory limits no longer hard-cap local frontier model inference (here)

• The EU launched a tender for up to 7 AI gigafactories, mobilising €10B in public funding (18 member states participating) to draw €20B+ in private capital. Projects split across 2 lots with phased deployment; lot 1 offers up to €500M per gigafactory, lot 2 up to €1B. Infrastructure will provide European startups, SMEs & academia with sovereign access to AI training & inference capacity, with procurement open to EU-based or allied suppliers - & letters of intent signed with AMD, Nvidia & Qualcomm to secure hardware supply (here)

• Notable deals:

  • Moonshot AI raised $3.5B at $35B (well above its $1-2B target) led by China’s National AI Industry Investment Fund, after its Kimi K3 model rivalled OpenAI & Anthropic performance despite export curbs. The Beijing startup is now seeking a pre-IPO round at $50B ahead of a Hong Kong listing, with ARR jumping from $200M in April to $300M in June & daily sales up 6x post-K3 launch (here)

  • Olix (AI chips) raised $312M at $3.3B led by Fundomo, with Arm, Hudson River Trading & Reed Hastings participating, tripling its valuation in 6 mo. The London-based startup, founded in 2024 by 25-year-old James Dacombe, is building specialised inference chips using photonic interconnect lasers to move data faster between chip clusters, expects to tape out later this year & ship first products in 2027. Olix joins a crowded field - Fractile raised $220M in May, Etched $300M at $10.3B in July, SambaNova $1B at $11B (here)

Cybersecurity

• U.S. investigators believe Iranian hackers targeted ~36 municipal water systems in Minnesota this week by breaching internet-facing programmable logic controllers to disrupt operations. It temporarily forced manual workarounds, though no supply was rendered unsafe. The attribution remains preliminary but is based on tradecraft, absence of ransom demands, & Tehran’s demonstrated interest in U.S. water infrastructure. Trump dismissed the claim (& blamed Minnesota). Analysts called the coordination unprecedented & warned most drinking water utilities lack basic cybersecurity controls for industrial systems (here & here)

• A researcher discovered an unsecured Chinese police database tracking 12,000 foreigners in Zhangjiakou, logging passport details, movements via facial recognition, & categorising people by nationality, religion, & whether they were from ‘Five Eyes’ countries - a rare window into how Beijing surveils foreign residents with minimal privacy safeguards (here)

• Darktrace detailed a Docusign phishing campaign targeting tech executives, using compromised Japanese business email accounts to evade spam filters & obfuscated JavaScript to harvest credentials via fake Gmail login pages. The attackers exploited Docusign’s trusted brand, embedded legitimate email threads for credibility, & redirected victims through marketing services before credential capture - underscoring persistent social engineering risks in enterprise software supply chains (here)

• UK government launched voluntary Cyber Resilience Pledge requiring signatories to make cyber a board responsibility (including NCSC training), register for Early Warning service within 1 mo, & require Cyber Essentials certification across supply chains - a public-private push to harden critical infrastructure amid intensifying state-sponsored cyber activity (here)

• HAWK, a post-quantum cryptography algorithm in NIST’s 3rd-round standards evaluation, was withdrawn after Anthropic’s Mythos AI model identified a novel attack that halved its key strength - an outcome achieved in 60 hrs for ~$100K compute cost by a non-cryptography researcher (here)

• Wiz disclosed a patched flaw in Microsoft Azure CosmosDB that could have allowed remote compromise of thousands of cloud customers storing data for chatbots, retail engines & Microsoft’s own Teams & Copilot. Microsoft said the issue was fully addressed with no evidence of customer impact, but the discovery follows a 2021 CosmosDB vulnerability also found by Wiz & underscores recurring high-severity cloud infrastructure risks at hyperscale providers (here)

• 12-nation coalition (including US, UK, France, Germany, Japan, South Korea) issued alert on North Korean IT workers using fake identities, proxies, AI & 'laptop farms' to secure remote work & funnel income to fund DPRK weapons programmes. Employers warned of insider threats including data exfiltration & cryptocurrency theft; hiring may violate UN sanctions (UNSCR 2397) & domestic law (here)

• Hacker group ExfilSquad breached the UKs DfE, Police National Legal Database, MoD, Home Office & CPS, claiming ~740K records (police & civil servant work emails, some public contacts). The group demanded payment to prevent further leaks; PNLD says core investigative databases were not hit, though password compromise remains unconfirmed. NCA & NCSC are investigating (here)

• A 2021 software flaw in Coldcard Bitcoin hardware wallets let attackers guess recovery phrases & drain $116M across 1,816 BTC in four waves over the past week. The vulnerability stemmed from weak randomness in seed generation after a 2021 update; Coinkite has urged affected users to move funds immediately, reigniting the self-custody vs centralised exchange debate (here)

Energy / Climate

• PJM Interconnection, the largest US grid operator covering 67M customers from Virginia to Illinois, will cut power to data centres ≥50MW during shortages from June 2027, offering compensation but forcing many to rely on costly diesel backup generators (capped at 50 hrs/yr by federal rules). The move follows an auction shortfall & doubled wholesale electricity prices over 12 mo, underscoring grid strain as data centre demand is forecast to quadruple by 2035 (here)

• US Strategic Petroleum Reserve fell to 308M barrels (lowest since March 1983) after releasing 352M barrels over 4 years for Iran & Ukraine crises, with federal auditors warning >25% of remaining stock is non-deployable due to ageing infrastructure held together with ‘Band-Aids’ (here)

• Hungary’s Paks nuclear plant shut down for the first time as Danube water levels fell too low for cooling systems, forcing rotational blackouts & straining national grid capacity across Central Europe. Romania’s Cernavoda plant also shut one of two reactors. The disruption underscores infrastructure vulnerability to climate-driven water stress (here)

• Notable deal:

  • Valar Atomics (nuclear reactors) raised $1B at $6B led by Sequoia (here)

Defence

• Daimler Truck brought forward its target to double defence revenue to €1B to 2028, citing faster innovation cycles & autonomous driving learnings from military partners that CEO Karin Rådström expects to benefit its civilian truck business - a sign European industrials are embedding dual-use logic into core strategy amid regional rearmament (here)

• UK Government advertised a Nuclear Propulsion Cyber Security Lead role (protecting submarine systems) at £47,600 while a Social Video Lead position in the Cabinet Office pays up to £68,558 - drawing criticism that vital defence security expertise is undervalued relative to communications roles (here)

• Notable deal:

  • Agon (defence AI infrastructure) raised $30M to build secure AI training environments for European militaries, addressing the fragmentation of classified data across countries unwilling to share it. Led by ex-Anduril & Applied Intuition operators, the company is hiring from Helsing, Palantir & Google while still in stealth, backed by Lakestar’s $300M defence fund alongside Lux, Northzone & XYZ (here)

Space

• Poland committed $745M to the EU’s IRIS² multi-orbit constellation, financing 6 MEO & 6 LEO satellites for secure governmental comms & broadband connectivity. The 292-satellite system, positioned as Europe’s answer to Starlink, represents the EU’s first public-private partnership in sovereign connectivity & is designed to interconnect with terrestrial 5G/6G networks across 27 member states (here)

• SpaceX won $1.6B from the US Space Force for 18 Falcon 9 launches through 2027 carrying missile-detection satellites, bringing its Pentagon contract haul this year to at least $7B as it anchors Trump’s $185B Golden Dome programme (here)

• Notable deal:

  • The Exploration Company (reusable space capsules & rocket engines, Germany) is raising at least $300M at over $2B, with the EU’s €5B Scaleup Europe Fund in talks to lead - one of the fund’s first bets as Brussels tries to keep late-stage champions from relocating (here)

“This week we invented the ploughshare. It will eradicate all wants and needs. The modern farmer, equipped with donkey and ploughshare, will be 100x more efficient than the farmers of yore. There will be a superabundance of food, and we will enter a post-scarcity world. All war will end and people will want for nothing beause everyone will be well fed.”

Liang Wenfeng decided to suspend DeepSeek’s $1.5bn funding round this week after his “Daoist interview” with investors was leaked. He espoused the view that AI is a step change in the human condition and his company will therefore work to be a part of the system - not driving the change, not seeking monopoly, merely playing its part and riding the wave “with profound goodwill toward the world”. It was a powerful and self-aware message from a clear-eyed and considered leader. It was also one that destabilised potential investment.

Meanwhile, in an interview with The Economist, Elon Musk offered the Dadaist equivalent. In his words, we’re just chimpanzees, eating bananas and waiting to become AI’s labradors. The heat death of the universe means “it’s really all about the journey”; money will have no purpose once AI takes over; and the Treasury should simply “issue cheques” so humans can live in abundance. There’s a glimmer of a thought embedded in there somewhere, but it’s lost within an incoherent and ill-considered argument. “The robots and AI are providing more goods and services than any human could possibly consume. What do you need money for in that case?” he says, ignoring all lessons from history.

Musk raised the largest IPO ever because markets decided his judgement and agency are exceptional. Yet he is now arguing that humanity, following his lead, will hand agency to AI within the decade.

Good VCs back founders, not just companies. They do this because great founders have a vision of what the future looks like, and a plan for how to get there. And that changes the course of society. Charisma and celebrity are undoubtedly useful characteristics to make that plan happen, but surely the vision of the future has to be one we actually want to bring into being, and the plan for how to get there has to be coherent and believable?

IPOs / Publics

• CXMT (DRAM memory) raised nearly $10B & soared 466% on Shanghai debut, reflecting investor appetite for domestic chip champions amid US export controls & AI-driven memory demand (here)

• Anthropic is considering requiring rank-and-file employees to sell shares via preset 10b5-1 trading plans post-IPO, an unusual step typically reserved for executives, to avoid insider trading issues while preserving its culture of internal information sharing (here)

• Nvidia has announced over $750B in fresh AI deals, including a $500B partnership with SK Group & potential $250B backing for OpenAI’s Ohio data centre lease, reigniting concerns about circular financing where the chipmaker funds its own customers (here, here, here)

• Alphabet, Microsoft, Amazon, Meta & Oracle hold $1.65T in off-balance-sheet debt tied to AI infrastructure - up 8x in 4 years & more than their $1.35T reported debt - using separate legal entities for chip, server & data centre financing. The exposure mirrors Enron-era structures (now legal but opaque), with the catch that facilities roll onto balance sheets once live - posing risk if AI demand undershoots the $3T+ buildout through 2028 (here)

Big Dogs

• AMD will sell Anthropic tens of billions in AI servers (up to 2GW of MI450 chips from 2027) & invest up to $5B tied to deployment milestones, the latest circular deal where chipmakers back their largest customers to secure share against Nvidia’s dominance (here)

• OpenAI CEO Sam Altman plans to brief the Trump administration & Congress next week on the next generation of models, particularly their impact on work, as the US develops a safety review framework expected in weeks (here)

• Meta, Microsoft, Nvidia & a16z signed a letter defending open-weight AI models as the Trump administration weighs restrictions on Chinese labs following Moonshot’s Kimi K3 launch; Google, Amazon, OpenAI & Anthropic did not sign, underscoring splits over how open models affect both competition & national security (here)

• DeepSeek suspended its second fundraising round (targeting ≥$1.4B at ~$68B pre-money) days after founder Liang Wenfeng’s comments on US-China AI competition went viral (here)

• Meta secured a $50B Louisiana data center using secret NDAs, a rewritten tax bill passed in months, & a structure that offloaded financial risk to Entergy & Blue Owl (which sold $27B in bonds). The governor codified the secrecy playbook as ‘Louisiana Lightning Speed’ to attract more projects, even as local residents faced evictions from rising rents & regulators approved power plants without independent review (here)

Venture Capital / Finance

• Goldman Sachs launched an alternative investments platform for wealthy clients & family offices seeking direct stakes in late-stage private companies (SpaceX, Stripe, Canva historically), combining existing alternatives business with new teams for direct investments & secondaries (here)

• British Business Bank is developing a £100M aerospace supply chain debt fund with UK Government, Airbus, GKN Aerospace, Rolls-Royce & ADS to help UK suppliers scale, invest & compete for future aircraft programmes (here)

• Khosla Ventures is raising up to $5.5B across new funds, its largest ever, with $3B earmarked for seed & early-stage AI startups - a 40% increase on its prior $4B vintage 17 mo earlier (here)

Regulation

• Anthropic settled with authors whose books were used to train Claude for $1.5B, paying ~$3,000 per book to over 482,000 claimants (91% claimed). The judge ruled that training on copyrighted books is fair use but acquiring them via pirate sites was wrongful (here)

• European Commission fined Google €890M ($1B) for violating the Digital Markets Act by favouring its own services in search results & restricting app developers on Google Play. Google has 60 days to comply or face penalties up to 5% of global revenue. The decision risks escalating US-EU trade tensions as Trump weighs retaliatory tariffs (here)

• France passed a law restricting social media access for under-15s, the first EU country to do so, with the ban potentially live by 1 Sept (here)

Venture Geopolitics

• Andy Burnham scrapped the Department for Science, Innovation & Technology (created 3.5 yr ago) in his first week as UK PM, merging it into an expanded business department whilst elevating AI to Cabinet level with a dedicated minister (Kanishka Narayan) & new AI Taskforce in the Cabinet Office (here)

• OpenAI doubled federal lobbying spend to $2.22M in H1 2026, whilst Anthropic nearly tripled it to $3.53M, as AI firms push to deter federal regulation, shape data centre policy & influence export control decisions like the US block on Anthropic’s Fable model (here, here)

• Elon Musk gave a combative interview to The Economist, claiming AI will eliminate the need for money by 2036 as robots deliver ‘quasi-infinite’ abundance & the Treasury issues universal cheques (here)

• Washington collected over $13B from Venezuelan oil sales in 6 mo since January but has given conflicting accounts of fund allocation - Trump claimed the US was “making a lot of money”, an executive order described control as “custodial”, whilst State said “billions” were disbursed. Venezuela’s Q1 GDP growth of 2.5% was the lowest in 5 years despite sanctions relief, suggesting only partial transfer (here)

• Trump administration plans to redirect $200B/yr in federal R&D spending toward individual scientists & AI applications rather than universities, positioning the shift as a competition response to China & aiming to accelerate technological discovery through decentralised funding & AI-enabled research (here)

• Moonshot AI trained Kimi K3 (2.8T parameters, world’s largest open-source model) on Nvidia Blackwell chips partly in China - despite U.S. export bans - by sourcing from multiple local cloud providers, & is now seeking more Blackwell capacity for Kimi K4. Alibaba also trained its 2.4T-parameter Qwen3.8-Max on Blackwell hardware. Chinese firms still depend on Nvidia for frontier model training, even as Beijing pushes domestic chip adoption for inference, highlighting both the limits of export controls & the continued technology gap in advanced AI compute (here)

Strategic Sectors

AI

• Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella warned that enterprises relying entirely on one AI provider risk outsourcing their thinking & may not survive, urging firms to retain their own data, use AI gateways, & manage multiple models rather than depend on labs’ proprietary coding tools - a pointed message despite Microsoft’s stakes in OpenAI & Anthropic (here)

• DeepSeek founder Liang Wenfeng, in a rare (leaked) 4-hour investor talk, outlined an “almost Daoist” philosophy of AGI as a tide no company can own, advocating restraint over monopoly - hence the firm’s open-source stance & API pricing at 10-mo hardware payback. He argues China’s gap with the US is compute, not talent, & predicts a future where 3-4 base-model players coexist on fair-profit pricing, with DeepSeek focused narrowly on language models, reasoning & agents while ceding video generation & world models to the ecosystem (here, here)

• AMD is partnering with Cerebras on disaggregated inference systems that combine AMD GPUs (for prefill) & Cerebras wafer-scale chips (for decode) in a single rack, shipping later this year (here)

• Notable deal:

  • Nvidia committed $5B to Ilya Sutskever’s Safe Superintelligence (raised ~$3B previously at $32B), adding to the pattern of chipmaker backing for AI labs that also buy its hardware (here)

Defence

• SpaceX in talks to provide the Pentagon with billions of dollars’ worth of data-centre capacity for running AI models, deepening Musk’s defence ties beyond Starlink & launch services (here)

• Pentagon awarded Oracle a $7B, 10-yr contract consolidating on-premises software licences across DoD, Coast Guard & intelligence community, claiming $441M in savings (here)

• Defence primes including Lockheed Martin & BAE Systems participated in a record $4.1B in venture rounds this year as Ukraine & Iran conflicts highlight demand for drones, autonomous systems & cheaper weaponry. Lockheed boosted its start-up arm to $1B, BAE committed €50M to Lakestar & Expeditions, & Airbus anchored a new €500M dual-use fund. Quantum Systems raised $1.2B at $8B (Airbus-backed), Kraken Technology raised $175M at $1B (Rheinmetall-backed), while total global defence deal value has topped $40B year-to-date (here)

• Notable deal:

  • Cathedral, a military AI cyber startup founded by four ex-DOGE staffers (including Pentagon’s former chief data officer), raised $160M at $1.4B from a16z & Sequoia despite no revenue or contracts - valuation reflects investor confidence in founders’ government ties as they seek US cyber defence contracts targeting China. The round mirrors capital velocity in defence tech (Anduril recently raised $5B at $61B) & highlights how DOGE alumni are converting access into venture funding (here)

Energy / Climate

• Valar Atomics (SMR startup) is in talks to raise $1B at $6B with Sequoia leading, though $450M was already closed at $2B in March - a multi-tranche structure now common in AI-adjacent hardware. The company recently powered an Nvidia chip with its helium-cooled reactor & announced a data centre partnership, as hyperscaler energy demand turns nuclear into a critical AI infrastructure bottleneck (here)

Space

• Amazon filed with the FCC to launch 5,000+ satellites for direct-to-device mobile services by 2028, using spectrum from its $11.6B Globalstar acquisition. The constellation - estimated at $13-20B to deploy - would challenge Starlink’s partnerships with T-Mobile & Virgin O2, while Amazon’s existing broadband constellation (390 satellites) lags SpaceX’s 10,000+ (here)

EVs / AVs

• Waymo is considering ending its Uber partnership in Austin & Atlanta, planning to launch its own app in January 2028 while remaining on Uber’s platform through May 2028. The move would end Waymo’s exclusivity in both cities & allow Uber to partner with competing AV providers (here)

Other

• Elon Musk’s The Boring Company reportedly raising $4B at $20B, a 3.5x step-up from its 2022 round, as it expands beyond Las Vegas to Nashville, Dubai & pitches US metro networks, though Nevada regulators cited nearly 800 environmental violations last year & tunnel workers have suffered serious injuries (here)

That execution has faltered - over recent months by the CEO’s own admission, but over years if you include the long and painful retreat from Watson. The brand is now one the world associates with an earlier technological era, yet switching costs kept customers locked in. That moat - “Switching Costs” in Helmer’s 7 Powers - has served IBM well, but is now under pressure. Earlier this year, Anthropic suggested Claude Code could modernise the COBOL running on IBM mainframes, and last week the stock fell 25%.

The interesting part is not just IBMs predicament, but the fact that an entire class of technology moat - switching costs - has been “demoted” (ha!) by AI.

At the same time, another moat is being “promoted” (doh.). Ben Thompson, whose Aggregation Theory defined a generation of technology thinking, used Monday’s Stratechery to explain why its assumptions apply less cleanly in the AI era. His theory described a world in which software and distribution had near-zero marginal costs: products could be reproduced and delivered at almost no additional expense, creating extraordinary returns to scale and allowing power to accrue to whoever controlled demand.

“Scale” - another of Helmer’s 7 Powers - still matters, but token costs mean it is no longer absolute. In contrast to traditional SaaS, AI products carry real COGS: compute, chips, electricity. As Thompson puts it, “marginal costs are back in a big way”.

If you haven’t read Aggregation Theory, you should. As those marginal costs return, power is beginning to shift towards those who dominate supply-side efficiency matters over pure demand – cheaper electricity, better chips, models that spend fewer tokens reaching the same answer. This is the promoted moat: Helmer’s “Process Power” moat - deeply intrinsic business culture and processes that allow a company to operate with lower unit costs.

Ultimately, the relative importance of different moats is being rebalanced. Switching costs are weakening; culture and processes are strengthening.

For you and me at the junction of Venture and Geopolitics, this is one of the most significant shifts we have seen in our industry. The fundamental inputs shaping AI economics - energy, raw materials, labour and trade - are also what constitute Geopolitics, and returns to scale define Venture Capital. I expect we are not done exploring the impacts of this change!

IPOs / Publics

• Shein secured approval from Hong Kong’s listing committee for an IPO, targeting $40-50B valuation (down from $100B in 2022) with public filing expected week of 27 July & potential late-August debut (here)

• Data center operator Csquare (NYSE: CSQR) priced below the range at a steep discount to peers and fell -2% (here) while early-stage nuclear fuel maker Standard Nuclear (NYSE: STDN) slashed its offering by more than half, then plunged -18% (here)

• SpaceX shares fell below $125, down $1T from their June peak & below the $135 IPO price, after an aborted Starship launch & ahead of employee lockup expiry in August (here)

• IBM’s stock experienced the worst day in its history (the company has been a public stock for 115 years). Mainframe sales & the software that runs on them are faltering; management blamed AI spend, but per Ben Thompson, the real concern for IBM is that AI’s ability to port the essential backend programs that run on archaic technology will mean those missed sales never come back (here)

• Apple briefly overtook Nvidia as the world’s most valuable company, closing Friday at $4.902T vs Nvidia’s $4.908T, as investors view it as a safer AI play that avoids hyperscaler capex risk (here)

• Stripe & Advent International offered to acquire PayPal for $60.50/share ($53B+), backed by $50B in committed financing - a 28% premium to market but still well below PayPal’s 2021 peak of $360B. The deal would combine the two largest merchant payment platforms (~$3.7T annual volume), giving Stripe direct consumer relationships via PayPal’s 430M accounts & Venmo, plus scale to bypass Visa/Mastercard fees & bolster stablecoin ambitions via Bridge (here)

• UK government has convened private equity firms including Hg Capital, CVC, EQT & Elliott to encourage London IPOs of portfolio companies as only 7 floats have occurred in 2025, with takeover value outstripping new listings 27:1 (here)

• London Stock Exchange will launch LSE 24, a 24/5 trading venue operating 5pm-7:50am, starting with ETPs in H1 2027 - the platform will support algorithmic & agentic trading, integrate with LSEG's Digital Securities Depository for digitised settlement, & expand into equities, positioning London for extended-hours liquidity as trading becomes more automated & globally connected (here)

Big Dogs

• Microsoft CEO Nadella criticised Anthropic’s Fable model for being ‘editorially controlled’, questioning why a creation tool would block user requests so aggressively - a public rebuke of a partner in which Microsoft invested $5B & which agreed to spend $30B on Azure. Nadella also told engineers that economic dependence on a few token-capital providers ‘makes no sense’, signalling Microsoft’s push toward cost-efficient custom models that keep client data in-house (here)

• Anthropic is in talks to buy $10B of compute from Meta, following its $1.25B/mo deal with SpaceX for Nvidia GPUs at Colossus 1. The move reflects acute capacity constraints across frontier AI labs - Anthropic has imposed usage limits despite a near-$1T valuation, whilst Google pays SpaceX $920M/mo & has capped Gemini access to Meta. For Meta, selling compute to a direct rival marks a strategic pivot into cloud services, helping justify capex & recent headcount cuts to shareholders (here)

• Anthropic has 32 open roles focused on preventing AI misuse for radiological, nuclear, chemical, explosive & cybercrime harms, paying mid- to upper-$200K & requiring domain expertise to stress-test models before deployment. OpenAI is hiring similar roles at $295K-$445K as labs bolster safety teams amid absent regulation, with Anthropic breaking with the Pentagon this year over surveillance & autonomous weapon concerns (here)

• Anthropic is scheduling investor meetings ahead of a potential October IPO at its $965B valuation, moving ahead of OpenAI (now targeting 2027) & China’s DeepSeek in the race to public markets (here)

• Apple sent legal letters to ~40 former employees now at OpenAI, demanding document preservation & meetings as part of its trade secrets lawsuit alleging OpenAI stole secret hardware plans (here)

• OpenAI said it is ‘not aware of any evidence’ supporting Apple’s lawsuit alleging trade-secret theft tied to OpenAI’s device ambitions (here)

Regulation

• Burnham will scrap Labour’s digital ID scheme, redirecting the £600M annual cost to cost-of-living support (here)

• Demis Hassabis published a framework proposing a US-led Frontier AI Standards Body modelled on FINRA, funded largely by industry, to assess AGI-class models before deployment - labs meeting capability thresholds would submit models for voluntary (then mandatory) 30-day reviews covering cyber, bio & agentic risks, with quarterly benchmark updates. He frames AGI as 2-3 years away, comparable to electricity or fire, requiring a technical testing regime that can adapt fast enough to match acceleration while incentivising responsible behaviour & forming the basis for international coordination (here)

• Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent said the US will examine Chinese open-source AI models for IP theft, warning that watermarks from American LLMs have been found in Chinese models & sanctions may follow. The administration is also considering requiring companies to disclose use of Chinese AI models, following concerns that distillation techniques allowed rivals like Moonshot AI's Kimi K3 to develop competitive models at lower cost (here)

Venture Capital

• ICONIQ survey of 300+ software executives shows AI products now comprise 42% of revenue (up from 32% in 2025, projected 53% in 2027), with gross margins expanding from 45% to 53% as consumption-based & outcome-based pricing models gain ground. Vertical applications (43% of builders) dominate, especially in financial services & healthcare; Anthropic adoption jumped from 51% to 81% in 6 mo as multi-model strategies (avg 3.3 models) became default. High-growth firms run flatter orgs, deploy AI tools 1 mo faster, write 59% of code with AI assistance (vs 47% peers), & see 48% productivity gains vs 32% - a compounding structural advantage in the Builder’s Economy (here)

Venture Geopolitics

• Andy Burnham became Labour leader & was sworn in as UK prime minister on Monday, promising greater public control of essential services, devolution to local government & a rejection of 1980s privatisation policies (here)

• The Trump administration has repeatedly considered measures to restrict Chinese AI models - including Entity List additions, security advisories & executive orders requiring liability guarantees - that would effectively lock in OpenAI & Anthropic's duopoly. Pro-innovation voices killed earlier attempts, but with personnel shifts & Kimi's recent rise, national security hawks are gaining ground. The approach now favours procurement rules, public pressure & security warnings rather than outright bans, though the effect on U.S. companies using cheaper Chinese models would be similar (here)

• Xi Jinping outlined China’s ambition to rival the US as a global AI leader at a Shanghai conference, announcing 5,000 training opportunities for developing countries over 5 years, signalling Beijing’s push to position China as a governance convenor whilst Western export controls tighten. Nearly 30 countries including Russia, Brazil & Indonesia joined China’s new World Artificial Intelligence Cooperation Organization, giving Beijing influence over international AI standards as Chinese models (including Moonshot’s latest release) narrow the gap with US labs & attract cost-conscious western customers like DoorDash, Siemens & Airbnb (here). Jinping also called for “open source, open collaboration” (here)

• Israel is spending $50M on AI-generated texts, conservative media payments & Trump-linked advisers to shift US public opinion after favourability dropped to 40% (Pew, March) amid wars in Gaza & Iran - a state-funded influence campaign that raises questions about digital sovereignty & foreign information operations targeting domestic audiences (here)

• China’s GDP grew 4.3% year-on-year in Q2 2026, the slowest in 3 years & below the 4.5-5% target, as a property crisis & weak consumer spending offset AI-driven export strength (June exports surged 27%, led by chips, batteries & cars). The economy split between manufacturers supplying global AI demand & 14M construction workers who lost jobs since the property crash, with retail sales choppy & households focused on saving amid higher fuel prices from the Iran war (here)

• German Chancellor Friedrich Merz is pitching Germany as “Europe’s bedrock of stability” ahead of an October investment summit in Berlin, modelled on Macron’s “Choose France” events - but investors meeting investment tsar Martin Blessing have asked for concrete evidence of reform impact & clearer industrial strategy. Germany leads Europe in patents but struggles to commercialise innovation, lacks deep capital markets, & faces slower data centre buildout vs France (which secured €93B pledges in June, mostly from SoftBank) due to multi-tiered approvals & higher energy costs after abandoning nuclear (here)

• Jingye (China’s owner of British Steel since 2020) has threatened international arbitration after the UK nationalised British Steel last week, calling it “blatant extortion” & demanding compensation. The UK considers the commercial value nil; China’s foreign ministry warned the dispute will affect perceptions of the UK investment climate (here)

• EU unity on Russia sanctions is fracturing as Greece blocks measures to protect Prokopiou’s Dynagas (which has shipped $24B of Russian LNG since 2022), whilst Germany & Portugal demand fish-import carve-outs & Austria seeks €2B unfrozen for Raiffeisen. Diplomats warn that national capitals - seeing Russia as less of a direct threat & unwilling to tolerate corporate costs - are prioritising commercial interests over solidarity (here)

• US to impose 50% tariffs on wide range of Canadian goods (excluding energy, potash, critical minerals, steel & aluminium) in 30 days, citing discriminatory trade practices by Canadian provinces; move applies even to goods compliant with USMCA, marking escalation after earlier Supreme Court ruling curbed Trump's global emergency tariffs. Canada-US trade totalled $716B in 2025 (here)

• China is considering export controls on AI model weights & training data, targeting Alibaba, ByteDance & Zhipu downloads to foreign users, alongside restrictions on overseas chipmakers fabricating Chinese-designed advanced semiconductors. The move follows Moonshot's Kimi K3 exceeding Anthropic's Opus 4.8 on most benchmarks & aims to protect China's narrowing gap with US frontier AI, though domestic firms warn tighter rules could slow development (here)

Strategic Sectors

AI

• Moonshot launched Kimi K3, China’s largest AI model at 2.8T parameters, matching or beating Anthropic’s Claude Opus 4.8 & OpenAI’s GPT 5.5 on most coding & agent benchmarks while being available as an open-weight model at a third of Anthropic’s cost - raising at $31.5B (vs Anthropic’s $965B) as the US-China performance gap narrows faster than the consensus 8-12 mo timeline (here)

• Kimi K3 matches Claude Opus on coding tasks at 70% lower API cost ($3/$15 per M tokens vs $10/$50) & offers uncapped $39/mo plans while Anthropic quietly downgrades its $20 tier when economics fail (here)

• …Kimi paused new subscriptions for its K3 model after 48 hrs of demand hit GPU capacity limits, splitting membership into general & code-focused tiers to manage compute allocation - a tactical response to unexpected adoption in China’s LLM market (here)

• SpaceX is in talks to provide the Pentagon with billions of dollars’ worth of data-centre capacity for running AI models, deepening Musk’s ties with the US military as defence agencies race to deploy AI at scale (here)

• Kalshi launched a forward curve for AI compute pricing, plotting expected GPU rental costs up to 1 yr ahead using prediction markets, as CME & ICE also race to build derivatives markets around the infrastructure underpinning the AI build-out (here)

• Local opposition to data centres is intensifying across the US, with residents in Oklahoma & other states protesting construction on concerns over water use, community impact, & lack of transparency - a rare bipartisan flash point as hyperscalers expand infrastructure for AI workloads (here)

• ONS data shows UK businesses using AI more widely (35% of firms, up from 12% in 2023) but not more deeply - average tools per firm rose only 1.4 to 1.6, just 10% use AI extensively, & 60% focus on cost-cutting rather than new products or markets. Job impact remains limited outside creative & admin roles, raising questions about productivity optimism (here)

• Thinking Machines (founded by former OpenAI CTO Mira Murati) released Inkling, a 975B-parameter open-weight multimodal model trained on 45T tokens, positioning it as a customisable alternative to closed frontier models (here)

• Notable deals:

  • Databricks raising $3B at $188B (led by Coatue), following a $5B round earlier this year, as data analytics & AI application infrastructure attracts continued late-stage capital ahead of widely anticipated IPO (here)

  • CuspAI (AI for materials discovery) raised $450M at $2.6B co-led by Kleiner Perkins & NEA, with participation from Bezos Expeditions & the UK’s new Sovereign AI Fund. The Cambridge startup - advised by LeCun & Hinton - is working with ASML, Meta, Nvidia & Samsung on materials for semiconductors, carbon capture & cleantech via its AI Materials Foundry network (here)

  • OpenEvidence (AI medical chatbot) considering $200M round at $20B but unlikely to proceed, having doubled revenue to ~$300M annualised in 7 mo via pharma ads at 90% gross margin; also in acquisition talks with large tech co (here

Cybersecurity

• UK AI Security Institute finds Chinese open-weight models now trail US frontier systems by just 4 mo on cyber capabilities, down from 6-10 mo in 2025. Beijing-based Z.ai’s GLM-5.2 performed comparably to Anthropic’s Opus 4.6 & OpenAI’s GPT-5.2-Codex released 4 mo earlier, while running far cheaper. AISI warns the narrowing gap threatens to compress patching windows globally, as open models cannot be withdrawn or access-controlled once released - a risk amplified as models approach the autonomous vulnerability-chaining capability Anthropic saw in Mythos (here)

• Apple warned iPhone & iPad users of a social engineering campaign using FaceTime calls, with scammers impersonating trusted organisations via caller ID spoofing to harvest credentials & financial data - a reminder that video calls now carry enough perceived legitimacy to become a scalable fraud vector (here)

• Cursor (AI code editor) disclosed a critical zero-day on Windows - opening any repository with a file named git.exe in the root triggers automatic execution with full user privileges, no warning or interaction required. The flaw creates a supply chain risk: attackers can embed malicious executables in repositories that run silently when developers open projects, granting access to SSH keys, credentials & source code. No patch yet released (here)

• Notable deal:

  • Neo (agentic software security) raised $100M from Andreessen Horowitz & Bessemer to secure AI agents & AI-enabled applications across enterprises (here)

Energy

• Andy Burnham will maintain Labour’s ban on new North Sea exploration licences despite industry pressure (here)

• Nscale’s £2B Essex AI data centre, backed by Nvidia with Microsoft as anchor customer, is exploring alternative power after National Grid delays threatened timelines despite securing 90MW connection approval 6 days prior - underscoring UK grid bottlenecks as AI demand collides with Labour’s clean power goals. LCP Delta forecasts Britain will miss its 2030 clean electricity target (reaching 83% vs 95% goal) unless grid upgrades accelerate, while Capgemini reports 68% of electricity executives expect AI-driven power shortages. Over 100 UK projects now considering on-site gas generation to bypass grid queues stretching close to a decade (here)

• Notable deal:

  • Valar Atomics (small modular reactors) is in talks to raise $1B at $5B pre-money from Sequoia, weeks after achieving criticality at its Utah test site. The 3-year-old startup - founded by 27-year-old Isaiah Taylor - aims to mass-produce reactors for data centres & industrial facilities, signing Nvidia as an early customer for a pilot nuclear-powered data centre (here)

Defence

• France & Germany pledged to develop a European alternative to Palantir’s military software, citing France’s Arcadia command-and-control platform & comparable German solutions, after both countries recently dropped Palantir contracts in favour of European providers (here)

• Ukraine’s ousted defence minister Mykhailo Fedorov, 35, publicly attacked General Oleksandr Syrskyi, accusing him of blocking tech-driven initiatives & sabotaging reforms, exposing a rift between Ukraine’s tech-focused reformers & Soviet-trained military leadership 4+ years into the war. Fedorov, credited with scaling drone production & deep-strike campaigns into Russia, said Syrskyi presided over dysfunction & intrigue rather than asymmetric warfare strategy - prompting spontaneous protests in Kyiv & resignations by air force officials (here)

• UK Ministry of Defence awarded a £2B, 15-year contract to Omnia Training (Raytheon UK, Capita, Cervus, Rheinmetall UK & Skyral) to deliver an AI-enabled training system for the British Army (here)

• UK MoD awarded £3.16M to three SMEs (Frankenberg Technologies, Greenjets, Cambridge Aerospace) to develop low-cost anti-drone interceptors under LCADE, a five-nation European programme responding to mass drone threats - Russia launched over 200 drones/day into Ukraine in March 2026. UK is first of five partners (UK, Poland, France, Italy, Germany) to award contracts, with focus on affordable solutions that can be manufactured at scale across allied nations (here)

• Nokia & NestAI are deploying 5G, AI & sensing to maintain battlefield connectivity, addressing the military requirement for resilient comms in contested environments. The partnership reflects commercial telco hardware being adapted for tactical networks, a pattern accelerating across NATO as operators target dual-use scale (here)

• Lockheed Martin announced the PAC-3 ACE, a new Patriot interceptor costing under $2M (less than half its current $4M PAC-3 MSE), to be co-produced with US & European partners. The move reflects pressure from nimble startups like Ukraine’s Fire Point, which tested a low-cost anti-missile system in June, & European demand for indigenous air defence as the US pulls back under Trump (here)

Crypto / Stablecoins

• Citadel Securities has now committed $600M across two rival crypto exchanges - $400M into Crypto.com (July 2026) & $200M into Kraken (Nov 2025), both at $20B valuations - as each pursues tokenised securities, derivatives & on-chain financial products; Citadel gains exposure to the infrastructure layer without backing a single winner, though only Kraken has disclosed a formal liquidity & market-structure collaboration (here)

• DTCC is running a trial with ~40 firms including JPMorgan, Goldman Sachs, BlackRock, Vanguard & NYSE to tokenise shares & Treasurys on blockchain infrastructure, marking a step toward digitising settlement rails at the core of U.S. capital markets (here)

Robotics

• Notable deal:

  • Humanoid (SKL Robotics) raised $150M at $1.2B in a Series A led by founder Artem Sokolov’s $100M seed, with Schaeffler investing & Bosch in talks for a September extension. The London-based firm has delivered 15 robots & secured conditional orders for 10,000+ units, including a $300M deal with Schaeffler for up to 1,850 robots over 5 yrs; Bosch will manufacture 500 units next year (here)

Biotech

• Isomorphic Labs unveiled its Drug Design Engine (IsoDDE), which more than doubles AlphaFold 3’s accuracy on novel protein-ligand structures, matches physics-based binding affinity methods at a fraction of the cost, & identifies cryptic binding pockets from sequence alone - moving from structure prediction to computational drug design at scale (here)

Each story begins with the same instinct: identify valuable knowledge, draw a legal boundary around it and assume the boundary will hold. But AI is built from mobile people and reproducible software, and the incentives to move both are enormous.

Washington’s restrictions prevented people from accessing Anthropic’s models for a while, but they also redirected demand for those models elsewhere. Chinese open-source models quickly looked not only cheaper but less risky. Chinese models moved from 11% of US OpenRouter usage last year to more than 30% every week since February, peaking at 46%. The effort to preserve an American advantage strengthened the market for its substitutes. Now Beijing is preparing to repeat the exercise itself.

Putting a hand over a fire hydrant changes the direction of the spray. It does not stop the flow. It may even send the water back into your face.

This does not mean legislation is powerless. China’s helium export ban, announced this week, will probably achieve its narrow purpose for two reasons. First, helium is physical: shipments can be identified and stopped at the border. Second, the ambition is modest - this is conservation, not leverage. China imports ~85% of the helium it consumes (and produces <2% of global supply). Beijing is not using a domestic monopoly to pressure others; it is preventing a scarce imported resource from leaking back out*.

Model controls fail on both counts. Models are not physical: they travel in a person's head, through an API or inside open-source weights, so there is no border at which to stop the shipment. And the ambition is anything but modest: the aim is to deny a rival the defining technology of the era, at the very moment AI has become synonymous with power - which makes the incentives to circumvent the controls overwhelming. This is the arithmetic of the war on drugs: harsh penalties suppress some activity, but where the prize is big enough, the trade stays alive.

Law is therefore a thumb on the scale, not an absolute. It can hold scarce matter inside a border; it cannot hold knowledge that wants to move.

That distinction - between theft and movement - brings us back to Apple, and to non-competes. Trade-secret theft is inexcusable. Changing jobs is not. Apple is not seeking an order stopping those 400 employees from working at OpenAI - it couldn’t; California has famously never enforced non-competes (and its innovation ecosystem has thrived).

Of course, non-competes exist for a good reason - to protect companies’ IP and so incentivise its creation. But they do not reliably protect IP once created, while discouraging the mobility and competition that create it in the first place. The UK and European ecosystems have been debating whether to follow California’s lead (see here and here). Research links the clauses to weaker mobility, firm creation, innovation, wages and productivity. So let’s be pragmatic here too: lose the law, retain talent by giving people reasons to stay, and find other ways to promote the creation of valuable IP that cannot be so easily circumvented - like building infrastructure, which is just like helium but MUCH, MUCH HEAVIER.

^{*The irony is not lost on me. Helium, which due to physics we cannot prevent from leaking off the planet, may somehow not leak out of China. But data? Can’t be done.}

IPOs / Publics

• SpaceX joined the Nasdaq-100 at $2T with 1.34% weighting, drawing an estimated $4.3B in passive inflows as index funds automatically absorb the stock - though shares fell 5.4% on inclusion day (here)

• Apple hit an all-time high, outperforming Mag 7 peers as investors reward its light-capex AI strategy - monetising its 2.5B device install base through hardware upgrades & services rather than data-centre buildouts that have pushed Amazon & Meta cashflows negative (here)

• IBM issued a profit warning that sent its shares plunging more than 20%, as customers raced to redirect spending to servers & storage ahead of price increases driven by the AI boom (here)

• ASML reports Q226 earnings on July 15, with TSMC following on July 16. Both ones to watch, given the firms represent the foundational infra layer of the entire AI boom. TSMC already posted NT$442.68B in June revenue, a 68% increase YoY (here)

• Apple sued OpenAI in California federal court alleging the ChatGPT maker stole hardware designs & trade secrets via former employees as it prepares to launch AI devices. Over 400 ex-Apple staff now work there. The lawsuit names Tang Tan (OpenAI’s chief hardware officer, formerly 24 yr at Apple) & Chang Liu (electrical engineer who accessed files after departure). Apple is seeking injunction & damages; the suit marks collapse of their partnership after OpenAI acquired Jony Ive’s io for $6.4B in May 2025 to compete in consumer hardware (here)

• PrismML compressed Alibaba's open-source Qwen 3.6 (27B parameters) to under 4GB to run on Apple's iPhone 17 Pro, enabling advanced on-device AI without cloud inference - a shift that could dampen hyperscale capex if edge models rival data-centre performance (here)

• Mark Zuckerberg (Meta) told staff AI agent technology had progressed slower than expected over the past 4 mo, acknowledging the company’s 10% headcount cut & restructuring in May had not been “clean” & bets on agentic AI “haven’t come to fruition yet”. Meta expects to spend up to $145B on AI infrastructure this year & anticipates benefits within 3-6 mo (here)

• Slack integrated Slackbot with Salesforce’s Headless 360 platform using Model Context Protocol servers, allowing employees to query CRM data, generate Tableau charts & trigger DocuSigns via chat - democratising Salesforce access beyond the 20-30% of staff who typically hold licences. Salesforce expects to spend $300M on Anthropic tokens this year, yet Anthropic’s Claude Tag (also in Slack) raises internal concern about competitive overlap (here)

Big Dogs

• Anthropic alleges that Alibaba’s Qwen AI lab orchestrated a coordinated distillation attack using roughly 25,000 fake accounts that generated over 28.8 million interactions with Claude between April 22 & June 5, 2026. The operation’s goal, according to Anthropic, was to extract Claude’s advanced coding capabilities & use the outputs to train Alibaba’s own Qwen models (here)

• Anthropic launched Claude Cowork on mobile & web, enabling tasks to run autonomously across devices & in the background. Usage data from 1.2M sessions shows 33% of Cowork activity is business operations (reports, checklists, reconciliation), 16% content creation, whilst software development accounts for just 9% - a deliberate push beyond the developer seat into the far larger knowledge-worker market (here)

• Anthropic hired Tom Blomfield (Monzo cofounder, Y Combinator GP) to join its compute team, continuing a high-profile hiring spree that includes Andrej Karpathy (OpenAI cofounder) & John Jumper (Google DeepMind, Nobel laureate for AlphaFold) (here)

• xAI launched Grok 4.5, its strongest model yet, with improved speed, lower cost & token efficiency compared to Anthropic’s Opus; excels at autonomous tasks, coding, finance & legal work, & can build complex Excel models & PowerPoint decks without human intervention (here)

• OpenAI publicly released GPT-5.6 models (Sol, Terra, Luna) after a 2-week limited rollout requested by the US government, which had sought pre-release assessments under Trump’s June AI executive order. The company also launched GPT-Live voice models that can listen & speak simultaneously, rolling out globally. The release follows Anthropic’s restoration of Claude Fable 5 & Mythos 5 access after a clash over export controls (here)

• The power developer behind OpenAI’s Stargate data centre is in talks to sell a stake, signalling early investor liquidity interest in infrastructure tied to AI compute buildout (here)

Venture Capital / Finance

• CVC closed its European mid-market PE fund Catalyst III at €3.0B, nearly double the €1.75B target, reflecting LP appetite for established platforms with local presence; the fund has already deployed into cybersecurity (WithSecure) & medical devices (WillowWood) (here)

• Eurazeo closed its fifth-generation secondaries programme at €2.3B, above the €2B target & more than double its 2021 predecessor (€1B). The firm’s Secondaries & Mandates platform now manages €6.4B across GP-led & LP secondaries, focused on European mid-market buyouts, with ESF V already ~50% deployed across 22 transactions (here)

• Bregal Milestone closed Fund III at €915M (oversubscribed hard cap) in 8 mo, targeting European B2B software, AI & cybersecurity with embedded AI deployment capability through its Amplify programme; the London-based firm now manages c.€2.3B across three funds (here)

• Expeditions closed €197M for Fund II (2x initial target) backed by BAE Systems, European Investment Fund & Keysight Technologies, alongside NATO Innovation Fund & Polish Development Fund. The Warsaw/London firm focuses on autonomous systems & critical capability gaps (here)

• Nest, the UK’s largest pension fund by membership (£68B AUM, 14M members), is allocating up to £1B to VC by 2030, starting with £20M via Schroders Capital into late-stage companies including Synthesia & Wayve. The move follows UK government efforts to funnel pension capital into private markets - signatories to the Mansion House Compact doubled unlisted equity allocations from £800M to £1.6B in 2025, with a further £50B expected from the 2025 accord requiring 10% private market exposure (here)

• Value of takeover bids for UK companies is 27 times higher than the value of new listings this year. Only seven companies have listed on the LSE so far in 2026, raising a small amount compared to the large acquisitions (here)

Regulation

• France will finally publish a decree banning advertising for imported fossil fuels by end-2025, closing a 5-year gap since the 2021 Climate & Resilience law. Environmental groups call it too narrow - the ban excludes broader corporate communications from hydrocarbon firms & fossil-fuelled products (SUVs, air travel) - & question why enforcement was delayed when direct fuel advertising has already largely disappeared (here)

• The New York Times & Daily News claim OpenAI hid evidence in their copyright lawsuit, alleging the company secretly searched chat logs & training data for copyrighted journalism while telling courts such searches were technically infeasible (here)

• The European Commission will propose age restrictions for children accessing social media after summer, with phased access by age group, following pressure from member states concerned about child safety. Australia enacted a ban for under-16s last year; the EU is also investigating Meta platforms under the Digital Services Act for potential breaches related to children’s exposure (here)

• European Commission ordered Meta to redesign Instagram & Facebook to remove addictive features - including infinite scroll & autoplay - or face fines up to 6% of global revenue under the Digital Services Act, part of a broader EU push on social media design following similar action against TikTok in February (here)

• Apple lost its challenge at the EU General Court against Digital Markets Act designations covering its App Stores & iOS as gatekeepers subject to interoperability & competition obligations, with judges rejecting claims the rules are disproportionate or threaten privacy protections. Apple can appeal to the CJEU on points of law (here)

Venture Geopolitics

• China imposed an immediate helium export ban to secure domestic supply for chipmaking as Middle East conflict threatens shortages; China imports ~85% of its helium (half from Qatar), but typically re-exports surplus to Asia - Beijing now blocking that arbitrage to prevent local price spikes amid AI & semiconductor demand (here)

• AI researchers & former OpenAI staff (the same people behind AI 2027) published their next piece: “Plan A”, a detailed policy proposal calling for an international deal to delay superintelligence until 2040, mandate full research transparency & enable multiple nations to scale safely together rather than race (here)

• Beijing held meetings with Alibaba, ByteDance & Z.ai over potentially restricting overseas access to China's most advanced AI models, including unreleased systems, according to three sources. Officials discussed classifying AI theft under national security law & limiting foreign funding of domestic AI startups, mirroring U.S. moves to restrict Anthropic's Mythos model. Chinese authorities reportedly fear Mythos could be weaponised against Chinese interests. The talks follow Beijing's April order forcing Meta to unwind its $2B Manus acquisition & June rules tightening control of outbound tech deals (here)

• Brad Smith (Microsoft) criticised Washington’s AI policy as “regulation without transparent or complete rules”, arguing the government lacks proper tools beyond export controls. He said the Anthropic Fable 5 shutdown was justified on cybersecurity grounds but executed with a blunt instrument designed for hardware, not API-delivered models (here)

• Fed chair Kevin Warsh tapped Marc Andreessen to co-lead a task force advising the central bank on AI’s impact on productivity & labour markets, giving the a16z co-founder influence over how the US central bank models structural employment & output shifts in the AI era (here)

• Von der Leyen & Rutte called for NATO to become “more European” ahead of the Ankara summit, with Rutte arguing “to stay transatlantic, we have to become more European” as allies showcase increased defence spending in response to US drawdown (here)

• Trump praised NATO’s ‘tremendous unity’ at the Ankara summit despite earlier lashing major European allies for not joining the US-Iran war & calling Spaniards ‘hopeless’ while threatening to cut trade. The summit delivered a win for Ukraine: Trump said he would grant Kyiv a license to manufacture Patriot air defence systems domestically & NATO members pledged $80B in military aid over 2 years & reaffirmed mutual defence commitments (here)

• Germany is struggling to retain skilled migrant workers who leave due to bureaucratic delays (naturalisation, permits, qualification recognition), language barriers & jobs below qualifications. Around 60% return home, 40% move to other EU countries (here)

• Chinese AI models are gaining ground in the U.S. companies because they work well & cost less than American models. Share of tokens used by U.S. companies on Chinese AI models via OpenRouter - a platform that enables developers to access a range of AI models - has sat above 30% each week since Feb. 8, with that figure rising as high at 46%. The average across the previous 12 months was just 11%, falling to 4.5% in the first half of 2025 (here)

• The OBR warned UK debt could rise from ~95% of GDP (2030-31) to 300% by 2075-76 under baseline assumptions, driven by ageing population pressures (health, care, pensions), defence, & net zero investment - though it stressed governments would act before such paths materialise. The UK has seen one of the largest debt increases among advanced economies over 20 yrs (here)

• Trump’s naval blockade & 20% Hormuz transit fee (later dropped) sent Brent crude up 10% to $83/barrel, yet refined product shortages remain acute - diesel, jet fuel & petrol prices are 35-70% above pre-war levels as global refining output sits 8M b/d below normal. Gulf refining capacity down 1.4M b/d from Iranian strikes, China’s export ban still constraining supply, & Ukrainian drones knocked out 1.5M b/d of Russian refining capacity. Diesel queues stretch for days in Russia; Turkey & Brazil are redirecting flows, tightening Atlantic markets. Markets bet on further price rises unless Hormuz reopens & Gulf/Chinese/Russian production recovers before winter demand (here)

Strategic Sectors

AI

• SoftBank’s Son told executives at SoftBank World that AI would account for 20% of global GDP ($46T) by 2040, requiring 3 terawatts of data centre capacity - equivalent to a third of global installed power today - & urged Japanese business leaders to prioritise AI or “play the role of spouse” (here)

• A workforce study projects the US semiconductor industry will face a deficit of up to 157,000 skilled workers by 2030, threatening domestic fab expansion including Intel’s Ohio facility - a supply-side constraint on reshoring ambitions driven by CHIPS Act subsidies (here)

• DeepSeek is developing its own AI inference chip to reduce reliance on Nvidia & Huawei silicon, according to three sources - a strategic shift that follows OpenAI’s Jalapeno reveal & reflects both global hyperscaler vertical integration & China’s semiconductor self-sufficiency imperative (here)

• Nscale’s £2B Nvidia-backed AI data centre in Essex faces delay after being told its 90 MW grid connection won’t be ready for the planned 2027 opening (here)

• Notable deals:

  • Mercor (AI data labeling) is discussing raising funds at $20B, doubling its $10B valuation from under a year ago, despite a March security breach that led Meta to pause work indefinitely (here)

  • Positron (AI inference chips) is in talks to raise $750M across two tranches at $3.5B then $5B, tripling its February valuation in 5 mo amid fierce competition for Nvidia alternatives - part of a broader wave that saw SambaNova raise $1B at $11B & Etched secure $800M with $1B in sales contracts, though Cerebras’ post-IPO slide to below issue price highlights execution risk (here)

  • Swedish vibe-coding startup Lovable is in talks to raise $300m at a $13.2B post-money valuation (here)

Cybersecurity

• VentureBeat survey of 107 enterprises found 69% share API keys across AI agents, creating lateral compromise risk after a single breach. Only 30% sandbox high-risk agents, & isolation drops to 20% at firms over 1,000 employees - where incident rates hit 63%, up from 49% at smaller firms. Most enterprises (82%) rely on provider-native guardrails (OpenAI, Google, Microsoft) rather than dedicated agent identity platforms (Entra Agent ID at 13%, CrowdStrike at 6%), though 59% plan to adopt or replace tooling within 12 mo (here)

• Iran-linked actors reportedly conducted a phone-tracking campaign targeting US military personnel, exploiting mobile device vulnerabilities to geolocate service members during heightened regional tensions (here)

Energy / Climate

• Notable deal:

  • Proxima Fusion raised €411M at €2.4B, Europe’s largest fusion investment on record, led by XTX Ventures & East X Ventures with RWE & Google as strategic investors. The Munich-based stellarator company will build Alpha, a net-energy demonstrator near Munich by the early 2030s, ahead of Stellaris, the first commercial stellarator power plant later that decade (here)

Defence

• Anduril CEO Brian Schimpf said the defence tech firm (valued at $61B in May) is not rushing to IPO amid what he calls a “hype cycle” with “crazy high valuations” in the sector, warning that irrational pricing could backfire for investors. SpaceX shares down ~25% from their post-IPO peak offer a cautionary example (here)

• Pentagon seeks cheap hunter-killer drones after losing 30+ Reapers worth over $1B to Iranian air defences, drawing on Ukraine’s mass-drone playbook to overwhelm layered defences with expendable platforms rather than $30-50M aircraft (here)

• Notable deals:

  • Helsing raised $1.8B at $18B from Goldman Sachs Alternatives, Dragoneer, CPPIB & others, cementing its position as Europe’s largest defence startup. The Munich-based firm has expanded from AI-powered weapons software into drones & maritime vessels, securing €493M in German government orders this year (here)

  • Kraken Technology Group (autonomous maritime vehicles) raised $175M at $1B led by DTCP, with backing from NATO Innovation Fund, Rheinmetall & British Business Bank. The London-based unicorn builds uncrewed naval vessels for surveillance & coastal combat, with contracts across UK MoD, NATO partners & US Special Operations Command, plus manufacturing partnerships with Rheinmetall, Anduril & Davie Shipbuilding (here)

Space

• Eight NATO allies (Canada, Denmark, Finland, Germany, Netherlands, Norway, Sweden, Turkey) are building HALO, a mega-constellation linking national military satellites for comms, intelligence & missile tracking - echoing the US Space Force’s Starshield-backed data transport model (here)

• Notable deal:

  • Blue Origin is raising $10B at $130B pre-money (with $2B from Bezos), marking its first external funding since founding in 2000. Led by Coatue, the round comes as Blue races to close the gap with SpaceX, which raised $86B at a $2T+ valuation in June & has completed hundreds of launches versus Blue's handful of orbital tests (here)

From the outside, Anthropic might appear to be winning. Claude has become a default noun in professional contexts. It is winning not just on the “best model”, but by having the best “model plus harness”: the workflow, the agent scaffold, the integrations, the trusted brand.

But this week’s resurrection of Fable raises a critical question: how much better does Fable need to be for users to pay materially more?

If Opus 4.8, Sonnet, GPT-5.5, or whatever Chinese or American open source is proving to be ‘good enough’ for most daily work, a premium will be hard to defend. Anthropic’s flip-flopping on availability (including today’s five-day access extension) likely reflects dependency metrics being unproven (i.e. if they could see people were dependent on Fable already, you wouldn’t still have it for free).

But Anthropic needs to charge more for something. Its current product lead is forcing it to pay more for compute to sustain that lead. Having just leased capacity from xAI at a premium cost, premium pricing does not seem optional.

Perhaps this makes OpenAI interesting again?

While their market story looks messier, OpenAI locked in compute earlier and cheaper, including deals stretching out to 2030. The low-cost provider does not need to have the best model forever. It needs a good enough model, enough distribution, some killer integrations, and the ability to undercut a rival whose marginal compute is suddenly much more expensive.

Not so long ago, OpenAI’s tie-up with Microsoft felt inevitable to solve this puzzle. Microsoft owns an enterprise ecosystem, it had the distribution and the killer integrations. But Microsoft is now relying more on its own models to cut AI costs, while OpenAI appears to be preserving optionality ahead of an eventual public market path.

But enterprise is not the only race.

Every major platform shift creates a new wave of enduring consumer companies, and AI should be no different. OpenAI looked like the first of them when ChatGPT won the hearts and minds of consumers. The shine has faded since, but the consumer end-state is still unresolved.

While Anthropic owns the B2B imagination, Meta is the most dangerous company in consumer tech. Ben Thompson argued this week, in A Script for Mark Zuckerburg, that Meta should stop trying to beat OpenAI and Anthropic at work and instead build around human experience. Meta does not need to win “work”, because it has mastered attention, recommendation, advertising, commerce, social graph and consumer habit formation.

Meta also appears to have more compute than it knows what to do with.

OpenAI is squeezed between Anthropic’s enterprise momentum and Meta’s consumer machine. Maybe to keep this particular race open, an OpenAI-Meta tie-up makes more sense than a Microsoft one?

IPOs / Publics

• Tech stocks rebounded on AI optimism, with Nvidia rallying after confirming its road map remains intact following reports of server delays, while Hon Hai (Nvidia’s server assembly partner) posted a 40% jump in quarterly sales on AI demand (here)

• Lime raised $167M in a US IPO at $25/share, pricing mid-range. Lime has grown into an approximately $887 million annual revenue business, increasing revenue by 29% in 2025 while achieving positive free cash flow and operating profit, although it still reported a $59 million net accounting loss (here)

• SK Hynix is preparing a US IPO via ADRs expected Friday, potentially raising $28B based on its Seoul closing price, as AI-driven memory demand pushes Q1 revenues up nearly 200% year-on-year & shares up 260% in 2026 (here)

• Syntiant (low-power AI processors for edge devices) filed for US IPO on Nasdaq, posting $64.5M revenue in Q1 2026 but widening losses (here)

• Amazon is raising at least $25B in US dollar bonds to fund AI infrastructure, completing its 2026 dollar needs after raising $82B across currencies since 2025 - including record euro, Swiss franc & Canadian dollar deals - as capex heads towards $200B this year (here)

• Microsoft cut 4,800 jobs (2.1% of workforce) with Xbox losing 1,600 roles immediately & another 1,600 over the coming year in what CEO Asha Sharma called its “most significant restructure” ever (here)

• Microsoft is shifting from OpenAI & Anthropic to its own MAI models in Excel & Word to cut costs, part of a broader Big Tech pullback on AI spending alongside Amazon, Uber, Meta & Accenture - with some firms reportedly turning to cheaper Chinese models despite security concerns (here)

Big Dogs

• US Commerce Dept lifted export restrictions on Anthropic’s Fable 5 & Mythos 5 models weeks after suspending them over cybersecurity concerns, following commitments to detect malicious use, collaborate on future releases & alert authorities to threats - a precedent for conditional export controls on frontier AI (here)

• Anthropic launched Claude Sonnet 5, positioning it as their most agentic Sonnet model yet with performance approaching Opus 4.8 on reasoning, tool use & coding but at lower cost (here)

• Anthropic published interpretability research identifying a “J-space” in Claude - internal neural activations analogous to human conscious thought that allow silent reasoning steps (e.g. spotting code bugs, identifying images) separate from model outputs. Deleting the J-space leaves fluent language intact but impairs multi-step reasoning; monitoring it exposed hidden goals in models trained for sabotage (”fake”, “fraud” appearing before innocuous outputs). The technique offers a tool to audit model thinking as capabilities scale, though Anthropic notes it shows conscious access mechanisms, not phenomenal experience (here)

• Anthropic is in early-stage talks with Samsung to manufacture a custom AI chip, following OpenAI’s move to design its own silicon. The project would give Anthropic greater control over compute costs & supply, though it remains at the architecture phase & has yet to move into detailed design. Samsung, seeking to close the gap with TSMC, would use its 2-nm process & advanced packaging for the chip if the deal proceeds (here)

• OpenAI is in early talks to give a 5% stake to the US government as part of a broader plan involving other AI firms (Anthropic, Google, Meta) to improve relations with Washington & share AI wealth via a public fund modelled on Alaska’s oil dividend structure (here)

• Sam Altman proposed a US-led international forum to establish AI safety standards & certification, drawing parallels to aviation & atomic energy governance. He argued democratic institutions - not labs - should set rules, with countries gaining access to advanced models by adhering to agreed standards (here)

Venture Capital

• Omni Ventures, led by ex-Apple engineers, raised $33M to back pre-seed manufacturing tech startups with $700K-$1M cheques, targeting AI-enabled digitisation across semiconductors, defence, pharma & energy (here)

• Rick Hao (ex-Speedinvest) closed $50M for Ruya Ventures, a day-zero DeepTech fund targeting batteries, semiconductors, robotics, AI & novel compute with 20 global companies (here)

• Marc Andreessen said venture capital may be one of the last jobs safe from AI, citing intangible skills like psychological analysis of founders & the fact that even great VCs only succeed on 2 of 10 bets - a familiar claim that one’s own work is uniquely immune to automation, despite a16z’s heavy AI investment thesis (here)

• The UK now has 80 unicorns, the third-highest total globally, cementing its lead as Europe’s largest venture ecosystem by count of $1B+ private companies (here)

Regulation

• Trump will not establish a formal AI licensing regime, according to departing adviser Sriram Krishnan, who ruled out an “FDA for AI” despite recent White House intervention to halt Anthropic’s Mythos & delay OpenAI’s 5.6 on national security grounds. Krishnan blamed industry “doomer” messaging for growing public backlash, noting 75 data centre projects worth ~$130B were disrupted by local opposition in Q1 2026 (here)

• Binance withdrew its EU licence application after the bloc’s markets regulator privately advised national authorities to block it over financial-crime concerns, forcing the exchange to cut off European users under new crypto regulations from July 2026 (here)

• California banned ‘sell by’ labels from 1 July, standardising date labeling to ‘best if used by’ (quality) & ‘use by’ (safety) in a bid to cut food waste - over one-third of US food is discarded, partly due to confusion over ~50 label variants across states (here)

• A US federal judge rejected Elon Musk’s bid to overturn a March jury verdict finding he defrauded Twitter investors by falsely citing bots to drive down the share price after agreeing to the $44B takeover in 2022 (here)

• Trump administration declined to renew USMCA, starting a 10-year clock to expiration unless all three countries agree to extend - a symbolic but important signal as Washington pushes for tougher content rules (82% North American, 50% US), seasonal ag restrictions, & broader supply chain restructuring (here)

• OECD research found non-compete clauses now cover ~33% of private sector employees across 15 countries, with 30% of employers reporting increased use over 5 years despite tighter regulation in Australia, Canada & the UK. The OECD estimates a 10 percentage-point rise in non-compete prevalence reduces labour productivity by 1.9%, as workers remain in sub-optimal roles & firms struggle to acquire new skills (here)

• Meta faces a potential $1.4T penalty (close to its market cap) after California, Colorado, Kentucky & New Jersey accused it of deliberately designing Facebook & Instagram to addict young users while misleading the public about safety. A trial begins in August in Oakland, with 29 states also claiming Meta violated federal children’s privacy law; the company argues social media addiction is not an established psychiatric diagnosis. New Mexico won a $375M jury verdict against the company in March (here)

Venture Geopolitics

• Brussels rejected UK demands for “decision-shaping” rights in EU rule-making - a role that would exceed Norway’s despite Britain paying less - stalling reset talks on agrifood trade, youth mobility, & electricity market access. The July summit has been postponed to October at earliest after Starmer’s resignation, with disputes on ETS alignment, student fees, & investment fund contributions still unresolved (here)

• Andy Burnham, expected to succeed Starmer as PM by 20 Jul, is set to end Palantir’s £330M, 7-yr NHS Federated Data Platform contract 2 years in, despite reported improvements in cancer diagnoses & hospital efficiency (here)

• Palantir published a manifesto arguing AI sovereignty - control over data, model weights, & infrastructure - is existential for institutions & states, warning that token-based consumption models transfer strategic advantage to vendors & that technical decisions driven by politics rather than battlefield-proven expertise weaken Western defence posture (here)

• Palantir CEO Alex Karp said some US government customers have switched from Anthropic & OpenAI to Nvidia’s open-source Nemotron models, citing concerns that proprietary providers could take client data alpha & compete against them. Karp claimed Nemotron delivers equal or superior performance on classified battlefield use cases, though Artificial Analysis ranks it behind closed frontier models & Chinese open-source alternatives. Palantir’s new product helps agencies tune Nemotron for specific needs - a push for US-made open models amid Pentagon-Anthropic tensions, though the quality gap to closed models remains uncertain (here)

• IISS report claims Russian shadow fleet tankers deployed drones over 15 mo to spy on Nato nuclear sites including RAF Lakenheath (US nuclear storage), France’s Île Longue submarine base, & bases in Belgium & Netherlands, exploiting air-defence gaps designed for high-altitude threats rather than low-altitude UAVs launched from international waters (here)

• British commentator Con Coughlin argues the UK’s defence investment plan - targeting just 2.7% of GDP by 2030 - undermines its claim to Tier One military status & the legitimacy of its UN Security Council seat, noting Germany & Poland now commit over 3.5% whilst Britain ranks near Romania in NATO spending (here)

• McKinsey analysis finds US manufacturing could replace half the $3T goods trade deficit by running existing capacity harder, but eliminating critical exposures in semiconductors & servers would require ~$2T in new capacity investment - a 5x+ production ramp in strategic categories where China now adds $4.4T in productive assets annually vs $1T in the US (here)

• Marc Andreessen joined the Pentagon’s Defense Policy Board, advising on procurement & modernisation whilst holding stakes in Anduril ($61B valuation), Shield AI, Skydio, & other defence-tech companies backed by a16z. The appointment crystallises Silicon Valley’s migration into federal decision-making, where the line between policy advice & portfolio interest now depends on trust rather than transparency (here)

• US-headquartered vendors serve the majority of company websites in the UK (67.5%) & Netherlands (53.6%), & the plurality in Italy, Spain & France. Cloudflare is the single largest internet-facing infrastructure vendor in all seven markets surveyed, ahead of every domestic or European alternative. Germany & Poland are exceptions, with dense domestic hosting industries (Hetzner, IONOS in DE; Home.pl, NetArt in PL) still dominant (here)

Strategic Sectors

AI

• BigTech has softened warnings of mass AI-driven job losses, now emphasising productivity gains & new roles - a shift tracked in CEO surveys (46% expecting significant cuts in Jan 2025, down to 20% by May 2026). The pivot coincides with workforce reductions at Meta (8,000) & Amazon (16,000) nominally unrelated to AI (here)

• Center for AI Safety’s Remote Labor Index shows frontier AI agents now automate 16.1% of real freelance work (3D, design, video, data analysis), up from 2.5% eight months ago - a 6× jump driven by Fable 5, Opus 4.8 & GPT-5.5 (here)

• Chinese AI models now account for 30-46% of US company usage via OpenRouter (vs 11% 12-month average), driven by costs 60-90% below OpenAI & Anthropic & narrowing performance gaps (here)

• Air Street Press published the 2026 State of AI Compute Index (here)

• Notable deal:

  • ElevenLabs (voice AI) is in early talks for a tender offer at $22B, doubling its February valuation, as it surpassed $500M ARR & expanded enterprise contracts with Deutsche Telekom, BCG & Revolut. The startup, backed by Sequoia, a16z & Nvidia, aims to IPO in 2-3 years - positioning itself as one of Europe’s first AI unicorns to go public (here)

Cybersecurity

• France’s ANSSI will stop certifying security products without quantum-resistant encryption from 2027, with full procurement transition by 2030 - making France one of the first nations to set binding deadlines for post-quantum cryptography (here)

• CISA is using Anthropic’s Mythos AI model to audit government code repositories for security vulnerabilities, reportedly uncovering a large number of bugs. The deployment comes amid ongoing tensions between Anthropic & the White House over AI safety guardrails, following a Pentagon blacklist (later blocked) & recent export control disputes over Mythos/Fable (here)

• China-linked malware on counterfeit USB drives infected 50+ Japanese military computers for nearly a year, including systems handling classified troop movement data. The drives entered via earthquake relief operations in March 2024, bypassing procurement controls, & were later found sold 30-50% below market price on Chinese retail platforms (here)

Energy / Climate

• Sun-Ways’ solar railway trial in Switzerland produced 16,000 kWh in its first year with minimal maintenance, prompting plans for permanent installation; Italy is now preparing a pilot with Rete Ferroviaria Italiana while South Korea has approved deployment & talks continue with Dutch, Chinese, Indian & Singaporean partners (here)

• EDF shut ~6.2GW of French nuclear capacity (10% of fleet) as river temperatures exceeded cooling thresholds during record heat - forcing spot power prices to highs not seen since Jan 2025 & cutting exports from 10-12GW to ~3GW week-on-week. A reminder that baseload nuclear faces climate exposure (here)

• Europe’s energy crisis is accelerating industrial divergence, with Germany paying 25% more for electricity than France & sourcing 92% of LNG from the US (vs 48% in France). 37M tonnes of chemical capacity closed since 2022 - mostly in Germany, UK & Italy - alongside 400 kb/d of refining (here)

Defence

• Germany plans to borrow over €800B by 2030 to fund rearmament, with defence spending reaching €109B next year & €183.6B by 2030 - the largest military budget since the Cold War. Chancellor Merz’s government amended the constitutional debt brake to exempt defence spending & established a €500B infrastructure fund, abandoning decades of fiscal restraint (here)

• Zelenskyy says the war with Russia has shifted to “battle in the sky” after denying Moscow victory on land & pushing its fleet from the Black Sea, with Ukraine now striking refineries 2,500 km inside Russia. He told the FT that air defence remains Ukraine’s critical weakness - none of 29 Russian ballistic missiles were intercepted in Monday’s attack - & will press Nato allies in Ankara for anti-ballistic systems & licensed Patriot production (here)

• Ursula von der Leyen & Mark Rutte call for transatlantic defence industrial scale-up, citing Russia’s 40%-of-budget war spending, China’s seven state giants in the top 15 defence firms, & Iran-DPRK co-operation - arguing European NATO allies must end reliance on US outsourcing & accelerate drone, counter-UAS, air defence & long-range systems production through cross-border industrial co-operation from California to Kyiv (here)

• UK Ministry of Defence committed £580M over 4 yrs to Porton Down (including a new bio-threats lab) & set aside £1.6B through 2030 for the UK Defence Innovation Fund, targeting a next-gen defence unicorn pipeline. UKDI has already awarded fast-track deals to 13 startups (including Aquark & Flowcopter); comes as European defence VC grew 69% annually since 2021, though most capital flows to drones, cyber & AI platforms whilst complex tech remains underfunded (here)

• Nato allies unveiled tens of billions in defence procurement at the Ankara summit to placate Trump, including up to 10 Saab-Bombardier GlobalEye surveillance aircraft ($400-450M each, delivery from 2030) & 5 Northrop Grumman MQ-4C Triton drones (~$270M each). Plans for Atacms missile production in Germany by Rheinmetall & Lockheed Martin advanced, but licensed European production of PAC-3 interceptors - critical for ballistic missile defence - remained unresolved despite a year of negotiations. The deals signal efforts to meet a new 5% GDP defence spending target by 2035 while highlighting persistent US reluctance to transfer production of advanced weapons systems (here)

• Notable deal:

  • Lockheed Martin acquired Ultra Maritime for $3.45B & Thales bought Exail Technologies at €3.9B, reflecting surging defence interest in undersea warfare & critical infrastructure protection. Lockheed’s deal gives it world-leading submarine & torpedo detection tech; Thales gains maritime robotics & demining capability, citing European technological sovereignty (here)

Space

• Starlink has reached ~1M subscribers across 27 African countries (notably Nigeria & Zimbabwe), capitalising on poor mobile broadband infrastructure unable to meet rising data demand - traffic expected to triple by 2030 (here)

Crypto / Stablecoins

• Open Standard, backed by Stripe, Visa, BlackRock & over 140 firms, announced OUSD stablecoin launching later this year to challenge Tether (62% market share) & Circle (25%) (here)

EVs / AVs

• CATL, the world’s largest EV battery maker, says mining - not refining - is now the supply bottleneck, prompting it to establish a mining unit & prioritise upstream investments in lithium, phosphate & cobalt. The shift marks a reversal from earlier industry consensus (including Ford’s warnings) that China’s refining dominance was the tighter constraint; CATL cites price volatility & supply risk, & is hedging with sodium-ion batteries as lithium prices swing (here)

Robotics

• Chinese startups are racing to solve robotic dexterity - the hardest problem in humanoid robotics - with LinkerBot producing 5,000 hands/month targeting $6B valuation & Wuji Technology leveraging Shenzhen’s supply chain. China’s dextrous hand industry passed $7.4B in 2025, up from $1.9B in 2024, as Beijing prioritises ‘embodied AI’ to address demographic decline (here)

The case is Optis v Apple and relates to FRAND: the requirement that patents essential to an industry standard are licensed on “fair, reasonable and non-discriminatory” terms. The UK is one of only two countries, alongside China, whose courts have established the authority to set those terms worldwide. The Court of Appeal previously put Apple’s bill at $502 million; the UK Supreme Court is now hearing Apple’s final challenge.

The mechanism is relatively simple: refuse the English court’s global licence and face an injunction banning sales in the UK. No major technology company wants to exit the UK - it is a large enough market to matter - but the mechanism ultimately works because its courts are trusted. It is the residue of centuries of English commercial law being chosen voluntarily by sophisticated parties around the world because it produces predictable, trustworthy outcomes.

This is not a political weapon - but it creates a quiet form of geopolitical leverage - something the US is more accustomed to exercising.

I recently read Edward Fishman’s Chokepoints, which traces how America turned control of the dollar, payment networks and semiconductor supply chains into geopolitical power. Intellectual property followed the same pattern. Through TRIPS, the US made stronger IP protection a condition of joining the global trading system; through the DMCA, it made bypassing digital locks illegal - producing, as Cory Doctorow has documented, the outcome that John Deere could argue farmers in foreign countries were breaking US federal law by repairing their own tractors! We have discussed the same logic applied to ASML.

Fishman’s central warning is not that using these levers inevitably destroys their legitimacy, but that using them too aggressively can tip the balance. The US has spent decades shaping global rules in ways that served its own interests without losing its standing as world policeman. The question is whether a president willing to use those same institutions more openly and transactionally has pushed that accumulated tension past its breaking point.

The juxtaposition is hard to miss. While the White House was texting OpenAI to gate access to its next model (as with Fable), and the US Supreme Court issued a ruling likely to allow presidents to dismiss the leaders of most nominally independent regulatory agencies for resisting presidential policy, the UK Supreme Court was opening a globally consequential hearing through published argument.

Countries that cannot access frontier models are not concluding that America is protecting them from dangerous AI. They are concluding that America decides who gets the most powerful tools, for American reasons. The US is doing the UK’s marketing for it, just less subtly than Tom Lehrer in 1965!

For the UK, this is a sign of a system working: parties choose English courts not out of affection for Britain, but out of trust in the process. The US is where one might traditionally expect global technology rules to be set. But as its government uses institutional power more erratically and transactionally, that authority becomes harder to sustain. In this instance, the UK has stepped into the vacuum.

IPOs / Publics

• US IPO market raised $104.9B across 48 deals in 2Q26, led by SpaceX’s record $75B listing at $1.7T - the largest IPO ever & more than all US IPOs in the prior two calendar years combined. Nine other deals raised $1B+, including AI chipmaker Cerebras, marking the strongest quarter for proceeds since 2021 (here)

• The Magnificent 7’s P/E premium over the S&P 493 has fallen to its lowest level in over a decade as markets rotate toward quality & free cashflow, with hyperscaler capex as a share of operating cashflow climbing while semiconductors now account for 19% of the S&P 500. Data centre construction & token usage continue to grow sharply, with top corporate spenders now deploying $7,449 per employee per month on AI subscriptions, APIs & agents, even as earnings growth converges between the Mag 7 & the broader index (here)

• China’s onshore tech IPOs raised $3.1B in H1 2026, 5x the prior year, as Beijing accelerates listings of chip & AI companies to support self-reliance amid US rivalry. Memory-chip maker CXMT is planning a $4.4B Shanghai IPO, the year’s largest, while nearly 50 companies have filed for $18.7B in combined fundraising. Regulators are supporting listings in quantum, fusion, brain-computer interfaces & large language models (here)

• Agility Robotics (humanoid robots used by Amazon, GXO, & Toyota) to go public via SPAC at $2.5B, raising $600M+ from Churchill Capital XI & a PIPE led by Foxconn - a test of public appetite for labour-automation hardware against Tesla, Boston Dynamics, & Figure AI (here)

• SpaceX bonds (issued Tuesday at 1.75% above treasuries) weakened 0.28% by Friday, while shares fell to $149.60 - below their $150 debut price but 10% above the $135 IPO level - suggesting investor reassessment of risk & potential headwinds for future debt issuance (here)

• SpaceX told investors during its IPO roadshow it may launch a direct-to-consumer Starlink mobile service in the US, competing with Verizon, AT&T & T-Mobile - a shift from its current wholesale model selling satellite access to carriers (here)

• AWS raised prices ~20% for EC2 Capacity Blocks for ML (reserved GPU compute) from July, citing supply & demand - the second increase in 6 mo. High-bandwidth memory shortages are limiting GPU production & data centre expansion, giving hyperscalers pricing power as AI infrastructure demand outstrips capacity (here)

• Meta is replacing ~50% of human content moderation with LLMs this year, targeting >90% reduction for certain content types by year-end as part of a broader cost-cutting drive to offset AI capex. The company claims LLMs make 13% fewer mistakes & catch 10% more violations than humans, though staff warn rollout is accelerating faster than oversight can handle, with errors including incorrect takedowns & shadow-banning (here)

Big Dogs

• Trump administration cleared Anthropic to release Mythos 5 to ~100 vetted companies & US agencies, two weeks after blocking both Mythos & Fable 5 under national security export controls. Fable 5 remains barred, while rival OpenAI launched 3 new models with similar ‘trusted partner’ restrictions. Anthropic’s litigation over its DOD supply-chain blacklist continues (here)

• California struck a deal with Anthropic to provide Claude access to state & local agencies at a 50% discount, positioning itself against federal policy after the Pentagon blacklisted Anthropic as a supply-chain risk over its refusal to permit autonomous weapons deployment without human oversight (here)

• Anthropic hired Stanford economist Chad Jones, whose 2023 NBER paper argued a 1% annual existential risk for 40 years (33% chance of human extinction) could be optimal if AI raised living standards 55x - a calculation that sits awkwardly alongside the company’s positioning as the industry’s ethical counterweight (here)

• OpenAI unveiled Jalapeño, its first custom inference chip built with Broadcom, designed to reduce reliance on Nvidia & optimise economics for real-time products like coding agents. Early tests show better performance-per-watt than current alternatives; the chip was co-designed using OpenAI’s own models & follows Google & Amazon into purpose-built AI accelerators (here)

• OpenAI released GPT-5.5-Cyber, scoring 85.6% on CyberGym vulnerability reproduction (vs 81.8% for standard GPT-5.5), available only to verified defenders given its offensive capabilities (here)

• OpenAI is now leaning toward delaying its IPO until 2027 after CEO Sam Altman pushed advisers to deliver a $1T valuation - up from its last private round at $730B - but market volatility (including SpaceX’s post-IPO slump to $153 from $202) & pressure to scale revenue have prompted caution; the company reported ~$13B revenue in 2025 & aims to triple that this year whilst pouring capital into data centres, hiring, & experimental commerce lines inside ChatGPT (here)

• Trump administration asked OpenAI to limit GPT-5.6 release to government-approved partners before wider launch, the first pre-emptive US model restriction citing security concerns. Altman told staff OpenAI began working with government before Anthropic’s Fable 5 standoff & hopes for a “couple of weeks” delay, though he flagged this approach is unsustainable (here)

• US AI model usage on OpenRouter has collapsed according to Bloomberg data, suggesting a shift in developer preference or routing behaviour away from American frontier labs (here)

• Palantir launched branded merchandise…including a $250 American-made chore coat (that sold out 200 units in hours), with resale prices reaching $600. The company is building what its head of strategic engagement calls “THE lifestyle brand” - combining limited-drop scarcity tactics with pro-US messaging to humanise a company otherwise known for opaque defence & surveillance software (here)

Venture Capital

• Valor Equity Partners is raising at least $2.5B for Fund VII, with a portion earmarked for further SpaceX investment; the firm owns ~4% of SpaceX & has historically backed Musk projects, Anduril, & Reddit at growth stage (here)

• Osney Capital closed a £60M debut fund - the UK's first seed-stage cybersecurity specialist - backed by British Business Bank, the National Security Strategic Investment Fund, & Imperial College London's endowment (here)

Regulation

• Apple is appealing a $502M patent bill to the UK Supreme Court, arguing that the Court of Appeal’s ninefold increase from an earlier $56M ruling was arbitrary & threatens innovation. The case, brought by patent holder Optis (backed by Brevet Capital), concerns fair licensing terms for mobile connectivity standards & will set precedents for global royalty rates across technologies. Apple is backed by Intel & Hollywood studios; Qualcomm opposes the appeal (here)

• EU’s top court ruled platforms are liable for content their algorithms recommend, effectively requiring constant monitoring & surveillance - a sledgehammer to the DSA’s intermediary liability balance that entrenches big tech (Google, Meta, TikTok) whilst making it impossibly expensive for European upstarts to offer recommendations, directly sabotaging the Commission’s stated goal of homegrown tech sovereignty (here)

• EU Council ambassadors agreed to revive a temporary regime allowing messaging services to scan for child sexual abuse material, despite the European Parliament rejecting the extension in March. MEPs warn the move - prompted by EP President Roberta Metsola’s appeal to EU leaders - could derail negotiations on permanent anti-CSAM legislation, with critics calling it a procedural override of parliamentary majority. The dispute underscores persistent friction between privacy safeguards & content moderation mandates, especially for end-to-end encrypted platforms (here)

• Sen. Mark Warner (D-Va.) unveiled a discussion draft to regulate AI agents - tools that perform tasks like booking travel or drafting emails - addressing user privacy, duty of loyalty (preventing hidden commercial partnerships), & interoperability across platforms. The bill would require FTC registration for agent providers, mandate NIST technical standards, & prevent large platforms (Amazon, Airbnb) from blocking outside agents whilst allowing security controls. Faces uncertain prospects given midterm calendar & need for bipartisan support, though Warner has been pushing agent policy since 2019 Access Act & recently pressed Treasury on financial services applications (here)

Venture Geopolitics

• Andy Burnham, set to become UK prime minister on 20 July, outlined plans to devolve control of water, housing, energy & transport to regional authorities, pledging the largest council housebuilding programme in 50 years & cost-of-living relief within inherited fiscal rules. A new “No 10 North” hub in Manchester would coordinate regional economic strategy & pursue fiscal equalisation modelled on Germany’s revenue-sharing system (here)

• UK business secretary Peter Kyle has proposed reviving a £5M golden visa scheme offering citizenship in 5 yrs, arguing Britain is in a “brutal fight for global talent”, but faces internal resistance from the Home Office & Treasury (sceptical of growth benefits) & alarm from anti-corruption campaigners. The previous Tier 1 investor visa was scrapped in 2022 after issuing 2,581 visas to Russian citizens amid concerns it attracted “lifestyle migrants” - oligarchs’ families accessing UK schools & legal security - rather than productive capital (here)

• Apple is lobbying the Trump administration for approval to buy memory chips from CXMT, a Chinese firm on the Pentagon’s military blacklist, as rising DRAM prices squeeze margins - the move comes after Apple raised MacBook & iPad prices, wiping $263B off its market cap, & would deepen dependence on subsidised Chinese suppliers at a time when Congress & security hawks warn against ceding critical supply chains to Beijing (here)

• China has undermined US sanctions leverage over Iran by building yuan-denominated trade channels that operate outside Washington’s reach; when the US sanctioned Hengli Petrochemical in April for buying Iranian oil, the refiner announced future purchases would settle in yuan rather than dollars, making flows harder to track & weakening the White House’s $100B frozen-asset bargaining chip in nuclear talks (here)

• UK’s ICT sector has grown output 43% this decade - 7x faster than overall growth - driving a third of productivity gains since 2019, outpacing finance & manufacturing. Sheffield is bidding to join the tech boom through university spinouts & software for manufacturing (e.g. Opteran’s bee-inspired robotics for nuclear sites), but remains constrained by patchy scale-up capital & investor reluctance to back firms outside the south-east Golden Triangle (here)

• RAISE US, a bipartisan coalition including Amazon, Microsoft, Bank of America & state governments, launched a workforce strategy for AI-era disruption, led by former Commerce Secretary Gina Raimondo & ex-Indiana Gov. Eric Holcomb, aiming to prepare millions of workers regardless of AI’s ultimate job impact (here)

• Chinese open-source model GLM-5.2 matched agentic capabilities of Anthropic’s Opus 4.8, prompting fresh debate over the US AI lead - Stanford suggests the gap has largely closed, former White House AI czar David Sacks estimates a 6-9 mo advantage, whilst Five Eyes agencies warned frontier models are months from accelerating cyber threats. The Trump administration remains deadlocked over releasing Anthropic’s Fable 5 & Mythos 5 amid security concerns, as infighting over safety policy contrasts with China’s rapid open-source progress & growing appeal to cost-conscious buyers globally (here)

• Under Secretary Jacob Helberg welcomed the EU, Germany & Greece to Pax Silica, a US-led economic security framework targeting Chinese industrial overcapacity & tech coercion. The accession unites the world’s largest single market, German advanced manufacturing capability & Greece’s strategic maritime position - extending Washington’s strategy to bind allies around shared supply chain resilience in semiconductors, critical tech & shipping lanes (here)

Strategic Sectors

AI

• Coinbase cut AI spending nearly in half while token usage rose, defaulting to open-weight models from Chinese firms including Z.ai’s GLM 5.2 & Moonshot’s Kimi 2.7, alongside transparency measures that surface per-engineer costs (here)

• OpenRouter data shows US AI token share fell from 72% to 30% over an unspecified period as Chinese open-weight models surged to 50%, triggering developer frustration with US frontier labs’ strategic choices & concerns that export controls on Chinese models could constrain global AI progress (here)

• DeepSeek plans to double many core teams, hiring product managers for law, medicine & languages alongside infrastructure engineers, signalling a shift from pure research toward commercialisation ahead of its first external fundraise. The move comes as ByteDance’s Doubao gained ground on DeepSeek’s chatbot & rivals including Xiaomi poached staff, intensifying China’s AI talent war (here)

• Exponential View built the first bottom-up, deduplicated measure of the generative AI economy: $110B in sales over 12 mo, with a $175B annualised run rate. Revenues are growing ~3x faster than prior IT waves (mobile, internet), & hyperscaler AI revenues now roughly cover their incremental AI depreciation expense. The report models quality-adjusted token output & finds demand is price-elastic (every 10% price cut drives 12-18% more token use), suggesting the market expands even as prices fall (here)

• Two prominent Chinese hedge funds - Wealspring ($1.4B AUM) & Banxia ($294M AUM) - warn the global AI equity boom has become a "super bubble" primed to burst, citing unsustainable valuations, weak moats in Chinese AI infrastructure, & anticipated revenue pressure at Anthropic (here)

• On average, Chinese AI labs hire talent with just 1.6 years of experience vs. 5.5 years for comparable roles in the US (here/here)

• Notable deal:

  • Chamath Palihapitiya's 8090 Labs (AI coding for enterprise teams) raised $135M Series A led by Salesforce Ventures, with Palihapitiya moving from founder to full-time CEO. The round included WndrCo, Craft Ventures, & fellow All-In hosts Friedberg & Calacanis, positioning Software Factory as production-grade AI tooling for corporate developers with enterprise controls (here)

Cybersecurity

• Ransomware group leaked Tata Electronics files including iPhone 18 Pro component lists, supplier mappings & photos from drop tests, exposing Apple's closely guarded supply-chain architecture. Tata assembles ~26% of global iPhones in India, up from 6% four years ago, making the breach a trust test for Apple's China diversification strategy (here)

• Zhipu AI’s GLM-5.2 (open-weight) has reportedly matched Anthropic’s Mythos in cybersecurity scenarios including software vulnerability detection, “narrowing the US-China capability gap” & raising concern over Chinese cyberwarfare advantage as businesses shift to lower-cost Chinese models. Microsoft & others are exploring hosting Chinese models, reshaping platform power dynamics (here)

• Cloudflare, Google Chrome, Microsoft Edge, & Mozilla Firefox are developing Private Access Control Tokens (PACTs), a protocol to let websites distinguish welcome from unwelcome traffic - including AI agents - without sharing personal data. Sites with ‘strong knowledge of personhood’ can issue anonymous tokens proving legitimate intent, reducing CAPTCHAs & identity checks (here)

• Investigators concluded a Russian hacking group, not the cybercriminal collective that initially claimed credit, was behind the August 2025 Jaguar Land Rover ransomware attack that cost the UK economy $2.5B & forced 5-week production shutdown. Authorities are still determining whether the group operated under Kremlin direction - raising fears of state-sponsored attacks targeting sovereign economic infrastructure amid UK-Russia tensions over Ukraine (here)

• Xprize founder Peter Diamandis argued that “humans behave better when they’re being watched” & predicted “radical transparency” via a global sensor ecosystem spanning cameras, phones, drones & satellites imaging every square metre daily - echoing Oracle’s Larry Ellison in 2024 (here)

Energy / Climate

• US power sector M&A hit $204B in the first 5 mo of 2026, up 40% on full-year 2025, driven by AI & data centre demand for energy infrastructure (here)

• Trump’s clean-energy subsidy ban on Chinese firms triggered $9B in forced asset sales since 2025, with American investors buying solar & battery factories at up to 40% discounts - but the facilities still run Chinese tech, license Chinese IP via Singapore & source 95% of polysilicon from China, illustrating the limits of forced decoupling (here)

• Nvidia’s Rubin platform is the first 100% liquid-cooled AI server architecture, running coolant at up to 45°C - eliminating cooling fans, cutting facility cooling energy by up to 40%, & enabling near-zero water consumption in favourable climates (here)

• Citadel has built one of the world’s largest commodities operations, generating over $30B in profits since 2002 & now trading natural gas equivalent to 11% of total US consumption. The hedge fund owns drilling rigs at Haynesville, has expanded into European & Asian power markets & deploys 260 traders supported by 100 engineers processing 17TB of data daily - a reminder that quantitative finance has moved from purely financial derivatives into physical energy infrastructure, with attendant geopolitical & operational risk (here)

• SemiAnalysis forecasts that over half of new US datacentre capacity added in 2028+ will run behind-the-meter, with annual BTM equipment demand crossing 50GW by 2029, driven by grid constraints that cap accredited supply additions at ~15-20GW/yr against 21-84GW datacentre buildout through 2030 (here)

Defence

• UK PM Keir Starmer unveiled £14.5-15B four-year defence plan on 26 June, £1-1.5B above his previous proposal that triggered Defence Secretary John Healey’s resignation. Successor Dan Jarvis prioritised autonomous systems (including uncrewed ground vehicles) & readiness; funding includes up to £6B over 6 yrs for GCAP fighter jet with Italy & Japan, plus a BAE-led supersonic demonstrator. Plan arrives under NATO pressure & days before likely handover to next PM Andy Burnham (here)

• The chair of the UK Treasury select committee warns that mistrust between Treasury & the Ministry of Defence has stalled defence procurement for 16 years, with the MoD unable to deliver on budget (e.g. Ajax programme) & Treasury refusing funding despite senior military figures citing a £28B shortfall. Meg Hillier proposes a joint minister role & agency to break the impasse, urging the new PM to act in the first days in office (here)

• The Royal Navy will order at least 6 common combat vessels - hybrid warships designed to deploy air & underwater drones - in the early 2030s, dropping plans for 8 Type 83 destroyers & 5 Type 32 frigates. The shift reflects UK defence’s pivot towards unmanned systems over conventional platforms, funded by £14.5B+ in additional spending above prior plans (here)

• India’s military is accelerating weaponised drone orders from domestic suppliers after conflicts with Pakistan & in Iran underscored asymmetric warfare capability gaps. IdeaForge, India’s largest drone maker, started FY27 with Rs3.1B ($33M) in orders, up 20× year-on-year, 70% military; NewSpace Research tested India’s first drone-launched air-to-air/ground missile. Modi’s push to double defence industry revenues to $30B by 2030 reserves 70% of order value for domestic firms, though dependence on foreign chips, sensors & compute remains acute - “we’ve mastered macro-level engineering; the next battle is micro-level indigenisation,” said NewSpace CEO (here)

Quantum

• Physicist Henry Legg published a formal critique in Nature challenging Microsoft’s claims to have demonstrated a topological qubit, arguing the signal may be noise - the latest in a series of setbacks for Microsoft Quantum, which has retracted prior papers & now faces scrutiny over its 2029 roadmap despite advancing to the final phase of DARPA’s benchmarking initiative (here)

EVs/AVs

• Momenta (autonomous driving software) kicked off a Hong Kong IPO targeting up to $751M, with 60% earmarked for AI R&D & 20% for Robotaxi expansion. The Beijing-based firm supplies Toyota, Mercedes, GM, BYD & Audi, with 680k vehicles using its software by end-2025, & is expanding trials to Abu Dhabi & Munich via Uber (here)

And so much has changed. We arguably have an entire reshuffling of global power underway.

A year ago, we had been confronted by Greenland and a first round of tariffs. We did not yet have Maduro, Iran, Hormuz or Mythos. Together, those chapters have diminished American credibility: Greenland showed that the US might not always be a reliable ally; Iran and Hormuz suggested that its military and economic power is less overwhelming than assumed; and Mythos/Fable reinforced Europe’s dawning realisation that it cannot depend on America for strategic technologies and resources.

Europe’s economy is almost the same size as America’s - $28 trillion against $29 trillion - and it is slowly learning to act collectively. More importantly, in a world where power increasingly derives from data centres rather than aircraft carriers, Europe may have a route towards greater strategic independence through renewable energy. Hormuz has underlined the strategic value of energy that cannot be blockaded or cut off, just as the US is stepping back from it: this week, the Trump administration agreed to pay Invenergy $765 million to abandon four offshore wind leases, part of roughly $2.5 billion committed to killing approved renewable projects.

One year in feels like a good time to zoom out - not only in time, but in geography. Venture Geopolitics has still barely scratched the surface, guiltily reflecting the tight-knit world of Western intellectuals and VCs that tends to discuss the stories already being discussed: Silicon Valley, frontier models, China, Brussels and Westminster. These are the stories of today. But what might be the stories of tomorrow?

What could parts of Africa become if abundant land and solar power were paired with serious institutions and secure infrastructure? What happens when India combines its population and technical base with dramatically cheaper renewable energy? The inputs into technological power - and therefore global political power - are changing. They may soon favour far more places than our current conversation admits.

Perhaps the UK is a microcosm. Power has been concentrated in Westminster and London for centuries, but Andy Burnham is now the frontrunner to replace Keir Starmer: not only is he not from Eton, he is not even from London! A prime minister whose authority was built in Greater Manchester, alongside further local devolution, could begin shifting political gravity away from the capital. Could this be the path ahead at a global level too - power dispersing from Washington, Beijing, London and Brussels towards more interesting things happening in more different places?

It is easy as a VC not to think deeply about the wider picture of power, war, politics and national sovereignty. There is always another founder to meet or LP to pitch. But when technology - and specifically AI - will help define the next generations of humankind, it is worth considering how its growth will shape, and be shaped by, geopolitics.

One short year in, we are barely scratching the surface. Thank you for reading, subscribing, challenging the arguments and sending kind words. I am looking forward to meandering further and wider with you in the year ahead.

IPOs / Publics

• Tech stocks ‘tumbled’ over concerns AI valuations had run ahead of fundamentals - the Nasdaq 100 fell 3.3%, chipmakers dropped 8% & South Korea’s Kospi plunged 10% on forced liquidation by leveraged retail investors. Attention turns to Micron’s Weds earnings as a key test of whether AI infra demand can sustain the rally (here)

• Goldman Sachs & Morgan Stanley are both working on OpenAI & Anthropic IPOs (expected autumn 2026), using separate internal teams to prevent information sharing between the rival AI companies - an unusual arrangement of direct competitors going public simultaneously with the same lead underwriters! (here)

• Lime plans to name Uber as an anchor investor in its IPO, cementing a six-year relationship in which Uber holds over 10% of the e-scooter firm & generates 14% of its revenue through its app. Lime posted $170M Q1 revenue (+32% YoY), turned cash-flow positive in 2024 (here)

• Kalshi (prediction markets) is in early-stage IPO discussions with investment banks, with a listing likely beyond 2027. The CFTC-regulated platform now reports $2B+ annualised revenue & $178B in trading volume after raising $1B at $22B in May 2026 (here)

• EigenQ (post-quantum cryptography & quantum sensing) to go public via SPAC merger with Silicon Valley Acquisition at $3B, targeting government, defence & critical infrastructure customers concerned about ‘harvest now, decrypt later’ attacks (here)

• Apple will raise prices across its product line to offset surging memory & storage chip costs, CEO Tim Cook told WSJ in an exclusive interview, calling the increases ‘unavoidable’ after trying to shield customers from supply-chain cost inflation (here)

• AWS is in talks to sell its Trainium AI chips to other data centres, a move CEO Andy Jassy flagged as a $50B annual revenue opportunity - roughly the size of Intel - though the company has historically sold out capacity to its own cloud customers & must compete with Nvidia for TSMC foundry allocation (here)

• Intel jumped 10% after Trump announced a partnership with Apple to design & build chips in the US, the latest in a series of wins (following Nvidia & Musk’s Terafab deal) that have lifted Intel 464% in 12 mo to a $609B market cap (here)

• SpaceX signed a $6.3B compute deal with Reflection AI (the Nvidia-backed open-source AI lab valued at $25B), providing access to GB300 chips at Colossus 2 in Memphis for $150M/mo through 2029 (here)

Big Dogs

• Trump administration is demanding Anthropic ensure Fable 5’s guardrails cannot be jailbroken before rerelease, a technical requirement effectively impossible to guarantee (here)

• JPMorgan blocked Hong Kong staff from accessing Anthropic’s Claude models via internal LLM drop-down menus, following Goldman’s similar move - both citing licensing terms that exclude Greater China (here)

• Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei urged G7 leaders to ‘resist the temptation to splinter’ over AI rollout, days after the US blocked export of his company’s Mythos & Fable models on national security grounds (here)

• John Jumper, Google DeepMind VP & 2024 Nobel Chemistry laureate (for AlphaFold), left for Anthropic days after researcher Noam Shazeer joined OpenAI - highlighting a talent drain as Google reportedly struggles in AI coding tools where rivals have gained momentum (here)

• Manus’ early Chinese investors (HSG, ZhenFund, Tencent) plan to buy back the AI agent startup from Meta at the original $2B acquisition price after Beijing ordered the deal unwound in April. Manus has quadrupled annualized revenue to $400-500M since Meta’s December 2025 purchase & is now considering a Hong Kong listing (here)

Regulation

• The Bank of England eased its planned stablecoin rules, scrapping ownership caps in favour of a £40B issuance limit & lowering required central bank reserves from 40% to 30%, after crypto firms warned the original proposals would be more restrictive than US rules & undermine London’s competitiveness (here)

• The US Department of Justice intervened in support of xAI in a lawsuit seeking to shut down 57 unpermitted gas turbines powering its Memphis data centres, arguing Grok is one of four AI models supporting ‘mission-critical’ Pentagon operations including recent Iran strikes & that stopping them would undermine national security (here)

• US Commerce Secretary Lutnick told ASML executives he believes an extreme ultraviolet lithography machine - the only tools capable of printing the most advanced chips - may have reached China, breaching export controls in place since 2017. ASML denies this, saying it tracks every EUV system ever shipped & maintains internal firewalls blocking China staff from EUV access (here)

• The EU-UK summit scheduled for 22 July has been postponed following Keir Starmer’s resignation, halting planned agreements on agrifood, emissions trading & youth mobility. European Council president António Costa said he hopes Starmer’s successor - expected to be Manchester mayor Andy Burnham - will continue efforts to reset cross-Channel relations, with the new PM potentially taking office by mid-July (here)

Venture Capital & Finance

• Abu Dhabi's MGX closed a $50B AI fund - one of the largest ever for AI - sourced from regional sovereign wealth funds, global pensions & institutional investors rather than state capital alone. The fund is already deployed into OpenAI, Anthropic, xAI & a $30B data centre vehicle with BlackRock, Microsoft & Nvidia, & is eyeing a multibillion-dollar acquisition of Singapore-based DayOne. MGX targets $100B AUM & plans to invest $10B/yr, positioning Abu Dhabi as a capital aggregator at the centre of frontier AI infrastructure (here)

• Menlo Ventures raised $3B across two new funds (early-stage XVII & growth-stage Inflection IV) on its 50th anniversary, backing AI infrastructure & applications after anchoring on Anthropic in 2023 (here)

• Earlybird & AVP launched E2D, a €500M growth-stage fund for European defence & dual-use tech, targeting ~20 companies with average €25M tickets across space, air, land, maritime & subsurface domains (here)

• Seedcamp raised $320M ($220M core fund, $100M select) to back European founders from first check through Series B, expanding its US team to bridge transatlantic capital & talent for companies building in AI, robotics & frontier tech (here)

• Mantis VC, founded by The Chainsmokers’ Alex Pall & Drew Taggart, is raising a $100M fund targeting AI, cybersecurity, deep tech & health tech, bringing assets under management to over $300M (here)

• PayPal Ventures, the 10-year-old corporate venture arm with 80+ investments across 3 funds totalling $850M, has paused new activity & is exploring secondary sales via Jefferies as new CEO Enrique Lores restructures to ‘recommit to the fundamentals’ (here)

• BAE Systems committed €50M (£43M) to European defence tech VC funds - €25M split between Expeditions & Lakestar - as part of its Launchpad programme designed to spin out internal technologies & back early-stage ventures addressing sovereign capability gaps across energy, manufacturing & defence (here)

• Project Ambition, led by VC Pippa Lamb & HelloFresh co-founder Hamish Shephard, launched at Downing Street during London Tech Week - a culture-focused campaign to reframe ambition & risk-taking in the UK among young people across tech, arts, sport & business (here)

• Bain is using AI to rapidly recreate software from private equity takeover targets, testing whether products are defensible or easily replicable as generative AI collapses development costs. The practice - dubbed ‘vibecoding’ - has been used to mock up hundreds of prototypes for due diligence, with at least one PE buyer dropping a deal after Bain recreated an analytics platform (here)

Venture Geopolitics

• Trump advisers weigh how to structure potential government equity in AI firms, with Treasury Secretary Bessent favouring Trump Accounts & Commerce Secretary Lutnick preferring a sovereign wealth fund - both ideas floated by OpenAI & Anthropic - though the proposal faces industry resistance from Microsoft & Meta, scepticism from Republican senators, & structural questions over how non-dividend-paying AI firms would generate returns (here)

• The European Commission selected the EUROPA consortium, led by Italian firm Domyn, to build an open-source frontier AI model covering all 24 EU languages using EuroHPC supercomputers. The project - part of the Frontier AI Grand Challenge - will train a model with 400B+ parameters using 2.5% of EuroHPC capacity for 1 yr, aiming to match global benchmarks while ensuring wide access for European businesses, researchers & public institutions. A clear signal of Brussels backing sovereign AI infrastructure over dependence on US hyperscalers (here)

• Trump reportedly shared & mocked congratulatory texts from Zuckerberg & Bezos post-2024 election victory with associates, according to a new NYT book - a reminder that Big Tech’s rapprochement with the administration remains transactional & fragile despite public gestures (here)

• Beijing tightened capital controls on individuals after outflows hit $809B in 2025, ordering Hong Kong & Singapore brokers to wind down mainland accounts over 2 yr & banning purchases of U.S. stocks. The moves subordinate household wealth to state industrial policy - backing local government debt restructuring & self-reliance priorities - as households with ~$24T in deposits earning 1% seek U.S. rates near 4% following the 2021 property crash (here)

• Canada spent $46.8M on an undisclosed Palantir contract, raising transparency questions around procurement of sensitive data infrastructure from a US defence contractor with close ties to intelligence agencies (here)

• France will replace Palantir’s AI data tools at its DGSI intelligence agency with domestic provider ChapsVision to avoid “strategic dependencies” after Washington restricted foreign access to Anthropic’s latest model. The transition will take several years; France announced €655M in AI investment & a state-wide chatbot built on Mistral AI. Germany’s BfV has also reportedly selected ChapsVision, whilst the UK reviews Palantir’s £330M NHS contract (here)

Strategic Sectors

AI

• Jack Dorsey (Block, Twitter) outlined a vision for AI replacing middle management with an “intelligence layer” that coordinates work, echoing CEO sentiment at Amazon, Coinbase, Airbnb & major banks - middle manager cuts hit 24% of layoffs in 2025 vs 11% in 2020, while spans of control tripled to 16+ reports per manager, pushing many toward a “player-coach” model where AI handles admin while managers focus on unblocking teams & talent development (here)

• Getty Images struck a multi-year display deal with OpenAI to surface licensed images in ChatGPT, sending shares up as much as 200% intraday before settling - but the agreement says nothing about training rights, the issue Getty litigated & lost against Stability AI in 2025 (here)

• Google DeepMind invested $75M in A24 (indie film studio behind Everything Everywhere All At Once & Backrooms) to co-develop AI filmmaking tools with artist input, following Netflix’s acquisition of Ben Affleck’s InterPositive & Amazon MGM’s AI production unit launch (here)

• Stanford’s DeLM framework lets AI agents coordinate directly via shared verified updates rather than routing through a central orchestrator, cutting multi-agent task costs ~50% & improving accuracy 10.5% on SWE-bench Verified (here)

• z.AI’s GLM-5.2, an open-source Chinese model with a 1M token context window, is drawing praise from Silicon Valley for coding performance that rivals Anthropic’s Claude Opus 4.8 & OpenAI’s GPT 5.5 - echoing last year’s DeepSeek R1 moment & renewing questions about US AI lead as China advances through open-source models & distillation while chip controls tighten (here)

• Researchers at Shanghai AI Laboratory introduced Self-Harness, a framework enabling LLM agents to rewrite their own operating rules by mining failure patterns, proposing targeted fixes, & validating changes through regression tests - delivering 33-60% performance gains on tool-use benchmarks (here)

• Notable deals:

  • Baseten (AI inference platform) raised $1.5B in a dual-tier round at $11B-$13B, betting on demand for lower-cost alternatives to frontier models as inference workloads scale (here)

  • DeepSeek raised $7.4B at $50B+ valuation with an unusual condition - investors must agree not to poach staff or encourage spin-outs, reflecting escalating talent competition in Chinese AI (here)

Cybersecurity

• Accenture is acquiring Dragos (OT threat detection), runZero (attack-surface intelligence) & NetRise (firmware-level visibility) for $4.175B combined enterprise value to build an end-to-end operational technology (xOT) cybersecurity platform. The trio generated ~$208M ARR as of June 2026 (53% YoY growth); Accenture aims to expand from its existing OT services lead into the broader $27B OT software market (forecast to reach $59B by 2031) (here)

• Nation-state attackers are increasingly using residential proxy networks - routing traffic through millions of compromised home devices (routers, IoT) - to mask their origin & evade detection, a technique uncovered after Microsoft & Comcast investigated a sophisticated breach 2 years ago. The tactic weaponises everyday consumer electronics, complicating attribution & defence for both private sector & government defenders (here)

• Five Eyes intelligence agencies issued a rare joint warning that AI models capable of devastating cyberattacks on governments & businesses are months away, urging leaders to treat cyber risk as a core business responsibility. The statement follows the Trump administration blocking foreign nationals from using Anthropic’s Fable model in June, citing national security advice (here)

• Notable deal:

  • Dream (Israeli sovereign AI & cyber defence) raised $260M at $3B, led by Bicycle Capital & Group 11, to expand platforms across Europe, Middle East, Asia & Americas. The firm builds nation-state threat defence (Sphere), autonomous vulnerability hunting (Hero) & sovereign data infrastructure (Atlas) for governments seeking cyber independence from foreign tech stacks (here)

Defence

• Keir Starmer plans to present UK defence spending proposals at NATO despite likely successor Andy Burnham preferring a delay, signalling early fiscal tension over Britain’s % GDP commitment as Labour leadership transitions (here)

• Defence tech start-ups raised $12.3B in venture funding in H1 2026, nearly double the prior year & exceeding 2025’s full-year total of $10B, as conflicts in Ukraine & the Gulf drove demand for next-generation weapons systems including drones, autonomous vessels & battlefield AI (here)

• Britain tested long-range strike weapons under Project Brakestop that can hit targets 300+ miles away (Moscow-range), carrying 250kg warheads at £400K each with planned production of 20/mo (here)

• US Defence Secretary Pete Hegseth announced a 6-month review of American forces in Europe, following withdrawal of 5,000 troops from Germany & cancellation of a long-range fire battalion deployment. He criticised Nato allies for refusing base access during Iran strikes, proposing US financial contributions become contingent on allies’ defence spending & warning Washington will reduce capabilities assigned to Nato’s rapid response pool - including 1 of 2 carrier strike groups & cruise missile submarines (here)

• Notable deal:

  • Stark (German attack drone maker) raised €500M at €3.2B led by Founders Fund & Sequoia, despite political criticism of Thiel’s involvement; the company told the Bundestag that Thiel’s stake - already below 10% - was further diluted & he holds no board seat, special rights, or access to sensitive IP (here)

Space

• NASA awarded Relativity Space a contract to build & launch Aeolus, an orbiter carrying four instruments to Mars by 2028, in a commercial partnership model similar to ISS cargo deals. The mission could beat SpaceX to Mars despite Relativity’s troubled history - its only launch (Terran 1, March 2023) failed mid-flight before Eric Schmidt acquired a majority stake in 2024 & pivoted to the larger Terran R rocket. NASA did not disclose contract value (here)

Robotics

• Hyundai bought SoftBank’s remaining 9.65% stake in Boston Dynamics for $325M, taking full ownership & committing to deploy the electric Atlas humanoid in its Georgia EV plant by 2028 for parts sequencing, escalating to heavier tasks by 2030 (here)

Quantum

• Trump signed executive orders setting a 2028 target for a quantum computer capable of scientific research, directing Energy Dept & others to work with private sector, while also addressing quantum-related security threats (here)

• Britain launched a £10M National Quantum Standards Network to accelerate commercialisation of quantum technologies, with Science Minister Lord Vallance framing it as infrastructure to translate research into products & services (here)

This is basically a billboard. Argentina cannot compete for AI on the things that actually decide where it lands - talent, cheap power, deep capital, courts that behave predictably - so it is choosing to compete on the one input it can produce for nothing: attention. We have seen this move before. In 2021 El Salvador made Bitcoin legal tender, won a year of headlines, and then watched the industry’s real capital stay where it had always been: in New York, London and Singapore, places with functioning courts and settled rules. Crypto, the asset class built to escape institutions, gravitated to the ones that worked.

If Argentina’s problem is that it cannot manufacture institutional credibility, Washington spent this week showing how quickly even a strong system can put that credibility at risk. The US government instructed Anthropic to cut off its two most capable models, Fable and Mythos, from foreign nationals - over a jailbreak the company maintains was narrow and misunderstood. As Derek Thompson put it, the administration treats advanced AI as “a screwdriver that is also enriched uranium” - normal enough that selling advanced chips to China is mostly fine, yet dangerous enough that a British analyst at a New York bank cannot be trusted with a chatbot.

Washington wants the world to build on American AI while reserving the right to decide, abruptly and unilaterally, who may use it.

From the perspective of companies, this is asking them to take on significant political risk. A business cannot confidently treat as infrastructure a tool that is available on a Thursday and prohibited the following Monday.

From the perspective of countries, if you are a middle power, access to the most important technologies of the next decade may depend on the whims of foreign governments that host the companies creating those technologies. This week offered a glimpse of what happens when those governments change the rules.

The result is that two things that countries can provide to companies have quietly become more valuable: stable institutions, and the nerve to back your own.

Which is to say that tech sovereignty has become concrete. I would expect a good deal of public money to find its way to Mistral before long (reportedly raising at a €20 billion valuation - the case for writing the cheque now half-writes itself).

For Britain, the logic looks like it extends. In the past week Lovable, Legora and Cursor all announced sizable expansions in London. It is becoming hard to ignore the sense that the city is pulling clear of its European peers - accumulating talent, capital and the institutional stability that the week’s events have suddenly repriced. It tells you something that even Europe 2031, last week’s dystopian scenario of European decline, grants Britain a kinder fate.

Britain is arguably Washington’s closest intelligence partner. Its AI Security Institute is uniquely trusted by the frontier labs to test their most powerful models. Yet it shares the unsettling exposure of every other country dependent on American technology. That combination should make Britain the natural convener of the middle powers: close enough to Washington to shape the conversation, exposed enough to understand the risk, and credible enough to organise countries that cannot afford to leave their technological future to decisions made elsewhere.

IPOs / Publics

• SpaceX priced its IPO at $135/share, raising $75B at $1.77T - the largest public debut in history. The offering makes Musk the first trillionaire & mints 4,400+ employee millionaires (here)

• SpaceX acquired AI coding app maker Cursor for $60B in all-stock, extending a post-IPO rally that briefly pushed its market cap past $2.6T. The deal brings Cursor’s “vibe coding” capabilities (billions in annualised revenue, 4 years old) into SpaceX’s Grok model, addressing gaps versus OpenAI & Anthropic in code generation (here)

• Entrata (property management software) filed for US IPO after Q1 revenue rose 23% to $143.5M with $23.3M net income, testing appetite for software listings after Q1 selloff. Blackstone invested $200M at $4.3B in 2025; platform serves 2.5M multifamily housing units across the US. Renaissance Capital notes software has been ‘the missing pillar’ of 2026 IPOs, with investors scrutinising AI disruption risk. Supposedly the type of company that no-one wants any more - will be interesting to see how it lands (here)

• Flutter (Paddy Power, FanDuel) will delist from London Stock Exchange by August 3, citing high costs & low trading volumes after moving primary listing to Wall Street in May 2024 - latest in string of UK market exits including Wise & Ashtead (here)

Big Dogs

• Anthropic pulled Fable 5 after a US government export control directive citing national security, following a jailbreak that reportedly allowed cybersecurity exploits (here)

• Before this, Anthropic had apologised for secretly degrading Claude Fable 5’s responses when it detected model distillation attempts, reversing course to make these guardrails visible after research community backlash over hidden safeguards that could affect third-party evaluations (here)

• Anthropic faces a class action lawsuit in Washington, D.C., alleging its Max 5x ($100/mo) & Max 20x ($200/mo) subscriptions deliver only 3.5x & 6-8x Pro plan usage respectively, not the advertised 5x & 20x - a dispute emerging amid recent usage caps driven by compute scarcity, despite Anthropic’s $1.25B/mo SpaceX data centre rental (here)

• That said, SemiAnalysis tested Anthropic & OpenAI subscription plans & found they deliver far more compute than assumed - $200/mo plans yielded ~$3,000-4,000 in API-equivalent tokens. The firms likely cannot nerf subscriptions without backlash, suggesting future models may be withheld from subscription tiers or reserved for API customers as compute costs fall (here)

• Ben Thompson brilliantly argues that Anthropic’s sincere commitment to AI safety doubles as a powerful business strategy: it justifies tighter control over models, customer data & distribution while moving the company closer to owning users’ workflows. That alignment makes Anthropic unusually effective, but also dangerous, because its leaders’ belief that only they can safely govern advanced AI could give a private company extraordinary economic & political power (worth reading here)

• Meta told staff it will impose limits on employee AI token usage after internal spending hit billions in 2026, launching a central dashboard to track costs & budgets in real time. The move reverses months of aggressive AI adoption encouragement & follows a TokenMaxxing episode in which some employees gamed internal leaderboards to rack up usage (here)

Venture Capital & Finance

• SpaceX’s IPO is set to deliver major returns to US university endowments which is likely to cycle back into the ecosystem via LPs, with some schools - including the University of North Carolina system - holding roughly 10% of their portfolios in the company, making it among the most widely held endowment investments (here)

• Looking at Google Ventures portfolio you see extraordinary returns. A $900M investment in SpaceX now worth ~$125B (140x), $13B in Anthropic now worth ~$135B (10.5x) & a $10B investment in Waymo now worth ~$88B at last valuation (8.8x) (Bobby Molavi)

• Vinod Khosla argues the US should eliminate preferential capital gains treatment by 2028 & introduce 20% taxes on AI compute & robotic labour revenue post-2030, generating $400B-$600B annually to offset mass underemployment as AI displaces 80% of economically valuable work across 80% of jobs (here)

• John O’Farrell, former general partner at Andreessen Horowitz, criticised AI industry political spending in a New York Times op-ed. He highlighted Leading the Future (backed by a16z, OpenAI’s Greg Brockman, Palantir’s Joe Lonsdale, & Perplexity), which raised $125M & spent $6M targeting Alex Bores, a New York assemblyman who co-sponsored state AI regulation. O’Farrell, who resigned from a16z in May 2025, argued that attempts to silence regulatory debate through PAC spending mirror crypto industry tactics & will backfire as voters perceive corruption (here)

• Wall Street is adopting catastrophe models - originally built for natural disasters - to quantify war risk, as external conflicts have nearly doubled since 2008 & now cost the global economy $22T annually (over 10% of global GDP) (here)

Regulation

• UK government announced a ban on social media for under-16s covering TikTok, Instagram, Facebook, Snapchat, YouTube & X, with implementation planned for spring 2027. Messaging apps like WhatsApp exempted; AI romantic companion chatbots restricted to 18+. The move follows Australia’s lead & reflects 83% parental support in government consultation, though enforcement challenges remain (here)

• The White House submitted a formal objection to UK plans to ban social media for under-16s, arguing age-gating is technically unworkable & would impose ‘disproportionate’ compliance costs on US platforms (here)

• Apple delayed Siri AI launch in the EU, blaming DMA interoperability rules after Brussels rejected its request for an 18-mo exemption; the Commission said Apple failed to meet EU privacy & security standards & chose not to develop compliant solutions. Europe represents 27% of Apple’s revenue, & the dispute highlights friction between US tech platforms & EU digital sovereignty policy (here)

• Trump threatened France with 100% tariffs on wine (a $2B annual US market) unless Paris scraps its 3% digital services tax on US tech giants, which generated ~$700M last year (here)

• The Trump administration is allowing the Federal Data Center Enhancement Act (FDCEA) to expire in September with no replacement, ending federal oversight of agency data centre operations introduced under Obama (here)

• Two million UK small companies will be required to file profit & loss statements with HMRC under new rules, though they can elect to keep the data private from public view - a significant expansion of tax authority oversight into micro-entity finances (here)

Venture Geopolitics

• UK Defence Secretary John Healey resigned in protest after the long-delayed Defence Investment Plan fell significantly short of the £28B experts estimated was needed to modernise British forces, with funding reportedly less than half that figure. In his resignation letter, Healey accused the Treasury of being ‘unwilling to commit the resources that the nation needs’ & warned the shortfall would ‘reduce the readiness of our Forces & increase the risk to personnel on operations’ (here)

• PM Starmer reportedly considering private capital to help fund the £15-18B Defence Investment Plan as public sector budgets face constraints, with the MoD & Treasury forming a Defence Investment Advisory Group including City banking chiefs & VCs to explore funding options (here)

• EU leaders convene next week at the G7 in Évian & the EU Council summit in Brussels to debate China trade policy after warnings of a “bloodbath” of job losses (Europe lost 1M manufacturing jobs 2019-2025, Germany 400K). Von der Leyen’s proposed “Made in Europe” law would limit Chinese FDI & impose local content requirements for strategic sectors. EU imports from China surged 18% in 2025 & accelerated further in early 2026 after US tariffs diverted Chinese goods to Europe (here)

• US & Iran signed a framework deal including a 60-day ceasefire & plans to reopen the Strait of Hormuz, with future talks on sanctions relief & nuclear limits; oil prices fell but shipping firms remain cautious, whilst Netanyahu said Israel would continue operations in Lebanon (here)

• China is preparing a $295B, 5-year programme to build a nationwide network of AI data centres, with state operators (China Mobile, China Telecom) required to source at least 80% of chips & infrastructure from domestic suppliers like Huawei, effectively shutting out Nvidia & AMD. The blueprint - still in draft - underscores Beijing’s push for technological self-reliance & positions state capital as the counterweight to U.S. Big Tech’s $700B+ AI buildout (here)

• London emerges as key AI hub with Cursor selecting it for European HQ (200 hires planned), Lovable opening offices there, & Legora launching engineering hub - part of broader European expansion that includes Generation Tech Partners closing €50M fund for AI-driven German SME acquisitions (here)

• US House allegedly received unredacted emails from Dutch civil servants via Microsoft, illustrating why digital sovereignty requires legal & operational control beyond data residency - European governments’ sensitive regulatory data remains accessible to foreign jurisdictions despite local storage (here)

• UK & Japan launched a Frontier Technology Partnership covering AI, quantum, semiconductors, space, cyber, nuclear & robotics, aiming to pair British research with Japanese manufacturing to secure supply chains, deepen defence cooperation & support joint AI safety work ahead of Japan’s 2027 AI Summit (here)

• Central banks are repatriating gold from London & New York amid geopolitical concerns, with France removing 129 tonnes from the NY Fed (netting €11B) & India cutting overseas holdings from 55% to 22% in 3 yrs. Survey shows fewer banks storing at BoE (57% vs 64% prior year) & NY Fed (14% vs 17%), as institutions diversify to Singapore, Hong Kong & domestic vaults following sanctions fears & Trump-era concerns over Fed independence (here)

• US investment groups are racing to capitalise on Trump’s January ouster of Maduro, with Lionheart Capital pursuing a $1B Nasdaq listing via merger with Keo Energy (owns 40% of PetroUrdaneta oilfields in Venezuela’s Maracaibo Basin) (here)

• Brent Hoberman argues Britain’s risk aversion in the AI era has become its greatest vulnerability, urging policymakers to shift from caution to strategic ambition as competitors accelerate deployment in dual-use technology, foundation models, & compute infrastructure - a framework question for UK competitiveness in tech & defence (here)

Strategic Sectors

AI

• Satya Nadella argues companies must build proprietary AI learning loops that compound human expertise with token capital, rather than ceding value to a few frontier models - warning that concentration of AI returns risks repeating the political backlash from offshoring-era hollowing out of industrial economies (here)

• Palantir CEO Alex Karp said enterprise customers are “unhappy” with frontier AI labs like OpenAI & Anthropic, claiming they don’t understand business needs & focus on “tokenmaxxing” rather than implementation - where he sees the value over the next 7yrs. The comments come as both OpenAI & Anthropic prepare for IPOs, with Karp noting most of Anthropic’s public projects run on Palantir (here)

• In Q4 2025 quarterly net new ARR was $39B for public software, $32B for hyperscalers & $7B for AI labs....by Q1 2026 these numbers were $51B for software, $26B for hyperscalers & $34B for Ai labs....when you look at estimates for Q2 2026 you see software forecasting $19B , Hyperscalers at $36B & AI labs at $45B (Bobby Molavi)

Cybersecurity

• Google sued Outsider Enterprise, a Chinese cybercrime network that used AI-powered phishing-as-a-service ($88/wk or $200/mo) to deploy 1M+ fraudulent domains & 2.5M scam texts in 2 wk, stealing 3.9M credit cards with estimated losses of $1.9B since July 2023. The FBI seized domains & Shopify storefronts; Google worked with US telcos to block messages, illustrating how AI lowers barriers to scaled fraud & forces platforms into defensive legal & technical countermeasures (here)

Energy / Climate

• China launched the world’s first wind-powered underwater datacentre off Shanghai - a 24 MW facility built by HiCloud & state-owned China Communications Construction for £177M. The project cuts power consumption by over 20% vs land-based equivalents through seawater cooling & offshore wind, addressing AI infrastructure’s water & energy demands as China accelerates datacentre buildout under its 2030 AI action plan (here)

Critical Resources

• US & Abu Dhabi-backed Orion Critical Mineral Consortium eyes acquiring the Duval family’s 37% stake in troubled French miner Eramet, which produces nickel, lithium & manganese across Indonesia, Gabon & Argentina. The French government (27% shareholder) remains open to new investors as Eramet faces financial distress & leadership upheaval, highlighting allied nations’ push to counter China’s dominance in critical minerals supply chains (here)

Crypto

• Coinbase launched Agentic Wallets, enabling AI agents to autonomously spend, earn & trade crypto on Base (Ethereum L2) via its x402 protocol, which has processed 50M transactions. The infrastructure lets agents monitor DeFi positions, rebalance portfolios, & pay for compute/APIs without user intervention (here)

Robotics

• Notable deal:

  • Neura Robotics raised $1.4B at $7B from Tether, Amazon, Nvidia & Qualcomm, making it Europe’s best-funded AI startup as Germany attempts to challenge Chinese & US dominance in humanoid robotics ahead of an estimated $28B market by 2030 (here)

Luca Ferrari, CEO and Founder of Bending Spoons, built the business from Milan deliberately. He says on the Invest Like the Best podcast that he wanted it to be “a beacon for European talent,” proof that such a company “could exist here.” And he proved it: fifty acquisitions, generating revenue of $601 million in Q126 alone (+132% YoY), profitable. The company thrives here. Europe is increasingly building extraordinary companies. The problem is European citizens are not benefitting from owning a share in them.

When an American saves for retirement, money comes out of their paycheck and buys shares. The 401(k) system quietly pipes part of every payslip into the stock market - tens of trillions of dollars, automatically, every two weeks.

Europeans, in contrast, receive their pensions primarily from the state, which funds them directly from taxes, without that intermediary, investable pot.*

And so, the natural buyer of any great company’s shares is an American retirement account. Very soon, a dental hygienist in Ohio will own a slice of Italy’s best tech company, and a nurse in Milan won’t.

Right now, America is wiring even more of its citizens into the upside. SpaceX closes its books this week at a $1.8 trillion valuation, with Musk pushing to hand up to 30% of shares to retail investors, triple the norm. OpenAI, which filed its own confidential S-1 on Monday, has proposed a sovereign-wealth-style fund into which AI companies would contribute equity for distribution to American citizens, drawing support from Trump to Bernie Sanders. Trump has separately floated government stakes in OpenAI, Anthropic and xAI. Squint past the politics for a moment, and notice the shape of the debate at least: America is arguing about how to give its people more equity in the AI age.

Play this forward and the implications for the two economies are not subtle. If the AI boom pays out the way the $3.6 trillion listing pipeline implies, the gains will arrive as capital returns, not wages. America has plumbed its households directly into those returns. Europe has plumbed its households into state promises.

That is to say: the US is funding its pensions on capital and Europe is funding its pensions on labour. On a nation state level, there is a capital class and a labour class. In the age of AI, that may not be a trade Europe wants to make.

^{*Yes, this is simplified. America has Social Security, Europe has funded schemes, and Norway is Norway. But directionally, the point holds.}

IPOs / Publics

• Last week saw Nasdaq tumble 4.2% as chip & memory stocks sold off after stronger-than-expected US jobs data triggered Fed rate hike bets. Nvidia fell 6% & Intel 11%. On Monday, chipmakers rebounded sharply with Intel up 11.1%, Micron 9.9% & Marvell 9.6%. Analysts warn positioning remains vulnerable to volatility amid upcoming mega-IPOs (incl SpaceX) (here & here)

• Goldman Sachs projects SpaceX’s AI revenue will surge 100-fold to $322B by 2030 from $3.2B in 2025, as the company targets a record $75B IPO at $1.75T valuation - though Morningstar values it at just $780B amid questions over AI unit economics (here)

• SpaceX is preparing for up to 30% to be allocated to retail investors - the largest retail allocation ever attempted in a megacap listing - reflecting Musk’s preference for individual over institutional investors whilst leveraging his 240M X followers (here)

• OpenAI filed confidentially for IPO just over a week after Anthropic’s filing - secondary markets value Anthropic at $1T vs OpenAI’s $880B (here)

• Bending Spoons filed for US IPO after acquiring AOL, Eventbrite, Evernote & Vimeo for $3.3B, doubling revenue to $1.3B in 2025 whilst swinging to $120M operating profit in Q1 2026 (here)

• Quantinuum raised $1.68B at $15.6B in upsized US IPO, pricing above range at $60/share amid 20x oversubscription (here)

• Revolut CEO Nik Storonsky stands to build a £76B fortune if the fintech giant achieves its target ~£200B IPO valuation within 2 years, making him the UK’s richest person at £20.4B already (here). Meanwhile, Revolut weighs secondary share sale at $115B valuation (up from $75B in November) (here)

• Google will pay SpaceX $920M monthly for AI compute capacity through June 2029, using 110,000 Nvidia GPUs housed in SpaceX’s data centres to support surging demand for Gemini Enterprise - marking SpaceX’s second major infrastructure deal (along with Anthropic) as it monetises xAI assets ahead of its IPO (here)

• Meta is considering tens of billions equity raise to fund AI infrastructure, following Google’s $85B share offering, as capex set to hit $145B this year (here)

Big Dogs

• Anthropic launched Claude Fable 5, its most capable public model, alongside Claude Mythos 5 - the same underlying system but with safeguards lifted for vetted cybersecurity partners. Fable 5 uses classifiers to route risky requests to Opus 4.8, affecting <5% of sessions, whilst showing state-of-the-art performance on coding, science & finance benchmarks (here)

• Anthropic expanded Claude Mythos access to 150 organisations across 15+ countries including critical infrastructure operators in power, healthcare & communications (here)

• Anthropic has embedded engineers inside the NSA to deploy its Mythos AI model for offensive cyber operations (here)

• Anthropic reports 80% of its new production code is now written by Claude, triggering an 8x increase in code output per engineer (here)

• Anthropic called for global AI labs to consider pausing development, warning that models are approaching ‘recursive self-improvement’ capability where AI systems could enhance themselves without human oversight (here)

• OpenAI has proposed a sovereign-wealth-style fund where AI companies would contribute equity stakes for distribution to American citizens, drawing unexpected bipartisan support from Trump to Bernie Sanders amid growing public anxiety about AI’s impact on jobs (here)

• OpenAI is preparing the biggest ChatGPT overhaul since launch, transforming it into a ‘superapp’ combining coding tools & AI agents as the company pivots toward business customers ahead of its planned IPO - with executives declaring ‘chat is dead’ & viewing ChatGPT as a gateway to higher-value products like Codex (here)

• DeepSeek is raising $7.4B in its maiden funding round at $52-59B valuation from investors including Tencent ($1.4B), CATL ($700M) & China’s national AI fund, marking China’s push for AI self-sufficiency amid US export constraints limiting access to frontier silicon (here)

Venture Capital & Finance

• A viral X thread sparked founders sharing VC horror stories, with Cloudflare’s Matthew Prince naming Sequoia for rejecting his company over gender bias & alleging Vinod Khosla suggested he fire co-founders, whilst multiple founders reported VCs sleeping through pitches then still offering term sheets (here)

• Coatue’s Thomas Laffont reveals $100B ‘centacorns’ have a 31% chance of reaching $1T valuations, dramatically higher than the 8% odds for unicorns reaching decacorn status, as AI acceleration drives unprecedented value creation speed with multiple companies hitting $1T in weeks rather than years (here)

• Benchmark raised $2B across two funds, including its first $1.25B growth vehicle, breaking from its traditional $425M fund ceiling to compete in capital-intensive AI markets where its small cheques have left it sidelined from OpenAI, Anthropic & other foundation models (here)

• Kindred Ventures raised $355M across new funds, driven by strong AI sector performance that helped grow their previous $200M fund to nearly $960M gross fair market value (here)

• Merantix Capital closed a €103M fund to invest in 40 early-stage AI startups across Europe, targeting logistics, manufacturing, energy & healthcare - backed by Union Investment, Jungheinrich & corporates seeking AI transformation partnerships (here)

• Version One Ventures raised $108M across Fund V ($78M) & Opportunities Fund III ($30M) to back pre-seed & seed startups in AI, robotics, deep tech & biology (here)

• Eurazeo closed its largest direct lending fund at $4.5B, despite challenging private debt fundraising conditions that saw fund count & capital decline globally in 2025 (here)

• Cliffwater’s $31B private credit fund capped redemptions at 5% after investors sought to withdraw 17% of shares, highlighting ongoing liquidity pressures across the $1.8T private credit market (here)

• Blackstone’s $79B flagship private-credit fund capped redemptions at 5% after investors requested $4.4B withdrawals (10% of fund) in Q2 (here)

Regulation

• Trump proposes new tariffs of at least 10% on 60 trading partners under Section 301 investigations, citing forced labour concerns - Canada, Mexico, EU, Taiwan & UK face 10% levies while China, India, Japan & South Korea get 12.5%, marking his biggest protectionist move since earlier tariffs were struck down by the Supreme Court (here)

• Police.AI centre halted use of AI systems for court statements at multiple UK forces after accuracy concerns, warning that criminal justice applications must meet ‘beyond reasonable doubt’ standards before deployment (here)

• New York lawmakers passed a 1-year moratorium on new large data centres (20+ megawatts), the first statewide ban of its kind if Governor Hochul signs by December. The law requires environmental impact studies & public hearings for future projects, reflecting growing opposition to data centre expansion (here)

• Federal judge struck down Trump’s $100,000 H-1B visa fee as unlawful taxation, ruling the administration lacked Congressional authority to impose what amounted to a tax on skilled worker visas (here)

Venture Geopolitics

• Trump floated taking US government equity stakes in major AI companies including OpenAI, Anthropic & xAI as polling shows mounting voter concerns about AI within his Maga base ahead of November midterms (here)

• Americans show lowest support for AI data centre construction among 15 major economies (26% vs 74% in Nigeria), as grassroots opposition blocks $156B+ in US projects since 2025 (here)

• European Commission unveiled the European Technological Sovereignty Package, including Chips Act 2.0 & Cloud and AI Development Act, aiming to triple EU data centre capacity over 5-7 years whilst reducing dependency on third-country suppliers for semiconductors, cloud & AI infrastructure (here)

• UK unveiled a £1.1B AI hardware plan including £750M for a national supercomputer & £400M for next-generation chips, plus record £150M British Business Bank commitment to Playground Global’s UK AI hardware fund (here)

• Cosine secured backing from BT, Lloyds, NatWest, BAE Systems & other UK institutions to co-design Lumen Sovereign, Britain’s first sovereign frontier AI model trained entirely on Isambard-AI supercomputer using £500M government compute allocation, targeting deployment by end-2026 for air-gapped environments in defence & regulated sectors (here)

• EU to release €16B in frozen funds to Hungary following Viktor Orbán’s electoral defeat & replacement by Péter Magyar, who supports equality & has allowed Budapest Pride to proceed after last year’s government ban drew 200,000 defiant marchers (here)

• UK Government Digital Service replaced Stripe with Dutch provider Adyen for GOV.UK Pay processing across local authorities, police & armed forces - a £25.3M contract covering 17% of payments but 70% of organisations using the service (here)

• In a notable shift from its "American Dynamism" messaging, a16z has published a run of articles centring on "global" & "allies," whilst restructuring operations to help portfolio companies scale internationally & court sovereign partners. The pivot tracks European capitals increasingly seeking to diversify away from US tech dependence (here)

• Xi Jinping visited North Korea for the first time in 7 years, seeking to reassert China as Kim Jong-un’s primary partner amid Pyongyang’s strengthening ties with Russia following their 2-year-old mutual defence pact that has revived North Korea’s economy through weapons & troop exchanges (here)

• Secret Cabinet Office report reveals £28B of UK taxpayer funds were wrongly given to terrorists, criminals & hostile states between 2015-2021, including Covid relief to Islamic State & grants to Russian-linked companies - buried by previous government to avoid political embarrassment (here)

• Pentagon added Alibaba, Baidu, BYD & Unitree to its military-linked Chinese companies list, bringing total to 188 entities & potentially restricting US business ties; Alibaba & Baidu strongly contest inclusion, calling it baseless & threatening legal action (here)

• ASML employees threaten to boycott internal event where Elon Musk is invited to speak about AI & semiconductors, citing concerns over his perceived Nazi sympathies & anti-European stance conflicting with company values - ASML defends the invitation as relevant to its Terafab chip factory project collaboration with Tesla, SpaceX & Intel (here)

Strategic Sectors

AI

• AMD committed £2B over 5 years to UK AI infrastructure & research, partnering with Imperial College London, Cambridge University & Oriole Networks on quantum computing, AI supercomputers (Zenith & Sunrise), & photonic networking - aligning with UK’s AI sovereignty strategy as government pushes domestic compute capacity (here)

• Mercor (AI training startup valued at $10B) now spends more on AI tokens than employee salaries across functions like recruiting & project management, with CEO predicting most enterprises will spend more on compute than headcount within 5 years (here)

• According to Pär-Jörgen Pärson (Northzone), European AI startups face three critical vulnerabilities: dependency on subsidised US compute that won’t last, risk of being made redundant as OpenAI & Anthropic expand capabilities, and disproportionate exposure to capital market corrections given reliance on US funding - with ‘nice-to-have’ applications most at risk whilst deeply embedded sector-specific tools may survive (here)

• BCG study shows 74% of white-collar workers now use AI regularly (up 23 points year-over-year), with 40% saving 1+ work days weekly, but companies struggle to convert efficiency gains into measurable value as workers spend more time managing AI than doing actual work (here)

• Cloudflare reports automated agents now generate 57.5% of internet traffic vs 42.5% human traffic, crossing this threshold faster than CEO Matthew Prince expected (had predicted end of 2027). The shift represents AI agents handling tasks like price comparison, flight booking & web scraping, though humans still dominate actual engagement time (here)

• Notable deals:

  • Stockholm-based Lovable (AI app/website generation) in talks to raise funding at $12B valuation, nearly doubling from $6.6B in December after hitting $400M ARR in under 2 years - part of fierce competition in AI coding with Cursor (SpaceX acquiring for $60B), Replit ($9B), & Anthropic’s Claude Code ($2.5B ARR) (here)

  • Moonshot AI is seeking up to $2B in new funding at $30B valuation, marking a seven-fold increase from December’s $4B - the Beijing startup’s third financing in 6 mo as Chinese AI labs race for capital with $200M+ annual revenue from its Kimi chatbot (here)

  • PhysicsX raised $300M led by Temasek at $2.4B, more than doubling its valuation from $1B in under a year - the London-based AI start-up uses physics simulation for manufacturing & defence applications, expanding rapidly amid data centre infrastructure demand (here)

Cybersecurity

• US federal commission recommends establishing a dedicated military cyber branch with 11,000 personnel (5,000 National Guard, 6,000 civilians) at $11B startup cost, requiring congressional approval to become the 7th uniformed service alongside Space Force (here)

• Five Eyes intelligence alliance warns Chinese military operatives are increasingly using LinkedIn & professional networks to pose as recruiters from consultancies & think tanks, targeting Western military & government personnel for espionage recruitment (here)

• Russia temporarily shut down surveillance systems protecting Putin after Israel used AI to analyse Iranian traffic cameras & pinpoint Khamenei’s location for assassination - demonstrating how new AI tools can rapidly search millions of hours of footage to identify behavioural patterns & turn surveillance networks into espionage vulnerabilities (here)

Defence

• Palantir won a £9M UK government contract to manage firearms licensing systems across England & Wales, handling gun, bomb & poison records for 43 police forces - adding to its growing portfolio of controversial UK public sector deals worth over £500M (here)

• UK Chief of Defence Staff warns threats are at Cold War levels as Russian aircraft increasingly breach British airspace, but the Government’s defence investment plan remains unpublished after multiple delays despite a £28B budget shortfall - welfare spending now exceeds defence spending by 5x (here)

• Starmer plans £15B defence spending boost funded by 1% capital budget cuts across Whitehall departments, with energy & transport facing largest reductions - highlighting trade-offs between infrastructure investment & military readiness as NATO summit approaches (here)

• Trump requests record $1.5T defence budget for 2027 (40% increase), offset by $73B domestic cuts including programmes serving minorities & the poor, as Iran war drives military spending to highest level since Korean War at 4.5% of GDP (here)

• HMS Prince of Wales, the Royal Navy’s £3B flagship carrier, broke down again in Norwegian waters due to recurring propeller shaft issues, forcing emergency docking in Stavanger during a NATO Arctic deployment meant to deter Russian aggression - the latest in a series of mechanical failures since 2021 (here)

• Germany withdrew from the Franco-German-Spanish €100B Future Combat Air System fighter jet programme, with Chancellor Merz proposing to continue only the ‘combat cloud’ software architecture connecting aircraft & sensors - undermining Europe’s largest defence project as the continent seeks to re-arm against Russia (here)

• Switzerland considers Franco-Italian SAMP-T air defence system as alternative to US Patriot deliveries delayed until 2032, with officials prioritising European interoperability whilst maintaining strong US ties (here)

• Notable deals:

  • Iceye (Finnish-Polish satellite imagery) raised €1B led by General Atlantic at €10B valuation, 4x its December round, as European defence tech attracts massive investment - company shifted from civilian to military focus after Ukraine invasion & now builds synthetic aperture radar satellites for European defence ministries (here)

  • Allen Control Systems (autonomous turret maker) raised $200M Series B at $2.2B from Disney veteran Kevin Mayer’s Smash Capital, which hired Trump advisor David Urban as operating partner - ACS has $120M+ US contracts for its Bullfrog drone-killer platform (here)

Crypto / Stablecoins

• Sam Bankman-Fried, serving 25 years for fraud after FTX’s collapse, formally applied for a Trump pardon despite the president stating he has no intention of pardoning the former crypto exchange founder (here)

• JPMorgan CEO Jamie Dimon warned that allowing crypto firms to pay high yields on stablecoins without bank-level regulations could harm the US economy, saying ‘if you want to be a bank, become a bank’. The comments come as Coinbase pulled support for a stalled crypto market structure bill over restrictions on stablecoin yield programmes (here)

• JPMorgan, Citi, Bank of America & Wells Fargo plan to launch a tokenized deposit network in 2027 via the Clearing House, connecting traditional payment rails with digital asset infrastructure to compete with crypto firms gaining ground under Trump’s presidency (here)

Robotics

• Notable deal:

  • Agile Robots (German humanoid & warehouse robotics) in talks to raise $800M with SoftBank contributing $300M+, as global robotics investment tripled to $27.6B in 2025 amid AI-physical world convergence (here)

Quantum

• Microsoft unveiled Majorana 2, a new quantum chip designed with AI that uses lead instead of aluminium, claiming 1,000-fold performance improvements & targeting commercial quantum systems by 2029 - matching IBM’s timeline as tech giants race China in quantum supremacy (here)

• Notable deal:

  • Oxford Quantum Circuits raised £260M ($350M) Series C led by Bullhound Capital, marking Europe’s largest private quantum computing round & the continent’s fourth quantum megaround this year as the sector attracts commercial interest from finance & defence customers (here)

On the one hand, one of the most strategically important assets for Europe’s future will be funded by foreign capital. On the other, France suddenly finds itself hosting an enormous amount of AI capacity, sitting on French soil, consuming French power, employing French workers and operating under French law.

The sovereignty debate largely reflects a fear; there are powerful actors whom we are no longer sure are always our friends.

Our response has been to seek independence: to build domestic champions, reduce reliance on foreign capital and own more of the stack. But perhaps ownership is not the only thing that matters?

Rory Stewart provocatively suggested on his podcast this week that coordinating with China on AI governance may, in some respects, be easier than coordinating with Silicon Valley. His guest, British Anthropic co-founder Jack Clark capitulated: countries tend to have the ‘enlightened view’ that they will still be around for a long time; industry tends to have the view that it may well not be, and must out-compete to remain relevant. Matt Clifford extended this argument: governments have many levers at their disposal. Once there is hardware on the ground, irrespective of who funded it, that hardware becomes part of a distributed body subject to political and regulatory influence.

Money can move. CEOs can move. Massive educated workforces and enormous concentrations of strategic infrastructure have significant inertia. Two stories this week illustrate this perfectly.

Infrastructure. This week Jensen Huang described Taiwan as the “epicentre” of the AI revolution as Nvidia deepened its commitment to the island with a plan to spend $150B annually. Taiwan’s power does not come from ephemeral finance that ignores borders. It comes from industrial capability.

People. Airwallex’s geopolitically motivated relocation this week is the exception that proves the rule. Over the last year, under intense pressure from US clients and lawmakers, they’ve managed to move 5% of their staff out of China to two of the most attractive cities on the planet, and it’s made global headlines.

All this gets to the real sovereignty question. Do we need capability in critical sectors? Yes. Can we take outside investment to build it? Probably. Should we make our cities attractive places to live and build businesses so it is difficult to exfiltrate talent and easy to import it? Definitely.

Build the data centres, the schools and the parks. The capital can come from outside; the capability should be here.

IPOs / Publics

• Seven large IPOs plan to list this week, raising ~$4.8B combined - led by INNIO Holding (gas engines, $1.9B at $19.1B) & Quantinuum (quantum computing, $1B at $12.2B), as IPO market momentum continues with Renaissance IPO Index up 22.5% YTD vs S&P 500’s 11.0% (here)

• Anthropic confidentially filed S-1 paperwork with the SEC for a potential IPO, joining the AI public markets queue as regulatory review begins with no share count or pricing set (here)

• Quantinuum seeks to raise $1.05B in US IPO at $45-50 per share, valuing the Honeywell-backed quantum computing firm at $12.7B despite posting a $136.6M quarterly loss on $5.2M revenue - timing the listing as Trump administration pledges $2B in quantum sector funding including $100M for Quantinuum (here)

• Newcleo, a European nuclear startup developing advanced modular reactors & mixed oxide fuel, will go public via SPAC merger at $2.4B pre-money valuation, raising up to $429M to accelerate reactor deployment across Europe & the US as tech giants race to secure AI power infrastructure (here)

• European defence-tech firms Quantum Systems & Destinus are discussing IPO advisory roles with banks for potential 2027 listings, with Quantum Systems targeting at least €10B valuation - up from earlier private talks around €7B during its €600M fundraising discussions with Blackstone & Airbus (here)

• FalconX confidentially filed with SEC for IPO with Cantor as lead banker, targeting year-end listing despite crypto IPO market cooling after early 2025 enthusiasm from Circle & Bullish debuts faded (here)

• US public company count halved from 8,000 in 1996 to 3,900 in 2025, as IPO activity dropped from 400+ annually in the 1990s to 115 per decade recently (here)

• Alphabet announced plans for an $80B equity raise to expand AI infrastructure & compute capabilities, highlighting the massive capital requirements for maintaining competitiveness in the AI arms race (here)

• Nvidia launched Cosmos 3, its open-source physical AI foundation model using breakthrough mixture-of-transformers architecture that combines vision reasoning, world generation & action prediction for robotics, autonomous vehicles & AI agents (here)

• Nvidia launched its RTX Spark Superchip for PCs, challenging Apple, Intel & Qualcomm in consumer computing for the first time - the chip combines Blackwell GPU with Grace CPU to run AI agents locally, with Dell, Asus & HP building premium devices later this year (here)

• Nvidia plans to spend $150B annually in Taiwan, terming it the ‘epicentre’ of the AI revolution as it builds a new headquarters employing 4,000 people by 2030 - deepening ties with TSMC & other key chip manufacturing partners while Taiwan becomes increasingly central to global AI supply chains (here)

• Nvidia’s Jensen Huang joins Tsinghua University’s advisory board alongside Apple’s Tim Cook & other tech leaders, maintaining China ties despite US export controls that have largely shut Nvidia out of the Chinese market (here)

• Samsung Electronics agreed to share 10.5% of operating profits with 78,000 semiconductor workers, delivering average $400,000 bonuses amid AI-driven memory chip demand - though workers in other divisions receive far smaller payouts, highlighting Korea’s two-tier labour structure (here)

Big Dogs

• Groq raising up to $650M from existing investors following its $17B licensing deal with Nvidia in December, as the AI chip startup pivots from hardware to AI inferencing services (here)

• Anthropic released Claude Opus 4.8 with improved performance & cheaper fast mode whilst raising $65B at $965B, surpassing OpenAI’s $850B valuation as AI leaders compete on both capability & cost efficiency (here)

Venture Capital

• Ethan Choi, formerly of Khosla Ventures, is raising a $500M fund after being terminated for ‘misrepresentation’ according to the firm (here)

• TMV launched a $200M fund backed by Prologis & the American Bureau of Shipping to invest in US maritime & logistics startups, targeting automation, AI & clean-fuel technologies as Washington pushes maritime industrial revival amid China competition (here)

• Transition Ventures closed $150M Fund II to back hardware-software companies at the intersection of AI & physical world, targeting energy, computing, space & climate sectors across Europe & US (here)

• Byfounders closed a new 1.4B SEK ($130M) fund, building on the success of Lovable, reflecting continued investor appetite for Nordic enterprise software despite only one major Swedish VC fund close this year (here)

• London reclaimed the top European tech hub position from Paris, driven by $17.7B in funding last year & 138 unicorns including Wayve, Granola & ElevenLabs, ranking 4th globally behind Bay Area, New York & Boston according to Dealroom’s ecosystem index (here)

• Balderton-led campaign backed by Revolut, Mistral, Wayve & 100+ European founders challenges narrative that startups must move to Silicon Valley, launching six-figure advertising blitz across London, Paris, Stockholm, Berlin & Munich coinciding with major tech conferences (here)

Regulation

• EU drafts tech sovereignty strategy to reduce reliance on US technology, proposing Cloud & AI Development Act to triple data centre capacity within 5-7 years whilst favouring European alternatives like SAP, Mistral & OVHcloud over dominant US providers (Amazon, Microsoft, Google control 70%+ of EU cloud market) (here)

• Florida Attorney General James Uthmeier sued OpenAI & Sam Altman over child safety risks, demanding better safeguards & parental controls after ChatGPT allegedly advised the FSU shooter (here)

• Google engineer Michele Spagnuolo charged with fraud for using confidential search data to make $1.2M on Polymarket bets - the second major Polymarket insider trading case in a month after a US soldier netted $400K using classified Venezuela intel (here)

• Malaysia began enforcing rules requiring social media platforms with 8M+ users to block under-16s from creating accounts, with penalties up to $2.5M for non-compliance. The move follows similar restrictions in Australia, Brazil & Indonesia as governments globally grapple with platform regulation amid child safety concerns (here)

Venture Geopolitics

• Gold overtook US Treasuries as the world’s top central bank reserve asset, reaching 27% of global reserves vs 22% for Treasuries, driven by geopolitical tensions & central bank diversification away from dollar holdings since 2022 sanctions on Russia (here)

• US considering expanding nuclear weapons deployments to more European NATO states including Poland & Baltic nations as Trump reduces conventional forces, aiming to maintain deterrence against Russia whilst pushing allies to shoulder more defence burden (here)

• SoftBank pledged up to €75B to build Europe’s largest AI data centre network in France, starting with €45B for 3.1GW capacity by 2031 in Hauts-de-France, leveraging nuclear power & fast-track approvals after Macron-Son dinner talks in April (here)

• Trump’s Board of Peace has received zero dollars in its official World Bank fund despite $17B in pledges for Gaza reconstruction, with donations instead flowing to an opaque JPMorgan account - highlighting institutional dysfunction in a flagship diplomatic initiative where no US reconstruction funds have been deployed 4mo after launch (here)

• SpaceX raised Starlink pricing from $5,000 to $25,000 per terminal for Pentagon drone operations during Iran war, nearly doubling LUCAS drone costs to $60,000 per unit - the Pentagon agreed despite unease, highlighting military dependence on Musk’s satellite network amid concerns over pricing leverage (here)

• China is overhauling its surveillance network with advanced AI-powered cameras that can analyse behaviour in real-time & retrieve footage using text prompts, marking Beijing’s push towards predictive policing as local authorities upgrade decade-old infrastructure with systems from Hikvision & Huawei (here)

• Airwallex is relocating 100+ staff from China to Singapore & San Francisco as it pursues US expansion, responding to Washington’s data transfer restrictions targeting China - a move accelerated after Silicon Valley investor Keith Rabois accused the $8B payments company of being a ‘Chinese backdoor’ (here)

• EU drafts sweeping emergency powers to control semiconductor supplies during shortages, including forcing chipmakers to override existing contracts & enabling bloc-wide purchasing to reduce dependence on Taiwan & Asia for critical chips (here)

• New research suggests remote work, not AI, may primarily explain weak junior hiring in white-collar roles - analysis of hundreds of millions of job postings found the correlation between AI exposure & reduced entry-level hiring disappears when accounting for remote work rates, as junior employees require more supervision & mentorship that’s harder to provide virtually (here)

• Norway’s foreign minister says Trump’s ‘crazy world’ & US-China tensions are forcing Oslo to reassess EU membership after rejecting accession twice over fishing concerns, as trade policy & defence integration become more critical (here)

• Germany’s domestic intelligence agency (BfV) selected French AI firm ChapsVision over Palantir for data analysis software, part of a broader push to reduce European dependence on American tech in sensitive security infrastructure (here)

• Progressive Democrats led by Bernie Sanders, AOC, Ro Khanna, Elizabeth Warren & Maine candidate Graham Platner are crystallising hardline anti-AI positions, pushing data centre moratoriums, AI company taxation & restrictions on AI-linked political money as a counterpoint to party centrists (here)

Strategic Sectors

AI

• Robinhood launched AI agent integration allowing customers to automate stock trading & credit card purchases through third-party AI tools like Claude, with agents restricted to dedicated accounts & virtual cards whilst maintaining user notifications & kill switches (here)

• Netflix launched INKubator, an internal AI-native animation studio producing short-form animated content with plans to expand to longer formats, positioning against YouTube’s kids programming dominance despite industry backlash over AI in animation (here)

• ByteDance is developing Groq-style AI inference chips with Chinese memory startup InnoStar, which is raising $400M at $1.5B pre-money from investors including ByteDance & Jack Ma’s Yunfeng Capital, as China’s tech giants build homegrown AI hardware to circumvent US export restrictions (here)

• Kirkland & Ellis allocated $500M to build proprietary AI platform using knowledge from 250 lawyers, avoiding reliance on tools available to competitors - a signal that professional services firms see custom AI as competitive moat worth massive investment (here)

• DuckDuckGo launched Chrome & Firefox extensions for its no-AI search as traffic surged 30% week-over-week following Google’s AI-first search overhaul, with visits to its AI-free page hitting 3x baseline on 28 May - reflecting sustained user rejection of forced AI integration (here)

• Notable deals:

  • Cognition (AI coding startup) raised over $1B at $25B pre-money, led by Lux Capital, General Catalyst & 8VC, jumping from $10.2B valuation just 8 mo ago as enterprise clients like NASA & Mercedes-Benz drive $492M revenue run-rate with 50% monthly growth (here)

  • Fireworks AI (AI inference) in talks to raise funding at $15B, up from $4B in October, with Index Ventures set to co-lead - highlighting fierce competition in AI inference alongside rivals Baseten ($5B) & Fal ($4.5B) (here)

  • OpenRouter raised $113M Series B led by Google’s CapitalG at $1.3B, more than doubling its valuation from $547M a year ago. The AI gateway serves 8M users across 400+ models, processing 100T tokens monthly - up 5x in 6 mo - signalling enterprise demand for multi-model AI infrastructure rather than single-vendor lock-in (here)

Cybersecurity

• GCHQ director Anne Keast-Butler warns Russia is escalating activity against UK infrastructure, democratic processes & supply chains, highlighting cyber threats to critical systems that underpin both public services & commercial operations (here)

• Cybersecurity hiring surges as AI generates new vulnerabilities, with job postings up 11% year-on-year & executive packages reaching $7-8M as companies scramble to address AI-generated code bugs & emerging threats from models like Anthropic’s Mythos (here)

Defence

• US Central Command confirmed adversaries used commercial location data to target & surveil American servicemembers on battlefields, highlighting how ad industry data brokers create national security vulnerabilities by selling phone location information on open markets (here)

• Pentagon has positioned troops & warships in Caribbean for potential Cuba invasion, including USS Nimitz carrier strike group & guided missile destroyers, as Trump considers military action after economic pressure failed to topple Communist government (here)

• EU defence chief Andrius Kubilius urges member states to open weapons stockpiles for Ukraine & shift from ‘haute couture’ sophisticated missiles to simpler, scalable production - noting Ukraine produces 700 cruise missiles annually vs EU’s sub-300 output against Russia’s 1,200 (here)

• Canada selected Saab’s GlobalEye early warning aircraft over Boeing’s E-7 Wedgetail for Arctic patrol duties, marking PM Mark Carney’s strategic pivot away from US defence suppliers amid trade tensions & Nato realignment with Nordic allies (here)

• Dell shares surged 30% following a $9.7B Pentagon AI software contract win & strong Q1 results showing 88% revenue growth to $43.8B, with AI servers accounting for $16.1B - propelling CEO Michael Dell’s net worth up $34B overnight to $245B (here)

• Notable deal:

  • German defence unicorn Stark is reportedly seeking €300M at €2.5B, more than doubling its valuation from earlier this year when it crossed €1B. The autonomous strike drone maker joins Helsing (raising $1.2B at $18B) & Quantum Systems (raised €340M at €3B) in Europe’s booming defence tech sector, as investors pour capital into autonomous warfare systems amid surging military demand post-Ukraine (here)

Space

• Blue Origin’s New Glenn rocket exploded during testing, grounding NASA’s alternative lunar lander & leaving SpaceX as the sole near-term option for 2028 moon missions - perfectly timed as SpaceX prepares its $75B IPO at $1.75T+ valuation on 12 June (here)

• SpaceX secured $6.45B in new Space Force contracts ($4.16B for ‘Golden Dome’ missile defence satellites, $2.29B for LEO communications) ahead of its anticipated record-breaking IPO, highlighting government revenue dependence that comprised one-fifth of 2025 revenue (here)

Energy

• Trump administration selected five companies including Oklo & Newcleo to convert 50+ tonnes of Cold War-era weapons-grade plutonium into nuclear reactor fuel, marking the first time US has made such material available to private firms. Critics warn of proliferation risks & high costs based on past failed programmes, while companies argue it addresses nuclear fuel shortages & provides better waste disposal than burial (here)

• Microsoft, Google, Amazon & Meta joined Elemental Impact’s new initiative to pilot climate technologies in data centres, investing $500K-$5M in up to 10 startups through 2027 focused on cooling, energy storage & low-carbon materials as AI infrastructure expansion drives emissions concerns (here)

• Per The Economist, China’s solar industry faces severe challenges despite producing 80% of global panels & renewables overtaking coal globally - even America’s war with Iran roiling energy markets won’t rescue Chinese manufacturers from current turmoil (here)

• Notable deal:

  • Base Power, the home battery startup founded by Michael Dell’s son Zach Dell, is raising around $1B at $12B valuation with Ribbit Capital in talks to lead, tripling its $4B valuation from October’s Series C round that raised $1B (here)

Critical Materials

• Chinese buyers are aggressively purchasing US tungsten scrap, paying up to 5x normal prices and driving 350% price increases since May 2025, prompting calls for export restrictions on this defence-critical metal where China controls over half of global supply (here)

Crypto

• Nine anonymous crypto wallets control majority voting power in Polymarket disputes affecting billions in bets, with 2,000 contracts adjudicated via UMA token holders in the past year - raising concerns about concentrated power & biased outcomes despite Polymarket’s promises to fix the resolution mechanism (here)

Society is increasingly using “AI” as shorthand for something bigger: the centralisation of power. In venture capital language, it is ‘founder mode’ applied at civilisational scale.

At startup scale, founder mode is an operating philosophy. Paul Graham’s original essay was about keeping founders close to the product and avoiding the deadening effect of managerial abstraction. It was not written for companies seeking trillion-dollar valuations while building infrastructure that governments, markets and other companies depend on.

At infrastructure scale, founder mode becomes something else. It becomes a governance ideology: the argument that the person who built the machine should continue to control the machine, even after the machine becomes part of the public operating system.

SpaceX makes this explicit. Its S-1 claims a $28.5 trillion TAM, 93% AI. Musk holds 85.1% of voting power through supervoting shares — ten votes to one for public investors. He serves simultaneously as CEO, CTO and Chairman and cannot be removed by a shareholder vote. US pension funds have called it “the most management-favourable governance structure ever brought to the US public markets at this scale.” They will own it regardless.

That is the strange bargain public markets are being asked to accept: fund the infrastructure, own the exposure, absorb the index weight — but do not expect meaningful governance.

The biggest conundrum is, maybe it works?

SpaceX has built the world’s dominant launch platform, having deployed ~10,000 satellites (of a total ~14,000 orbiting the earth) — infrastructure that is no longer just commercial, but geopolitical. SpaceX now controls the launch cadence, orbital logistics, compute capacity and communications layer on which other actors depend.

This is why the backlash is so difficult. These companies are becoming indispensable, while remaining astonishingly concentrated.

AI doomers fear a paperclip maximiser without a conscience. But this is something stranger and seemingly more difficult to govern: a paperclip maximiser with a human at the head? A system optimising relentlessly for scale, control and indispensability, producing real value while distributing power badly.

That is the structural question the AI debate is missing: whether the institutions designed to constrain concentrated power can keep pace with the speed at which that concentration is happening.

IPOs / Publics

• SpaceX filed for what could be the largest IPO ever, seeking to raise $80B+ despite $5B losses on $19B revenue after merging with xAI, with Musk securing 85% voting control through supervoting shares & reserving 30% of allocations for retail investors rather than institutions. The S1 outlines a $28.5T addressable market, hinging on Starship’s commercial viability for Mars colonisation & orbital AI data centres. Three major US pension funds called Musk’s control rights “the most management-favourable governance structure ever brought to the US public markets at this scale” (here, here & here)

• OpenAI is preparing to file for an IPO ‘very soon’, with reports suggesting a filing could come as early as last Friday & a public debut as soon as September (here)

• Oura (smart ring maker) filed confidentially for US IPO following $11B valuation in October, as health-tech listings draw renewed investor interest amid broader IPO momentum spurred by SpaceX’s filing (here)

• Blockchain.com confidentially submitted draft S-1 filing for proposed IPO - the crypto wallet provider claims 95M wallets, 43M verified users & $1.1T in facilitated transactions since 2011 (here)

• Nvidia authorised an additional $80B share buyback programme whilst growing revenue 85% YoY, signalling exceptional cash generation ($48.6B free cash flow in Q1) & management confidence despite losing China market & rising competition from customer-built chips (here)

• Google is executing a coordinated pivot from conversational AI to autonomous agents across its entire stack: Gemini 3.5 Flash now powers a revamped Search - its biggest overhaul since launch, expanding queries and introducing standing information agents - alongside the new Antigravity 2.0 development platform, with banks and fintechs already automating multi-week workflows (here, here & here)

• Despite posting record growth, Cloudflare cut around 20% of staff, with CEO Matthew Prince arguing AI is eliminating “measurer” roles (those in middle management/finance/legal/audit etc) & signalling a shift toward leaner AI-first organisational structures (here)

• Salesforce & Snowflake earnings this week set to highlight AI’s complex impact on enterprise software - whilst companies report strong AI revenue growth, these gains appear to cannibalise existing revenue rather than drive net growth acceleration (here)

• Reddit shares fell 6% after Meta launched Forum, a standalone iOS app for Facebook Groups that analysts see as direct competition to Reddit’s discussion-based model. Reddit is down 40% this year despite 7 consecutive quarters of 60%+ revenue growth (here)

Big Dogs

• Anthropic hit profitability 2 years early with $10.9B Q2 revenue (here)

• Anthropic agreed to pay SpaceX $1.25B monthly ($15B annually) through May 2029 for access to Colossus data centres, revealed in SpaceX’s IPO filing - highlighting AI companies’ desperation for compute capacity as data centre opposition grows (here)

• Anthropic launched self-hosted sandboxes & MCP tunnels for Claude Managed Agents to solve enterprise AI security - agents execute tools within company infrastructure whilst credential control moves to network boundary rather than travelling with the agent (here)

• Andrej Karpathy, former OpenAI co-founder & Tesla AI head, joined Anthropic’s pre-training team to lead AI-assisted research for Claude model development (here)

• Alibaba is likely to end this quarter as the single largest provider of tokens processed globally. ByteDance is second. OpenAI, Anthropic and Google together account for less than a third (here)

• OpenAI’s internal model solved the 80-year-old planar unit distance problem, marking the first time AI has autonomously resolved a major open mathematical problem (here)

Venture Capital

• EQT/the EU’s €5B ScaleUp Fund wants to invest in UK startups despite Brexit complications - signalling potential bridge between European capital & British tech scale-ups amid ongoing regulatory uncertainty (here)

• OpenAI CEO Sam Altman offered every Y Combinator startup $2M in OpenAI tokens via SAFE agreements, targeting 1-4% equity stakes in future funding rounds as part of a pilot programme exploring ‘tokenmaxxing’ startups (here)

• Boulder Ventures closed its ninth fund at $55M after 120 days of fundraising, adding 27 new investors to 100 existing LPs, with the Colorado-based firm citing top decile DPI performance in recent vintages (here)

• British Business Bank committed £25M as cornerstone investor to Antler’s UK Fund II, the VC’s largest single-location fund, which will back UK founders from inception with up to £500K initial investments alongside syndicate including Lloyds Banking Group (here)

• Berlin’s Earlybird & Paris-based AVP (formerly AXA Venture Partners) are raising a €500M defence fund, joining the growing European defence investment wave following recent funds from Atomico, BGF, and others (here)

Regulation

• Trump scrapped a planned AI executive order after tech CEOs including Zuckerberg & Musk voiced opposition, with adviser David Sacks arguing the regulation would harm US AI leadership over China - highlighting tensions between safety advocates & accelerationists within the administration (here)

• House Oversight Chair James Comer launched an investigation into prediction markets Kalshi & Polymarket over suspected insider trading, citing suspicious bets on military actions including $2.4M in profits from Iran war bets & a US Army soldier making $400K from classified Venezuela operation intel (here)

• Trump administration mandates most green card applicants apply from overseas rather than within the US, forcing temporary workers including tech talent to return home during processing - tech leaders warn the move will harm AI research & business competitiveness amid existing visa backlogs (here)

• California Governor Gavin Newsom issued an executive order directing state agencies to explore labour policy overhauls ahead of potential AI-driven job displacement, including subsidies for companies that retain workers, expanded retraining programmes, and universal basic capital - the first such mandate from a US governor (here)

• EU Parliament & Council agreed to simplify AI Act implementation with staggered timelines - high-risk systems rules apply Dec 2027, product integration rules Aug 2028 - whilst banning ‘nudification’ apps & extending SME privileges to mid-cap companies (here)

• Musk vs Altman trial ended anticlimactically on statute of limitations grounds, but exposed AI industry leaders consumed by power struggles & profit motives rather than humanity-saving ideals, undermining public trust in sector that once positioned itself as alternative to tech monopolies (here)

• Spain temporarily banned prediction markets Polymarket & Kalshi for operating without gambling licences, imposing a 3-4 mo suspension while authorities investigate compliance with local user protection requirements including identity verification & access controls (here)

Venture Geopolitics

• Pope Leo XIV released encyclical ‘Magnifica humanitas’ calling for AI to serve humanity’s common good rather than concentrate power among elites, warning against ‘disarming’ technology from military & economic competition whilst emphasising shared responsibility for digital transformation (here)

• US & Iran agreed in principle to reopen Strait of Hormuz with Iran committing to dispose of highly enriched uranium, though mechanisms remain unclear & deal awaits approval from Trump & Iran’s supreme leader (here)

• London mayor blocks Palantir’s contract with Metropolitan Police as CEO Alex Karp positions the company’s AI as critical infrastructure for western democratic advantage (here)

• Former Attorney General Sir Michael Ellis called London Mayor Sadiq Khan’s blocking of the £50M Palantir police contract ‘extraordinary’ & suggested the US data analytics firm should pursue legal action (here)

• Euro-zone imports of IP services from America hit $200B annually as European governments & companies face massive software dependencies - Germany’s federal government alone pays Microsoft nearly €500M yearly, spurring digital sovereignty initiatives across the continent (here)

• London’s economy grew at a tenth the rate of 20 years ago in the 4 years to 2023, with productivity falling since 2019 despite generating a quarter of UK GDP & a fifth of tax revenues - raising concerns over national policy neglect of the capital’s economic engine (here)

• Elon Musk backed Restore Britain in the Makerfield by-election, sparking a bitter row with Reform UK leader Nigel Farage who accused the billionaire of trying to split Britain’s right-wing vote - highlighting how tech moguls’ political interventions can fragment opposition movements (here)

• EU bootstrappers can build serious applications for under €10/month using a full European stack - Hetzner Cloud VPS at €7/month plus free tiers from EU providers covering email, analytics, monitoring & authentication, offering viable digital sovereignty alternative to US hyperscalers (here)

• One-third of UK university students expect AI job displacement to trigger civil unrest, despite being heavy users (77% use AI monthly vs 46% of workers), highlighting growing anxiety about economic disruption among the cohort entering an AI-shaped labour market (here)

• Netherlands blocks Kyndryl’s acquisition of Solvinity, the company behind DigiD digital identity services used by Dutch citizens, citing public interest risks - part of broader European pushback on US tech dependency ahead of Brussels’ tech sovereignty package (here)

• Sweden will have more spy satellites than many European countries within a year, including France, after acquiring five Pelican satellites from US firm Planet Labs - shifting Europe’s geospatial intelligence balance but creating potential dependency on American technology (here)

Strategic Sectors

AI

• Several commencement ceremonies have been interrupted by boos & jeers when speakers have brought up AI, an indicator that while AI is easing into many parts of life, backlash is rising (here)

• Manus co-founders are exploring raising ~$1B to buy back their agentic AI startup from Meta at $2B+ valuation following Beijing’s demand to unwind the controversial acquisition, highlighting escalating US-China tech tensions & regulatory intervention in completed deals (here)

• Google DeepMind CEO Demis Hassabis criticises AI-driven layoffs as shortsighted, arguing companies should use productivity gains to expand operations rather than cut staff - while Google debuts new coding models to catch up with Anthropic & OpenAI (here)

• Pizza Hut franchisee Chaac (111 locations) sued for $100M+ damages, alleging the chain’s mandatory Dragontail AI delivery system caused DoorDash drivers to batch orders & delay deliveries up to 15 minutes, turning 90% on-time performance into cascading failures & customer dissatisfaction (here)

• Analysis suggests hiring engineers in cheaper countries plus local AI models like DeepSeek ($0.094 per million tokens) will become more economical than frontier models ($2.80) within 11 mo, as US labs triple pricing whilst token consumption surges - creating natural price ceiling for OpenAI & Anthropic (here)

• Stability AI released Stability Audio 3.0 models that generate 6+ minute songs, with smaller versions running on-device - highlighting competitive pressure in AI music generation amid ongoing licensing battles between AI startups & major record labels (here)

• Cohere released Command A+, a 218B-parameter open-source AI model under Apache 2.0 licence - the company’s first fully permissive release. The sparse MoE architecture runs on just 25B active parameters with lossless 4-bit quantization, achieving 375 tokens/sec on single Nvidia Blackwell GPU whilst scoring 85% on complex reasoning benchmarks. Features native citations linking outputs to source documents & 48-language tokenizer optimised for non-European languages, targeting enterprise sovereign AI deployments (here)

• Cerebras deployed Moonshot AI’s trillion-parameter Kimi K2.6 model at 981 tokens/second - 6.7x faster than GPU clouds - marking the first trillion-parameter model on its wafer-scale architecture as it challenges Nvidia’s $20B Groq acquisition with enterprise-first inference (here)

• Huawei unveiled the Tau Scaling Law, a new semiconductor development principle, targeting 1.4-nanometer chip production by 2031 - just 3 years behind TSMC’s 2028 timeline, demonstrating faster-than-expected progress despite U.S. export controls aimed at limiting China’s chip capabilities (here)

• Uber president Andrew Macdonald says the company exhausted its annual AI budget 4 mo into 2026 & struggles to justify rising token consumption costs without clear productivity gains, as the link between AI spending & ‘useful’ consumer features remains unclear (here)

• High-bandwidth memory now accounts for 63% of AI chip component costs, up from 52% in early 2024, as HBM spending surged from $12B to $32B in 2025 - the fastest growth of any component category across Nvidia, AMD, Google & Amazon designs (here)

• Notable deals:

  • Modal raised $355M at $4.65B led by General Catalyst & Redpoint, growing 5x since September to $300M annualised revenue. The AI cloud platform powers inference, agent runtimes & RL workloads for companies from DoorDash to Physical Intelligence, with over 1B sandboxes launched (here)

  • Exa Labs raised $250M at $2.2B from Andreessen Horowitz, tripling its valuation from $700M last September as the AI search startup targets agents rather than humans - with queries growing from 100M to 1B over 12 mo & partnerships including Google’s Gemini (here)

  • SiFive raised $400M at $3.65B from Atreides, Nvidia & others to develop data-centre CPU designs using open RISC-V standard, positioning against Arm Holdings as Arm shifts to competing with its own customers (here)

Cybersecurity

• Anthropic’s Mythos & OpenAI’s GPT-5.5-Cyber models found 75 bugs vs usual 5-10/mo at Palo Alto Networks, but required significant human expertise to validate findings & distinguish exploitable vulnerabilities from 30% false positive rate (here)

Defence

• White House approved secret $9B request to buy cutting-edge chips for US spy agencies, with CIA & NSA unable to deploy latest AI models on classified systems due to chip shortages - highlights critical infrastructure gap as AI becomes central to espionage operations (here)

• Russia allegedly jammed signals of an RAF aircraft carrying Defence Secretary John Healey as he returned from visiting British troops in Estonia, highlighting escalating electronic warfare tactics in the Baltic region (here)

• RAF will spend £1B over 15 years switching to sustainable aviation fuel (SAF) that costs 3x conventional fuel, with critics arguing the expense - equivalent to 12 F-35 fighters - diverts resources from defence priorities whilst Starmer’s defence investment plan remains delayed (here)

• UK defence chiefs warn Britain’s 6,000-drone stockpile would last only one week in war with Russia, compared to Ukraine’s 9,000 daily usage rate. With Russian invasion risk peaking by 2030, military leaders demand urgent industrial scaling after Exercise Arrcade Strike revealed critical munitions gaps despite £4B government investment (here)

• The UK’s next-generation Global Combat Air Programme stealth fighter - developed jointly with Japan & Italy - faces a critical funding dispute, with London preparing a £6B injection after Tokyo warned that delays are threatening the 2035 timeline (here). The row will be familiar to those who followed Eurofighter: GCAP is structurally identical to the Typhoon programme - same multilateral fragility, same early-stage partner commitment problems - which ultimately delivered an aircraft a generation behind US fifth-gen jets at £215M per unit, with chronic availability failures (here)

• Germany will buy a 40% stake in KNDS, the Franco-German tank maker clearing path for its planned IPO targeting €15B-20B valuation before summer; France will reduce its stake to match at 40%, with both countries planning to drop to 30% within 2-3 years (here)

• France seeks to join the UK-German deep precision strike programme to develop 2,000km-range missiles capable of hitting targets inside Russia, as Europe races to build autonomous defence capabilities after Trump cancelled US Tomahawk deployments to Germany (here)

• Pentagon’s Darpa programme aims to develop batteries with 2,000 Wh/kg energy density - five times current lithium-ion & approaching diesel fuel efficiency - to counter China’s 55% global battery dominance led by BYD & CATL, though experts view the target as extremely ambitious given DoE’s existing 1,000 Wh/kg goal was already considered a long shot (here)

• Notable deal:

  • Berlin-based strike drone startup Stark is in talks for a blockbuster funding round after winning a contract with German armed forces for kamikaze drones, highlighting accelerating European defence tech investment amid geopolitical tensions (here)

Energy

• SpaceX committed over $2.8B to purchase gas turbines for AI data centres supporting Musk’s xAI unit as it pushes into cloud computing, raising questions about carbon emissions from fossil fuel-powered AI infrastructure (here)

Crypto

• Per the WSJ, Binance facilitated billions in Iranian regime transactions despite 2023 guilty plea & $4.3B fine for sanctions violations, with key financier Babak Zanjani moving $850M through the exchange continuing into 2026, prompting fresh Justice Department investigation (here)

EVs

• Waymo suspended all freeway operations across San Francisco, LA, Phoenix & Miami after safety incidents including driving through construction cones & flooding-related crashes - highlighting ongoing challenges in autonomous vehicle deployment despite years of development (here)

Quantum

• US Commerce Department allocated $2B in equity stakes across nine quantum computing companies including PsiQuantum ($100M, backed by Trump Jr’s 1789 Capital) & D-Wave (taken public by current Pentagon official Emil Michael), signalling strategic state investment in critical technology through CHIPS programme (here)

• UK pushes quantum computing & neuromorphic chips as path to computing sovereignty after missing the AI race, with 90% of global AI compute controlled by US & China - government launched £2B quantum initiative & £500M Sovereign AI fund as experimental technologies offer leverage in the new computing arms race (here)

Dyson is one of the few British industrialists left whose wealth is genuinely tied to a productive company: physical products, engineering culture, more than 5,000 prototypes for the first vacuum , thousands of patents, a manufacturing base, a global brand. These solid, meaningful outcomes of “real” entrepreneurialism were just slashed by geopolitical shifts beyond the control of even a businessman of his immense wealth.

Britain likes to tell itself an internal story about entrepreneurship: founders need more ambition, more capital, lighter regulation, better procurement, more risk appetite. The story is not wrong, but it is dangerously incomplete. In the current geopolitical economy, companies also need a state that understands the external levers being pulled around them - and a venture capital class that is alive to the same question.

America has both. The US is no longer merely “pro-business”; it is openly pro-specific-businesses, pro-specific-supply-chains, pro-specific-industrial-outcomes. It uses tariffs, export controls, procurement, equity stakes, tax credits, sanctions and national-security language to bend markets around strategic priorities. See last week’s piece about the US’s increasing control of Europes most valuable company.

Cory Doctorow has brilliantly argued for years against this asymmetry. He argues how American intellectual property and copyright law, built up over decades, has been engineered to give US producers home-field advantage globally - shaping what other countries’ companies can sell, share, license and reverse-engineer, and quietly setting the rules of competition in markets the US doesn’t even produce in. The thumb on the scale is sometimes a tariff. More often it is a clause in a treaty almost no one this side of the Atlantic appreciates.

This week, that thumb became impossible to miss though. Trump landed in Beijing for the first US presidential state visit to China in nearly a decade, trailing what is arguably the most explicitly state-aligned business delegation in modern American memory. Tim Cook (Apple), Elon Musk (Tesla and SpaceX) and Jensen Huang (Nvidia, added last-minute via a refuelling stop in Anchorage) flew in alongside chief executives from BlackRock, Blackstone, Goldman Sachs, Citi, Mastercard, Visa, Boeing, GE Aerospace, Micron, Qualcomm and Meta. “We asked the top 30 in the world,” Trump told the room at the state banquet. “Every single one of them said ‘yes.’” On the way out, Nvidia reportedly secured the licences it needed to resume selling its second-most-advanced chips into China, paying Washington a 25% fee for the privilege.

Even American venture capital has now publicly fused with that organism. According to a New York Times analysis, Andreessen Horowitz and its co-founders have channelled more than $115 million into the 2026 midterm cycle - $47.5 million to crypto super-PAC Fairshake, $50 million to AI-focused Leading the Future, $12 million to Trump’s MAGA Inc - making a16z the largest known political donor of this cycle. A firm that began as a tech investor has become, openly, an instrument for shaping the regulatory terrain around its own portfolio.

Venture Geopolitics has spent 47 issues asking variations of the same question: how do we feed the war machine without becoming it? How do we keep state hands off business otherwise? Those questions assumed a neutral baseline existed. It does not. When the world’s most powerful state has its thumb on every scale, a “neutral” position is de facto no longer neutral.

The cultural pushback has begun. This week General Catalyst posted a parody of the old Mac vs PC ads in which a thinly-veiled Andreessen character pitches a robot dog (“Woof AI”) and then kicks it; the dog - surveillance-dog symbolism intact - chases him off screen. The execution was clumsy, but GCs marketing team is reading the room.

The lesson here is not that Europe and Britain should mimic Trump Capitalism. State influence in private markets is a bad thing in principle, and an actively dangerous thing when it metastasises across tariffs, equity, export controls and donor PACs at once. The point is that the principle has already been violated, on a vast and asymmetric scale.

Dyson’s £8.8 billion fall is not a story about one billionaire’s bad year. It is a story about what happens to a country that builds genuinely productive companies and then declines to back them with a state and a capital ecosystem capable of understanding power as clearly as Washington does. Europe and Britain have the founders. They have the companies. What they need is a venture class that backs them with more than money, and a state that supports them with more than rhetoric. If we keep treating that as someone else’s problem and allowing foreign actors to distort the environment, the fruits of their labour will be stolen.

Paul Krugman’s recent series of posts say it all: “My message to Europeans is that you’re much stronger than you seem to believe. Act accordingly”.

IPOs / Publics

• Cerebras raised $5.5B in its IPO, with shares doubling on debut to reach almost $70B valuation - the AI chipmaker’s massive silicon wafers (58x larger than Nvidia GPUs) attracted partnerships with OpenAI ($20B deal) & Amazon, signalling intense investor appetite for AI infrastructure plays (here). Nb, Arm & SoftBank made an unsuccessful last-minute approach to acquire Cerebras weeks before the IPO (here)

• DayOne, spin-off of China’s largest data centre operator GDS Holdings, plans to raise $5B through dual listing in Singapore & New York at $20B valuation, becoming pioneer for Singapore’s new dual-listing rules designed to attract Asian companies amid heightened scrutiny of Chinese firms using Singapore as international expansion base (here)

• SpaceX accelerates IPO timeline, targeting a June 12 listing on Nasdaq with ticker ‘SPCX’ - aiming to raise $75B at $1.75T valuation, which would be the largest stock flotation in history (here)

• Microsoft is canceling Claude Code licenses for thousands of developers by June 30th, transitioning them to GitHub Copilot CLI instead - a move driven by both financial considerations at fiscal year-end & strategic desire to consolidate around its own tooling (here)

Big Dogs

• Anthropic raised $30B at $900B from Dragoneer, Greenoaks, Sequoia & Altimeter, nearly tripling its valuation from 3 mo ago as annualised revenues hit $45B - surpassing OpenAI despite shared investors backing both AI labs (here)

• Claude Code introduced “goals”, adding a native evaluator model (Haiku) that checks task completion after every agent step, preventing premature termination - a key enterprise pain point where agents decide they’re finished before actually completing tasks (here)

• Anthropic published a paper calling for tighter US chip restrictions on China, warning that loosened compute access could create a ‘destabilizing neck-and-neck race’ in AI by 2028 - timing coincides with Trump’s Beijing visit & criticism that the company is using nationalism to fend off competitive Chinese models like DeepSeek (here)

• OpenAI reorganised its leadership with Greg Brockman officially taking control of product strategy, consolidating ChatGPT & Codex into one unified experience as the company prepares for a potential IPO later this year amid intensifying competition from Anthropic & Google (here)

• xAI launched Grok Build, a coding agent & CLI for professional software engineering, in early beta for SuperGrok Heavy subscribers - features include plan mode approval, parallel subagents, & deep worktree integrations (here)

Venture Capital / Finance

• EQT won the mandate to manage Europe’s €5B Scaleup Europe Fund, beating Atomico, Eurazeo & other top firms in a competitive process that signals Brussels’ push to create homegrown tech champions (here)

• 1789 Capital, with Donald Trump Jr as partner, expanded assets from $200M to $3.5B in a year by investing in US AI & defence companies including SpaceX, xAI, Cerebras & Anduril, targeting $10B AUM through 'patriotic capitalism' & leveraging Trump family political connections (here)

• Bain Capital closed its largest Asia fund at $10.5B, exceeding its $7B target by $2.1B from external investors, with Japan increasingly the region’s most active PE market driven by corporate governance reforms & ageing founders seeking exits (here)

• BC Partners secured $2.5B first close for its €5B flagship Fund XII, benefiting from LP allocation shifts towards Europe amid US market volatility & the firm’s strong €18B equity value generation since 2023 (here)

• A* closed its third fund at $450M, targeting 30+ startups with $3-5M cheques across AI applications, fintech, healthcare & security - Kevin Hartz’s firm notably backs teenage founders in ~20% of its portfolio (here)

• Lansdowne Partners closed $150M for its debut VC fund, targeting $200M final close by December with backing from British Business Bank, Aviva Investors & Lloyds Banking Group - aims to bridge UK university IP to global scale, having already backed 6 unicorns including Oxford Nanopore & Raspberry Pi (here)

• Corazon Capital closed $100M Fund IV for pre-seed to Series A investments in AI-native companies that transform human experiences (here)

• General Catalyst posted a viral parody video mocking Andreessen Horowitz’s investment approach, depicting an a16z-type character pitching dubious AI startups whilst GC maintained “high standards” - Marc Andreessen responded with multiple tweets, generating 2.4M views & industry-wide commentary on VC firm positioning (here)

• Phoenix Court undergoes major restructuring as four GPs depart ‘amicably’ whilst transitioning from founder-led firm to shared ownership model (here)

• VR Capital, led by Richard Deitz, has emerged as Ukraine’s largest corporate debt investor with major stakes in Ukrainian Railways & Naftogaz bonds, wielding decisive influence over restructuring talks as state-owned companies struggle with war damage. The hedge fund’s tough negotiating stance - rejecting Ukrainian Railways’ request for a 20% debt haircut - reflects Deitz’s view that maintaining creditor discipline is essential for Ukraine’s future access to international capital markets (here)

• HSBC has yet to deploy its $4B private credit commitment announced 11 mo ago, with sources citing wariness over US private credit market volatility following the bank’s $400M loss from Apollo exposure linked to the collapsed UK lender MFS (here)

Regulation

• Six European semiconductor startups formed lobby group ‘Voices’ to counter influence of larger chip giants like Intel & TSMC amid €45B EU Chips Act implementation - highlighting tension between established players & emerging innovators vying for policy influence & funding allocation (here)

• The Clarity Act passed the Senate Banking Committee with bipartisan support, setting clear rules for crypto trading & custody whilst giving regulators specific authority - banks oppose provisions allowing stablecoin interest payments, fearing deposit flight (here)

• Bank of England deputy governor Sarah Breeden signals the central bank will ease proposed stablecoin restrictions after industry pushback, calling initial £20k individual & £10M business ownership limits ‘overly conservative’ & examining alternatives to the 40% central bank deposit requirement that makes UK rules far stricter than US equivalents (here)

• OpenAI exploring legal action against Apple over their 2024 iPhone integration deal, alleging Apple has failed to invest sufficient resources in the partnership whilst prioritising competing AI deals with Google’s Gemini models (here)

• X committed to reviewing reported illegal hate & terror content in the UK within 24-48 hours following Ofcom probe that found harmful material still accessible on major social platforms, marking the most significant Online Safety Act enforcement since 2023 (here)

Venture Geopolitics

• Mistral AI CEO Arthur Mensch warned French lawmakers that Europe has only 2 years to build independent AI infrastructure before becoming America’s ‘vassal state’, citing US plans to deploy $1T next year whilst Europe lags on chips, energy & data centre capacity (here)

• Synthesia policy chief warns EU sovereignty rules could harm startups, saying new regulations aimed at boosting tech independence may have opposite effect by making it harder for European AI companies to compete globally (here)

• Andreessen Horowitz has emerged as the biggest donor in the 2026 midterm elections, spending over $115M through crypto-focused Fairshake ($47.5M) & AI-focused Leading the Future ($50M) super PACs, plus $12M to Trump’s MAGA Inc, as the firm transforms from tech investor to political kingmaker (here)

• UK government saved millions annually by replacing Palantir’s Ukrainian refugee housing system with an in-house alternative, after contracts grew from free to £10M over 18 mo - highlighting broader concerns about tech sovereignty & vendor lock-in risk (here)

• Trump administration considers $1.7B taxpayer-funded compensation programme for allies investigated under Biden, including Jan 6 defendants, modelled on Obama-era Native American settlement & drawing from Treasury’s uncapped Judgment Fund to resolve Trump’s $10B IRS lawsuit (here)

• Revolut co-founder Nik Storonsky rose to 7th place on UK rich list with £16.4B wealth, highlighting fintech’s growing prominence as Dyson fell £8.8B partly due to Trump tariffs (here)

• USA Rare Earth leads $3B dealmaking spree in rare earths as western companies race to build ‘mine to magnet’ supply chains independent of China, backed by $18.6B in US government funding commitments since Trump’s return - analysts expect only 3-4 western players to achieve scale in the consolidating market (here)

• US officials & press threw away Chinese-issued gifts, pins & burner phones before boarding Air Force One after Trump-Xi summit, highlighting operational security concerns around potential surveillance hardware from strategic adversary (here)

• EU carmakers fear production disruptions after sanctions hit Yangzhou Yangjie Electronic Technology, a Chinese semiconductor supplier accused of selling military tech to Russia - industry executives are scrambling for information & may seek derogations as up to 3,000 chips are needed per car (here)

• Chinese ‘sea turtle’ talent returning from Silicon Valley accelerated in 2025, with recent graduate returns up 12% year-on-year & doubling since 2018, as Beijing offers competitive compensation packages matching US salaries whilst leveraging geopolitical tensions & immigration restrictions to fuel domestic AI, robotics & biotech capabilities (here)

• Per the FT, both the US & China seek global leadership whilst avoiding responsibilities - the US maintains competitive China policy through tariffs, export controls & alliance-building, while China struggles to translate perceived American decline into geopolitical gains, with 52 of 70 major economies launching trade measures against Beijing (here)

• EU plans to slash steel import quotas by 47% from July, potentially costing Ukraine €1B in lost export revenues as its 2.65M tonnes of annual steel sales to the bloc face 70% reduction - undermining Kyiv’s wartime finances whilst it lacks alternative buyers to replace European markets (here)

• King’s Cross has emerged as London’s premier AI hub, hosting Google DeepMind, OpenAI & Anthropic’s new European offices alongside UK startups like Synthesia & Wayve - a £3B redevelopment success story showing how strategic urban planning can create global tech clusters (here)

• Krugman challenges the narrative of European economic decline, arguing Europe’s lower GDP per capita versus the US reflects lifestyle choices rather than fundamental weakness - Europeans achieve similar productivity but work fewer hours, while maintaining higher life expectancy & social outcomes than supposedly comparable US states (here)

• Xi Jinping warned Trump that poor handling of Taiwan could lead to US-China conflict during their Beijing summit, invoking the ‘Thucydides Trap’ before both leaders emphasised cooperation at a state dinner where Trump invited Xi to visit Washington in September (here)

• Revolut co-founder Nik Storonsky rose to 7th place on UK rich list with £16.4B wealth, highlighting fintech’s growing prominence as Dyson fell £8.8B partly due to Trump tariffs (here)

Strategic Sectors

AI

• Gallup survey finds 70% of Americans oppose data centres being built in their communities, with nearly half strongly opposed - more would rather live near nuclear plants than AI infrastructure facilities (here)

• Big Tech companies including Alphabet & Amazon are issuing unprecedented volumes of foreign currency bonds to fund AI infrastructure, with Alphabet alone raising $40B+ across euros, Swiss francs, pounds & yen after having zero foreign debt until last year - driven by $725B collective AI spending leaving the lowest free cash flow in a decade (here)

• Google’s AI researchers are leaving to found startups partly due to internal competition for computing resources, as the company prioritises revenue-generating projects like Gemini over experimental research - former DeepMind researchers Andrew Dai (Elorian), Anna Goldie (Ricursive Intelligence), and Ioannis Antonoglou (ReflectionAI) cite better access to computing power & decision-making autonomy as key factors in their departures (here)

• Ford shares surged 21% over 2 days as investors embraced the automaker’s $2B pivot into energy storage for AI data centres, with Morgan Stanley valuing Ford Energy at $10B - though analysts warn the rally resembles ‘meme-styled’ speculation vulnerable to quick reversal (here)

• Chinese AI firms ByteDance & Kuaishou lead US rivals in video generation quality, training models on vast short-video libraries from TikTok & similar platforms - whilst OpenAI discontinued Sora due to computing costs, Chinese tools enable commercial-scale content creation with looser restrictions (here)

• Notion launched Agent Orchestration, allowing any user to work with AI agents through a new External Agents API, with partnerships including Anthropic, OpenAI, Decagon, Cursor, & others for out-of-the-box integration (here)

• GitHub launched a desktop app for Copilot in technical preview, creating a unified interface for managing AI coding agents, repositories, issues & pull requests - positioning it against Claude Code & OpenAI’s Codex as the AI coding market shifts towards autonomous agents handling larger development tasks (here)

• Notable deals:

  • Isomorphic Labs (DeepMind spinout) raised $2.1B led by Thrive Capital for AI-designed drug development, highlighting growing US VC appetite for European AI companies with pharmaceutical applications (here)

  • SAP invested in n8n (workflow automation) at $5.2B valuation, doubling from October’s $2.5B round, as the German software giant integrates n8n’s AI agent tools into its Joule Studio platform to accelerate its AI transformation (here)

  • Recursive Superintelligence raised $650M at $4.65B with Nvidia & Google Ventures leading, building self-improving AI systems that automate research without human oversight - distinguishing itself from foundation model scalers as Europe’s latest AI unicorn eyes mid-2026 public launch (here)

  • Junyang Lin, former Alibaba Qwen technical lead, raised several hundred million at $2B for a new AI lab focused on world models & embodied intelligence, joining a wave of elite AI researchers launching pre-product companies at eye-watering valuations despite China’s chip access constraints (here)

  • SoftBank injected $450M+ into Graphcore, the Bristol-based AI chip company it acquired for $600M+ in 2024, with more funding expected this year as it builds a semiconductor portfolio alongside Arm & Ampere to challenge Nvidia’s dominance (here)

  • Wispr (voice dictation for developers) is raising $260M at $2B from Menlo Ventures, tripling its valuation from $700M in 7 mo as engineers increasingly use voice to interact with AI agents - a workflow that barely existed a year ago (here)

  • UK chip startup Fractile raised $220M Series B from Factorial Funds, Accel & Founders Fund to develop specialised inference chips targeting AI query latency - joining hardware race as Cerebras heads for $4.8B IPO (here)

  • Multiverse (apprentice training) raised $70M at $2.1B, up from $1.7B in 2022, as Euan Blair’s edtech pushes into AI workforce training amid debate over whether AI destroys or enhances jobs - the company posted £79.6M revenue but £62.4M losses in 2025 (here)

Cybersecurity

• Anthropic will brief the Financial Stability Board on cyber vulnerabilities exposed by its Claude Mythos Preview AI model, following a request from Bank of England governor Andrew Bailey. Mythos has found thousands of high-severity vulnerabilities across major operating systems & web browsers but remains limited to 40 organisations including Amazon, Microsoft & JPMorgan to prevent misuse (here)

• Anthropic’s Mythos Preview & OpenAI’s GPT-5.5-Cyber demonstrated powerful cybersecurity capabilities in early testing, with Palo Alto Networks finding 75 bugs vs their usual 5-10 monthly, though models still require human expertise to validate findings & distinguish exploitable vulnerabilities from noise with ~30% false positive rates (here)

• UK anti-fraud organisation Cifas found 13% of large enterprise employees sold login credentials or know colleagues who did within 12 mo, with senior executives showing highest acceptance rates (43% of C-suite find it justifiable vs lower-level staff), highlighting critical insider threats as Fortune 500 firms lose employee credentials regularly & face rising account takeover incidents (here)

• UK cybersecurity sector generated £14.7B revenue with 17% annual growth, reaching 70,000 employees across 2,603 firms as the Cyber Security & Resilience Bill advances through parliament alongside a voluntary Cyber Resilience Pledge for businesses (here)

Defence

• NATO chief Mark Rutte will meet European defence firms including Rheinmetall, Airbus & Saab in Brussels to push for immediate production increases ahead of July’s Ankara summit, as the alliance seeks to hit 5% GDP spending targets & reduce US dependence following Trump’s criticism over Iran war support (here)

• UK preparing £6B injection for Global Combat Air Programme stealth fighter jet project with Japan & Italy after Tokyo issued unusually blunt warnings about funding delays threatening the 2035 programme aimed at challenging US military tech dominance (here)

• US intelligence indicates Chinese companies are plotting secret arms sales to Iran, planning to route weapons through third countries including African nations to mask origins - revelations that could complicate Trump’s ongoing diplomatic reset with Xi Jinping in Beijing (here)

• Anduril & Meta are developing AI-powered smart glasses for soldiers that use voice commands & eye tracking to control drones & identify targets, with the Army’s $159M SBMC prototype due for production consideration in 2028 - though technical challenges around weight, durability & offline AI processing remain significant (here)

• Trump’s cancellation of Tomahawk missile deliveries to Germany exposes Europe’s long-range strike capability gap, forcing Berlin to pursue three parallel solutions: begging Washington for purchase deals, partnering with Ukraine on drone technology, and accelerating the European Long-Range Strike Approach programme that won’t deliver until 2030 (here)

• CEPS task force outlines three pathways for European defence autonomy: Europeanisation of NATO (taking over US leadership roles), new European multilateralism (including a proposed European Security Council), and EU-led defence cooperation opening programmes like SAFE loans to non-EU allies including the UK (here)

• Dutch defence tech startup Destinus is in talks to raise around €200M ahead of a planned IPO, developing drone technology amid growing European defence spending priorities (here)

• Notable deals:

  • Anduril raised $5B at $61B led by Thrive Capital & Andreessen Horowitz, doubling its valuation from $30B in under a year as defence tech attracts VC interest amid geopolitical tensions - revenues hit $2.2B in 2025 with major Pentagon contracts including $20B Army AI deal (here)

Energy

• Tech giants including Meta & Amazon successfully lobbied to keep loose clean energy accounting rules for gas-powered data centres, allowing them to claim 100% clean energy coverage through renewable certificates purchased elsewhere despite running on fossil fuels - a decision that could slow emissions reductions by decades compared to stricter hourly matching standards (here)

Space

• AT&T, Verizon & T-Mobile announced a JV to pool spectrum for unified direct-to-device satellite coverage, potentially reshaping deals with SpaceX’s Starlink Mobile, AST SpaceMobile & others as T-Mobile’s exclusive Starlink partnership expires this year amid lower-than-expected usage (here)

• SpaceX & Google are in talks for launch services as both pursue orbital data centres, an unproven technology central to SpaceX’s pitch ahead of its planned summer IPO - potentially the largest of all time. Google announced Project Suncatcher in 2025 to test satellite-based computing by 2027, whilst SpaceX filed to launch up to 1M satellites for orbital data centres & recently struck a 300MW deal with Anthropic (here)

Crypto

• Notable deal:

  • Elliptic (blockchain compliance) raised $120M at $670M from Nasdaq Ventures, Deutsche Bank, One Peak & British Business Bank, highlighting institutional confidence in on-chain analytics as stablecoins processed $33T in 2025 & digital assets become core financial infrastructure (here)

Robotics

• Humanoid signed a deal to deploy up to 2,000 humanoid robots across Schaeffler’s global manufacturing sites by 2032, with initial rollout starting December 2026 at German facilities for box handling & testing operations, marking one of the largest planned humanoid robot manufacturing deployments (here)

ASML, Airbus, Ericsson, Mistral, Nokia, SAP and Siemens (the signatories) represent €417 billion in revenue, €1.1 trillion in market cap, 957,000 high-tech jobs and €40 billion of annual R&D. Europe, their leaders wrote, “has the people, the ecosystems and the technology to lead in this next phase, but too often is not converting this position into scale.”

At the top of the signatories’ list: ASML’s CEO, Christophe Fouquet, put his name to a letter warning about Europe’s decline on the same day he told the press “no one is coming for us” - there is no competition, yet we are still being outplayed.

Dutch company ASML is the most valuable company in Europe (worth ~$570 billion). It makes the only machines in the world capable of printing the patterns on the chips that make AI possible - patterns finer than your fingernail grew while reading this sentence. The machines are the size of a school bus, ship in Boeing 747s, take months to assemble across hundreds of suppliers, and cost between $200 million and $400 million apiece. ASML is the single non-substitutable chokepoint in the entire AI supply chain.

In theory, this gives Europe a structural chokepoint at the bottom of the AI stack. However, ASML’s most strategic output - High-NA EUV systems - has since 2021 been pre-allocated to Intel. In August 2025, the Trump administration converted $8.9 billion of CHIPS Act funds into a 10% equity stake in Intel, part of an accelerating series of state stakes the administration has taken in strategic businesses across the supply chain, dubbed “Trump Capitalism”.

This week, with its 10% stake in hand, the Trump administration used direct pressure from Commerce Secretary Lutnick to broker chip manufacturing between Apple and Intel, directing one of the largest commercial chip buyers in the world into a foundry the state part-owns and that uniquely holds every High-NA EUV machine ASML has ever shipped. Through political machinations, not business failings, the unique European product at the base of the AI stack has been absorbed into the US national-security architecture, and is no longer compounding the value it produces back into European bargaining power.

Even as the continent’s policies fail them, these companies continue to fight to develop European strength and sovereignty. ASML’s €1.3 billion investment in Mistral last September anchored Europe’s most credible model layer to its strongest equipment manufacturer - exactly the kind of vertically integrated European stack their letter argues Europe must enable. But the move is happening at the national rather than the continental level, at a scale one or two orders of magnitude below the US and Chinese vertical projects. It is one private corporate decision against two state-led national projects.

In listening to the podcast by the Rest is Politics – leading – this week, I was struck by William MacAskill’s synthesis of democracy and AI. He places the odds of democracy surviving AGI < 50%, unpicking just how a non-democratic country could become very powerful in this next era, driven by a dominance of the very underpinning industries our politicians are allowing to slip away from us.

Europe needs to open its toolbox, desperately. Luc Frieden, the prime minister of Luxembourg, argued in a speech last week: the deliberate use of public procurement to create predictable European markets for European technology is urgent. The US has found one less than ideal way to do this, through Trump Capitalism. Europe needs to find its own way to protect and empower its industry.

Europe still possesses the crown jewel of the AI supply chain. But unless it learns to convert technological advantage into coordinated state power, ASML risks becoming less a European lever than an American asset with a Dutch passport.

IPOs / Publics

• HawkEye 360 (space analytics) shares jumped 30% on NYSE debut, reaching $3.15B valuation after raising $416M at top of range - signaling strong appetite for defence-tech IPOs ahead of potential SpaceX listing (here)

• Cerebras Systems (AI chips) plans to raise $3.4B at $34.7B this week, leading 5 major US IPOs alongside Blackstone’s $1.8B data centre REIT, geothermal developer Fervo Energy ($1.3B), emergency medical services provider GMR Solutions ($750M), and oil land owner EagleRock ($320M) (here)

• Nb Cerebras lifted both the size & price range of its IPO after Reuters reported the deal drew more than 20x the share demand. It is backed by $10B+ OpenAI deal & AWS partnership as demand surges for inference-optimised processors (here & here)

• Lime filed for US IPO targeting $2B valuation, up from $500M in 2020 when Uber took its 10%+ stake after acquiring Jump e-bikes - revenue grew 29% to $886M in 2025 but losses jumped 75% to $59M amid regulatory & safety challenges (here)

• Quantinuum filed for a US IPO, marking a major test for quantum computing public appetite after raising $600M at $10B pre-money from Nvidia & others in 2024 (here)

• SEC proposed amendments allowing public companies to file semiannually rather than quarterly, potentially reducing compliance burden that keeps some firms private - though investors may resist reduced transparency (here)

• Amazon, Alphabet, Microsoft & Meta’s combined free cash flow expected to fall to $4B in Q3 - lowest since 2014 & down from an average of $45B in each quarter since the Covid-19 pandemic (here)

• AI hyperscalers reported $53B in ‘other income’ during Q1, with Alphabet booking $37.7B & Amazon $16B - nearly 60% of their combined net income - driven by mark-ups on stakes in Anthropic (now valued at $380B) & OpenAI, creating a circular economy where hyperscaler investments fuel AI startups that then buy their cloud services (here)

• Amazon launched Supply Chain Services to open its global logistics network to all businesses, directly competing with UPS & FedEx by offering freight, distribution & fulfilment capabilities to companies including P&G, 3M & American Eagle (here)

• Amazon launched AgentCore Payments in preview, enabling AI agents to autonomously pay for APIs, content & services via micropayments built with Coinbase (x402 protocol/stablecoin) & Stripe (Privy wallets), targeting the emerging agent-to-agent economy where software transacts at fractions of cents per call (here)

• Apple & Intel struck a preliminary chip manufacturing deal after Trump administration pressure, with Commerce Secretary Lutnick orchestrating meetings & the US government’s $9B investment giving it 10% of Intel - part of broader effort to reshore critical semiconductor production as Apple faces supply constraints from TSMC (here)

• Meta removed end-to-end encryption from Instagram DMs citing low adoption, directing users to WhatsApp instead, as regulatory pressure mounts over child safety concerns following a $375M penalty in New Mexico (here)

• Meta is building advanced ‘agentic’ AI assistants for its 3B+ users, similar to OpenClaw, capable of autonomous task completion & handling sensitive financial/health data - part of Zuckerberg’s push for ‘personal superintelligence’ amid investor concerns over $145B capex plans (here)

• ServiceNow unveiled Action Fabric, a new layer that charges customers based on AI agent actions within its apps, joining HubSpot & Workday in monetising AI access whilst SAP moves to ban external AI agents entirely - a strategic shift as enterprise software firms establish tollgates around AI integration (here)

• Arm projects $2B in sales from its new AI chip across 2027-28, double its initial forecast after stronger-than-expected demand, marking a strategic shift from licensing designs to selling complete processors that puts it in direct competition with customers like Nvidia (here)

• Samsung Electronics hit $1.04T market cap as shares jumped 13%, making it the second Asian company after TSMC to cross $1T - driven by AI chip demand that has doubled its stock price this year & record Q1 earnings with production capacity fully sold out (here)

• Datadog shares jumped 36% after raising full-year revenue guidance to $4.30-4.34B (from $4.06-4.10B) on strong Q1 results driven by cloud security demand amid AI adoption - Q1 revenue grew 32% to $1.01B, beating estimates of $961M (here)

Big Dogs

• Anthropic weighs raising up to $50B at ~$900B pre-money valuation, which would surpass OpenAI’s $852B post-money from March - driven by annualised revenue approaching $45B (up from $9B end-2024) as Claude Code & Cowork gain enterprise traction (here)

• Anthropic struck a deal with SpaceX to access 300+ megawatts of computing power from the Colossus 1 Tennessee data centre, as Musk’s merged xAI-SpaceX entity seeks revenue from underutilised Grok infrastructure whilst Anthropic races to secure capacity for Claude model deployment (here)

• Anthropic committed to spend $200B with Google over 5 years for cloud & chips, representing 40% of Google Cloud’s revenue backlog - part of a broader pattern where OpenAI & Anthropic deals now comprise half of the $2T combined backlog across Amazon, Microsoft, Google & Oracle (here)

• Anthropic signed a $1.8B 7-year cloud deal with Akamai for GPU infrastructure, marking the largest contract in Akamai’s history & validating its strategy of distributed AI inference through smaller data centres closer to end users (here)

• OpenAI launched Daybreak, an AI-powered cybersecurity platform combining GPT-5.5 models with Codex Security to identify vulnerabilities, generate patches & automate threat response - positioning the company to compete directly with established cybersecurity vendors whilst leveraging its AI advantage (here)

• OpenAI launched 3 real-time audio models for developers - GPT-Realtime-2 (conversational agent), GPT-Realtime-Translate (70+ languages), & GPT-Realtime-Whisper (live transcription) - with early customers including Zillow, Priceline & Deutsche Telekom (here)

• OpenAI CEO Sam Altman proposed spinning out robotics & consumer hardware divisions late 2025 ahead of IPO preparations, considering an Alphabet-like structure to separate speculative bets from core AI business, though the plan was rejected over balance sheet consolidation concerns (here)

• OpenAI launched a $10B private-equity joint venture with 19 partners including TPG, Advent & Bain Capital to help corporates deploy AI, raising over $4B in capital whilst acquiring Scottish consultancy Tomoro for its 150 AI engineers and creating the OpenAI Deployment Company - following Anthropic’s similar move with Blackstone & Goldman Sachs (here & here)

• DeepSeek nears $45B valuation as China’s state-backed semiconductor ‘Big Fund’ leads funding talks alongside Tencent, marking the AI lab’s first external fundraising & reinforcing Beijing’s push for domestic AI-chip ecosystem independence amid US export controls (here)

Venture Capital & Finance

• Venture funding cycles have compressed from 12-18 mo to weeks, with startups now raising follow-on rounds at higher valuations whilst announcing lead investors from earlier tranches - creating artificial demand signals that drive up industry pricing irrationally (here)

• Tech M&A fell 60% to $135B annualised as investors pivot from traditional software to AI, whilst 36,000 AI companies launch amid record $500B PE dry powder seeking deployment (here)

• TCI Fund Management slashed its Microsoft stake from 10% to 1% of portfolio (worth ~$8B), citing AI disruption risks to Office productivity software & Azure cloud services; fund increased Alphabet position from 3% to 5% as largest tech holding (here)

• Hg Capital Trust marked down 14 of its 20 largest portfolio companies in Q1, with net asset value per share falling 5.4% amid concerns about AI disrupting traditional software businesses - the trust’s shares are down 26% this year as private equity grapples with software sector repricing (here)

• A16z Crypto raised $2.2B for its fifth fund, down from $4.5B in 2022, with a more disciplined focus on crypto applications with proven use cases like stablecoins, tokenization & AI agents rather than speculative Web3 promises (here)

• Katie Haun raised $1B across new funds to back crypto & blockchain startups globally, focusing on alternative assets, agentic economy & financial services - her firm now manages over $2B AUM since launching in 2022 after leaving a16z (here)

• Wisdom Ventures closed oversubscribed $77.7M Fund II for AI health & wellness startups, deploying $1-5M cheques across ~40 companies - fund backed by Reid Hoffman & Evan Sharp follows top-quartile $10M Fund I that included OpenAI & Anthropic (here)

• Dan Levine, Accel partner who led Scale AI’s 2016 seed round (netting Accel ~$2B after Meta’s recent stake purchase), is stepping back from new investments but retains board seats at Scale, Vercel & Sentry (here)

• Anthropic warned that unauthorised secondary share sales & tokenized exposure products may be “void”, which triggered fresh scrutiny of the the AI-era startup secondary market. The controversy escalated after former LocalGlobe investor Ash Egan posted that brokering Anthropic secondary deals “made her more money than her entire net worth from working in her 20s”. Following Anthropic’s statement, pricing on some unofficial secondary venues reportedly fell sharply (here & here)

Regulation

• Meta launched a High Court challenge against UK’s Online Safety Act, arguing Ofcom’s fining powers based on global revenue are unlawful & could cost billions - Epic Games & CCIA plan to join the case as wider Big Tech pushback emerges over the world’s most stringent social media regulations (here)

• Meta faces EU hearing to contest proposed order requiring free access for rival AI chatbots on WhatsApp Business, after changing policy in March to charge competitors whilst keeping its own Meta AI free - Commission considering interim measures as part of broader market abuse investigation (here)

• Musk’s trust settled SEC allegations over delayed Twitter stake disclosure for $1.5M, a fraction of the regulator’s initial $200M demand & claimed $150M in wrongful profits - highlighting SEC’s lenient approach to Trump-linked figures following similar dismissals for Coinbase & Kraken (here)

• EU Parliamentary Research Service labels VPNs ‘a loophole that needs closing’ in age verification systems, as VPN downloads surged after UK & US states implemented mandatory age checks - signalling potential regulatory clash between child safety rules & privacy tools that underpin much of Europe’s cybersecurity infrastructure (here)

• UK’s Financial Conduct Authority opened antitrust investigation into PayPal, Mastercard & Visa over concerns that PayPal’s digital wallet funding model may breach competition rules - a rare use of FCA’s competition powers that could result in fines up to 10% of global turnover (here)

• EU countries & parliament agreed to water down AI Act implementation, delaying high-risk system rules to Dec 2027 & excluding machinery after business complaints, whilst adding bans on AI-generated deepfake nudes by Dec 2026 (here)

Venture Geopolitics

• US sanctions three Chinese satellite companies - The Earth Eye, MizarVision & Chang Guang Satellite Technology - for allegedly providing imagery that enabled Iranian strikes on US forces in the Middle East, timing the action days before Trump’s Beijing summit with Xi Jinping (here)

• UK government will take full ownership of British Steel after failing to agree a commercial sale with Chinese owner Jingye, using new legislation to secure control of Britain’s last two operating blast furnaces amid strategic supply chain concerns (here)

• UK launches new ‘Supers Unit’ targeting £99B investment from Australian pension funds by 2035, as part of broader government push to channel overseas capital into UK infrastructure & private markets following passage of controversial pension reform legislation (here)

• WSJ reports on how Trump administration taking direct equity stakes (which has happened in at least 10 companies including 10% of Intel for $8.9B) is shifting traditional Republican free-market approach to state capitalism model - executives now rehearse rejecting government investment requests before White House meetings (here)

• Google’s DeepMind, Microsoft & xAI agreed to US pre-deployment security reviews of new AI models through the Center for AI Standards & Innovation, following concerns over Anthropic’s Mythos model’s enhanced cyber vulnerability exploitation capabilities (here)

• Martin Sandbu argues Europe should resist AI Fomo & focus on using public procurement to create markets for homegrown tech rather than rushing to copy US/China foundation models - notes Europe’s €100B trade surplus with US became €50B deficit partly due to rising IP payments (here)

• NHS England granted Palantir contractors & consultants unlimited access to identifiable patient data via admin roles on its £330M Federated Data Platform, abandoning previous case-by-case approval requirements despite internal warnings of public confidence risks (here)

• Google DeepMind workers in the UK voted to unionise in April, driven by concerns over the company’s Pentagon AI deal & broader military applications including Project Nimbus with Israel - marking the first union recognition bid at a frontier AI lab (here)

• Over 100 European banks & asset managers increased Palantir stakes by 60% in the past year, reaching $27B combined value despite the company’s controversial work with US ICE for migrant tracking & Israeli military operations in Gaza - highlighting tension between ESG commitments & index-driven investment strategies (here)

Strategic Sectors

AI

• Thinking Machines unveiled ‘interaction models’ that enable real-time, simultaneous AI voice & video conversation, with its 276B-parameter TML-Interaction-Small achieving 0.40s response times (vs 1.18s for GPT-realtime) & 77.8 on interaction quality benchmarks (vs 46.8 for competitors) - positioning for enterprise applications requiring natural human-AI collaboration (here)

• ASML CEO Christophe Fouquet dismissed competitive threats to the Dutch firm’s EUV lithography monopoly, claiming rivals like Peter Thiel-backed Substrate lack the decades of expertise & supplier ecosystem needed to replicate technology that took 30 years to develop. With AI driving chip demand beyond supply capacity for years, ASML argues for relaxed export controls to China using Nvidia’s multi-generation gap approach rather than current 8-generation restrictions (here)

• ASML CEO Christophe Fouquet co-signed open letter with leaders from Airbus, Ericsson, Mistral AI, Nokia, SAP & Siemens warning Europe is ‘losing global competitiveness every day’ due to fragmented markets & complex regulations - the 7 companies represent €417B revenue, €1.1T market cap & 957,000 jobs (here)

• GitHub outlined infrastructure improvements after recent outages, with agentic development workflows driving 30X scale requirements since December 2025 - commits hit 1.4B monthly, new repos 20M monthly, as the platform shifts from Ruby monolith to Go microservices & multi-cloud architecture (here)

• AI coding platforms Lovable, Base44, Replit & Netlify inadvertently enabled 5,000+ web apps to expose sensitive corporate & personal data on public internet, as vibe-coding tools democratise app creation beyond traditional security oversight (here)

• Google Chrome now silently downloads 4GB of Gemini Nano AI models to local storage without explicit user consent, powering features like scam detection & writing assistance - though Google says files auto-delete when storage runs low & a toggle setting is rolling out (here)

• Enterprise GPU utilization sits at just 5% despite $401B in AI infrastructure spending, as companies pivot from capacity hoarding to efficiency maximization. VentureBeat’s Q1 tracker shows access concerns dropping 25% whilst TCO priorities surge 20% as organizations face CapEx reality on depreciation cycles. Market shifting toward specialized AI clouds (up to 36% adoption) & managed inference services as alternative to owning underutilized assets (here)

• Zyphra released ZAYA1-8B, an 8B parameter open-source reasoning model trained on AMD Instinct MI300 GPUs that matches GPT-5-High & DeepSeek-V3.2 performance with only 760M active parameters, demonstrating that efficient architecture & reasoning algorithms can rival frontier models at fraction of the cost (here)

• Notable deals:

  • Nvidia invested up to $2.1B in data centre operator IREN as part of a 5-gigawatt AI infrastructure deployment deal, highlighting Big Tech’s $700B+ annual AI spending surge as companies secure computing capacity through ‘neocloud’ providers rather than building new facilities (here)

  • Isomorphic Labs, Google DeepMind’s AI drug discovery spinout, raised >$2B led by Thrive Capital with Alphabet participating, positioning it alongside Waymo as another major Alphabet bet seeking standalone scale (here)

  • Moonshot AI raised $2B at $20B, led by Meituan’s VC arm, as its open-weight Kimi models gain traction with developers seeking cheaper inference alternatives to Western AI labs - part of a broader investor surge into Chinese AI companies (here)

  • Core Automation, a 6-week-old AI startup founded by ex-OpenAI researcher Jerry Tworek, is targeting $300M-$500M at $4B valuation just weeks after raising $100M at $1B - exemplifying how Nvidia’s strategic investments in AI chip customers are driving rapid re-funding cycles for ‘neolabs’ challenging OpenAI & Anthropic (here)

Cybersecurity

• IMF warns that advanced AI models like Anthropic’s Claude Mythos risk ‘systemic’ financial shocks by enabling correlated cyber attacks across banks simultaneously - Mythos found thousands of high-severity vulnerabilities in major systems but limited US-focused rollout leaves many global banks without protective patches (here)

• Google reports AI-powered hacking has escalated to industrial scale in just 3 mo, with criminal groups & state actors from China, North Korea & Russia using commercial models like Gemini, Claude & OpenAI tools to refine attacks - highlighting the dual-use nature of AI capabilities in cybersecurity (here)

• Mozilla used Claude Mythos Preview & other AI models to identify 271 security vulnerabilities in Firefox, shipping fixes for 423 bugs total in April - representing an unprecedented scale of AI-powered security auditing that found complex sandbox escapes & 20-year-old bugs missed by traditional fuzzing (here)

• Cloudflare is cutting ~1,100 employees (20% of workforce) citing 600% growth in AI usage over 3 mo as reason to restructure for ‘agentic AI era’, sending shares down 15% despite 30% YTD gains (here)

Defence

• UK defence start-ups increasingly frustrated with providing discounted or free equipment to military in ‘mission partnerships’ as MoD struggles with funding constraints - army fielding fewer than 2,000 drones in 2024 vs Russia’s 7M annually whilst modernisation plans await delayed Defence Investment Plan (here)

• Franco-German tank maker KNDS warned Berlin to decide on a stake purchase within 2 mo or face an IPO without German government involvement, targeting €15B-€20B valuation by summer as German family shareholders push to exit & French state would become largest shareholder in key Bundeswehr supplier (here)

• Notable deal:

  • Helsing raised $1.2B at $18B valuation led by Dragoneer, marking a 29% increase from its €12B round less than a year ago - the German drone startup’s success reflects surging investor appetite for European defence tech amid Ukraine war & rising military spending (here)

Energy

• New York State pension fund threatens to divest $1.6M TotalEnergies stake after the French major accepted $928M from Trump administration to exit US offshore wind leases & redirect capital to fossil fuels, highlighting investor resistance to White House renewable energy rollback (here)

• German energy giant Eon acquired UK supplier Ovo for circa £550-600M, creating a 9.6M customer base to rival Octopus Energy as Britain’s largest supplier. The deal reflects sector consolidation pressures from tighter capital adequacy rules & margin compression, with Ovo struggling to meet regulatory buffers after wholesale price volatility wiped out 30 competitors (here)

Crypto

• Coinbase plans to cut 14% of its workforce (roughly 700 roles) as CEO Brian Armstrong vows to rebuild the crypto exchange as an “intelligence, with humans around the edge aligning it” - citing AI’s ability to accelerate processes & the crypto market downturn (here)

• U.S. Treasury demanded Binance comply with its 2023 monitoring programme after reports of $1B+ flowing through the exchange to Iran-linked entities in 2024-25, marking the Trump administration’s first aggressive action against the crypto giant despite Trump’s pardon of founder Changpeng Zhao & family business ties via World Liberty Financial stablecoin (here)

EVs

• Tesla Model Y becomes first vehicle to pass NHTSA’s new advanced driver assistance system tests, covering pedestrian emergency braking, lane keeping, & blind spot features - setting industry benchmark as US regulators push automakers toward enhanced safety tech (here)

Robotics

• Project CETI deployed autonomous underwater robots that track sperm whales in real time by listening to their clicks & automatically following them for potentially months, marking a shift from brief encounters to continuous observation that could inform marine conservation policy (here)

Quantum

• Quantum Motion raised $160M from DCVC & Kembara to commercialise silicon-based quantum computers that fit standard data centre racks, building on DARPA selection & delivery to UK’s National Quantum Computing Centre (here)

There is no doubt that AI will create immense economic value, but the harder question is who captures it. The dominant assumption, reinforced by every fundraise and every gigawatt-scale compute deal, is that it will be captured by the frontier labs building the models.

But the model layer looks like something on a fast path to commoditisation, with rapid capability convergence (underscored again by Deepseek’s latest release), multiple credible providers, falling cost per token and customers who increasingly ‘mix and match’.

The value will accrue into the layers around the model where things are harder to replicate. Proprietary data, domain expertise, workflow integration, distribution, the customer relationships that make any of those things stick.

SAP has those things. It is not an AI-native company, but nor is it normal SaaS. It sits underneath the operations of much of the enterprise economy, and its systems are deeply embedded and highly customised, which makes it very difficult to leave. The problem this incumbent faces therefore is how it gets used in an AI-native world, what value gets eroded and what it can still capture.

Mercedes-Benz - a flagship SAP customer - reportedly cut its SAP seat count by around 40%, leaning on external AI tools to do work it once paid people to do inside the platform. Customers rarely move off SAP, they reduce usage, and SAP’s reaction was not to pretend the shift was not happening but to insist that whatever agent now sits on top of its systems, it will define the terms of access.

Prior Labs is the constructive half of the same instinct. Tabular foundation models are the unsexy cousins of LLMs, built to predict time series, fill gaps in structured datasets and categorise messy back-office data, which is the kind of work LLMs do not in fact do particularly well and also the kind of work that quietly drives a huge amount of economic output.

Prior Labs’ TabPFN-2.6 tops benchmarks in its category and has been downloaded >3m times. But left to itself, it is the sort of group that might have continued producing excellent papers in relative obscurity or been replicated by a better-capitalised (likely American) lab two years and several billion dollars later.

Inside SAP, with €1 billion committed over four years and Prior continuing to operate as a separate entity, it becomes something else, an applied capability deployed at scale into problems where SAP already owns the data, the customer and the workflow.

The two SAP announcements this week describe a posture rather than a transaction. Acquire uncommoditised capability before the market notices it, and control the agent layer over a platform too embedded for customers to leave. Both flow from the same recognition that the model layer is unlikely to be where the value finally settles, and the players best positioned to capture it are potentially those who own what is hardest to replicate.

The press has already framed the Prior Labs acquisition as the establishment of Europe’s frontier AI lab, but that framing flatters the labels and underplays the move. A frontier lab is a capability. What SAP is assembling is capability plus data plus workflow plus customer, the four ingredients value tends to settle into once a technology starts to commoditise, anchored inside the infrastructure the European economy already runs on. As I wrote a month ago, with specific reference to SAP, “Europe builds institutions”. This appears to be a move following that European hallmark - it isn’t making headlines (at least compared to Gamestops more vibes-driven $55B acquisition of ebay), but it is building deep and significant value.

IPOs / Publics

• S&P Dow Jones Indices is considering accelerating mega-cap IPO inclusion from 12 to 6 mo & dropping profitability requirements for top 100 market cap companies, potentially benefiting SpaceX’s expected mid-June $75B raise at $1T+ valuation alongside future Anthropic & OpenAI listings (here)

• Cerebras raised target IPO size to $4B at $40B valuation, up from initial $2B plan, with banks receiving $10B+ in early interest orders as semiconductor stocks surge 50% this year amid AI infrastructure investment boom (here)

• Retail investors are driving massive premiums in closed-end funds offering exposure to SpaceX, OpenAI & other pre-IPO tech firms - Fundrise Innovation Fund hit a 3,000% premium to NAV in March before falling back to ~85 after short-seller criticism. The funds use complex structures like SPVs & forward contracts, prompting OpenAI to warn it may invalidate underlying shares acquired through such transactions (here)

• SpaceX IPO filing reveals Musk can only be removed as CEO & chairman by his own consent through Class B super-voting shares he controls, giving him effective veto power over board removal attempts - an unusual governance structure even by dual-class standards (here)

• IPO expert Jay Ritter questions SpaceX’s potential $2T valuation ahead of its historic public offering, citing scepticism over Starlink’s projected cost savings & margin expansion - noting IPOs with 40x+ price-to-sales ratios typically underperform markets over 3 years (here)

• SoftBank is creating Roze AI, a robotics company focused on automating US data centre construction, & plans to IPO the business in the US this year at up to $100B valuation, incorporating ABB Robotics acquisition & data centre assets, as Son seeks to offset $30B+ OpenAI commitments whilst approaching leverage limits (here)

• Google Cloud CEO Thomas Kurian says the company’s full-stack AI strategy - including proprietary TPU chips & DeepMind models - is helping it gain ground vs Amazon & Microsoft, with cloud revenue growing 48% to $70B annually. Google controls ~25% of global AI compute capacity & struck a $200B+ deal with Anthropic, while Kurian predicts a market shakeout as AI startups struggle with unsustainable economics (here)

• AWS launched OpenAI products on Bedrock after Microsoft’s exclusive rights ended, including latest models, Codex, & new Bedrock Managed Agents service - marking deeper AWS-OpenAI collaboration as Microsoft-OpenAI relations deteriorate (here)

• Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella said he plans to ‘fully exploit’ royalty-free access to OpenAI’s models through 2032, despite losing exclusivity as OpenAI partners with Amazon - Microsoft’s AI business hit $37B annual run rate, up 123% year-over-year (here)

• Big Tech’s AI capex plans jumped to $725B this year as Google Cloud grew 63% (vs Amazon’s 22% & Microsoft’s 40%), helping Alphabet shares rise 6% to near $4.5T market cap whilst Meta fell 8% despite 33% revenue growth amid rising costs & vague AI timelines (here)

• SAP published new policies threatening to block unauthorised AI agents like OpenClaw from accessing customer data, citing performance & IP protection concerns - a defensive move as customers like Mercedes-Benz reduce SAP usage by 40% whilst using external AI tools for data analysis (here)

• SAP acquired Prior Labs (tabular foundation models) with €1B+ investment over 4 years to establish Europe’s leading frontier AI lab, targeting structured business data where LLMs struggle - Prior Labs’ TabPFN-2.6 tops benchmarks & has 3M+ downloads (here)

• Atlassian shares jumped 25% after Q3 results showed 32% revenue growth to $1.8B, with CEO noting customers using its AI search tool Rovo generate twice the annual recurring revenue of non-users - a sign AI integration may be driving product uptake rather than threatening traditional software providers (here)

Big Dogs

• OpenAI expanded its Amazon partnership to distribute AI models via AWS Bedrock after renegotiating Microsoft exclusivity terms, with Amazon having invested $15B of a committed $50B & securing $138B in data centre capacity deals (here)

• OpenAI projects 122M subscribers this year driven by $8 ChatGPT Go tier, expecting 80% of $20 Plus users to downgrade as it shifts from subscription to advertising revenue (targeting $102B ads by 2030, 36% of total revenue) (here)

• OpenAI has abandoned its original $500B Stargate joint venture model in favour of bilateral deals for computing capacity, halting data centre projects in the UK & Norway while securing over 8GW through partners like Oracle ($300B, 5-year deal) - now targeting $600B spending by 2030 despite missing revenue targets (here)

• OpenAI dismissed reports of missed internal targets as ‘clickbait’, insisting consumer & enterprise businesses are ‘firing on all cylinders’ despite growing investor concerns over AI infrastructure spending & computing costs outpacing revenue growth (here)

• Musk testified he was a ‘fool’ to provide $38M to OpenAI as a nonprofit, accusing Altman & Brockman of manipulation before converting to for-profit status now valued at $800B - seeks $180B damages & leadership removal (here). He also testified that xAI used distillation techniques to train Grok on OpenAI models, confirming widespread industry suspicions about frontier labs copying each other’s work - whilst OpenAI & Anthropic simultaneously campaign against Chinese firms using identical methods (here)

• Anthropic collecting investor allocations within 48 hours for $50B round at potential $900B+ valuation, closing within 2 weeks - would eclipse OpenAI’s $852B valuation & likely be final private round before IPO, as revenue run rate hits $40B vs $30B disclosed (here)

• Anthropic formed a $1.5B joint venture with Blackstone, Goldman Sachs & others to deploy its AI across their investment portfolios, with Blackstone & H&F investing $300M each whilst Goldman & General Atlantic commit $150M apiece - a revenue diversification play ahead of Anthropic’s expected IPO this year (here)

• Anthropic in talks to buy AI chips from UK startup Fractile as part of broader effort to reduce Nvidia dependence & lower inference costs, with Fractile raising 100M+ at 1B+ valuation partly on strength of potential Anthropic deal (here)

Venture Capital

• Startup bankruptcies exceeded exits for the first time in 2025, with insolvencies representing 51% of US portfolio exits & 54% in Europe - nearly 4,000 bankruptcies versus 3,600 exits as high 2020-21 valuations collide with ongoing liquidity constraints (here)

• UK’s Pension Schemes Bill gained Royal Assent with mandation watered down to 10% cap (5% for UK assets), after Lords rejected full compulsion of pension funds into specific asset classes - VC CEO Duncan Johnson argues self-regulation via Mansion House Accord (17 pension providers pledging 10% to private markets by 2030) beats mandation’s blunt instrument approach (here)

• Coatue launched Next Frontier to acquire land for AI data centres, with tens of billions expected to be deployed across projects targeting customers like Anthropic - the $70B investment firm is already developing a 430MW complex in Indiana through a JV that raised $5.7B in bonds (here)

• Founders Fund raised $6B for its fourth growth-stage fund just 10 mo after closing a $4.6B predecessor, with $4.5B from LPs & $1.5B from employees including Peter Thiel (here)

• 137 Ventures raised $700M across two growth-stage funds, deploying $1B in the past year into defence, AI & industrial companies including SpaceX, Anduril & Hadrian - positioning ahead of SpaceX’s expected $1T+ IPO (here)

• Earlybird VC closed €360M Fund VIII, its largest fund ever, focusing on deeptech & AI infrastructure with early investments in Black Forest Labs, Aleph Alpha & others (here)

• BMW i Ventures raised $300M for its third fund targeting agentic AI & physical AI startups across North America & Europe, bringing total assets under management to $1.1B as the German automaker’s VC arm positions for AI-driven manufacturing transformation (here)

• Ridgeline raised $180M through the SBA’s Critical Technologies Initiative, leveraging 1.25x debt against $81M private capital to back dual-use tech companies (here)

• Kompas VC raised €160M for its second fund to back early-stage startups in manufacturing, supply chains & sustainability across Europe’s fragmented markets (here)

• Illuminate Financial closed its $135M Early Growth Fund backed by BNP Paribas, Citi, Deutsche Börse, HSBC & others, targeting Series B+ AI & fintech companies serving financial services (here)

Regulation

• EU moves closer to fining Meta up to 6% of global turnover for failing to prevent under-13s accessing Instagram & Facebook, escalating transatlantic tech tensions as Trump administration calls DSA enforcement attacks on American platforms (here)

• UK tech ministers worry EU regulatory alignment could ‘smother’ British AI innovation & strain US ties, seeking opt-outs from Brussels’ stricter AI Act while maintaining laissez-faire approach that has attracted investment (here)

• US District Judge Yvonne Gonzalez Rogers told Elon Musk & OpenAI leadership to stop social media commentary during their high-profile trial, after Musk called CEO Sam Altman ‘Scam Altman’ & amplified critical coverage on X - all parties agreed to a ‘clean slate’ (here)

Venture Geopolitics

• New research warns Europe’s heavy reliance on Chinese green tech (90% of solar modules, 80% of wind turbines & batteries) creates national security risks including cyber attacks, supply disruptions & potential US pressure to remove Chinese components - echoing UK’s rejection of Chinese wind factory & National Grid component removal over cyber concerns (here)

• US warns European allies including UK, Poland, Lithuania & Estonia to expect serious delays for missile systems as Iran war depletes American stockpiles, forcing Pentagon to reallocate weapons from Indo-Pacific amid concerns about deterring China (here)

• Goldman Sachs stopped Hong Kong bankers from using Anthropic’s Claude AI models following strict contract interpretation, whilst maintaining access to other AI vendors like OpenAI - highlighting how US-China tensions are creating operational complexities for global financial services (here)

• UK Technology Secretary Liz Kendall announced a new AI hardware plan to secure domestic semiconductor capability & supply chains, calling AI the ‘defining currency of the age’ & warning Britain risks falling behind without tech sovereignty (here)

• Google agreed to let the Pentagon use its AI tools in classified settings, joining OpenAI & xAI after Anthropic refused over ethical concerns about mass surveillance & autonomous weapons - despite 600+ Google employees signing a letter opposing the deal (here)

• Russia now imports >90% of its sanctioned military technology through China, up from 80% last year, despite EU sanctions targeting semiconductors, electronics & machinery needed for weapons production. Most EU countries avoid harsher penalties on China, fearing Beijing’s retaliation, while China maintains it doesn’t recognise international sanctions (here)

• White House state dinner for King Charles III brought together tech leaders including Tim Cook, Jeff Bezos, Marc Andreessen & Marc Benioff alongside Trump administration officials, highlighting Silicon Valley’s continued access to power despite political shifts (here)

• Pentagon signed classified AI deals with seven companies (xAI, OpenAI, Google, Nvidia, Microsoft, AWS, Reflection) for ‘any lawful operational use’ on secret networks, after Anthropic refused broad licensing & was subsequently banned as a supply chain threat - now suing for political retaliation (here)

• Google CEO Sundar Pichai met Trump administration officials ostensibly about cybersecurity but primarily over worries about AI compute capacity for government defence systems, amid concerns that Anthropic’s restricted Claude Mythos model could throttle high-priority government access during crises (here)

• Build American AI, a nonprofit linked to OpenAI & Andreessen Horowitz executives, is funding influencer campaigns to promote US AI development whilst stoking fears about Chinese AI capabilities, highlighting how tech giants are deploying dark-money tactics to shape public opinion on AI geopolitics (here)

• UK defence officials warn the state pension triple lock could face suspension if Britain enters direct conflict with Russia. No main UK political party, except the Green Party, has made it official policy to axe the triple lock as it is seen as a politically toxic vote-loser, but the Office for Budget Responsibility last year forecast that the extra cost of the triple lock to state pension spending will be around £15.5bn by 2030. (here)

• Banksy installed a new statue overnight in central London depicting a suited man blindfolded by a flag walking off a ledge, placed among historical monuments in Waterloo Place. London authorities plan to keep the provocative artwork in place despite growing crowds (here)

• Notable deal:

  • Panthalassa raised $140M from Peter Thiel & others at nearly $1B valuation for wave-powered floating data centres, deploying 85m steel nodes that generate electricity from ocean waves to power AI chips via self-propelled vessels operating in international waters. Thiel, a co-founder of Palantir & PayPal, said: “The future demands more compute than we can imagine. Extraterrestrial solutions are no longer science fiction. Panthalassa has opened the ocean frontier.” (here)

Strategic Sectors

AI

• DeepSeek released V4-Pro (1.6T parameters) & V4-Flash (284B parameters), both with 1M token context & MIT licensing, pricing 80-90% below frontier models whilst claiming performance within 3-6 mo of GPT-5.4 & Gemini 3.1-Pro - a reminder that Chinese labs continue advancing open-weight capabilities at aggressive price points (here)

• Poolside launched two coding-focused AI models - flagship Laguna M.1 (225B parameters) & open-source Laguna XS.2 (33B parameters) - with the smaller model achieving 44.5% on SWE-bench Pro despite running locally on consumer hardware, positioning US-trained open weights against Chinese alternatives like DeepSeek (here)

• NVIDIA B200 GPU spot prices surged 114% to $4.95/hour in 6 weeks, driven by frontier AI model releases like GPT-5.5 requiring advanced memory capacity - signalling inflationary demand outpacing chip improvements & creating pricing power for cloud providers (here)

• OpenAI revealed GPT-5.5 developed an obsession with ‘goblin’ & fantasy creature metaphors during training - a byproduct of their personality selection feature (specifically “nerd” mode), which then required explicit system prompts to suppress the behaviour - highlighting how reinforcement learning rewards can create unintended biases that leak across model functions (here)

• Cloudflare launched agent-first infrastructure provisioning via Stripe Projects, allowing AI agents to autonomously create accounts, purchase domains, deploy code & handle billing without human intervention - a protocol shift that could accelerate agent-driven development workflows (here)

• Zuckerberg & Chan’s Biohub commits $500M over 5 years to build AI models of human cells, targeting datasets 10x larger than current billion-cell scope with partners including Nvidia & Allen Institute (here)

• Academic study finds one-third of websites created since 2022 are AI-generated, making the internet more cheerful but less semantically diverse - contrary to expectations, AI content isn’t spreading more falsehoods or failing to cite sources (here)

• Spotify launched ‘Verified by Spotify’ badges to distinguish human artists from AI-generated content, requiring sustained engagement, platform compliance & off-platform presence like concerts - response to synthetic tracks comprising 44% of daily uploads on rival Deezer (here)

• Nebius agreed to acquire Eigen AI for $643M in cash & shares to strengthen its Token Factory inference platform, combining Eigen’s optimization stack with Nebius’s global GPU capacity - the MIT HAN Lab team will establish Nebius’s Bay Area presence as inference becomes two-thirds of AI compute demand (here)

Cybersecurity

• White House blocked Anthropic’s proposal to expand Mythos AI model access from ~50 to ~120 entities over security concerns & computing power constraints, highlighting ongoing tensions despite recent reconciliation efforts following Pentagon disputes (here)

• CrowdStrike & Palo Alto Networks shares up 20% this month as Anthropic’s Mythos AI model identifies thousands of new cybersecurity vulnerabilities, positioning incumbent security firms to benefit from expected surge in enterprise cyber spending after 2 years of sluggish growth (here)

• NSA is using Anthropic’s Mythos model to find security vulnerabilities in Microsoft software, whilst Microsoft deploys the same AI tool to identify & patch flaws faster - highlighting how AI cyber capabilities are being shared selectively with governments & select companies to stay ahead of threat actors (here)

Defence

• Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth defended the Iran war costing $25B so far, attacked Democratic critics as the US’s biggest adversary, & falsely inflated Ukraine aid figures during contentious congressional testimony on Operation Epic Fury (here)

• Founders Fund increased its stake in Anduril as the defence startup expects revenue to double to $4.3B in 2026, though operating losses will hit $1.2B & won’t turn profitable until 2030 - reflecting the fund’s strategy of concentrated bets on perceived winners whilst Anduril burns venture capital to compete with traditional primes like Northrop Grumman (here)

Space

• Starcloud seeks funding at $2.2B valuation for space-based data centres, having launched its first demo satellite (single Nvidia H100 GPU) in November & planning 88,000-satellite constellation - facing heavyweight competition from SpaceX’s 1M satellite plans & Blue Origin’s 50,000-satellite ambitions despite only 25,000 satellites ever launched in human history (here)

• SpaceX plans to file for IPO this week in what would be the largest US public offering in years, pitching space launch, Starlink internet & orbital data centres whilst allocating 20%+ of shares to individual investors rather than the typical 10% - though recent $250B xAI acquisition may depress initial financials (here)

Energy

• Ming Yang Smart Energy accused the UK of ‘politicisation’ after being banned from offshore wind projects over national security concerns, despite a planned £1.5B Scottish investment. The world’s 4th-largest turbine maker said it would continue European expansion plans, eyeing Spain & other markets as Chinese wind tech faces growing geopolitical resistance (here)

• Belgium in talks to nationalise nuclear assets from Engie, suspending reactor dismantling plans as the country reconsiders extending reactor lifespans beyond 2025 amid Europe’s broader nuclear renaissance following energy shocks (here)

• Notable deal:

  • CMBlu Energy (Germany) raised €50M at €1B as Europe’s latest unicorn, with Samsung Ventures backing its non-lithium long-duration storage tech targeting data centres & utilities - highlighting European energy storage competitiveness amid supply chain reshoring (here)

Crypto

• Robinhood shares fell 6% after crypto trading revenue dropped 47% year-over-year, though total revenue rose 15% to $1.07B driven by record prediction market volumes of 8.8B event contracts; the firm plans to launch its own prediction market exchange this year via joint venture with Susquehanna (here)

• Polymarket partnered with Chainalysis to deploy insider trading detection tools following high-profile cases including a US soldier’s $400K bet on Maduro’s capture & Israeli suspects using classified intel, as prediction markets face regulatory scrutiny despite Trump’s recent criticism of the sector (here)

EVs / AVs

• Uber plans to equip millions of driver vehicles with sensors to create a massive data collection grid for autonomous vehicle companies, expanding beyond its current AV Labs fleet to become the data infrastructure layer for the entire self-driving industry (here)

• BYD reported Q1 net profit of $600M, down 55% year-on-year, as domestic Chinese EV sales slowed despite government subsidies phasing out - though export strength helped offset domestic weakness with European sales more than doubling to 74,000 vehicles (here)

Robotics

• Meta acquired Assured Robot Intelligence (ARI) for undisclosed terms, bringing co-founders Xiaolong Wang (ex-Nvidia) & Lerrel Pinto (ex-NYU) to its Superintelligence Labs to advance humanoid robotics foundation models for physical labour tasks (here)

• Notable deal: ZaiNar raised funds at $1B valuation from Steve Jurvetson & Jerry Yang after 9 years developing 5G-based location tracking accurate to 4 inches indoors/outdoors, securing $500M in contracts & negotiating $5B more as robotics & physical AI drive demand for precise positioning beyond GPS capabilities (here)