The most mind blowing stat we've seen so far is this: "As of June 30, 2026, we had raised an aggregate of $141.1 billion of capital and had cash and cash equivalents of $112.4 billion and short-term investments of $19.3 billion." That means to date, they have burned 9.7b, they are growing at a rapid pace, and are profitable on an operating income basis as of the June quarter! This is likely the most efficient scaling of a business in the history of capitalism. x.com/AnthropicAI/status/211…

Mark Zuckerberg says Alexandr Wang is the sharpest entrepreneur of his generation: "Alex is the guy. He's the fucking guy." "Alex and I had spent a bunch of time talking over the years, and maybe once every few months or something we'd talk. And I was always just very impressed by how he thought about things strategically." "I kind of had this view of like, all right, currently he's doing this very operational data business, but it always felt to me like he was the sharpest entrepreneur of his generation of the ones who I had a chance to meet." "I think maybe when we got started, a lot of people were like, okay, like how is this going to work? It's like the social media guy is working with the data guy. Like, are we going to build a frontier lab here or what?" "My really strong conviction is because I talked to all the leaders of all the labs, all the heads of research, all this stuff, and I was like, no, Alex is the guy. Like he's the fucking guy." "We need this kind of strategic clarity that he has around the different ways that we want to approach this, the kind of extreme focus on talent density, on the clarity of communicating the different vision which we kind of fashioned together over this period." "And a bunch of things that I think were kind of extreme but have basically worked, like having this very flat culture was something that you were kind of really obsessed with."

Looks like today may be a record day for token volume % of open models on Vercel AI Gateway: 🟦 Open 78.4% 🟨 Closed 21.6% While spend 💲 usually tells a different story, #3 and #4 today are Moonshot AI & DeepSeek. Adding Z⁠.ai, their combined spend surpasses OpenAI (#2). (Do note that's the spend for inference of the model across providers (mostly in the US), not revenue going directly to the open weight labs.)

Last month I wrote about how we can build a positive and safe future for everyone: meta.com/thefutureisforevery… Every lab has the responsibility and incentive to move at the pace required to train its models safely, and the ability to take its own actions to ensure that happens. The reality is: - People won't want to use agents that are misaligned with them and that don't do what they ask, so labs have a strong natural incentive to make their models more aligned. There is a lot of debate about slowing progress on capabilities until alignment catches up. My view is that trust and alignment are quickly becoming the most important capabilities that will differentiate agents and models. Any lab that doesn't focus on alignment will fall behind. - Labs face significant liability if their models cause harm, so they have a strong incentive to prevent this as well. Meta delayed shipping Muse for several months to focus on safety and security. We didn't call for everyone else to do this before we would. We just did it as part of our day-to-day work because it was clearly the right thing for people and for us. I'm proud of the security foundations we've built. - Engaging independent evaluators and advisors is industry best practice. MSL already does this today in several areas because it helps produce better work. Other labs can just do this too. In general, it would be helpful for there to be a larger and more diverse ecosystem of evaluators. - Committing the significant majority of compute towards serving people rather than racing towards recursive self-improvement is one of the best ways to ensure we develop this technology safely. Meta has made this commitment and other labs can do this as well. I believe the key to building a positive future for everyone is maintaining the right balance of power. This is within our power to do.

Right. Dario was already claiming that GPT2 was too dangerous to open source back in 2019. I made fun of them then. Everyone should make fun of them now.

This is GPT-6 Astra. Anything you can do on a computer, Astra can do for you. Fast.

$MRNA is up over 70% after becoming one of the first companies ever to deliver a positive Phase 3 result for a personalized cancer vaccine. Treatment is built around each patient’s own tumor and when combined with KEYTRUDA it reduced the risk of melanoma returning or spreading.

Introducing Hy3D WorldClaw——an agentic workflow that generates large scale 3D open worlds from text prompts.🚀🚀🚀 Not video, Not Gaussian Splatting, Every scene generated by WorldClaw is freely explorable and built entirely from editable, game-ready 3D assets with high-quality geometry and textures. Project Page: tencent-hunyuan.github.io/Hu…

DeepSeek Harness beta invites are going out. Looks like the public release isn't far off.

Bad News: DeepSeek API prices are going up significantly. platform.deepseek.com/usage

🚨 DeepSeek Code Is Coming > DeepSeek is building a dedicated AI coding agent powered by its new Harness framework > The project is designed for autonomous software engineering, including planning, tool use, and code execution > Harness will provide long-running agent workflows with memory and repository awareness > Recent V4-Flash benchmarks were already evaluated using DeepSeek Harness, signaling it’s a core part of DeepSeek’s roadmap > The company is positioning it as a direct competitor to Claude Code and OpenAI Codex > Closed beta testing is expected to begin soon Can DeepSeek Code become the biggest open-source coding agent? 👀

IRAN: NO HORMUZ REOPENING DEAL Iran says reports that it agreed to reopen the Strait of Hormuz are false. A source cited by Fars News says no deal has been accepted. The report adds the strait will remain closed while the US continues what Iran calls "hostile actions." Ships may only pass via Iran's designated route and with permission from the IRGC Navy.

🦔AI companies are bulk-buying rare books, scanning them through high-speed machines that cut the spines off, and shredding the originals. A service called ISBNdb facilitates orders of up to a million books and keeps buyers anonymous. Pre-2022 books are premium because they're free of AI-generated text. A federal judge ruled the practice is fair use because eliminating the original means only one copy exists at a time. Anthropic hired the former head of Google Books partnerships to obtain "all the books in the world." My Take This got to me. A bookseller told 404 Media that rare books with almost no surviving copies are being fed into this pipeline. Books that survived wars, fires, and centuries of handling are being shredded so an AI can learn to write a better marketing email. ISBNdb's website literally says "'AI company destroys two million books' is not a headline that generates sympathy," and they still built an entire business around making it happen quietly. They offer NDAs as a feature. They coach clients to call it "digital preservation." I've covered AI companies scraping the internet, torrenting libraries, and stealing music. This is worse because it's irreversible. You can re-upload a website. You can reprint a bestseller. You can't replace the last three copies of an 18th-century botanical text once someone shreds them for training data. And the judge said it's legal. So it's going to accelerate. "We shred rare books and offer NDAs so nobody finds out" is a legitimate business model in 2026. What a timeline. Hedgie🤗