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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. 24 · Wed · 15 July 2026
Happy Wednesday. Google DeepMind's Demis Hassabis this week urged
Washington to start policing frontier AI, echoing a call Anthropic's
Dario Amodei made earlier this summer; the two rivals agree on little
else. IBM had its worst day on record as clients raided the software
budget to stockpile AI hardware, and DeepSeek went shopping for fresh
cash at a $71 billion valuation. New York, meanwhile, became the first
state to freeze the data centers everyone else is racing to build.
░░▒▒▓▓ TOP 5 ▓▓▒▒░░
Rival lab chiefs Hassabis and Amodei both ask Washington to
referee frontier AI
Google DeepMind chief Demis Hassabis published an essay on Tuesday
calling for a US standards body modeled on FINRA (the industry-funded
watchdog that polices Wall Street brokers under government oversight) to
test frontier models for cyber, biological, and deception risks up to 30
days before release, with a passing grade eventually required to ship in
the US. Anthropic's Dario Amodei has gone further, backing a federal
agency with the power to block unsafe models outright, a position he
laid out in an essay this summer; the two men who build Gemini and
Claude now agree Washington should regulate them and differ mainly on
who holds the gavel. Hassabis, a Nobel laureate, told Axios that AGI is
only a few short years away and that the field has "essentially found a
way to make sand think." (via AI Daily Brief, The Information, Axios —
Axios
· TechCrunch
· CNBC)
IBM loses a quarter of its value in a day as clients divert
cash to AI hardware
IBM shares fell 25% on Tuesday, its worst day on record and steeper
than the 1987 crash, after it pre-announced that June-quarter revenue of
$17.2 billion had missed estimates. Chief executive Arvind Krishna said
clients redirected late-quarter spending away from IBM's software and
mainframes toward servers, storage, and memory, racing to lock in supply
before AI-driven price increases. The selloff erased more than $50
billion in market value and pulled Salesforce and Microsoft down with
it, a warning that the great AI-spending shift now cuts against the
incumbents too. (via The Information, Reuters, Axios AI+ — CNBC
· Yahoo
Finance)
DeepSeek seeks fresh cash at a $71 billion valuation and
readies an IPO
DeepSeek, the Chinese open-model lab whose cut-price systems rattled
US rivals last year, is in talks to raise about $1.5 billion at a $71
billion valuation and preparing to file for a public listing as soon as
this year. That is a 37% markup in a matter of weeks on the $52 billion
valuation set by the roughly $7 billion round we covered last month, as
the firm's annualized revenue reaches $400 to $500 million from selling
access to models that run on Huawei chips rather than export-controlled
US ones. Two Chinese labs, Z.ai and MiniMax, are already public;
DeepSeek would be the marquee name to follow them. (via The Information,
StrictlyVC — TechCrunch
· The
Information)
New York becomes the first state to freeze new data
centers
Governor Kathy Hochul signed an executive order on Tuesday pausing
state environmental permits for up to a year on any new hyperscale data
center that draws 50 megawatts or more, the first statewide moratorium
in the country, meant to buy time to write rules on ratepayers, water,
and the grid. It hardens a backlash that until now was local: opponents
across the country had already blocked or delayed some 75 data-center
projects worth about $130 billion in the first quarter alone, but a
whole state saying no changes the arithmetic for an industry that treats
permitting as a formality. Boosters warned it cedes the buildout to
states more willing to build. (via The Information, StrictlyVC, Axios —
Governor
of New York · CNBC
· Data Center
Watch)
Apple hits a record as money flees the AI-spending
trade
Apple closed at an all-time high on Monday, its market value near
$4.7 trillion and its shares up 16% since bottoming on June 25, a
roughly $650 billion swing that makes it the year's best performer among
the Magnificent Seven. The draw is that Apple largely skipped the
capital-spending frenzy: as nerves about AI budgets pushed Alphabet and
Amazon more than 10% below their May peaks and left Microsoft down 20%
on the year, the money went hunting for a big-tech name that is not
setting cash on fire. The same flight that lifted Apple is the one that
flattened IBM. (via Bloomberg, Axios AI+ — Bloomberg
· 24/7
Wall St)
░░▒▒▓▓ STATS OF THE DAY ▓▓▒▒░░
- 25% — IBM's stock drop on Tuesday, its worst day on
record (CNBC)
- $71 billion — DeepSeek's valuation in its new
fundraising talks (The Information)
- 50 megawatts — the size threshold for New York's
new data-center permit freeze (CNBC)
- 59 — natural-gas turbines xAI ran near Memphis
without federal air permits (Reuters)
- $1.8 billion — Munich defense-AI firm Helsing's
raise, at an $18 billion valuation (CNBC)
░░▒▒▓▓ AI ▓▓▒▒░░
- Richard Sutton, the Turing Award winner often called the father of
reinforcement learning, left John Carmack's AGI startup Keen
Technologies in mid-July to start Oak Lab, a shop chasing AI that learns
from its own experience rather than from giant datasets; the stated goal
is a trillion-parameter agent that does its planning on roughly 20
watts, about what a human brain runs on (The
Next Web · BetaKit).
- A mid-July network trace found that xAI's Grok Build coding tool
uploads a developer's whole repository, commit history and the secrets
in the
.env file included, to a Google Cloud bucket whether
the privacy toggle is on or off; on one 12GB test, the actual AI request
used 192KB and the silent upload 5.1GB. Musk said on Monday that all
previously uploaded data would be "completely and utterly deleted,"
though no timeline or proof followed (The
Neuron · The
Register).
░░▒▒▓▓ TECH ▓▓▒▒░░
- Global smartphone shipments fell 11% in the June quarter to their
lowest second-quarter level since 2013, Counterpoint Research said this
week, as memory makers steered scarce DRAM and NAND chips toward AI data
centers and away from phones; Samsung led with 24% and Apple took a
record 20% share of a shrinking market (Counterpoint
Research).
- OpenAI's first hardware device is reportedly a screenless, moving
smart speaker pitched as a "humanlike AI companion" for the home, part
of a broader turn toward families and older users as ChatGPT's audience
ages. The push also has Apple's lawyers watching, since the device is
being built by former senior Apple hardware people (TechCrunch
· Future
Blueprint).
░░▒▒▓▓ POLICY ▓▓▒▒░░
- The European Commission exempted smart glasses and other wearables
from its rule requiring user-replaceable batteries, clearing the biggest
obstacle to Meta selling its glasses in the EU after months of US
lobbying; the Commission said it had bowed to no one's pressure (The
Next Web · European
Commission).
- Nvidia has begun shipping H200 AI chips to China (update), the
concrete first step after Washington cleared the sales we flagged last
week: a US commerce official told a House committee on Tuesday that
exports have started, if only a trickle so far, and Reuters named ZTE,
the Chinese telecom-gear maker Washington once nearly shut down, among
the newly licensed buyers (Reuters
via U.S. News · Rappler).
░░▒▒▓▓ INFRA ▓▓▒▒░░
- A Reuters investigation found that xAI installed 59 natural-gas
turbines to power its Colossus 2 supercomputer near Memphis without the
federal clean-air permits their emissions require, in neighborhoods that
are predominantly Black and already carry high asthma rates. The US
civil-rights group NAACP and the environmental-law nonprofit
Earthjustice sued in April; residents say the turbines run around the
clock and sound like jet engines (Reuters
via U.S. News · Tom's
Hardware).
░░▒▒▓▓ BUSINESS ▓▓▒▒░░
- Neko Health, the Stockholm body-scanning startup co-founded by
Spotify's Daniel Ek, raised $700 million from investors including Mark
Zuckerberg on a bet that a full-body scan can catch what you cannot feel
yet; it is one of Europe's largest health-tech rounds, timed ahead of a
US launch (Reuters
· BusinessCloud).
- Chai Discovery, a two-year-old San Francisco lab whose AI models
help drugmakers design molecules, raised $400 million at a $3.8 billion
valuation from Index Ventures, Thrive, and OpenAI among others, one more
sign that the money chasing AI-for-biology has not cooled (Fierce
Biotech).
░░▒▒▓▓ GEOPOLITICS ▓▓▒▒░░
- The US and Iran traded strikes for a fourth straight day on Tuesday
over control of the Strait of Hormuz (update), with Tehran hitting
US-allied Gulf states and Washington threatening to strike a fortified
site near Iran's Natanz enrichment plant; the June 17 ceasefire is now
in tatters (GZERO
· Stars
and Stripes).
- China's economy grew 4.3% in the second quarter, its slowest pace
since late 2022 and below the 4.5% forecast, as an 18% drop in property
investment offset a June export surge; it is the first time in years
Beijing has undershot its own growth target (CNN
· SCMP).
- Hungary's parliament voted 139 to 6 on Monday for an amendment
removing President Tamás Sulyok, an Orbán appointee, clearing the way
for Péter Magyar, the new prime minister whose party swept April's
election, to install a successor; Sulyok has five days to sign the
amendment ending his own term or face impeachment (Al
Jazeera · Euronews).
░░▒▒▓▓ ALPS ▓▓▒▒░░
- Munich's Helsing, which builds AI software, strike drones, and
underwater surveillance for European militaries, raised $1.8 billion on
July 13 at an $18 billion valuation, Europe's largest defense-tech
round, with Goldman Sachs and JPMorgan among the backers and demand
running well past the allocation (CNBC
· Defense
News).
- Investment in Swiss startups fell 15.5% in the first half to CHF
1.25 billion, the Swiss Venture Capital Report found, as biotech and
canton Zurich cooled even while hardware set a fresh funding record; the
deal count held steady at 123, the same number of deals sharing less
money (SWI
swissinfo · startupticker).
- Switzerland's competition regulator, Weko, opened a preliminary
probe into Google for dropping the Android choice screen that lets users
pick a default search engine, a feature Google still shows across the
EU. It lands less than two weeks after Europe's top court made the
bloc's €4.1 billion Android fine final (SWI
swissinfo · Euronews).
░░▒▒▓▓ RESEARCH ▓▓▒▒░░
- Anthropic published research showing Claude's personality shifts
with language: across 309,000 conversations in 20 languages, the models
ran warmer in Hindi and Arabic, more rigorous in Russian and English,
and more willing to admit error in Dutch. Anthropic said it does not yet
know why, or whether it wants the effect at all (Anthropic
· The
Rundown).
░░▒▒▓▓ ROBOTICS ▓▓▒▒░░
- LimX Dynamics, a Shenzhen humanoid-robot maker founded by a former
Ohio State professor, closed a pre-IPO round at a $2.2 billion valuation
on Tuesday, pulling in $200 million from IDG Capital, Apple supplier
Lens Technology, and Abu Dhabi's Stone Venture, with more than half its
orders coming from outside China (The
Information · CNBC).
- Ukraine ran what it calls the first robotic amphibious assault,
landing a gun-armed ground robot from a naval drone behind Russian
lines; Defense Minister Mykhailo Fedorov says its ground-robot missions
jumped to nearly 17,000 last month from about 7,500 in January, a 122%
rise as the front's kill zone widens for human troops (Business
Insider · Business
Insider via Yahoo).
░░▒▒▓▓ COMMS DESK ▓▓▒▒░░
- Anthropic's new brand campaign opens on burning buildings,
gravestones, and facial-recognition surveillance before pivoting to a
hopeful note, and it aired to a World Cup crowd during an
Argentina–Switzerland match. It landed badly enough that Sam Altman
posted "I thought this was satire," and the doom-heavy open drew the
reaction while the hopeful turn went largely unremarked. Takeaway for
comms teams: leading with the apocalypse to prove your conscience only
works if the audience stays for the second act (TechCrunch
· Adweek).
░░▒▒▓▓ CORRECTIONS ▓▓▒▒░░
- Our June 25 edition led with more than 300 US towns and counties
having banned new data centers. The 300 counts data-center bills filed
in statehouses, not local bans; the correct picture is at least 69 local
governments with bans and some 75 projects blocked or delayed in the
first quarter (Data
Center Watch).
░░▒▒▓▓ ONE MORE THING ▓▓▒▒░░
The US communications regulator, the FCC, cleared Reflect Orbital on
July 9 to launch Eärendil-1, a satellite that unfurls an 18-meter mirror
to bounce sunlight down to chosen spots on Earth after dark. Astronomers
filed some 1,900 objections, the European Southern Observatory calling
it, for optical astronomy, "an existential threat," and the FCC
concluded that the night sky was, regulatorily speaking, not its
department (SpaceNews
· WIRED).
░░▒▒▓▓ TRACK OF THE DAY ▓▓▒▒░░
🎵 THE DOOR —
Ariel Pink
Mind the mirrors — the Uncertain Futures team