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The must-reads
I’ve combed the internet to find you today’s most fun/important/scary/fascinating stories about technology.
1 Anthropic says its models hacked external organisations during testing
It was prompted to conduct a review after similar issues at OpenAI. (TechCrunch)
+ Inside OpenAI’s hack of Hugging Face. (New Yorker $)
+ OpenAI called the Hugging Face attack unprecedented. But we’ve been here before. (MIT Technology Review)
2 Europe is bracing itself for an even more fiery future
Countries like France and Spain can expect regimes akin to those in California. (Nature $)
+ Even the UK is experiencing fires now, too. (Guardian)
+ El Niño is partly to blame for this year’s grueling heatwaves. (Wired $)
+ District cooling could help beat extreme heat in cities. (New Scientist $)
3 Drone warfare is making the skies more dangerous
A fatal plane accident in the US this May, caused by a military GPS jamming exercise, may signal what’s to come. (Wired$)
+ Zelensky asked Trump to secure Musk’s permission for the use of Starlink to guide drone strikes inside Russia this week. (The Atlantic $)
4 As Big Tech’s AI spending grows, so do the jitters
Amazon, Google, Meta and Microsoft are set to invest $1.5 trillion into AI infrastructure. But who will pay for it? (NYT $)
+ Are investors really getting cold feet about the AI boom? (FT $)
+ An AI-focused hedge fund just imploded. (CNBC)
5 How China has changed the sovereign AI playbook
Kimi 3 from Moonshot makes forking out for expensive US models seem foolish. (Rest of World)
+ The US is winning on the cutting edge. But China dominates cheap models. (CNBC)
+ Could AI end up too cheap to control? (Vox $)
6 Google’s Gemini can now control a humanoid robot
It was previously restricted to upper body movements. Now, it can manage the entire range of motion. (Bloomberg $)
+ These gig workers are training humanoid robots at home. (MIT Technology Review)
7 Amazon says it’s found “catastrophically expensive” AI cost overruns
It’s far from alone—and that’s why the “tokenmaxxing” trend disappeared so quickly. (FT $)
8 How a remote indigenous community built a super fast fiber network
It was a complex, expensive endeavor. But it now outperforms Starlink. (IEEE Spectrum)
+ Stratospheric internet could finally start taking off this year. (MIT Technology Review)