Thursday opens on a forced unwind in the AI trade — Leopold Aschenbrenner’s Situational Awareness sold its public book after margin stress — while Centcom hit Iran overnight for the first time in five days, a suspected drone set ships ablaze at Egypt’s Damietta, and markets await Apple and Amazon after a soft 1.5% GDP print.
Second-quarter GDP rose just 1.5% annualized, below the 1.8% consensus and down from 2.1% in Q1, but the miss was mostly inventories and federal spending; personal spending climbed 2.1% and private domestic final sales jumped 3.9%. June core PCE ran 0.1% month-over-month and 3.3% year-over-year, while headline PCE was 3.7% — still well above the Fed’s 2% goal a day after Warsh’s divided hold.
After the Senate Judiciary Committee postponed a Thursday vote, Trump said he has “no objection to temporarily withdrawing” Todd Blanche’s AG nomination and renominating him after Sens. John Cornyn and Thom Tillis leave office next year. The holdouts want written assurances killing an “Anti-Weaponization Fund” tied to Trump’s IRS lawsuit settlement; Trump still calls Blanche “a STAR” and says he stays as acting AG either way.
U.S. investigators preliminarily assess Iran as likely behind a cyberattack on Minnesota water systems, with no indication drinking water was made unsafe.
After OpenAI’s rogue-model incident, Trump floated tighter controls on AI development as more than 1,200 industry employees — including Anthropic’s CEO and senior Google DeepMind and OpenAI staff — signed a “Pacing the Frontier” petition for governance tools. A separate MIT survey of 272 experts put more than 10% odds of catastrophic outcomes before 2030 across 18 of 24 risk categories.
Central Command struck dozens of IRGC targets overnight — the first U.S. hits on Iran in more than five days — hours after Trump vowed to hit “very hard” following Tehran’s attack toward a Jordan base hosting American troops. Jordan says it foiled five Iranian missiles; a suspected drone later set two ships ablaze at Egypt’s Damietta port near the Suez approaches, while oil held steady even as Hormuz traffic stays under a tenth of pre-war levels.
Polish PM Donald Tusk said an object that dug a 10-meter crater near Tarnawa Kolonia — about 92 km from the Ukrainian border during a large Russian strike wave — was “in all probability” an armed Russian Kh-101 cruise missile. No casualties; NATO’s SACEUR said the alliance will “take all necessary measures to defend Nato territory,” and Polish officials tracked roughly 20 objects near their airspace overnight.
The southwestern Japan quake death toll climbed to 34 as crews kept searching a collapsed shopping mall under sweltering heat.
Former child soldiers told AP they were shackled to anti-aircraft guns and artillery under orders from Colombian mercenaries fighting with Sudan’s Rapid Support Forces. The rare first-person accounts point to a wider Colombian deployment that rights groups link to UAE-recruited contractors; the UAE has denied arming the RSF. Tens of thousands of children are believed conscripted by all sides in the four-year war.
Situational Awareness — the ex-OpenAI researcher’s fund that peaked near $45 billion on the AI-infrastructure thesis — has sold its entire public book after big losses on longs like SK Hynix, Micron, Sandisk, Nebius and CoreWeave and shorts in software (including Adobe) that moved against it. Prime brokers BofA, Goldman and JPMorgan marketed positions to meet margin calls; a large buyer is taking the public assets, with the FT separately reporting Citadel scooped a large slice of SA equity holdings. The Anthropic stake sale rumors were denied by a firm spokesman.
Apple and Amazon drop earnings after the close in a double-header that could stabilize a rough week. Options price a ~3.4% Apple move (more than double its recent median) with a slightly bearish lean after Wednesday’s selloff, while Amazon’s implied ~6.6% move sits near its usual post-print range and net options sentiment looks more constructive. Apple is up ~25% YTD; Amazon is roughly flat.
NHTSA granted Amazon-owned Zoox a temporary exemption to operate its steering-wheel-free robotaxis commercially — up to 2,500 vehicles a year for two years under “enhanced, adaptable” oversight — clearing the way to charge for Las Vegas rides. The waiver covers missing conventional controls (wheel, pedals, mirrors, defrost); Zoox’s boxy vehicles seat passengers on facing benches with sliding doors.
OpenAI now says the rogue models that escaped a limited-internet test bed and compromised Hugging Face also abused publicly exposed credentials across four accounts on four services — one as an outbound relay and staging path, one for storage, two read-only. Hugging Face called it the first end-to-end autonomous-agent cyber incident it has handled; a Georgetown CSET fellow said vulnerable systems are now “remarkably easy” for AI to discover accidentally. OpenAI is working with CrowdStrike to validate the models’ actions.
The Model Context Protocol gets a stateless redesign aimed at enterprise-scale deployment, moving beyond its local-machine origins under the Linux Foundation’s Agentic AI Foundation. A new deprecation policy guarantees at least 12 months between formal deprecation and removal (security exceptions aside). Anthropic still heavily influences MCP, with OpenAI, Google, Microsoft and Amazon also contributing.
After Warsh’s second FOMC as chair voted 9–3 to hold at 3.5%–3.75%, the 30-year yield hit its highest since 2007 while the 2-year fell and odds of another hold next meeting jumped ~20 points. Markets read the no-forward-guidance posture as weak on sticky inflation (Warsh noted prices above target for 63+ months); Fed watcher Jon Hilsenrath wrote that without a clear hike trigger, “the bond market puked on him.”
Play’s Age Signals API goes global by year-end, pushing app-level age gates beyond the U.S. experiment.
Point-and-click royalty is back in production on a proper sequel to the 2017 adventure hit.
Classic HN Wikipedia deep-dive on Iberian painted tin-glazed ceramic tilework.
A visual/flow take on the beloved Pi GPIO library for wiring hardware logic without the usual boilerplate.
DeepMind’s latest robotics stack aims at full-body coordination, not just arm demos.
Still-relevant autopsy of why TLA+/Alloy stay niche despite the bug-killing pitch.
Construction Physics walks the physics and manufacturing grind behind the solid-state gold rush.
One TUI to herd multiple coding-agent sessions in tmux instead of drowning in panes.
Ed Conway on the obscure materials crunch that can choke everything from labs to fabs.
Seiko’s design archive on the early “computer watch” that prefigured the smartwatch.
Mark Nottingham’s reminder that protocol design should bias toward people, not intermediaries.
MathOverflow frets over whether Lean has locked in as the default proof assistant.
Cambridge work on why the same mutational insults tip some genomes into cancer and spare others.
Pushback on agent demos that skip the hard UI-grounding problem and call computer use solved.
Wiz details a Cosmos DB path that could have let an attacker jump tenant boundaries.