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T H E U N C E R T A I N F U T U R E S
all the news that fits the context window
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No. 22 · Mon · 13 July 2026
Happy Monday, and an apology before the news: you were owed a Friday
edition. It was written, fact-checked and had cleared every automated
gate by 08:43 that morning, at which point it reached the one step in
this pipeline no machine is allowed to touch, a human clicking Approve,
and sat unclicked in an inbox all weekend. The software held up its end;
the human missed his deadline; today's issue covers Friday through this
morning. It was quite a stretch to sleep through. Apple is suing OpenAI
over its hardware plans, SK Hynix pulled off the largest American
listing ever by a foreign company, and OpenAI lost its second-in-command
while folding half its product line into a single app.
░░▒▒▓▓ TOP 5 ▓▓▒▒░░
Apple sues OpenAI and two of its own former engineers over
stolen hardware secrets
Apple filed suit against OpenAI in a California federal court on July
10, accusing the ChatGPT maker of building its device business on stolen
Apple know-how. The complaint names OpenAI hardware chief Tang Tan, a
24-year Apple veteran it says used Apple codenames to draw information
out of candidates still at Apple, and engineer Chang Liu, who allegedly
kept an Apple laptop and downloaded confidential files after leaving.
OpenAI, which employs more than 400 former Apple staff and still sits
inside Apple Intelligence, says it has "no interest in other companies'
trade secrets." Covered by AP, Reuters, TechCrunch and StrictlyVC (TechCrunch
· CNBC).
SK Hynix raises $26.5 billion in the largest US listing ever
by a foreign company (update)
The Korean memory maker's Nasdaq offering we covered last week priced
at $149 per depositary share on July 9, raising $26.5 billion and
passing Alibaba's 2014 record of $25 billion for a foreign debut; the
stock closed its first session on Friday at $168.01, up 13 percent.
Demand ran to seven times the shares on offer, the proceeds go to a new
fab and packaging plant in South Korea, and US Commerce Secretary Howard
Lutnick spent the week urging SK Hynix and Samsung to build factories in
America instead. Chief executive Kwak Noh-jung is not talking like a man
at the top of a cycle: he expects the worst of the memory shortage in
2027, with demand outstripping supply beyond 2030 (TechCrunch
· Yahoo
Finance).
OpenAI loses its No. 2 and folds its products into one
app
Fidji Simo, OpenAI's CEO of applications, said on July 9 she is
stepping down to a part-time advisory role after a relapse of a
neuroimmune condition kept her on medical leave since April. Her duties
are split among president Greg Brockman, finance chief Sarah Friar and
strategy chief Jason Kwon, with Brockman, per CNBC, taking the largest
share ahead of a possible IPO at a reported $852 billion valuation. The
reshuffle capped a housecleaning week: OpenAI shut
its Atlas browser after nine months, merged the Codex coding app
into a revamped ChatGPT desktop app, and launched ChatGPT Work, its
answer to Anthropic's Claude Cowork (TechCrunch).
Brussels finds Instagram and Facebook addictive by design,
putting 6% of Meta's revenue at risk
The European Commission preliminarily found on July 10 that Meta
breaches the Digital Services Act with infinite scroll, autoplay, push
notifications and engagement-tuned recommendation feeds, features it
says push users into "autopilot mode." The Commission wants autoplay and
infinite scroll off by default plus real screen-time breaks; confirmed
findings carry fines of up to 6% of global annual revenue. Meta told
CNBC it disagrees with the findings, in a week when it was already
retreating from its Instagram AI-image feature (more in TECH, below) (European
Commission · TechCrunch).
Beijing unwinds Meta's $2 billion Manus deal, and Tencent
picks up the pieces
Tencent is in talks to become the largest shareholder of Manus, the
Chinese-rooted AI-agent startup Meta agreed to buy for more than $2
billion late last year, after Beijing blocked the deal on
national-security grounds, the Financial Times reported on July 10. A
consortium of Manus's original backers, including ZhenFund and HSG, the
investment house formerly known as Sequoia Capital China, would buy the
company back at the price Meta had agreed to pay, with Tencent as the
biggest single holder but still a minority one; US investor Benchmark is
expected to sit out, leaving the startup back where it started, in
predominantly Chinese hands (The
Next Web).
░░▒▒▓▓ STATS OF THE DAY ▓▓▒▒░░
- $26.5 billion — raised in SK Hynix's Nasdaq debut,
the largest US listing by a foreign company (TechCrunch)
- 6% — share of global annual revenue Meta risks if
the EU's addictive-design findings are confirmed (European
Commission)
- $50 — what a million of Fable 5's output tokens
will cost Claude subscribers when the thrice-delayed meter starts July
20 (WIRED)
- 100,000 — jobs Volkswagen's chief proposed cutting
in the overhaul he put to the board on July 9 (Euronews)
- 90 — Russian oil tankers Ukraine says it has struck
in the Sea of Azov since July 6 (ISW)
░░▒▒▓▓ AI ▓▓▒▒░░
- Claude Fable 5's meter is on hold again (update): Anthropic on
Sunday extended subscribers' free access to its top model a third time,
the cutoff drifting from July 7 to July 12 to now July 19. The announced
fees, $10 per million input tokens and $50 per million output on top of
existing plans, would be the first usage-based pricing a frontier lab
has put on a consumer model, per WIRED, and now start July 20. Anthropic
cites capacity; but with OpenAI selling GPT-5.6 Sol at $30 per million
output tokens since July 9, a $50 meter that keeps not starting also
reads like an answer to Sol, and users win either way (BleepingComputer
· WIRED
· OpenAI).
- Anthropic appointed Ben Bernanke, who ran the Federal Reserve
through the 2008 crisis, to its Long-Term Benefit Trust on July 9, the
body of financially disinterested trustees that appoints part of the
company's board. How AI's potential plays out, on Bernanke's telling,
"will depend, in part, on the institutions we build around it" (Anthropic).
- An OpenAI model swept the AtCoder World Tour Finals, the world
championship of competitive programming, in Tokyo on July 8 and 9,
winning the open-ended heuristic contest by a margin its top human rival
put at several days of extra work, then solving all five algorithmic
problems, two of which no human cracked. The organizers handed OpenAI
two specially created "humanity surrenders" awards, which at least
settles the naming question (Understanding
AI).
░░▒▒▓▓ TECH ▓▓▒▒░░
- Meta killed the Instagram AI-image feature we flagged last Thursday
(update): as of July 10, tagging a public account to generate pictures
of its owner is gone, three days after launch, following objections from
users and talent agencies including CAA. Meta's verdict on its own
product: "We've heard the feedback that this feature missed the mark, so
it's no longer available." (TechCrunch).
- Patreon switched on network-level blocking of AI training crawlers
across every creator page on July 9, using Cloudflare's controls, with
search crawlers still allowed. Chief executive Jack Conte's terms for
the model builders: credit, compensation and consent, three things the
crawlers had not been offering (404
Media).
░░▒▒▓▓ POLICY ▓▓▒▒░░
- The expert panel Ursula von der Leyen convened on children and
social media hands over its report in Brussels today; it is expected to
stop short of an Australia-style ban and instead sketch a minimum age of
13 with graduated protections above it, the line a parallel German panel
took last month, evidence meant to move national capitals still
skeptical of EU-wide restrictions (Tech
Policy Press).
- The New York Times and fellow publishers asked a federal judge on
July 9 to sanction OpenAI, saying it searched its own models and logs
for their copyrighted journalism while telling the court it could not,
built a detection tool called Project Giraffe, and deleted billions of
ChatGPT outputs despite a preservation order. OpenAI says the publishers
are trying to invade the privacy of users with no connection to the case
(TechCrunch).
░░▒▒▓▓ INFRA ▓▓▒▒░░
- China banned helium exports on July 10, effective immediately and
with no exemptions named, to keep its own chipmakers supplied while the
Iran war chokes shipments from Qatar. The dry detail: China imports more
than 80% of its helium, so this is less an embargo than a country
locking the pantry from the inside (SCMP).
- Meta broke ground on its first Canadian data center on July 8, a
one-gigawatt campus in Sturgeon County, Alberta, worth more than 13
billion Canadian dollars (about $9.5 billion): 3,000 workers to build
it, roughly 300 to run it (Meta).
░░▒▒▓▓ BUSINESS ▓▓▒▒░░
- The Federal Reserve's new chairman Kevin Warsh named the leaders of
five task forces on July 9, and his AI panel reads like a bull market:
venture capitalist Marc Andreessen, Stanford economist Charles I. Jones,
currently on sabbatical at Anthropic, and Xbox chief Asha Sharma,
appointed to advise on jobs and productivity days after announcing 3,200
layoffs in her own division (Yahoo
Finance).
- Shein won Chinese regulatory approval on July 10 for a Hong Kong
listing of up to 341.6 million shares, its third exchange of choice
after years of stalled attempts in New York and London; reports put the
fast-fashion retailer's likely valuation at $40 billion to $50 billion,
roughly half its 2022 peak of about $100 billion (SCMP).
- General Fusion starts trading on the Nasdaq today under the ticker
GFUZ, the first publicly traded pure-play fusion company, after closing
its merger with the blank-check firm Spring Valley Acquisition Corp. III
on July 10. The Vancouver company arrives with about $150 million in
cash to push its magnetized-target reactor, a design that fuses atoms by
compressing a magnetized plasma, toward milestones set for 2028; the
power output, for now, remains zero (Stock
Titan).
░░▒▒▓▓ GEOPOLITICS ▓▓▒▒░░
- The US struck about 140 targets in Iran early Sunday (update), its
third night of strikes within a week, after Revolutionary Guard forces
attacked a Cyprus-flagged container ship in the Strait of Hormuz,
leaving it with significant engine-room damage; one crew member is
missing. Iran answered with missiles and drones against Bahrain, Kuwait,
Qatar, Oman and Jordan, and insists the strait stays closed until calm
returns, while Washington says ships are still passing. The 60-day
interim deal signed June 17 is at its midpoint, and mediators from
Pakistan, Qatar and Egypt are still trying to save it (PBS).
- Ukraine says it has struck 90 Russian oil tankers in the Sea of Azov
since July 6, a new campaign to cut occupied Crimea off from seaborne
fuel, per the Institute for the Study of War. President Zelensky,
meanwhile, announced on July 12 that he is reshuffling his cabinet and
reassigning Prime Minister Yulia Svyrydenko to lead work with a key
partner he did not name (ISW).
- A wildfire that broke out on the afternoon of July 9 near Los
Gallardos in Spain's Almería province killed at least 12 people, with
roughly 20 still unaccounted for; regional authorities call it the
deadliest fire in the region's recorded history (Al
Jazeera).
░░▒▒▓▓ ALPS ▓▓▒▒░░
- Volkswagen chief executive Oliver Blume put a plan to the
supervisory board on July 9 to close the Hanover, Emden and Zwickau
plants plus Audi's Neckarsulm site and shed up to 100,000 jobs, about a
sixth of the workforce. The board did not approve it; the metalworkers'
union IG Metall staged protests at plants across Germany the same day
and promises to fight the plan through months of negotiation (Euronews).
- Handelsblatt devoted its July 10 weekend cover to what it calls the
rebellion of the AI customers, aimed squarely at OpenAI and Anthropic:
German firms from SAP down are done paying the two labs' bills on faith,
with SAP's leadership putting every AI expense under review and
companies increasingly routing queries to cheaper models, often Chinese
ones, reserving the expensive American flagships for when they are
genuinely needed (Handelsblatt).
- The Swiss army's cyber command is moving every workstation off
Microsoft and onto the open-source suite OpenDesk by October, the
Federal Chancellery has confirmed; its chief argues any vendor bound by
the US Cloud Act, the law that lets Washington compel data from American
providers wherever it is stored, is unusable in a military setting. The
International Criminal Court and Austria's armed forces made the same
move first, reported by digital-politics journalist Adrienne Fichter (techjournalismus.ch).
░░▒▒▓▓ RESEARCH ▓▓▒▒░░
- China recovered a rocket booster for the first time on July 10: the
maiden Long March 10B put its payload in orbit from Wenchang, and six
minutes after separation the first stage descended onto a net-rigged sea
platform called Linghangzhe. Only SpaceX has managed routine booster
recovery; the state contractor CASC says it intends to reuse this stage
before the end of the year (SCMP
· SpaceNews).
░░▒▒▓▓ ROBOTICS ▓▓▒▒░░
- Surgeons at UC San Diego teleoperated a Unitree G1 humanoid, a
$13,500 robot nicknamed Surgie, to remove gallbladders from live pigs, a
world first published in Nature on July 9. The procedures ran slower
than on a $500,000 da Vinci surgical system and needed frequent
recalibration; at under 3 percent of the price, the point stands: an
operating room that fits in a suitcase, for rural clinics, battlefields,
and eventually space (Ars
Technica).
░░▒▒▓▓ COMMS DESK ▓▓▒▒░░
- Meta filed its response last week to Sarah Wynn-Williams, the
Careless People author suing since June 25 to escape the arbitration
ruling that bars her from promoting her memoir under a $780,000
non-disparagement deal, calling her case a last-ditch effort to dodge
the process she signed. She says it "feels like Meta has open-ended
control over my speech, livelihood, movements, and ability to associate
with others," and each slip risks a $50,000 fine. Takeaway: a $1.6
trillion company enforcing a contract against one unemployed policy
author can win every motion and still lose the story (WIRED).
░░▒▒▓▓ ONE MORE THING ▓▓▒▒░░
A squirrel arrived at Meta's Bangkok office inside a package, escaped
during handover, and held the floor for some 20 minutes, scratching a
janitor's finger before capture, WIRED reported on July 8. An internal
memo records that the janitor "formally acknowledged their misconduct,"
and an employee marked the occasion with an AI-generated HR training
video on squirrel-related office best practices. Meta declined to
comment, which is understandable (WIRED).
░░▒▒▓▓ TRACK OF THE DAY ▓▓▒▒░░
🎵 Flurries —
Will Hofbauer
Mea culpa — the Uncertain Futures team, humans and all