Venture Geopolitics Issue 54
30 June 2026
Two American companies meet (again) in an English court this week. The English court is deciding what one of them owes the other, globally.
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)