Welcome back to your daily memorandum talking tech, business, AI, markets, and more. 🗞️

In today’s edition, we are tackling the following:

⚡ Musk's shortcut to faster gas turbines brings a new pollution problem.
🗺️ Google Maps renames Lake Ontario as Lake America for U.S. users.
🚔 Public opinion on police license plate cameras flips to opposition.
🎵 Music publishers sue Anthropic over alleged mass piracy of copyrighted works.
🙅 Icelandic voters reject restarting talks to join the European Union.

TECHNOLOGY

• Musk's shortcut to faster gas turbines brings a new pollution problem (TechCrunch)
  ^{_{More: Firstpost, Yahoo!, The Information}}

  • Musk confirmed SpaceX's secret Bastrop, Texas, foundry will cast gas turbine blades and vanes in-house.

  • He claims the move could accelerate the commissioning of natural gas turbines by up to 18 months.

  • Grid power is now a second AI bottleneck; the IEA expects data center use to double by 2030.

• Google Maps renames Lake Ontario as Lake America for U.S. users (AP)
  ^{_{More: PBS, Time Magazine, ABC}}

  • Google updated Maps after Trump's order, showing 'Lake America' in the U.S. and 'Lake Ontario' in Canada.

  • The company says it follows names assigned by the U.S. Geographic Names Information System.

  • Ontario Premier Doug Ford answered with a shoreline billboard reading 'Lake Ontario. Now and forever.'

• NVIDIA's AI edge now extends well beyond the GPU itself (TechCrunch)
  ^{_{More: CryptoRank, Yahoo!}}

  • Investors long assumed NVIDIA's advantage rested on GPUs, where Amazon and Google now build competing chips.

  • Wednesday's earnings shifted that narrative toward the orchestration hardware surrounding the GPU in massive data centers.

  • Running megascale data centers at peak efficiency remains difficult, and gigawatt-scale deployments make it harder.

BUSINESS

• Public opinion on police license plate cameras flips to opposition (Washington Post)
  ^{_{More: WSJ, TechCrunch, Yahoo!}}

  • A YouGov survey of 20k Americans found 46% oppose Flock's cameras while 38% support them.

  • That reverses last year's result, when most respondents said they favored the surveillance technology.

  • Flock runs over 120k license plate readers, and dozens of communities have canceled contracts over abuse reports.

• Music publishers sue Anthropic over alleged mass piracy of copyrighted works (Axios)
  ^{_{More: Mashable, TechCrunch, PCMag}}

  • Sony Music Publishing, Warner Chappell, and others accuse Anthropic of illegally torrenting and scraping copyrighted works.

  • The suit, filed in the Northern District of California, also names co-founders Dario Amodei and Benjamin Mann.

  • Anthropic says it will defend itself; it was ordered to pay $1.5B in the Bartz case.

• Vijay Pande leaves a16z's $4B bio practice for a smaller firm (TechCrunch)
  ^{_{More: CryptoRank, Yahoo!}}

  • Pande built a16z's bio practice to nearly $4B before leaving in June 2025 to co-found VZVC.

  • VZVC makes a handful of concentrated bets each year, has no associates, and relies heavily on AI.

  • He argues biological data can't be scraped, so each biotech builds its own walled-off dataset.

MARKETS

WORLD

• Icelandic voters reject restarting talks to join the European Union (BBC)
  ^{_{More: The Guardian, Al Jazeera, Reuters}}

  • Opponents won 52.8% to 47.2%, ending for now a debate revived more than a decade later.

  • Fishery control weighed against security concerns after Trump's repeated threats to take control of nearby Greenland.

  • The government moved the vote forward after Trump mistakenly named Iceland while discussing Greenland.

• Nepal-Tibet flood death toll passes 900 as rescue efforts intensify (AP)
  ^{_{More: BBC, Washington Post}}

  • Nepal's disaster agency counted 903 deaths and 4,247 missing, including 592 foreigners, as of Monday.

  • Foreign teams are helping search hydroelectric plant tunnels where hundreds of workers are believed trapped.

  • Chinese authorities reported 16 deaths and 546 missing, 261 of them foreigners, including many Nepalis.

• U.S. carrier docks in Pattaya, bringing spending & sex-tourism concerns (Reuters)
  ^{_{More: Straits Times}}

  • The USS Abraham Lincoln docks Wednesday at Laem Chabang after more than 200 consecutive days at sea.

  • Nearly 5k sailors and Marines will come ashore; the mayor estimates 3k baht in daily spending each.

  • Police plan extra patrols and drone monitoring around the beachfront and nightlife district.

FUTURISM

• Caterpillar applies decades of mining automation lessons to its broader AI rollout (TechCrunch)
  ^{_{More: CryptoRank, Yahoo!}}

  • Caterpillar is adapting autonomy tools built for mining for use on construction sites, quarries, and other dynamic job sites.

  • Its Cat AI Assistant lets field technicians use voice commands to troubleshoot machines and identify needed parts.

  • The company draws on roughly 1.6M connected assets and over 16 petabytes of structured data.

• Brave adds email aliases, giving privacy-minded users a reason to switch (The Verge)
  ^{_{More: TechCrunch, Yahoo!}}

  • Brave's new feature lets users sign up for sites with aliases instead of their real addresses.

  • Aliases forward mail to the primary inbox, blocking sites and ad tech from tracking purchases.

  • Brave says it deletes forwarded emails from its servers and encrypts account data at rest.

• Hollywood talent moves into microdramas as short-form phone series take off (TechCrunch)
  ^{_{More: Yahoo!, Reuters}}

  • Microdramas are short scripted series built for phones, with cliffhangers designed to push viewers toward paid episodes.

  • Omdia expects U.S. microdrama revenue to hit $1.5B this year, with TikTok launching its own app.

  • Actors are starring in series, founding companies, and investing as studios seek cheaper, faster content.

• Stay ahead of AI at work*

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CONTENT

• OpenAI's Tara Seshan on the rise of persistent AI coworkers (Lenny's Podcast)

  • Seshan leads product for Codex and ChatGPT Work at OpenAI after six years at Stripe.

  • She describes a shift from 'rowing' to 'steering' as AI increasingly takes over execution work.

  • OpenAI builds for model capabilities two to three months ahead of what currently exists.

• Factory's Eno Reyes on Chinese open models & Anthropic's valuation (20VC)

  • Reyes co-founded Factory, which builds autonomous coding 'Droids' and has raised $220M from Khosla, Sequoia, and NVIDIA.

  • He argues the cheapest AI model rarely produces the cheapest overall system for enterprise engineering teams.

  • The conversation covers model routing commoditization and his view that most neolabs die within 18 months

• NVIDIA's Hugging Face buy & Poolside license signal a major shift (This Week in Startups)

  • NVIDIA agreed to buy Hugging Face for $12.9B, days after licensing Poolside's coding model for over $6B.

  • The plan is unmetered on-prem enterprise compute, pulling customers away from Anthropic and OpenAI's frontier models.

  • The episode also features Halter's solar-powered cattle collars and Hop Aero's autonomous hypersonic cargo rocket.

EXTRAS

• Lambda raises $1B in private debt to buy NVIDIA chips (Bloomberg)
  ^{_{More: TechCrunch, Yahoo!}}

  • Lambda raised $1B in short-dated private debt, arranged by JP Morgan Chase, to lease chips to Microsoft.

  • It recently closed a $926M loan for GB300 GPUs and a $1B credit facility in May.

  • Banks and tech firms have raised over $400B in AI-related debt globally so far in 2026.

• Anthropic paper offers an early look at AI improving itself (Firstpost)
  ^{_{More: TechCrunch, Digital Trends}}

  • An Anthropic fellow’s paper shows automated systems improving model performance across 10 alignment benchmarks without broader degradation.

  • Each system searches the literature, proposes a method, trains for 30 minutes, and then keeps only what works.

  • The work points toward recursive self-improvement, which many see as AI's next major step.

• OpenAI cuts off AI models for SpaceX-owned Cursor as feud escalates (Reuters)
  ^{_{More: Mashable, NY Post}}

  • OpenAI plans to stop supplying models to Cursor, the coding-tool company now owned by Musk's SpaceX.

  • It says it isn't confident SpaceX will use the technology within its terms of service.

  • Anthropic will boost compute support for Claude in Cursor; Musk said he "couldn't care less."

AND MORE

• The Theragun Sense makes everyday muscle recovery surprisingly easy.

• BYD shares fall as fierce Chinese competition cuts into first-half earnings.

• Memorandum: Smarter insights on technology, business, markets, world, and culture.*

• Chinese automakers follow Tesla in betting robots become the next profit engine.

• Meta- & Google-backed Jio Platforms wins regulatory approval for record IPO.

• Grindr wants to be the everything app for gay men.

• Grand Canyon flash flood kills one, leaves several unaccounted for.