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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. 50 · Thursday, 20 August 2026Fifty editions in — thank you for reading!
Anthropic out-sold OpenAI in a quarter for the first time; OpenAI's numbers landed on Tuesday, completing the ledger we opened on Monday. Pennsylvania's governor now wants data-center developers to bring their own power and stop signing NDAs with his agencies. Google took an option on $12.2 billion of stock in its chip supplier Marvell. And Moderna had the best day in its history, on a cancer result that has nothing to do with any of it.
░░▒▒▓▓ TOP 5 ▓▓▒▒░░Anthropic out-sold OpenAI last quarter for the first time, and OpenAI's loss ran to nearly twice its revenue (update)
OpenAI told investors its second-quarter revenue rose 18% to $6.7 billion, from $5.7 billion in the first quarter, while its operating loss, stock compensation included, widened to $12.3 billion from $9.3 billion. Anthropic more than doubled revenue over the same three months to $11.6 billion and turned a small operating profit. We ran Anthropic's side of that quarter on Monday, when the figure it was giving prospective investors was more than $11.5 billion; what arrives now is the other half of the comparison. Both companies are walking toward public markets with these numbers in the file (WSJ · SiliconANGLE).
Google can buy $12.2 billion of Marvell stock if it buys enough Marvell chips
Marvell, the American chip designer that builds custom silicon to order, disclosed on Wednesday that on Tuesday it had issued Google a warrant for up to 58,970,907 shares at $206.58 apiece, worth about $12.2 billion if taken in full and enough to make Google its fifth-largest holder. Roughly 1.36 million of those shares vest in equal quarterly installments over the first year. The rest vest only as Google hits purchase targets running out to fiscal 2033, under a commercial agreement signed on July 29 covering inference accelerators, storage and network controllers and near-memory compute attached to Google's tensor processing units. Nvidia has spent the summer guaranteeing the debt its customers raise to buy its chips. Marvell is running that arrangement in reverse, paying the customer in its own equity to keep the orders coming (Marvell 8-K · Yahoo Finance).
Apple settles with Brussels by cutting the fees it charges European developers
Apple opened the new European terms for signature on Tuesday; they take effect on October 1. Apple drops the per-install Core Technology Fee and replaces it with a 5% Core Technology Commission on digital purchases, and removes the initial acquisition fee and the store services fee for apps distributed outside the App Store entirely. Apps sold through the store using Apple's own in-app purchase pay 26%, falling to 15% for small businesses and for the video and mini-app partner programs, and developers may now put an alternative payment option next to Apple's rather than choosing between them. Apple frames the changes as the product of "close collaboration" with the European Commission, resolving its disagreements over business terms and alternative distribution (MacRumors · Bloomberg).
Unitree closed 460% up on its first day in Shanghai (update)
The Hangzhou maker of humanoid and quadruped robots raised 6.1 billion yuan, about $904 million, priced its shares at 150.8 yuan and watched them open 629% up at 1,100 yuan before closing 460% up, at a market value of 342 billion yuan. Dollar conversions in the coverage ranged from roughly $48 billion to $66 billion depending on the moment and the rate used. It is the first humanoid maker to list on the mainland, and the retail scramble we covered earlier this month finished with nearly 9.8 million accounts chasing 9.7 million shares in the online tranche. DeepSeek put in about 140.8 million yuan. AgiBot, Deep Robotics and LimX Dynamics are all expected to follow (Bloomberg · SCMP).
A private Chinese rocket company landed an orbital-class booster, on the vehicle's second flight ever
LandSpace launched its ZhuQue-3 from the Dongfeng commercial spaceport on Wednesday morning local time, separated the stages at about 137 seconds, put the Honghu 03 satellite in orbit and set the first stage down on legs at a pad in Minqin County, Gansu. That makes LandSpace the fourth entity anywhere to propulsively land an orbital-class booster for reuse, after SpaceX, Blue Origin and China's state launch corporation, and the first Chinese commercial firm to do it. The booster is stainless steel and burns methane and liquid oxygen, which leaves less soot in the engines and so less work between flights. The December landing attempt, on the rocket's first flight, ended in a crash (Spaceflight Now · Space.com).
░░▒▒▓▓ STATS OF THE DAY ▓▓▒▒░░░░▒▒▓▓ AI ▓▓▒▒░░OpenAI halved the price of its best model in the two places everyone measures market share. GPT-5.6 Sol went to half price on OpenRouter on Monday and Vercel's AI Gateway on Tuesday, a discount that needs no code change and, on Vercel, runs to September 18, following cuts already applied to the cheaper Luna and Terra tiers. OpenRouter and Vercel handle a rounding error of total token volume, which is the point: they are the two public datasets analysts use to estimate who is winning among developers, and the semiconductor research firm SemiAnalysis reads the promotion as buying a share-of-usage chart. The Information reports Luna is now the top closed model on OpenRouter, drawing more use than Anthropic's Opus 5 and Sonnet 5 together (The Information · OpenRouter).
Zero data retention stays for the API customers who qualify, and OpenAI is building a way to police them anyway. The company confirmed on Wednesday that Zero Data Retention stays available on frontier models for eligible API customers, meaning prompts and responses are not kept after a request runs, and previewed a system it calls Private Safety Processing that looks for abuse patterns across related sessions without any employee seeing the underlying content. A technical white paper and a wider rollout are promised for September. The competitive edge is unsubtle: Anthropic requires 30 days of retention on its most capable models, which is exactly the clause a security-conscious buyer reads first (OpenAI · Axios).
░░▒▒▓▓ TECH ▓▓▒▒░░Mojo, the programming language built to make AI chips easier to program, went fully open source on Tuesday. Modular released the compiler and toolchain under Apache 2.0 with LLVM exceptions after four years of running an open community around a closed compiler, a week after the language reached version 1.0. The company is now owned by Qualcomm, which closed its roughly $3.9 billion acquisition in late July, and the announcement came at Modular's own ModCon conference in San Francisco. Outside contributions to the compiler are still not accepted; Modular says it plans to start taking them by the end of the year, which makes this open source you can read rather than open source you can join (Modular · Phoronix).
WIRED got the code behind Flock's next-generation police tool, and it goes well past license plates. Flock Safety sells automated license-plate-reading camera networks to American police departments, and its cameras have already drawn objections from civil-liberties groups. WIRED reconstructed the newer AI system, called OS Investigate and already deployed by some departments, from more than 450 files served by Flock's own login pages, 69 prewritten prompts included: a system that can identify drivers, track them by movement pattern, surface their associates and search for people by physical description. A former police officer who reviewed the prompts for WIRED is among the objectors; Flock says it is testing the product with a small group of law-enforcement partners and that it is still in development. For anyone drafting a surveillance policy, the useful detail is that the capability arrived in the field before the debate about it did (WIRED).
░░▒▒▓▓ POLICY ▓▓▒▒░░Pennsylvania's governor tells data-center developers to bring their own power, and bars his agencies from signing NDAs about them. Josh Shapiro signed an executive order on Tuesday directing the state environmental department not to issue a data-center permit until the developer has won local approval, and to review applications as they arrive only for developers who sign legally binding commitments on energy, environmental standards, local hiring and community benefits; the rest wait for local sign-off before review even begins. The order strips data centers out of Pennsylvania's fast-track permitting lane, requires developers to supply their own generation and pay the costs of connecting to the grid, and prohibits any agency under the governor's authority from entering a nondisclosure agreement about a project. This is the same governor who stood up fourteen months ago to announce Amazon's Pennsylvania buildout. A National Republican Senatorial Committee memo obtained by Axios this week warns that voter hostility to data centers now threatens a Republican Senate seat in Ohio, and asks the industry to start explaining who benefits and who pays (Pennsylvania Governor's Office · Axios · WHYY).
Australia's online regulator has Roblox on a court-enforceable promise about children. eSafety said its own testing found adults could still send connection requests to young Australian children without a parent's consent, that children and adults could talk on forums outside games unsupervised, and that children's connections and profile details were visible to other users, all despite the safeguards the platform introduced last year. Roblox has three months to fix it, has agreed to bring in an outside auditor and to tell complainants what happened to their reports, and if it slips the regulator can go to the Federal Court. An enforceable undertaking with an audit attached is a sharper instrument than a fine after the fact (ABC News · The Star).
A US congressional advisory body says China's real AI advantage is its data. The US-China Economic and Security Review Commission wrote in a report released on Tuesday that Beijing treats data as a strategic national asset, commercializing and curating it to raise productivity and to feed intelligence and military work. Its sharper argument is about embodied AI: China's systematic collection of enterprise and industrial data from manufacturing and robotics gives its models a pool of real-world material that American firms cannot easily buy, and that may compound even where US models keep the benchmark lead. The commission also warns Washington is on course to cede the setting of global data standards (Reuters, via Yahoo · SCMP).
░░▒▒▓▓ BUSINESS ▓▓▒▒░░Etched doubled its valuation to $21 billion in a month, and the investor leading the round is the customer running the first rack. The San Jose chip startup announced $700 million on Tuesday at a $21 billion post-money valuation led by Jane Street, four weeks after a $300 million round at $10.3 billion and eight months after being worth $5 billion. The trading firm tested the hardware, bought it, put the first shipped rack into production in its own data center and then led the financing, in that order. Etched says it now holds more than $1 billion in customer contracts. The company that named itself for etching specific models into silicon has since dropped that plan in favor of systems that run whatever the frontier ships (TechCrunch · Etched).
German shoppers cost Klarna a fifth of its market value on Tuesday. The Swedish buy-now-pay-later lender cut its full-year guidance, putting gross merchandise volume at $149 billion to $151 billion against $155 billion previously and revenue at $4.08 billion to $4.16 billion against $4.34 billion, blaming weaker volumes in Germany, its largest market by transaction volume, plus about $600 million of adverse currency translation. The quarter itself was fine: revenue up 27% to $1.04 billion, volume up 18% to $36.6 billion, and a $9 million net profit where a year ago there was a $53 million loss. The shares fell more than 20% anyway, and Klarna said its long-serving finance and marketing chiefs will both leave early next year (The Information · Yahoo Finance).
Women took 26% of new US hires into AI roles last year, against about half of hires everywhere else. LinkedIn published the numbers on Tuesday, drawing hiring shares from member profiles and pay from job listings. The gap widens as the money does: 82% of new hires into member of technical staff roles, the title AI labs use for work sitting between research and engineering, went to men, and the median listed pay is $223,000. Data annotation, at a median $51,000, is split roughly evenly. These are still a small slice of the labor market, which is the qualification worth keeping in any slide that uses this chart (CBS News · Axios).
░░▒▒▓▓ GEOPOLITICS ▓▓▒▒░░Evergrande's founder was sentenced to life in prison today. The Shenzhen Intermediate People's Court convicted Hui Ka Yan of large-scale fraud and ordered all his personal property confiscated. He had pleaded guilty in April to eight charges including misuse of funds, fundraising fraud and illegally taking public deposits. The court fined Evergrande 8.82 billion yuan and its main subsidiary Hengda Real Estate 7 billion yuan, and sentenced five other senior executives to terms of six to eighteen years. The company carried more than $300 billion of liabilities before it was ordered to liquidate (SCMP · Bloomberg).
Washington says Israel's strike in Syria came close to a shooting incident with Turkey. Tom Barrack, the US ambassador to Turkey and special envoy for Syria, said Turkish forces had no advance warning that Israeli aircraft were heading for the Abu al-Duhur airbase near Idlib on Tuesday, and could reasonably have scrambled their own jets believing they were the target. He called the strikes an unnecessary escalation and said the United States is in quiet talks about relaunching a deconfliction cell between Israel and Syria that Turkey could be invited to join, directly or indirectly. Israel's position, stated that evening, is that Damascus was on the verge of breaking their security status quo by letting Turkish troops deploy at the base, which its statement places near Aleppo (Jerusalem Post · Jerusalem Post, PMO statement · CBS News).
The Ford-class carrier island may move 140 feet, because the President prefers the Second World War look. The US Navy has begun an operational and technical review of whether to move the island superstructure on future Ford-class aircraft carriers about 140 feet forward, The War Zone reported on Tuesday. The engineering case for the current position is that it leaves more parking near the catapults, shortens launch times and reduces turbulence in the landing lane. The case for moving it is that President Trump would prefer the ships to look more like the carriers of the Second World War. The Navy studied this once before, during his first term, and a former senior official told the Washington Post the answer came back that the cost and the delay would be extraordinary. A 100,000-ton warship is, it turns out, a styling exercise (The War Zone · The Hill).
░░▒▒▓▓ ALPS ▓▓▒▒░░A Russian logistics firm has asked the Kremlin to put five of Nestlé's Russian subsidiaries under temporary state administration. KS Logistika filed the request, Kommersant reported on Monday, 17 August, arguing that the Vevey company is not expanding its production capacity in Russia, where it runs six factories, and does not export what it makes there. The petition sits with the office of Deputy Prime Minister Dmitry Patrushev, with an answer expected by the end of the year. Nestlé says the Russian government has not contacted it and that its offices and factories are operating normally. The precedent everyone in Vevey is looking at is Danone, whose Russian assets went into temporary management in 2023 and whose eventual exit deal confirmed a €1.2 billion loss (SWI swissinfo · Just Food).
░░▒▒▓▓ RESEARCH ▓▓▒▒░░Merck and Moderna's personalized cancer vaccine worked in a late-stage trial, and Moderna had the best day in its history. Merck and Moderna said on Wednesday that the Phase 3 INTerpath-001 trial of intismeran autogene, an mRNA therapy built individually for each patient from mutations found in their own tumor, met its primary endpoint of recurrence-free survival and its key secondary endpoint of distant metastasis-free survival when added to Merck's Keytruda. The trial enrolled 1,137 patients whose stage IIB to IV melanoma had been surgically removed. It is the first positive late-stage result for any individualized neoantigen therapy. Moderna's shares rose 177%, its largest one-day gain ever, which cost short sellers $5.5 billion. Merck rose 12.6%. Effect sizes and survival data go to an upcoming international medical meeting, not yet named, and to regulators (Merck · Bloomberg).
░░▒▒▓▓ ROBOTICS ▓▓▒▒░░A robot shown one video of a task will attempt it, improvise around missing tools, and get it right about three times in five. Generalist AI, a Cambridge, Massachusetts startup founded by Pete Florence, Andrew Barry and Andy Zeng, all previously at Google DeepMind or Boston Dynamics, showed WIRED arms that stack cups, empty a purse and sweep blocks after watching a short instructional clip rather than thousands of labeled examples. Take the brush away and the machine flicks the block with the dustpan instead; hand it a banana and it sweeps with that. The number that matters is 59%, the average success rate on a task it has been shown, against the upwards-of-99% it would ideally hit. The company trains on data gathered by people wearing camera-equipped gripper gloves, and built its models from scratch, with no open language model underneath (Generalist · WIRED).
░░▒▒▓▓ PAPERS ▓▓▒▒░░Microsoft — you cannot stop people stripping the safety off an open-weight model, so poison the answers they get afterward. Azure CTO Mark Russinovich's paper, posted in August, starts from an uncomfortable fact: abliteration, the technique that projects the refusal direction out of a model's weights, takes minutes, and no known release-time defense prevents it durably. His proposal, decoy hardening, concedes the strip and attacks the payoff. The model is trained inside a simulation of the attack so that once its refusals are removed, its answers to hazardous operational requests come out confident, fluent and wrong in the parts that matter, while its behavior in the normal state is held to the original. Across seven models from five families, 9B to 122B parameters, the six that passed a pre-registered efficacy test produced decoys in 51% to 90% of attacked-state answers. The limits are stated plainly, and they are the part a communications team needs: the defense does nothing against in-context jailbreaks, and applies only to first releases. It changes what an open-weight safety claim can honestly say, from the guardrails hold to removing them buys you an unreliable answer (arXiv).
Berkeley, MIT and collaborators — a 753-billion-parameter open model, served from one workstation. FreeToken, posted to arXiv in August, is a serving system that treats a personal machine as a single elastic pool rather than a small GPU, continuously remapping which expert sub-networks live where and how work splits between CPU and GPU as the job changes. Mixture-of-experts models, the architecture behind most large open releases, run only a few specialist sub-networks per token, which is what makes this possible at all. The authors report support for more than 20 such models and real coding and tool-using agents across hardware from an 8GB laptop GPU up to a single workstation serving GLM-5.2 at 753 billion parameters. The author list runs through Ion Stoica, Matei Zaharia, Kurt Keutzer and Song Han. For anyone whose data-residency argument rests on frontier-scale models needing a data center, that argument is getting weaker by the month (arXiv).
░░▒▒▓▓ REPORTS ▓▓▒▒░░Crunchbase News — VCs Pour Billions Into Physical AI As The Next Wave Of AI Investing Takes Shape. The August tally puts venture funding into robotics, autonomous vehicles, aerospace, drones, industrial automation and sensors at $47.4 billion across 521 deals in the first half of 2026, close to four times the $12 billion those companies raised across 470 deals in the second half of last year. The deal count barely moved, so the money is arriving in much larger checks, Waymo's $16 billion round chief among them. The comparison that lands hardest: the three years from 2022 to 2024 put $41.9 billion into the sector in total, several billion less than the last six months alone (Crunchbase News).
░░▒▒▓▓ COMMS DESK ▓▓▒▒░░A working journalist automated his own morgue. In his annual productivity column on Tuesday, Platformer's Casey Newton described building a Markdown wiki that a model writes and maintains for him: seeded with his own archive back to 2020, fed each morning by a web clipper, and now running to more than 1,440 pages that assemble timelines and link back to original sources. He calls it easily the most useful of everything he tried this year for the deskbound parts of the job. His Meta page alone runs past 12,000 words. He is candid that it needs constant maintenance and that he opens the originals before saying anything out loud. The shape matters more than the tooling: the asset is a running, sourced institutional memory of a beat, which is precisely what most communications teams keep in individual heads and lose when those people leave (Platformer).
░░▒▒▓▓ TRACK OF THE DAY ▓▓▒▒░░Touchdown — from the Uncertain Futures desk, fifty down