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The Download: NASA's new space telescope and OpenAI's autonomous hacker
Plus: France has become the first EU country to ban social media for under-15s. Shape-shifting mirrors on NASA's new space telescope could unveil Jupiters like our own When NASA's Nancy Grace Roman Space Telescope launches, as early as the end of next month, it will attempt one of astronomy's most precise disappearing acts to date. It will carry the first space-bound "active" coronagraph, an instrument that effectively erases most of the light from a star during photography. The technology will allow astronomers to take the first pictures of planets orbiting other stars that are similar to those in our solar system. Ultimately, it could pave the way for a future mission that could snap the first photos of Earth-like worlds. "I hope it's remembered for it being that critical stepping stone for finding Earth 2.0," says Brandon Creager, the instrument's lead mechanical engineer.
Trump vows Iran will 'pay' for killing US soldiers
Trump vows Iran will'pay' for killing US soldiers US President Donald Trump says Iran will "pay" for killing United States soldiers after multiple service members were killed in action over the weekend. "Every time Iran kills an American Soldier they will pay for that killing many times over!" Trump said on Monday on social media. "This directive has been passed on to Secretary of War, Pete Hegseth, Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, Daniel Caine, and every Leader in the Military. The US military also identified two soldiers who were killed in Jordan on Friday while defending against Iranian ballistic missile and drone attacks. Seventeen US troops have been killed since the start of the five-month US-Israel war on Iran. The renewed exchanges of fire, now in their second week, have seen the US target Iranian bridges and electrical facilities as the countries appear to inch closer to a return to full-scale war.
The Download: AI hiring biases, and weather data sabotage
Plus: SpaceX is negotiating to sell the Pentagon AI compute. The next time you apply for a job, AI may screen your résumé before any human sees it. But there's good reason to question whether AI will judge you fairly. We already know that LLMs pick up human biases from their training data. New research suggests they can also develop their own biases from experience--and stereotype job applicants more than humans do. As AI companies race to build agentic models that remember the tiniest details about users, they may be handing them ammunition for forming those biases.
The Download: Claude's inner workings, and the future of world models
Plus: New York has become the first state to enact a data center moratorium. When Anthropic announced last week that it had found a new window into its models' "internal thoughts" as they reason through answers, there was one colleague I had to talk to: senior editor Will Douglas Heaven. Aside from having a PhD in computer science, Will has spent a lot of time digging into what we can say about how AI models work. I spoke with him about what we should take from Anthropic's new (and typically quirky) research. Here's what he had to say . How will AI understand the real world?
The Download: Claude's inner workings and OpenAI's "super app"
Plus: OpenAI has unveiled its long-awaited super app. The AI firm Anthropic has got the clearest glimpse yet at what's really going on inside large language models as they answer questions or carry out tasks. What they found ranges from the mundane to the unnerving. Researchers at the company built a tool called the Jacobian lens (or J-lens) and used it to uncover a hidden area, which they named the J-space, inside its flagship LLM, Claude. The J-space contains words related to the response a model is working on but may not ultimately produce. If Claude were a person (which it is not), you might say these hidden words reveal what's on its mind before it actually speaks.
The Download: a nuclear landmark, and China eyes Nvidia chips
Plus: NATO is building a network to stop Russian attackers in their tracks. I was really looking forward to July 4, and not just because I love a poolside barbecue. This year the American holiday also marked a big symbolic deadline for US nuclear power. Last year the Trump administration set a goal to see three new microreactors achieve criticality, a technical milestone establishing that a reactor can sustain a chain reaction, by the nation's 250th birthday. And just in time, not just three, but four reactors did so. But achieving criticality doesn't mean a reactor is ready to provide electricity for the grid (or at all, for that matter).
The Download: your stake in OpenAI, and the Treasury's AI warning
Plus: Samsung profits have jumped 1,800% on booming AI chip sales. Sam Altman's proposal that Americans should share in the wealth created by AI is back in the spotlight, with reports that he is discussing giving the US government a 5% stake in OpenAI. At the company's current valuation, that stake would be worth roughly $320 per American household. The idea is meant to address concerns that AI companies are benefiting from human-generated work without compensating creators, while also easing fears that AI will cause a collapse of the labor market by providing a safety net. The details, however, remain unclear. Indeed, the offer may be more powerful as a political narrative than as a policy plan.
The Download: metric weaknesses and AI elephant warnings
Plus: The US has allowed Anthropic to release Mythos 5 to "trusted" orgs. There are plenty of useful things a metric can reveal. There are even more that it can obscure or corrupt. Like a lot of people bitten by the self-quantifying bug, I started gathering personal data to pursue a nebulous collection of goals and desires. I wanted to feel better physically and emotionally, get outside more, and bring order to the messiness and uncertainty of my daily existence. But external metrics and data can never capture what's truly important.
The Download: record-breaking subsea tunnels and flexible data centers
Plus: SK Hynix has overtaken Samsung as South Korea's most valuable company. I'm under the iconic fjords of Norway to visit what will soon become the world's longest and deepest subsea road tunnel--an exceptional engineering feat that will carry drivers deep beneath the North Sea. I'm here to understand how you make a 16.6-mile highway that sits 1,280 feet below the sea at its deepest point. And also--at a time when it can feel hard to get anything done--to reassure myself that ambitious engineering is still possible. That we can still make things. Step inside Norway's Rogfast tunnel and see how engineers are making it happen .