Pentagon blacklists Anthropic as AI wars split tech

Protocol (3)

• David Bennett reports an unconfirmed Iranian missile strike on a US ship near the Strait of Hormuz caused Bitcoin to drop sharply from an intraday high of $80,594 to approximately $79,074.
• Galoy unveiled an updated Bitcoin-native core banking platform that bundles six use cases into a single sidecar system for US banks, including Bitcoin-backed lending, Lightning payments, and custody options.
• The decentralized exchange Bisq disclosed a critical vulnerability in its trade protocol exploited over 12 days, resulting in the theft of approximately 3 BTC and 4,000 XMR from seven victims in the XMR/BTC market.

Culture (1)

• Bennett criticizes modern news agencies, arguing they prioritize clickbait over investigative journalism and rarely provide clarifying follow-up on major stories, creating a 'one and done' news cycle.

AI & Tech (1)

• Bennett speculates the Bisq exploit may have been discovered using AI to audit open-source code, noting the vulnerable protocol version had been live since October 2019.

Corruption (1)

• Law firm Gerstein Harrow LLP filed a restraining notice to block the transfer of $73M in frozen ETH from the Kelp DAO exploit, claiming its clients are owed over $877M from prior judgments against North Korea.

Markets (1)

• GameStop made an unsolicited $55.5B cash and stock offer to acquire eBay, citing a 46% premium and potential $2B in annual cost savings, and proposed using its 1,600 US stores for eBay logistics.

Big Tech (1)

• Trix notes the F-35 program led by Lockheed Martin is valued at approximately $1.7 trillion, far exceeding neoprime deals, yet venture capital is pouring into defense tech at record levels on expectations of a changing of the guard.

Politics (2)

• Political ties risk bipartisanship, as Donald Trump defended Palantir against short sellers and his son is a venture partner at 1789 Capital, which invests in Anduril.
• President Woodrow Wilson's 1917 call to enter WWI, framing it as a defense of democracy, was followed by the 1920 ratification of the 19th Amendment granting women's suffrage after suffragists highlighted the hypocrisy of his ideals.

AI & Tech (2)

• Neoprimes advocate for military AI use, with Palantir using Anthropic models for classified work, Anduril embedding AI in autonomous weapons, and SpaceX acquiring Elon Musk's XAI lab.
• The Trump administration's Department of War blacklisted Anthropic as a supply chain risk after the AI lab stipulated its models not be used for autonomous weapons or mass surveillance.

Business (1)

• The Great Depression began with the 1929 Wall Street crash, leading to 25% unemployment by 1933 before Franklin D. Roosevelt introduced the New Deal with bank deposit insurance, jobless relief, and public works projects.

Culture (1)

• Andrew Palmer advises on workplace emoji etiquette, noting a stand-alone heart emoji can imply a proposal, a thumbs-up may seem frosty to Gen Z, and the tilted tears of joy emoji signals genuine laughter.

AI & Tech (10)

• Sacks argues the U.S. must win a global AI race against competitors like China to protect national security and the economy, framing it as an 'infinite game' without a finish line.
• Sacks cites Trump's AI policy pillars: pro-innovation, pro-energy infrastructure to power data centers, and pro-export to gain global market share for American chips and models.
• He disagrees with Elon Musk's more pessimistic view of AI as an existential threat. Sacks believes the biggest dystopian risk is government using AI for surveillance and control, not a Terminator-like scenario.
• Sacks views the AI-enhanced cybersecurity arms race as one AI will solve. He argues tools like Anthropic's Mythos will help defenders find and patch vulnerabilities before hackers exploit them, reaching a new equilibrium.
• He points to a Stanford study showing a stark optimism gap: 83% of Chinese respondents believe AI will be more beneficial than harmful, compared to under 40% of Americans. Sacks calls this the biggest threat to U.S. leadership.
• Sacks says current data does not support widespread AI-driven job loss. He cites a Yale Budget Lab study finding no discernible labor market disruption in the three years after ChatGPT's launch and the Challenger Gray report attributing less than 5% of 2023 layoffs to AI.
• He highlights an AI-driven construction boom, with $650 billion in data center capex this year acting as a 2% GDP tailwind and boosting blue-collar wages for electricians and plumbers by 25-30%.
• Sacks argues AI won't eliminate coding jobs but will shift them toward prompting and supervising models. He notes demand for software engineers rose 10% year-over-year even as AI coding tools proliferated.
• He claims Anthropic's enterprise revenue from coding tools scaled from about $10 billion to $30 billion between January and March 2024, calling the growth unprecedented.
• Sacks criticizes well-funded 'doomer' groups and super PACs that want to halt AI progress, alleging they have astroturfed NIMBY backlash against data centers and influenced media discourse.

Politics (10)

• Robert Evans argues that the current political era is dominated by extremophiles, drawing a parallel to organisms that thrive in extreme environments like the Dead Sea.
• Evans rejects the nostalgic view of the 1990s as a Goldilocks zone, pointing to the Rwandan genocide, US military misadventures in Somalia, domestic terrorism like the Oklahoma City bombing, and the rise of an extremist Republican Party.
• Moms for Liberty, founded in 2021, initially gained power through school board elections but began losing major races in 2023 in Pennsylvania, Virginia, and Iowa as a backlash against culture war politics grew.
• A 2026 AP/NORC poll put Trump's overall approval at 33%, down 5% since March, with only 32% approving of his handling of Iran.
• In Virginia, only 4% of voters listed transgender policies as a top issue in the 2026 governor's race, yet Republicans spent heavily on anti-trans attack ads, which failed to deliver victory.
• Sage and James condemn the 'anti-imperialism of idiots,' which whitewashes authoritarian leaders like Gaddafi or Assad simply because they are targets of Western aggression.
• Muammar Gaddafi ruled Libya for 42 years after a 1969 coup. His ideological project, the Jamahiriya or 'state of the masses,' featured People's Congresses but kept real power over oil, military, and security services in his hands.
• Gaddafi's regime was responsible for severe human rights abuses, including the 1996 Abu Salim prison massacre where approximately 1,200 prisoners were killed.
• In the 2000s, Gaddafi pursued economic liberalization, privatizing 360 state enterprises and laying off up to 400,000 public sector workers by 2007, policies praised by the IMF.
• Post-Gaddafi Libya has seen open slave markets where Black African migrants are auctioned, a result of human trafficking and debt bondage exacerbated by the country's collapse.

Culture (1)

• Social media use in the US is declining, with visits and posts on Twitter/X and Facebook falling nearly 50% since 2020, according to a study by University of Amsterdam professor Peter Tornberg.