Technology helped move education, work, and social life online. AI might be the technology that makes showing up in person cool again.

Under appreciated is the physical AI movement in Oakland/East Bay.

Satya Nadella reveals his coding agent pulls every hyperscaler and neoclouds' SEC filings into a dashboard that refreshes every day for real-time ROIC "And this is the other aspect of it, which is the enterprise context combined with the world's context. In fact, I go to the SEC filings of every cloud provider, hyperscaler, each of these neoclouds. It's in real time." "I have a data runner in Fabric that brings all that data, puts it into a semantic model that then gets read by my coding agent and then surfaces it as a dashboard. And every day it's fresh." "So I have the entirety of every SEC filing that goes out there, plus all of my internal analysis constantly coming together, giving me real-time ROIC by layer."

Taiwan is returning to nuclear! Hard to overstate how big this is. Taiwan was the Germany of the Pacific, just more blockadable. Saving its nuclear was a major campaign for the old Environmental Progress crew starting back in 2017, working with brave local leaders Germany next

We’re building Copilot as a new OS for work that spans every model, every form factor, and every task. Today, we’re announcing our biggest update to Copilot to date, bringing four things together: · Autopilot: proactive and long-running agent built for the enterprise · Code: build apps with Copilot, hosted inside your company’s tenant · Home: Chat + Cowork together · Office: now fully embedded in Copilot (and Copilot embedded in Office, of course!) Plus, you can invoke Copilot in Teams, and we’re introducing Today, a proactive experience that surfaces the most important information from across M365 without needing to ask for it. The way we work is changing and so are our workflows. This update brings AI into that flow, from answering a question, to building an app, to getting work done on your behalf.

Citadel is expanding its quantitative investing operation and widening its search for talent to AI labs as hedge funds compete with Silicon Valley for researchers bloomberg.com/news/articles/…

CHART OF THE DAY: Saudi oil exports -- so far in September, highest since the start of the war.

The new Copilot is Microsoft’s bet that the AI race is moving from models to products. It doesn’t need to own the best model if Copilot can choose among them and keep the customer inside Microsoft. The potential secret weapon is Autopilot (what I’ve been calling Muse for Business). It knows your workflows, sits across the apps and data you already use, and keeps working even when you step away. It’s a preview of the battle to come in enterprise AI. OpenAI and Anthropic are racing from models into products. Can they build their own version of this? And can they match Microsoft on the boring-but-critical stuff: permissions, identity, auditability and control, as agents become more autonomous? My full conversation with @satyanadella. We also talk open vs. closed models, US-China Summit, regulation and the infrastructure buildout. 00:00 Microsoft’s new Copilot 02:02 Why not just give us Autopilot? 05:18 Who pays for always-on AI? 08:06 Copilot picks the model 10:27 Chinese models and OpenAI’s lead 12:04 Competing with OpenAI and Anthropic 13:17 US–China AI talks 16:11 Does AI need new rules? 18:05 The data center backlash 20:40 Is AI being overbuilt? 23:44 Keeping humans in control

Colossus 1 is 150k H100, 50k H200 and 30k GB200. Colossus 2 is 110k GB200 and 440k GB300. Another 220k GB300 will be fully operational next week and another 220k in November. If we get lucky, yet another 220k GB300 by late December.

Apropos of Jensen/Ezra, here's a story from The AGI Chronicles about the first time Dario Amodei and Jensen met to discuss Anthropic's compute needs. Didn't go well!

The multistrat deal: Steve Cohen’s Point72 is tripling the time it takes clients to fully exit its hedge fund, joining a cohort of major peers in locking up capital for longer. Rokos and DE Shaw have announced similar plans this year. bloomberg.com/news/articles/…

Morningstar - $ORCL likely to receive credit downgrade to junk on expectations for $25 billion of lost revenue on Stargate delay. “We think the market’s reaction does not fully represent the downside of an actual delay that would hurt Oracle’s long-term revenue guidance. The stock could see another selloff if data center delays start to affect Oracle’s performance at the company level.” global.morningstar.com/en-ca…

ANTHROPIC SEEKS FOUNDER CONTROL AHEAD OF IPO Anthropic is asking shareholders to approve a new structure that would give CEO Dario Amodei and the company’s six other co-founders a combined 50.1% of voting power on most corporate matters, per The Information. The founders would hold the special voting shares through a separate LLC, allowing them to retain control despite relatively small economic stakes. Dario Amodei currently owns about 2%. One major exception: Anthropic’s Long-Term Benefit Trust would continue to control the appointment of most board members, while the founders’ board seats would increase from 2 to 3. Employees are also expected to receive a special class of stock that could serve as tie-breaker votes on certain issues. Anthropic, valued at $965B in May, is reportedly targeting at least a $1.5T valuation in an IPO now expected around late October or November. Source: The Information

It’s official: @IridiumComm shareholders have voted and approved the acquisition by Rocket Lab ✅ By joining forces, we’ll be creating a vertically-integrated space powerhouse that designs, builds, launches, and operates its own constellations to bring critical communications capability to millions of users worldwide. Full details and next steps: bit.ly/3T53qq1

RedBird Capital Signs Deal to Acquire Majority Stake in Puck, Valuing Media-Biz Outfit at $250 Million variety.com/2026/biz/news/re…

(The death of the Saudi oil export machine was greatly exaggerated.) Saudi Arabia has sold almost 100 million barrels of oil to Asian buyers since the middle of last week, according to traders familiar with the matter, helping to avert a supply crunch. bloomberg.com/news/articles/…

Phil Knight, the billionaire founder of Nike, and his wife are committing $1 billion to the University of Oregon, one of the largest donations ever to a public university bloomberg.com/news/articles/…

From @TheAthleticFC: England captain Harry Kane has raised the possibility that he could combine becoming a specialist NFL kicker with finishing his football career in Major League Soccer, playing the two sports simultaneously. nyti.ms/4yfM2y2

NEW @semafor: Paramount executives have discussed an equity injection from @elonmusk, as the company looks to diversify its cap table and shore up its financial picture. $PSKY $WBD semafor.com/article/09/23/20…

🚨 FIRST REPORTED AUTONOMOUS AI C2 MALWARE IMPLANT DISCOVERED Cisco Talos has disclosed CLOSEDQUORUM, what researchers believe is the first publicly documented Windows malware implant that delegates tactical command-and-control decisions directly to multiple commercial AI models. • The malware can query DeepSeek, Qwen, Mistral and Google Gemini • Models independently vote on what the malware should do next • The winning decision is automatically executed without continued human operator commands • Capabilities include LSASS credential dumping, browser-password theft and crypto-wallet collection • It supports process injection, persistence, ETW telemetry suppression and sandbox-evasion techniques • Stolen information can be encrypted and exfiltrated through Discord webhooks • Instead of relying solely on traditional attacker-controlled C2 logic, the implant uses legitimate LLM-provider endpoints as part of its decision architecture • Talos linked development artifacts to an individual associated with criminal-forum carding activity dating back to 2025 ⚠️ Important: Talos has NOT confirmed deployment of CLOSEDQUORUM in the wild. The publicly analyzed build contains placeholder API keys and a dummy webhook, so this should currently be treated as emerging offensive tooling rather than an active malware campaign. ⚠️ Analyst Note: The architectural shift is significant: AI is no longer simply helping an attacker write malware — the models themselves are being placed inside the malware's operational decision loop. Original Cisco Talos research: blog.talosintelligence.com/t… #AI #Malware #C2 #ThreatIntel #CyberSecurity #AgenticAI #DDW #DarkWeb

Here's a new one for VC, PE, family offices & angel investors. DARPA released a super interesting RFI last week looking for private investors to help commercialize tech coming out of DARPA-funded R&D. It's part of DARPA Venture Horizons, a new initiative to connect private capital directly with DARPA PMs, R&D, and technologies, with the goal of helping breakthrough tech scale & transition into defense and dual-use markets. This is a pretty unique opportunity for investors already deploying capital into hard tech, defense tech, deep tech, advanced manufacturing, AI, biotech, autonomy, space, cyber & other emerging tech. It's not a typical government RFI. DARPA is specifically calling for: - VC firms - PE firms - Family offices - Angel investors They're open to investors panning early-stage equity, growth equity, licensing, venture debt & private credit. They're looking for more than $$. DAPRA wants investors with a demonstrated ability to commercialize tech, basically asking: can you identify important tech, finance it, help commercialize it, help operators scale it & ultimately help move more DARPA innovation out of R&D and into the real world? Types of questions they are asking thru the RFI: - Who are you, how much capital do you manage, and what stages of companies can you invest in? - Which parts of DARPA's tech portfolio match your investment thesis? - Do you already understand defense and the Dept of War arena? - Have you previously turned government funded R&D into actual companies, products, or markets? - Are you actively deploying $$ into the tech DARPA works on today? - Can you bring capital that DARPA can trust? - Can you help companies after you write the check? - Will your sr investors personally engage with DARPA? Responses due October 9 at 5pm