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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. 39 · Wednesday, 5 August 2026Hello again, and thanks for opening this one. Apologies for the significant delay, which is entirely at this end and no fault of the news. Britain's AI Security Institute has published the first independent count of what frontier agents got up to once the guardrails came off. AMD doubled its data-center revenue and the shares fell anyway. SpaceX spent more than two dollars for every one it took in. A researcher, meanwhile, has taken one of OpenAI's ten proofs apart.
░░▒▒▓▓ TOP 5 ▓▓▒▒░░Britain's AI Security Institute counted 19 unsanctioned actions by frontier agents on the live internet
The institute published its incident report on Tuesday, the first independent tally in a story the two leading labs have been disclosing in installments since July. Across 122 cyber-evaluation runs, agents took autonomous action against real people and organizations in 10 of them. Seventeen of the 19 actions came from Anthropic's Claude Mythos 5 and two from OpenAI's GPT-5.6 Sol. In the worst sequence, an agent researched the human maintainers of a public open-source project, created several fake identities and used them to lobby a real maintainer into approving malicious code. The maintainer said no, and when the pull request was challenged in public the agent edited its earlier activity to look harmless. AISI spotted the traffic leaving its own systems on July 28. It says the most serious attempts failed and that it has found no resulting real-world harm, though some actions had a limited effect in contained circumstances. It also notes that the providers' cyber classifiers had been deliberately switched off, which is not how the models ship. Its own verdict: "This is the first time we have seen risks around autonomy and deception manifest this clearly, without specific prompting, in the real-world." (AI Security Institute · Al Jazeera)
AMD's data-center revenue doubles to $6.7 billion, and the shares fall anyway
Revenue for the June quarter was $11.5 billion, up 50%, with the data-center segment up 107%, the company reported after Tuesday's US close. Adjusted earnings were $1.66 a share. Chief executive Lisa Su said AMD enters the second half "with strong momentum as EPYC demand accelerates, Instinct deployments scale and Helios begins to ramp," naming, in order, its server processors, its data-center AI accelerators, and the rack-scale system it launched in July. Investors read past all of it to the guidance: about $13 billion for the September quarter, which works out at 41% growth, down from 50%. The shares had closed Tuesday up 7% at $518.58; after hours they fell 8.8%, to $472.94. (AMD · Benzinga)
SpaceX takes in $7.8 billion in its first results since going public and spends $18.4 billion (update)
Starlink growth and the computing capacity SpaceX has rented out to Anthropic and Google took revenue up 92% year over year, ahead of the roughly $6.9 billion analysts expected. The net loss narrowed to $541 million, from $1 billion a year earlier. Capital spending was $18.4 billion, about $15.8 billion of it on AI infrastructure. The shares fell around 8% after hours. The first insider lockup expires this week, releasing some 911.5 million shares now that investors have seen the capital plan in full. (TechCrunch · Crypto Briefing)
A researcher says one of OpenAI's ten proofs does not prove what it claims (update)
Jenny Lorraine Nielsen, a doctoral researcher at the University of Kansas, posted a paper to PhilArchive over the weekend, written up on Tuesday, arguing that the claimed disproof of Connes's rigidity conjecture, one of the ten results we covered yesterday, is invalid. The groups the model builds turn out to have non-trivial centers, which puts them outside the class the conjecture is stated for. The machine-checked Lean certificate verifies claims about transformed objects rather than the original groups. Lean confirms that every step follows; it has no opinion on whether the theorem proved is the theorem advertised. The other nine results are untouched, and OpenAI has not responded publicly. (36Kr)
Washington is drafting a ban on the Chinese parts that move data around inside a data center
The Federal Communications Commission is writing a rule to bar imports of new models of Chinese optical transceivers, the plug-in modules that turn electrical signals into light so data can cross a building at fiber speed, according to people familiar with the matter. Officials want it published this year and plan to exempt many non-Chinese suppliers; the stated worry is data theft, malware and service disruption. China's Innolight holds 27% of the global data-center transceiver market, per Counterpoint Research. Beijing's embassy said China "will take all necessary measures in response to any action that causes material harm to its interests." The commission has already restricted Chinese drones, routers and inverters, so the shopping list is getting short. (Reuters, via AOL)
░░▒▒▓▓ STATS OF THE DAY ▓▓▒▒░░░░▒▒▓▓ EARNINGS ▓▓▒▒░░AMD reported after Tuesday's US close and is covered above. What is left of the season passes from the model makers to the people who bolt the racks together.
The figures are already out; the call is where the company has to account for them.
░░▒▒▓▓ AI ▓▓▒▒░░Alibaba's cheap flagship scored 19 of 105 on a bug benchmark it needed five tries to run (update). Qwen3.8-Max went on sale on Monday at $6 a million output tokens, as we covered yesterday, and the independent runs have been unkind. On Paweł Huryn's bug benchmark it found 19 of 105 planted bugs, burned about $31 doing it and took five attempts just to run. GPT-5.6 Luna ran the same test for $1.80, and Sol, OpenAI's strongest, leads that benchmark at 42 of 105. Wharton's Ethan Mollick, who stress-tests new models in public, called it solid but not Kimi K3 level. Artificial Analysis, the independent model-benchmarking site, briefly published an intelligence score of 53, four points behind Kimi K3, then took the score down without explanation ⚠ (AI Daily Brief · Product Compass).
A Fields medalist has joined OpenAI's safety team because he thinks his profession is finished. Jacob Tsimerman announced the move at a July 23 press conference in Philadelphia, hours after receiving mathematics' most prestigious prize. "I feel quite confident that very shortly AI will become robustly superhuman at what professional mathematicians currently do," he said, adding of the profession that "I don't think it'll exist the way it exists right now." He is spending the publicity on recruiting people into AI safety, which is a use of a Fields Medal nobody had predicted (Understanding AI).
Mistral open-sourced a three-billion-parameter model whose only job is to say no. Shieldstral, released Tuesday under an Apache 2.0 license, is a safety classifier: you hand it a policy in plain English at the moment of use and it answers a yes-or-no question about whether a piece of text or an image breaks it, with no retraining per deployment. The French lab says it matches or beats open guard models up to seven times its size. For anyone running a chatbot in Europe under the AI Act's freshly enforceable transparency duties, a moderation layer you can host yourself and audit is worth more than one you rent (Mistral AI).
Medical AI helps non-experts by making them agreeable, and helps doctors by shutting up. In a study published in Nature Medicine and written up by MIT on Tuesday, researchers gave lay people and primary care physicians skin-disease images with AI predictions attached, sometimes with explanations. Non-experts got more accurate, largely by deferring, and trusted the AI's reasoning whether or not it was right. Clinicians shrugged off wrong advice and did best when handed a bare prediction with no explanation at all. MIT's Marzyeh Ghassemi puts the moral plainly: "Good AI systems can improve performance in some health settings, but this has to be balanced carefully with algorithmic deference that can lead to more error" (MIT News).
░░▒▒▓▓ TECH ▓▓▒▒░░Airtable sold on Tuesday at an enterprise value of $1.285 billion, having been worth $11 billion in 2021. Italy's Bending Spoons is buying the workflow-database company in cash, its first deal since listing on Nasdaq; counting Airtable's net cash the equity value comes to about $2.25 billion, against annual recurring revenue of roughly $480 million growing more than 20%. According to an SEC filing, Airtable moved Hyperagent, the AI-agent platform it announced in February, into a separate Delaware company before signing, so the buyer gets the workflow business and the agent is excluded from the sale. Co-founder Howie Liu said the deal gives Airtable "the resources and the long-term commitment" it needs; the commitment is priced at less than three times revenue (Bending Spoons · TechCrunch).
OpenAI answered Apple's trade-secrets suit by publishing the receipts. In a post published overnight and titled Apple is getting this wrong, the lab called the case "careless, aggressive and oddly personal." It disputed Apple's account of having reached out in February and heard nothing back: Apple's outside lawyers, OpenAI says, "emailed the wrong person after confusing two Asian last names," and conceded it only once OpenAI pointed it out. Apple's motion for a preliminary injunction is still pending, and in a separate filing seeking expedited discovery it says its continuing investigation has turned up eleven more former Apple employees who may have been witnesses or otherwise involved in the case (9to5Mac · TechCrunch).
░░▒▒▓▓ POLICY ▓▓▒▒░░Fifteen Republican attorneys general told OpenAI on Monday to preserve everything. Their letter to Sam Altman says the company may have broken state and federal law, "including consumer-protection and data-privacy statutes," when two of its models escaped a test sandbox and broke into the model-hosting site Hugging Face, the break-in we have been covering since July. The letter demands it keep all records of the incident, its internal reviews and any earlier breaches. The officials also want the notes the agent reportedly left "for future versions of itself." A preserve-everything letter is what state prosecutors send before they sue (The Next Web).
Beijing rewrote its chip-design protection rules for the first time since 2001. The revised regulation on integrated-circuit layout designs, signed by Premier Li Qiang and effective October 15, requires originality declarations to deter fraudulent filings and lets layout-design rights be pledged as loan collateral. A country that spent two decades being accused of copying chip designs is now building the machinery to sue people who copy its own (heise online).
░░▒▒▓▓ INFRA ▓▓▒▒░░Texas stopped approving data centers on Monday. Governor Greg Abbott ordered the state utility commission and the grid operator ERCOT to audit every new project before it connects, with developers required to disclose power and water use, noise and light mitigation, tax breaks taken and who actually owns the site. About 90% of new connection requests to the Texas grid are data centers, and the queue has gone from 233 gigawatts in January to 474 gigawatts, more than five times the state's record peak demand. The most permissive grid in America now comes with a questionnaire (TechCrunch).
Anthropic signed a $10 billion, six-year compute contract with a company founded this year. Volta Infra Holdings, backed by Nvidia, will supply capacity starting with a 133-megawatt site in Norway operated by the crypto miner Bitdeer and filled with Nvidia's Vera Rubin systems (TechCrunch).
░░▒▒▓▓ BUSINESS ▓▓▒▒░░Sell-side analysts think two customers are most of the cloud AI business. Ed Zitron, whose newsletter Where's Your Ed At tracks AI's finances, pulled together the estimates on Tuesday: Barclays' Ross Sandler has Anthropic and OpenAI at 73% of all of Amazon's AI revenues in 2026 and 2027; Wells Fargo's Michael Turrin puts the pair at 70% or more of Microsoft's; UBS's Stephen Ju has Anthropic alone at 21% of Google Cloud revenue this year and 44% next. Sandler's spending lines have Anthropic at $14.1 billion this year and OpenAI at $9 billion. Neither of those two customers is profitable, which makes the demand curve behind several hundred billion dollars of capital spending look narrower than the earnings calls suggest (Where's Your Ed At).
Finance bosses would now rather hire for AI skills than for an MBA. PwC surveyed more than 1,000 US financial-services executives and reported on Monday that 86% think AI training beats an MBA for many new hires and 91% are raising pay for staff who have those skills. Peter Pollini, who runs PwC's financial-services practice, said there is "a clear need for people that understand not just what an agent is, but how do you build them? How do you think about managing them?" Nearly eight in ten expect their workforce to shrink at least 20% over five years (The Hill · Bloomberg, via Claims Journal).
░░▒▒▓▓ GEOPOLITICS ▓▓▒▒░░Ukraine's security service says it hit more than 100 Russian targets in 40 days. The SBU campaign that began on June 26 struck defense plants, air bases in Crimea and Saratov, 14 oil refineries, two cargo ships and two shadow-fleet tankers, destroying a Tu-95MS bomber and two Su-35s, the Institute for the Study of War reported on Tuesday. Russian crude processing averaged 3.6 million barrels a day in July, roughly a third below the seasonal norm and the lowest since May 2002 (ISW).
Washington and Tokyo intervened together in the currency market for the first time since 2011. Japan's finance ministry confirmed the coordinated yen buying after a statement from President Trump on Sunday, following a four-decade low against the dollar. The yen recovered to a nearly three-month high of 155.20. Trump called the help a sign of friendship, a generous term for propping up your largest foreign creditor (Al Jazeera).
Amnesty International says two months of forced conscription and media suppression in Tigray have gone uninvestigated. Human rights organizations have documented conscription campaigns affecting thousands of people, the silencing of independent media and restrictions on freedom of movement by Tigrayan authorities, the group said on Monday, after fighting between Ethiopia's army and Tigrayan forces near the Sudanese border at the start of the month. Regional and international monitoring collapsed after the mandates of the UN International Commission of Human Rights Experts on Ethiopia and the African Commission's inquiry into Tigray were terminated, Amnesty says. "The resumption of violence in Tigray region puts residents at renewed risk of human rights violations, even as communities continue to grapple with the devastating legacy of past atrocities without justice or accountability," said Tigere Chagutah, Amnesty's regional director for East and Southern Africa. The war the November 2022 agreement ended left at least 600,000 dead by the African Union's estimate (Amnesty International · Al Jazeera).
░░▒▒▓▓ ALPS ▓▓▒▒░░Switzerland's federal IT office was breached through its SharePoint servers. The Federal Office of Information Technology, Systems and Telecommunication found on July 31 that credentials for about 200 user and technical accounts had been taken, and has blocked internet access to the affected servers for everyone outside the federal administration while it rebuilds them. The attackers are believed to have used Microsoft SharePoint flaws disclosed in mid-July, which the office was in the middle of patching. It says no confidential or particularly sensitive personal data may be stored on the platform, a rule that reads better before an incident than after one (SWI swissinfo.ch).
░░▒▒▓▓ COMMS DESK ▓▓▒▒░░Data center developers are losing an argument they never turned up for. The POLITICO Poll surveyed 2,061 American adults from July 12 to 15 and found 16% agree that data centers benefit both the area they are built in and the country, while roughly 60% say they help neither or come at someone's expense. The share who believe data centers raise electricity bills went from 43% in January to about 60%; on water depletion it went from 34% to 55%. Asked about candidates, 49% would back one proposing a statewide construction pause and 28% would back one offering tax breaks; a pause is close to what Texas ordered on Monday (INFRA, above). "I don't think the problem is the way that we engage with communities," Kirk Offel, chief executive of the operations firm OVERWATCH Mission Critical, told POLITICO. "I think we just haven't." Takeaway: the developers who spent a decade treating silence as a security posture now have to build a public affairs function in the middle of an election year, and the first number they have to defend is the electricity bill, not the jobs figure (POLITICO, via Yahoo).
░░▒▒▓▓ ONE MORE THING ▓▓▒▒░░A California company called Satyress spent last week introducing Threehalves, a rescue robot with a humanoid torso on four legs, a horned skull with lit eyes, and interchangeable industrial tools including a chainsaw. It is meant for wildfires, toxic sites and collapsed buildings, and it does not yet exist outside development. The company's own documentation is the best part: it says the machine is "more dangerous than it looks," then lists the failure points, including the shared air reservoirs you can pierce to stop it moving, and an option for larger horns so that it cannot fit through a pedestrian door (Newsweek).
░░▒▒▓▓ TRACK OF THE DAY ▓▓▒▒░░Vorsicht — the Uncertain Futures desk