░▒▓█ THE UNCERTAIN FUTURES █▓▒░
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No. 8 · Fri · 19 June 2026
Happy Friday. Washington is telling Anthropic to do something its own
security experts call impossible; the same administration is mulling
whether taxpayers should own a slice of the AI labs outright; Trump says
Intel and Apple will build chips together at home; Waymo's robotaxis
keep wandering into closed construction zones; and a San Francisco
image-generator has decided that what it really wants to do is scan your
body in a tank of water. Let's get into it.
░░▒▒▓▓ TOP 5 ▓▓▒▒░░
Washington tells Anthropic to prove its models can't be
jailbroken — a bar engineers say is impossible to clear
(update)
A week into the shutdown of Claude Fable 5 and Mythos 5, the Trump
administration told Anthropic it can rerelease the models only once it
guarantees their guardrails cannot be bypassed, even though independent
researchers say fully preventing jailbreaks is not achievable. WIRED
also reported the trigger we had not seen named: days before the
takedown, the White House ordered Anthropic to revoke Korean carrier SK
Telecom's access to Mythos over alleged China ties, which Anthropic did
the same day, and which accelerated the broader ban. The carrier says it
has no ties to China. (WIRED
· Korea
JoongAng Daily · StrictlyVC)
Washington's plan to take equity in the AI labs gets rival
blueprints, and Sanders formally files his bill (update)
The idea of the US government taking a stake in the AI labs — in the
air since Trump floated it earlier this month — now has rival
blueprints. Semafor reports Treasury's Scott Bessent wants to seed
"Trump Accounts" with AI shares, while Commerce's Howard Lutnick prefers
routing the stakes into a sovereign wealth fund; the talks predate the
Anthropic fight. On Thursday, Senator Bernie Sanders formally introduced
his rival bill to build a roughly $7 trillion sovereign wealth fund
through a one-time 50 percent tax on the largest AI firms' stock.
Microsoft and Meta stayed cold; a government that spent the week
threatening to switch one model off is now sketching how it might own
the company that makes it. (Semafor
· Sanders
Senate office · AP)
Trump says Apple will build chips with Intel in the US, and
Intel jumps about 10 percent
Intel shares closed up roughly 10 percent on Thursday after President
Trump said on Truth Social that Apple has agreed to work with Intel to
design and produce semiconductors domestically. Neither company
confirmed a deal, and any arrangement would be a foundry one — Intel
acting as contract manufacturer for chips Apple designs itself, the role
TSMC plays today, which would make for an awkward reunion given Apple
ditched Intel's processors in 2020 and never looked back. Winning an
outside customer of Apple's scale is central to Intel's turnaround under
CEO Lip-Bu Tan; the announcement landed the same day Apple separately
warned of device price hikes. (Bloomberg
· The
Hill)
Apple says it will raise device prices, blaming an AI-driven
memory-chip crunch
Tim Cook — still CEO until John Ternus takes over on September 1 —
told The Wall Street Journal that Apple will raise prices on its devices
to offset soaring memory and storage costs, calling the situation
unsustainable, though he named neither a number nor a date. The squeeze
traces to the AI build-out: hyperscalers spending hundreds of billions
on memory-hungry servers have tightened supply industry-wide, and Nvidia
this year passed Apple as TSMC's biggest customer. Cook said Apple would
dip into its cash pile to help shore up memory supply but stopped well
short of building its own factories, ahead of a September event expected
to bring new iPhones including a foldable. (The
Information · WSJ · The Verge)
Waymo recalls nearly 4,000 robotaxis after they kept driving
into closed construction zones
Waymo recalled close to 4,000 robotaxis and suspended highway driving
after at least 13 of its vehicles drove into closed construction zones
in Phoenix and the Bay Area — its sixth recall, and an awkward look for
a fleet whose whole pitch is that software pays closer attention than a
tired human driver. (TechCrunch)
░░▒▒▓▓ STATS OF THE DAY ▓▓▒▒░░
- $7 trillion — size of the sovereign wealth fund
Bernie Sanders' bill would build from a one-time 50% tax on the largest
AI firms' stock (Sanders Senate office)
- ~10% — Intel's Thursday share jump after Trump said
Apple would build chips with it (Bloomberg)
- $300 billion — reconstruction funds pledged to Iran
under the 14-point deal signed Wednesday (AP)
- 49% — share of US adults who have used an AI
chatbot, up from 33% in 2024; 63% say AI is moving too fast (Pew
Research Center)
- ~4,000 — Waymo robotaxis recalled after at least 13
drove into closed highway construction zones (TechCrunch)
░░▒▒▓▓ AI ▓▓▒▒░░
- Google, Microsoft, Salesforce, Snowflake, ServiceNow, Hugging Face,
and Databricks backed a new "agentic resource discovery" protocol that
lets one enterprise app reach any AI the company pays for — a bid by the
incumbents to stay the gateway and keep Anthropic and OpenAI, neither of
which bothered to sign on, from owning the front door (Search
Engine Journal).
- Cursor said it will launch Origin, a code-storage and git-hosting
product, this fall, taking direct aim at Microsoft's GitHub as AI coding
tools peel developers away — and confirming a move OpenAI has privately
weighed for its Codex users (BigGo
Finance).
- Hermes, an open-source agent from Nous Research, overtook the
runaway hit OpenClaw on new GitHub contributors over the past 30 days;
it writes its own reusable "skills," then quietly demotes itself to a
cheaper model once it has learned the task (The
Information).
░░▒▒▓▓ TECH ▓▓▒▒░░
- Microsoft walked away from a roughly $3 billion deal to lease cloud
capacity from Oracle over security concerns, a rare public falling-out
between two firms the AI build-out keeps shackling together (Business
Insider).
- SpaceX named former Sequoia leader Roelof Botha to its board in a
securities filing, a week after its record $85.7 billion IPO; the stock
has since surrendered much of that pop, falling another 3.6 percent
Thursday to just under $185, capping a two-day, 20 percent slide from
its peak (The
Information · CNBC).
░░▒▒▓▓ POLICY ▓▓▒▒░░
- An argument making the rounds in Brussels: Europe should stop
chasing trillion-parameter frontier models it has no real hope of
winning — its compute is roughly 5% of the global total, orders of
magnitude behind the US and China — and instead spend its €20 billion AI
Gigafactories budget on reliable, safety-critical industrial AI,
steering public procurement toward the narrow-AI suppliers where the
continent can actually lead (AI
Policy Bulletin).
- The Senate Judiciary Committee unanimously advanced the NO FAKES Act
from Senators Chris Coons and Marsha Blackburn, which would give every
American an intellectual-property right to their voice and likeness and
a path to sue over unauthorized deepfakes; digital-rights groups oppose
it on First Amendment grounds (Roll
Call).
░░▒▒▓▓ INFRA ▓▓▒▒░░
- SemiAnalysis pushed back on the much-shared claim that half of 2026
US data-center capacity is delayed or canceled, tracing the scare to a
flawed denominator: most of the "canceled" projects were speculative
announcements that never had a real 2026 timeline. Its own estimate of
how much the hyperscalers will actually build has barely moved — about
one percent in six months — which is rather the point (SemiAnalysis).
- AMD acquired MEXT, a startup whose software makes low-cost flash
behave like DRAM, easing the memory bottlenecks squeezing AI workloads —
the same shortage now pushing up Apple's prices (Network
World).
░░▒▒▓▓ BUSINESS ▓▓▒▒░░
- Manus's early Chinese backers — including HSG, ZhenFund, and Tencent
— are moving to buy the AI-agent startup back from Meta at the same $2
billion Meta paid, after Beijing ordered the deal reversed; Manus's
annualized revenue has meanwhile climbed to between $400 million and
$500 million (The
Information · Reuters).
- Right-wing video app Rumble agreed to buy data-center firm Northern
Data in an all-stock deal, joining the rush to rent out Nvidia GPUs; the
purchase comes with 22,000 Hopper chips and a cloud business Rumble
plans to rename Quake AI (The
Information).
- Accenture's forecast took a hit from the Iran war and its shares
fell more than 17 percent, a reminder that the war's drag reached the
consulting class too, not just the oil price (BNN
Bloomberg).
░░▒▒▓▓ GEOPOLITICS ▓▓▒▒░░
- The US and Iran signed a 14-point deal to end the war: Trump and
President Masoud Pezeshkian put their names to it on Wednesday before a
Versailles dinner with Macron, lifting the US naval blockade, waiving
oil sanctions, and pledging at least $300 billion for reconstruction,
with a 60-day clock now running on the harder nuclear question. The
Strait of Hormuz reopened toll-free, oil slid below $80 a barrel — some
$40 off the war's peak — while the Bürgenstock implementation talks that
were to open in Switzerland today were postponed after Vice President JD
Vance pulled out (NBC
News · NPR).
- Ukraine struck the Moscow Oil Refinery for the second time in two
days, setting fires at five sites and grounding flights at all four
Moscow airports; Russia claimed it downed 555 drones overnight, and
locals reported "oil rain" near the refinery (ISW).
- China sanctioned Philippine Defense Secretary Gilberto Teodoro,
barring him and his family from the country — the first time Beijing has
sanctioned a sitting minister of a nation it recognizes, as friction in
the South China Sea sharpens (SCMP).
- Colombia holds a presidential runoff on Sunday between leftist Iván
Cepeda and hard-line lawyer Abelardo de la Espriella, who leads on a
tough-on-crime message amid surging violence; the winner takes office
August 7 (PBS
News).
░░▒▒▓▓ ALPS ▓▓▒▒░░
- France moved to remove Palantir from its intelligence agencies, a
concrete step toward the digital sovereignty European leaders pressed at
this week's G7 even as they pleaded for access to American AI (Semafor).
- The Swiss parliament backed the government's proposal to allow
construction of new nuclear power stations, advancing this week's quiet
reversal of a new-build ban the country had spent years defending (SWI
swissinfo.ch).
- EPFL researchers released MeditronFO, a fully open framework for
building medical large language models, and put it to work building
healthcare versions of open models including Apertus, Switzerland's own
multilingual LLM (EPFL).
- DNIP's Reto Vogt argued in his Friday column that Google's
error-prone, opaque AI search summaries — soon to be the default — are a
problem for democracy, not just for search (DNIP).
░░▒▒▓▓ RESEARCH ▓▓▒▒░░
- In a blinded test by 12 US clinicians published in Nature Medicine,
general frontier models from Google, OpenAI, and Anthropic outperformed
specialized clinical tools like OpenEvidence and UpToDate for medical
information — a result the researchers called unanticipated, and that
hospital IT departments have been slow to accept (Don't Worry About
the Vase).
░░▒▒▓▓ REPORTS ▓▓▒▒░░
- Pew Research Center's Americans and AI 2026 report finds that 49% of
US adults have used an AI chatbot, up from 33% in 2024, while 63% say
the technology is advancing too quickly and just 16% expect it to
benefit society over the next two decades (Pew
Research Center).
- PwC's 2026 Global AI Jobs Barometer, out this week and built on more
than a billion job ads across 27 countries, finds the wage premium for
AI skills has risen to 62% (from 57% a year ago) while jobs demanding AI
skills grew 69% against just 9% for the market at large — the data under
PwC's "two-track" labor market, where the roles that let AI amplify
expertise pull away from the ones it merely simplifies (PwC).
░░▒▒▓▓ COMMS DESK ▓▓▒▒░░
Andreessen Horowitz used the one-year mark of its in-house "New
Media" team to lay out a "go-direct as a service" pitch for founders:
launch videos, owned channels with a million-follower X account and a
quarter-million-subscriber newsletter, and the argument that in the new
media order signal comes from people, not brands, and the path to
winning is, simply, being interesting (a16z).
Takeaway: the comms lesson in a16z's manifesto is real but double-edged
— owned channels and a credible principal beat a press release, yet "be
interesting" is a brief, not a strategy, and a venture firm that hands
you the audience is also quietly holding the deed to your story.
░░▒▒▓▓ ONE MORE THING ▓▓▒▒░░
Midjourney, until now an AI image generator, used a launch event at a
members-only club to unveil a full-body ultrasound scanner — you descend
into a tank of water and emerge about a minute later with images its
founder David Holz claims are, in many ways, superior to an MRI's. The
company plans to open a 25,000-square-foot San Francisco spa in 2027,
complete with hot tubs and cold plunges, and says it wants thousands of
them producing a billion scans a month within about six years. An image
company that made its name rendering bodies now wants to scan the real
ones, ideally while you soak in a tub it owns. (The
Information)
Schönes Wochenende — and we'll see you on the flip flop. Your
desk at the Uncertain Futures.