I'd Rather Risk Cancer Than See AI Move This Fast I'd benefit if AI cured cancer. And I still want AI progress to slow down. On a fall afternoon 15 years ago, I met an idealistic researcher outside a Stanford coffee shop to discuss our shared dream: using AI to detect cancer. He had wiry hair, a penchant for talking with his hands, and a reputation for brilliance. He worked at a research lab that developed early screens for cancer; I, at 20, had just learned that I carried a mutation that conferred a very high risk of breast, ovarian, and other cancers.

Plus: Amazon workers who backed data center limits face potential termination. A startup claims it broke through a bottleneck that's holding back LLMs AI startup Subquadratic came out of stealth last month with a huge claim: it had solved a mathematical bottleneck that had held back large language models for almost a decade. The purported breakthrough comes from slashing the number of computations transformers need to carry out to generate answers. The result is a faster and cheaper LLM that uses far less energy than any other model on the market. Many experts remained skeptical--but Subquadratic has started to share the receipts. They suggest that their approach might be worth paying attention to.

Artificial intelligence has become the latest issue to drive a wedge between the United States and its allies after US President Donald Trump ordered tech giant Anthropic to cut off foreign access to its powerful Mythos 5 and Claude Fable 5 AI models, citing national security concerns. The US issued the unprecedented order for all foreign nationals in and outside the US last week, promoting Anthropic to take the two AI models completely offline to ensure compliance. The two public versions of the model, Mythos 5 and Fable 5, were due to be released in early June. Anthropic said the US government did not provide a reason for the order, but that it was its "understanding" that the Trump administration believed it had become aware of a method of "jailbreaking" Fable 5. The Trump administration's ban immediately sent shockwaves across Europe, which is heavily dependent on US-developed AI.

Anthropic still can't distribute Claude Mythos or Fable 5 after running afoul of the Trump administration. But no one can say exactly what the company did wrong. It's been nearly a week since the Trump administration sent an export control directive to Anthropic, forcing one of the world's leading AI labs to pull its most advanced models offline. After days of negotiations between Anthropic and the White House, the two still remain at odds about how to bring Claude Mythos and Fable 5 back. Well, it depends whom you ask.

On today's, we dive into the dysfunction in Meta's newly formed AI unit and why it's been driving already-low employee morale even further into the ground. This week on, our hosts discuss the meltdown that has been recently unfolding at Meta and what it says about the company's relentless ambitions in the AI race. They also dive into the leaked messages and names of an invite-only group cofounded by billionaire tech founder Peter Thiel, and how Sam Bankman-Fried is now actively seeking a pardon from the Trump administration. Plus, they share their impressions on SpaceX acquiring Cursor and the latest on the negotiations between Anthropic and the government. 'Tell Him He's a Piece of Shit': Meta's New AI Unit Is a Total Mess Write to us at [email protected] . You can always listen to this week's podcast through the audio player on this page, but if you want to subscribe for free to get every episode, here's how: If you're on an iPhone or iPad, open the app called Podcasts, or just tap this link . Before we start, two quick things. If you've been enjoying listening to the show, we would appreciate it if you took a second to rate it in your podcast app of choice. It really helps us reach more people. And second, if you have any questions related to tech, privacy, or politics that you would like me, Zoë, and Leah to take on, now is the time to submit them to [email protected] . It doesn't matter how big or how small, we want to hear from you and get you answers. Today on the show, we're talking about the dysfunction in Meta's newly formed AI unit and why it's been driving employee morale, which was already very, very low, even further into the ground. We'll also break down the recent online leak that shed light on Peter Thiel's invite-only group, Dialog, more than 200 names of high profile people in government, tech, academia, beyond are listed in the documents as members and guests of this secretive society, not to mention a look at what they talk about behind closed doors.

Silicon Valley's Elite Financial Advisers Say This Era of Wealth Is Different The rich are getting richer. Here's what wealth advisers are telling their tech clients right now. If anyone in tech has already started their Hot IPO Summer, it's Silicon Valley's elite wealth advisers. Two private wealth managers who work with high-net-worth techies told me they've seen an uptick in activity from their client base, some of whom are expecting a big liquidity event this year. We're talking, of course, about the employees and early investors at SpaceX, OpenAI, and Anthropic who are coming into mind-boggling riches.

Plus: The Pentagon says it used Grok in strikes on Iran. For decades, physicists have hunted for weakly interacting massive particles (WIMPs), a leading candidate for dark matter. But their search has run into a new problem: neutrinos. These tiny particles from the sun and other stars can create a "neutrino fog" that drowns out any signal of dark matter. Hitting the neutrino fog does not, however, mean an end to the search. Researchers just have to shift the focus of their hunt.

Days before Anthropic took its most advanced AI models offline, the White House ordered the company to revoke SK Telecom's access to Claude Mythos over claims of alleged ties to China. The Trump administration's move to impose export controls on Anthropic's most powerful AI technology followed a spat over the company granting South Korean telecom giant SK Telecom access to its Claude Mythos model, according to people familiar with the matter. US officials were concerned about what they alleged were SK Telecom's ties to China, those people said. Those concerns appear to have compounded when Amazon later flagged vulnerabilities it identified in Fable 5 to the White House. Fable 5 is a highly safeguarded version of Mythos that Anthropic released to the public on June 9.

Anthropic's design assistant now works better with its coding agent Anthropic's design assistant now works better with its coding agent Exactly two months after releasing a preview of Claude Design to subscribers, Anthropic has begun rolling out a major update for its design assistant that brings better integration with its other apps. To start, Claude Design can now begin working from a local codebase, meaning any assets it generates will contain elements that already exist in your front-facing products. From there, the app can hand off a design to Claude Code, allowing the coding agent to program an interface without the need to start from scratch. You also don't need to provide it with screenshots to give it an idea of your intent. And if you want to skip Claude Design, you can do that too, with Anthropic adding the option to create and edit designs directly from Claude Code. Outside of more robust integration with Anthropic's other apps, today's update brings with it quality of life improvements, starting with a more flexible import tool that can build entire design systems from GitHub and raw files.

From Amazon's to Netflix's upcoming, the recent spate of hetero hockey romances shows Hollywood learned the wrong lessons from The streaming industry has gotten a lot of flak over the past few years, but there is one thing that Hollywood studios are undeniably good at: recycling the same idea, over and over and over again until the world ends (or until everyone finally decides they're sick of, whichever comes first). This tried-and-true formula is now playing out in real time with Prime Video's and Netflix's upcoming series Icebreaker shows that, like are hockey-themed romances about polar opposites who just can't seem to keep their hands off each other. But there's one key difference: and are about heterosexual romances, while is about a secret gay relationship. And considering how much queerness played a role in's explosive popularity, it seems like the clamor for straight horny hockey content is another example of Hollywood just not getting the message. The forthcoming which Netflix announced this week, is about a figure skater who falls in love with a hockey player after they're forced to practice on the same rink.