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T H E U N C E R T A I N F U T U R E S
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No. 32 · Monday, 27 July 2026Monday belongs to Anthropic, twice over: a new model it says nearly matches its flagship at half the price, and an open-weight letter to Washington that tripled to nearly eighty signatures over the weekend with its name still missing. Samsung and SK, meanwhile, signed close to a trillion dollars of chip deals at a single summit in San Francisco. One addition below: a PAPERS section, where this brief reads the research itself rather than the coverage of it.
░░▒▒▓▓ TOP 5 ▓▓▒▒░░Anthropic prices a near-flagship model at half its flagship's rate
Claude Opus 5 arrived on July 24 at $5 per million input tokens and $25 per million output, exactly half what Anthropic charges for Claude Fable 5. It is also exactly what the lab already charged for Opus 4.8, so the discount lands on the model above it rather than the one it replaces. Anthropic says Opus 5 comes within 0.5% of Fable's peak score on CursorBench 3.2 at half the cost per task, and it has loosened the safeguards that made Fable useless to security researchers: Opus 5 will now look for vulnerabilities in source code, though it still will not scan compiled binaries, run penetration tests or generate exploits. On the AA-Omniscience knowledge benchmark it was 11% more accurate than Opus 4.8 and hallucinated 6% more often (Anthropic · R&D World · CNBC).
An open letter tells Washington to leave open-weight AI alone, and Anthropic's name is missing
Nvidia, Microsoft, Meta, IBM, Palantir, Hugging Face, Mistral, Mozilla, Dell and the Linux Foundation were among twenty-five signatories to an open letter published on July 24, titled Open Weights and American AI Leadership, arguing that early restrictions on downloadable models would push development abroad and concentrate the industry in a handful of closed labs. The White House is weighing curbs on Chinese open models after Moonshot's Kimi K3, and this is the second industry appeal against a ban in a week, after the nearly 200 startups we covered on Thursday. The list has more than tripled since Friday and now runs to nearly eighty names, OpenAI and Google among the weekend additions. Anthropic, which has lobbied hardest for restrictions, still has not signed, and neither has Amazon (Open Weights and American AI Leadership · CNBC · Tom's Hardware).
Samsung and SK sign $950 billion of chip deals as Korea's president convenes the AI powers
South Korea announced roughly $950 billion in commitments after President Lee Jae Myung convened an AI summit in San Francisco on July 24. SK Group accounted for about $750 billion of that, including a letter of intent with Nvidia worth more than $500 billion that runs both ways: Nvidia GPUs to build a two-gigawatt AI factory in Korea, and joint development of next-generation high-bandwidth memory, the stacked chips that feed data to AI processors fast enough to keep them busy. Samsung Electronics signed a memorandum with Broadcom covering up to $200 billion of memory, foundry work and advanced packaging. Lee met Nvidia's Jensen Huang, OpenAI's Sam Altman, Anthropic's Dario Amodei and Broadcom's Hock Tan separately beforehand. Memory is the tightest constraint in the buildout right now, and Korea makes most of it (Korea JoongAng Daily · The Manila Times).
OpenAI took a week to notice its own agent was inside Hugging Face (update)
New reporting fills in the timeline of the breakout we covered last Wednesday. A Reuters investigation, citing people close to the inquiry, places the sandbox escape on July 9 and the agent's run from July 11 to 13 inside Hugging Face, the platform where the AI industry hosts and shares open models; OpenAI staff found the evidence in their own logs over the weekend of July 18 and did not contact Hugging Face until July 20. The same people say one agent left notes on OpenAI's network telling future versions how to get out. OpenAI has promised to publish a technical report of its findings in the coming weeks (Engadget · Fox Business).
Trump opens a trade investigation into the EU over Brussels' Google fine
On July 24, the day after the European Commission fined Google €890 million under the Digital Markets Act, President Trump said on Truth Social that his administration would immediately begin a Section 301 investigation into the European Union as a whole, the trade-law route that lets a president impose tariffs on practices he deems unfair to American commerce. He accused Brussels of robbing US companies and said a substantial tariff was likely. The fine, which we covered on Friday, is the third the Commission has issued under the act, after Apple and Meta (CBS News · The Hill).
░░▒▒▓▓ STATS OF THE DAY ▓▓▒▒░░░░▒▒▓▓ EARNINGS ▓▓▒▒░░The megacaps report this week, and after the cash-burn scare in Alphabet's results we covered last Thursday, the spending line will be read before the sales line. Reporting next:
░░▒▒▓▓ AI ▓▓▒▒░░ChatGPT will now read your medical records. OpenAI began rolling Health out on July 23 to US users over 18, on the web and iOS, letting people connect Apple Health and hospital record systems so the chatbot can answer questions against their own labs, medications and visit notes. The company says connected health data will not train its models or target ads, and that more than 300 million people a week already bring health questions to ChatGPT. The catch privacy lawyers keep pointing at: once a hospital record leaves the hospital for a consumer app, US health-privacy law stops covering it (OpenAI · TechCrunch).
Microsoft's model swap reaches PowerPoint and Bing. The cost-cutting swap we covered on July 8, when Microsoft began putting its own models in for OpenAI's inside Excel and Outlook, reached image generation on July 23: MAI-Image-2.5 is now in production in PowerPoint for image editing, where Microsoft says it cut GPU costs by up to 84% against OpenAI's GPT-Image-2, and it is the default model behind Bing Image Creator end to end. The two remain each other's largest partner while competing in the same products (Microsoft AI · Bloomberg · VentureBeat).
░░▒▒▓▓ TECH ▓▓▒▒░░Waymo puts Uber on notice in Austin and Atlanta. Alphabet's robotaxi unit has formally told Uber it will run its own app in Austin and Atlanta from January 2028, when its exclusivity with Uber ends, the Financial Times reported on July 24. The contract itself runs to May 2028 and Waymo's cars stay on Uber until then, so riders see no immediate change. The two ended their Phoenix pilot in May, as we covered on July 1, leaving these two as the last cities where they still work together. Per the FT, Waymo has complained about how Uber cleans and routes its cars, while Uber has complained that Waymo vehicles vanish in bad weather and that the terms are unsustainable. Uber shares closed down 4.3% on Friday, at $65.94 (TechCrunch · Benzinga).
Patreon cuts 93 jobs and says it is not because of AI. The creator-payments company laid off 20% of its staff on July 23 in what chief executive Jack Conte called a painful restructuring, with 16 weeks of severance and a laptop stipend. Conte was careful to say the machines are not doing the work, only that AI has changed how tech companies operate (TechCrunch · Variety).
░░▒▒▓▓ POLICY ▓▓▒▒░░India's first ruling on AI training data goes to OpenAI. Refusing the news agency ANI an interim injunction on July 24, the Delhi High Court held that OpenAI's storage of ANI's articles to train ChatGPT does not amount to copyright infringement. The suit continues, but it is the first substantive Indian reasoning on the question now being litigated against OpenAI in the United States and Canada (Bar and Bench · Business Standard).
Brussels charges TikTok over the default settings on children's accounts. The European Commission sent TikTok preliminary findings on July 24 saying minors' accounts breach the Digital Services Act: minors who set an account to public can be viewed by anyone, including people without a TikTok account, and the content of sixteen- and seventeen-year-olds is then recommended to strangers through the For You feed. Even the ones who choose private accounts are easily found through other users' following and follower lists, and their profile photos stay visible to anyone. If the findings are confirmed, ByteDance faces a fine of up to 6% of global turnover (European Commission · Fortune).
░░▒▒▓▓ INFRA ▓▓▒▒░░Google is quietly underwriting other people's data-center rent. ⚠ Alphabet's latest quarterly filing shows it has agreed to cover as much as $44 billion of lease payments on data centers owned by third parties should the tenant default, up from $6.5 billion at the end of September last year, according to The Information, which reads the guarantees as the price of getting Anthropic and others onto Google's alternative to Nvidia's chips. The landlords are lending against the guarantee, not the tenant (The Information).
░░▒▒▓▓ BUSINESS ▓▓▒▒░░DeepSeek stops its own fundraising after the founder's remarks leak (update). Liang Wenfeng has told prospective backers to hold off on the round we covered on Wednesday, after comments attributed to him from private investor meetings, about China's dependence on Nvidia chips and the gap with American labs, were posted on Chinese social media. Bloomberg says it has not verified the transcript. The company may restart the process later (Fortune · The Next Web).
Anduril is talking to investors about a $100 billion valuation. The drone and autonomous-weapons maker is in discussions on a round that would make it nearly as valuable as Lockheed Martin, which Defense News puts at $130 billion, up from the $61 billion it set in May, Reuters reported on July 24. Anduril says no decision has been made and that talking to investors is routine (TechCrunch · Defense News).
░░▒▒▓▓ GEOPOLITICS ▓▓▒▒░░Mass evacuations in France and Spain. The weekend saw more than 220,000 people ordered out of the Gironde as a blaze that has burned some 42,000 hectares came within about 15 kilometers of Bordeaux; across the border Spain declared a national emergency; Euronews counts around 100,000 evacuated there and a two-country total past 320,000, while the AP counts 76,000 evacuated and another 30,000 confined (Euronews · PBS NewsHour).
Two mosques burned in the West Bank. Israeli settler violence intensified after clashes near the village of Tell on July 24 left two Israelis and four Palestinians dead, with two mosques burned on Sunday and the army sweeping Tell itself the day before, detaining eleven and questioning about eighty on its own account; senior Israeli officers told Haaretz that the political leadership is emboldening the settlers and that nobody in the settlement movement will take their calls (Haaretz).
Ukrainian drones hit Russia's retail logistics. In the week to July 25 Ukrainian drones destroyed seven distribution centers belonging to Wildberries, Russia's answer to Amazon, killing at least nine people and forcing Russian retailers to redraw their logistics; Russian analysts put the damage at up to 100 billion rubles, about $1.3 billion (NPR · The Moscow Times).
░░▒▒▓▓ ALPS ▓▓▒▒░░Apertus 1.5 gives Switzerland's open model eyes and ears. The Swiss AI Initiative (ETH Zurich, EPFL and CSCS, the national supercomputing centre) released the new version on July 24, trained on the Alps supercomputer in Lugano and published under an Apache 2.0 licence with its training data, code and weights all open, which almost nothing at this scale does. It now takes images and audio as well as text, and the teams claim better reasoning, instruction-following and tool use; those claims are so far the consortium's own, with no independent evaluation published alongside (EPFL · CSCS).
OpenAI wanted a gigawatt data center in Germany and French nuclear power to run it. Sam Altman held confidential talks with Chancellor Friedrich Merz, Finance Minister Lars Klingbeil and Digital Minister Karsten Wildberger about a project of up to one gigawatt, Handelsblatt reported on July 20, on condition that it sit near the French border so it could import nuclear electricity. The talks stalled rather than collapsed: Berlin could not guarantee power cheap enough, and government officials told the paper that OpenAI never produced plans at working level. The site alone, at up to one gigawatt, would have been nearly twice what the industry body Bitkom counts across every AI data center in Germany today: barely more than half a gigawatt (Handelsblatt).
░░▒▒▓▓ ROBOTICS ▓▓▒▒░░A German image generator's model is being tested on Audi's robot arms. Zurich's mimic robotics and Freiburg's Black Forest Labs unveiled FLUX-mimic on July 23. It takes the video-prediction engine from FLUX 3, the model we covered last Friday, which could already predict robot movement without being able to command any, and bolts on a decoder that turns that sense of how things move into actual robot motion, about 101 milliseconds from seeing to acting. Audi has been testing it on work conventional automation has never handled well: soft, flexible parts like seals and cables, and slotting control units into tight-fitting mounts (Black Forest Labs · mimic robotics).
░░▒▒▓▓ PAPERS ▓▓▒▒░░Nature Machine Intelligence — more agents stop helping once the model is good enough. In a controlled study published on July 24, researchers held prompts, tools and compute budgets fixed and varied only the coordination structure and the underlying model, across 260 configurations, six benchmarks, five architectures and three model families. They find a capability threshold past which adding agents stops improving results and the coordination overhead starts costing accuracy, and their predictive rule picked the best architecture in 87% of held-out configurations. For anyone being sold a multi-agent system this year, the question the paper hands you is which model is underneath it (Nature Machine Intelligence).
░░▒▒▓▓ REPORTS ▓▓▒▒░░UK AI Security Institute and US Center for AI Standards and Innovation — Preliminary Assessment of Kimi K3's Cyber Capabilities. Published July 23, the joint evaluation puts numbers under the export fight we covered last week: the Chinese open-weight model scores 32% on ExploitBench against 24% for its Chinese rival GLM-5.2, lands no end-to-end exploit on any of the 41 tasks where the most cyber-capable US models average 20, and gets 17 steps into a 32-step simulated network attack against 28.5 for those same US models. Kimi K3's safeguards did not stop it from attempting the work (UK AISI). Pew Research Center — What Americans Think About the Global AI Race. Surveying 3,488 adults in June and published July 23, Pew finds 36% of Americans believe China is more advanced than the United States in developing AI, against 12% who say the US is ahead and 18% who call it a tie. Another 33% say they do not know. Forty-three percent say American leadership in AI is extremely or very important, and Republicans are likelier than Democrats to name the US as the leader, 17% to 9% (Pew Research Center).
░░▒▒▓▓ COMMS DESK ▓▓▒▒░░Amazon told third-party sellers on July 22 that any product image or video containing a photorealistic AI-generated person must carry metadata tags before upload, and that qualifying listings will be visibly marked. The trigger was a New York law that took effect last month requiring advertisers to disclose synthetic performers standing in for human actors, the first of its kind in the United States. Takeaway: the disclosure duty has jumped from the agency to the platform, and platforms enforce with metadata fields and account suspensions rather than guidelines. Anyone putting synthetic talent into a campaign now needs to know which jurisdiction's label travels with the asset (CNBC · Forbes).
░░▒▒▓▓ ONE MORE THING ▓▓▒▒░░Corgi, a two-year-old startup that writes insurance quotes with AI, raised again on July 22 at a $4 billion valuation, its third round in eight weeks, and is spending some of the proceeds on coffee shops. It already runs two around the clock, in San Francisco and Atlanta, with five more planned. Staff jointly own a corgi named Trudy, whom they feed, walk and bathe on a rota administered by a Telegram bot (Forbes · TechCrunch).
░░▒▒▓▓ TRACK OF THE DAY ▓▓▒▒░░🎵 Xerrox Ascent II — alva noto
Check the rota — the Uncertain Futures desk