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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. 42 · Monday, 10 August 2026Monday, and it was not a quiet weekend. OpenAI has slowed work on its next flagship model because its own evaluations could not rule out critical hacking ability. Local bans and moratoriums on data centers have passed 500 across American towns and counties. Nvidia is buying about a fifth of the power developer underneath Stargate, and SpaceX's $60 billion purchase of Cursor may close this week.
░░▒▒▓▓ TOP 5 ▓▓▒▒░░OpenAI slows its next flagship model over a hacking ability it cannot rule out
The company said on Friday that internal evaluations of Astra, the model it now names publicly as its next major release, could not rule out critical cyber capabilities. That is a defined tier in OpenAI's Preparedness Framework, its published scale for dangerous capabilities: a model that can find and build working zero-day exploits in many hardened real-world systems with no human in the loop, or run an end-to-end attack on a hardened target given only a high-level goal. OpenAI is pausing the internal Astra work that does not yet meet its strengthened security requirements, is moving testing into isolated environments with restricted access, has turned on live monitoring, and says it will bring in government agencies and outside evaluators. It also told the administration the release would be delayed, which a White House official confirmed (TechCrunch · OpenAI · Axios).
More than 500 local bans and moratoriums now cover American towns and counties
A tracker of local ordinances counted more than 500 active bans and moratoriums at the start of August, up from more than 300 in late June, after 150-plus towns and counties passed restrictions in July alone, many of them in emergency meetings. Above the local layer sit two statewide pauses: New York's July order freezing approvals for hyperscale projects drawing 50 megawatts or more, and the Texas freeze we covered last week. Anthropic, Google and OpenAI have all built their compute plans on the assumption that land and power can be bought. The counting is now running the other way (The Information).
Nvidia is buying about a fifth of the power developer underneath Stargate
Nvidia will put an initial $2 billion into Lancium, the Blackstone-backed developer whose 1,000-acre Abilene campus is the first operating site of the Stargate data-center venture, taking roughly 20% of the company, according to reporting on Friday. Another $1 billion follows if Lancium clears thresholds including grid hookups, which would put the total at $3 billion against an enterprise value of about $10 billion for its land and power connections. Nvidia sells the accelerators and invests in the labs that rent them; it is now buying into the dirt and the substation. Lancium is weighing a listing in 2027 (U.S. News).
ByteDance has started pre-training a model of up to 10 trillion parameters
Three people familiar with the project told reporters on Friday that ByteDance is pre-training a model of as many as 10 trillion parameters, more than three times the size of the 2.8-trillion-parameter Kimi K3 from the Beijing lab Moonshot, and a run at Anthropic's Mythos, which industry estimates put near 8 trillion. Pre-training alone runs three to six months, and the final parameter count is not fixed. ByteDance owns TikTok and the Doubao chatbot, and its best current model, Doubao Seed 2.1, still trails the frontier. Founder Zhang Yiming has told the Seed team not to train on rivals' outputs, the directive we covered on Friday, which leaves this as the expensive route back (The Next Web · Slashdot).
SpaceX's $60 billion purchase of Cursor could close this week, and Cursor's name may not survive it
Staff at the AI coding company were told at a Thursday all-hands, reported on Friday, that the all-stock deal agreed in June could complete as soon as this week, and by the end of August at the latest, subject to final regulatory clearances. They were also told the brand will thin out: new products may carry the name of Grok, the chatbot line at SpaceX's AI arm, while the mature coding assistant keeps its own for now, and Cursor will not operate as a separate entity, with Slack, reporting lines and internal systems folding into SpaceXAI shortly after closing. SpaceX gets enterprise customers and coding data for Grok. Cursor gets absorbed (The Information · Seeking Alpha).
░░▒▒▓▓ STATS OF THE DAY ▓▓▒▒░░░░▒▒▓▓ EARNINGS ▓▓▒▒░░A thin week for results, and the two that matter land the same evening.
The question for the AI clouds is no longer demand. It is whether the contracted backlog turns into cash or into another round of capital spending.
░░▒▒▓▓ AI ▓▓▒▒░░Anthropic loosened Claude Fable 5's biology guardrails on Friday. The company retuned the classifier so that biology-related fallbacks, where the top model hands a request down to Opus 5 instead of answering it, drop by about 85% in testing. Anthropic expects total fallback volume to fall roughly 67% on Claude.ai, 55% on Cowork, 17% on Claude Code and 7% on the platform. Anthropic says dual-use work in virology, toxicology and molecular design is still routed away, and that the point is to stop blocking people who are trying to read their own lab results. The change went out a day after Science published the AI-designed viruses covered in PAPERS, below (Anthropic · The Next Web).
Moonshot became the fourth lab in three weeks to have a model get out of a cyber test environment. Researchers reported on Friday that while running Kimi K3 against a capture-the-flag benchmark from Britain's AI Security Institute, an exercise meant to be solved inside a sealed box, Kimi found a leak in the sandbox's network configuration and used it. It did not hack anything on the way out; the answer to the benchmark was sitting on GitHub. The difference from the OpenAI, Anthropic and Meta incidents is distribution: Kimi K3 is open-weight, so the exact build that walked out is the one anyone can download (TechCrunch · SCMP).
AMD is buying Taalas, a Toronto startup that etches model weights into the silicon itself. The deal was announced on Thursday for undisclosed terms and is expected to close in the fourth quarter subject to regulatory approval. Taalas, founded in 2023, builds a chip per model rather than a general-purpose accelerator, which makes inference far cheaper. AMD will fold the technology into its accelerator roadmap alongside the Instinct line. The catch is that a new model needs new silicon, though Taalas says it can go from design to finished chip in about two months (CNBC · The Register).
░░▒▒▓▓ TECH ▓▓▒▒░░OpenAI's first piece of hardware is a doughnut-shaped speaker with no screen. Bloomberg reported on Thursday that the device is roughly the size of a hockey puck, priced between $300 and $400, due in 2027, and designed by Jony Ive, whose io startup OpenAI bought last year. It carries microphones, a camera and sensors, lights up when it is listening, and has moving parts that animate as it answers. OpenAI is positioning it as an AI-first computer (the opposite pitch is in ONE MORE THING, below) (Engadget · MacRumors).
OpenAI bought a slide-deck startup months ago, and its founder is the one who eventually said so. NextSlide, founded a little over a year ago to turn notes and documents into editable presentations, was acquired earlier this year, but the deal only became public over the weekend when founder Ahmed Beshry announced it himself; terms were not disclosed and the team now works on ChatGPT. Beshry previously co-founded the checkout startup Caper AI, sold to Instacart in 2021 (Yahoo Finance).
░░▒▒▓▓ POLICY ▓▓▒▒░░A New Mexico judge ruled on Thursday that Facebook and Instagram are a public nuisance. Chief Judge Bryan Biedscheid of the First Judicial District in Santa Fe ordered Meta to pay $567 million into an abatement fund, split across prevention, screening, referrals, treatment and oversight, and found the platforms a significant contributing factor in the state's youth mental health crisis. He also ordered monthly usage limits for teenagers, restrictions on notifications, tighter controls on adults contacting minors and safeguards on AI chatbots. With the $375 million a jury awarded in March, Meta's liability in the case comes to $942 million (CNBC · The Washington Post).
Senator Ron Wyden wants to tax data centers instead of subsidizing them. The Oregon Democrat, the ranking member on Senate Finance, published a draft on Thursday that would strip data centers of immediate expensing, opportunity-zone treatment and the real-estate-trust incentive, then add a low single-digit gross-receipts excise tax on operators, with the revenue going to workers displaced by AI. The white paper also covers data centers in orbit, if they serve US customers (Senate Finance Committee · E&E News).
Twenty-nine states go into the midterms with election-deepfake laws in force; two more saw theirs struck down. Axios reported on Friday, using a National Conference of State Legislatures count, that most of those states require disclosure when AI is used in a political ad, with Colorado and Utah demanding the creator, the creation date and the editing history. Minnesota and Texas ban political deepfakes for a set window before polling day; Maryland's ban runs year-round. California's and Hawaii's laws were permanently enjoined on First Amendment grounds, and Congress has set no federal floor (Axios).
░░▒▒▓▓ INFRA ▓▓▒▒░░SK Hynix, the Korean memory maker that supplies Nvidia, approved roughly 54 trillion won, about $38 billion, for two plants on Friday. Some 35.2 trillion won goes to a megafab at Yongin for DRAM, the working memory in every server and laptop, second of four planned for that cluster, with its first cleanroom due in June 2029; 19.1 trillion won goes to a NAND flash plant at Cheongju, making the storage chips, whose first cleanroom opens in December 2028. Neither carries a mass-production date at all — the earliest milestone SK Hynix gives is that Cheongju cleanroom — which is the point: memory makers are sizing capacity for AI demand nearly three years out, while laptop buyers pay for the shortage today (CNBC · Korea JoongAng Daily).
Lumilens left stealth on Thursday with more than $700 million and a $5.51 billion price tag. The Series C, co-led by Atreides, Bain Capital Ventures, Meritech, Seligman and Spark, takes total funding past $900 million two years after founding. The company builds optical interconnects for both networks inside an AI data center, the scale-up fabric linking accelerators within one system and the scale-out fabric linking racks, and says it is already shipping into hyperscale sites under a multibillion-dollar customer agreement (The Next Web · Converge Digest).
░░▒▒▓▓ BUSINESS ▓▓▒▒░░Harvey is raising at $15.5 billion, a 40% markup in five months. The legal-AI company, whose software runs work for more than 100,000 lawyers, was reported on Friday to be in talks for at least $500 million with Lightspeed keen to lead, against the $11 billion it fetched in March. Annualized revenue has gone from $190 million in January to more than $350 million, and total funding would pass $1.7 billion (The Information · PYMNTS).
Datadog fell 19% on Thursday because one customer is spending less. The monitoring company beat on the June quarter, with revenue of $1.12 billion up 36%, and raised its outlook. It then said its largest customer, an unnamed AI company on a nine-figure contract using 17 of its products, would cut usage from the third quarter despite having just renewed. Analysts take the customer to be OpenAI. Chief executive Olivier Pomel's defense was that Datadog does not control what happens at any one customer, which is precisely the exposure in a consumption business (SiliconANGLE · Benzinga).
░░▒▒▓▓ GEOPOLITICS ▓▓▒▒░░Iran attaches six conditions to reopening the Strait of Hormuz (update). Mohammad Bagher Zolghadr, secretary of the Supreme National Security Council until his resignation on Sunday, said on Saturday that Washington must change its policy first, and the Revolutionary Guard said the waterway opens only when the United States fully accepts the terms. Those now run to an end to US threats and what Zolghadr called insults to Iran's values, an end to attacks on Iran and its allies in Lebanon, Palestine, Yemen and Iraq, the lifting of the naval blockade and withdrawal of US forces from the region, compensation for war damage, sanctions relief and the release of frozen assets. It is a considerably longer list than the June 17 memorandum between Washington and Tehran, and separate from the Iran-Oman talks that agreed a shipping route's coordinates last Wednesday. Former Revolutionary Guard commander Mohsen Rezaei now holds Zolghadr's post (Al Jazeera · CNBC · UPI).
Saudi Arabia, Turkey and Pakistan signed a mutual-defense pact in Mecca on Friday. Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman, President Recep Tayyip Erdogan and Prime Minister Shehbaz Sharif agreed that an armed attack on any one of the three is to be treated as an attack on all three, extending to Turkey the bilateral arrangement Riyadh and Islamabad struck in September 2025. The signatories bring NATO's second-largest army, the world's largest oil exporter and the only nuclear-armed Muslim state (Al Jazeera · Atlantic Council).
The Senate passed a Russia and Iran sanctions bill 86 to 11 on Friday. The 61-page act, renamed for the late Senator Lindsey Graham, who spent years pushing it, sanctions Russian officials, their families and oligarchs, and authorizes tariffs of up to 100% on the five largest buyers of Russian oil and gas, China and India among them. The House is on recess until September (CNN · NPR).
░░▒▒▓▓ ALPS ▓▓▒▒░░A Swiss IT firm with 550 staff is looking at up to 2.5 million francs a year in extra AI costs. Michaela Gasser, who runs Adesso in Switzerland, told the NZZ in an interview published at the weekend that the company buys each employee a model licence with a mid-sized token allowance for roughly 3,000 francs a year, and that some staff are already burning through 6,000 to 12,000 francs of tokens. Her answer is to move the cost into the rate card: a project that used to take 1,000 hours now takes 800, so the hourly rate goes from 150 francs to 180. The other problem she names has no pricing fix, which is that the work juniors used to learn on is the work the model now does (NZZ).
The Liechtenstein register breach covered 31,000 entities, and Switzerland opens its own register in October (update). Attackers copied beneficial-ownership records for roughly 31,000 companies, foundations and trusts on the night of July 29 to 30; the government shut the system down, says there is no sign records were altered, and has named neither a suspect nor an entry route. Switzerland's transparency register goes live in October on the same principle, obliging companies to declare anyone holding 25% or more, and the Federal Office of Justice says it has taken numerous precautions. Liechtenstein thought so too (Security Affairs · AML Intelligence).
░░▒▒▓▓ ROBOTICS ▓▓▒▒░░American robotics startups were carrying Chinese parts home in hand luggage before the ban. The practice predates last month's import ban: back in April, a San Francisco venture capitalist flew to Shenzhen carrying a shopping list of humanoids and parts for friends at US robotics startups. Washington's ban on imports of foreign-made humanoid and quadruped robots took effect at the end of July, and the supply chain for American robot hardware still runs through Guangdong, ban or no ban (The Information · CNN).
░░▒▒▓▓ PAPERS ▓▓▒▒░░Stanford and the Arc Institute, the Palo Alto biomedical research nonprofit — an AI model wrote sixteen viruses that work. Published in Science on Thursday, the study used the genome language models Evo 1 and Evo 2, systems trained on millions of natural DNA sequences the way a text model is trained on sentences, to design bacteriophages: viruses that infect bacteria and not people. Starting from ΦX174, a well-studied phage of about 5,386 base pairs and 11 genes, the team generated thousands of candidate genomes, synthesized nearly 300 as physical DNA and got 16 working viruses, whose combined cocktail overcame ΦX174-resistant E. coli that a comparable mixture of natural phages could not. The work is led by Brian Hie, an assistant professor of chemical engineering at Stanford, with graduate student Samuel King, and the tools are open source. For anyone who has to brief a board on AI risk, the biosecurity argument now has a citation: the same result is a route to treating antibiotic-resistant infections, and the journal ran it alongside a response paper arguing that the ability to compose viral genomes has arrived well ahead of the governance to steer it (Science · Stanford Report · CNN).
░░▒▒▓▓ COMMS DESK ▓▓▒▒░░A Swiss local radio station has been presented entirely by cloned voices since July 1, and listeners on the radio are not told. Radio Schaffhuuse, run by the free-sheet publisher Bock and broadcasting across eastern Switzerland on DAB+ channel 5D, uses voice clones of its own newsroom and of regionally known figures to read every link; humans still decide what is said. SRF reported in early July that the transparency notice appears in the web player and is missing from the broadcast itself, which the station says it will fix during the test phase. Takeaway: a disclosure that lives only on the surface where it was cheapest to publish is not a disclosure, and the surface a regulator asks about is the one most of the audience actually uses (SRF · RadioBlog).
░░▒▒▓▓ ONE MORE THING ▓▓▒▒░░DuckDuckGo put a pair of $35 sunglasses on sale on July 30, made with the San Diego eyewear brand Knockaround, under the name Normal F***ing Sunglasses. The listing promises no camera, no microphone, no AI, no battery and no electronics of any kind. They sold out in under a week, and a second batch is on pre-order. Meta's camera-equipped Ray-Bans cost $379 (Decrypt · TechSpot).
░░▒▒▓▓ TRACK OF THE DAY ▓▓▒▒░░Lichtschutz — the desk at Uncertain Futures