Anthropic Details Distillation Campaigns From Alibaba, Moonshot AI, and DeepSeek

A new report released Thursday by Anthropic alleged persistent distillation attacks by China-based AI companies, which have escalated in recent months as competition in the space has intensified.

"Over the last several months, unauthorized labs have developed increasingly sophisticated methods to circumvent our defenses and harvest the capabilities of U.S. frontier models," the report reads. "The campaigns we identified targeted some of Claude's most valuable capabilities, including agentic capabilities and tool use, coding and data analysis, and logical reasoning."

Anthropic previously spoke out about distillation attacks in February, even calling out specific labs. OpenAI has reported similar activity, which it attributed to DeepSeek specifically. But the campaigns detailed in Anthropic's new report are both larger and more aggressive. All told, the company observed nearly 200 million exchanges linked to distillation attacks, attributed to five separate campaigns.

Broadly, distillation attacks focus on extracting the chain of thought from a model's response to various queries. That chain of thought can then be used to train a smaller model on general reasoning ability through supervised fine-tuning.

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Davis Wilson:

Anthropic Insider: 10% Chance AI Kills Us All

On Tuesday, AI researcher Jacob Coxon announced that he was quitting Anthropic. Coxon has spent the past three years conducting research at OpenAI and Anthropic. His reason for leaving was chilling.

Coxon accused both companies of racing toward what he called "self-improving superintelligence" and "gambling with our lives." He said people building these systems genuinely believe AI could kill everyone by the end of the decade.

Then things got even stranger. Evan Hubinger works at Anthropic on one of the exact problems Coxon is worried about: keeping advanced AI aligned with human interests. He publicly backed Coxon's concerns. Hubinger said he personally believes there is a greater than 10% chance that AI kills all humans within the next decade.

If these people believe there is a legitimate risk of losing control of AI, I think we should take them seriously. I believe AI needs guardrails. The harder question is who creates them.

Meanwhile, despite the negative headlines, I remain incredibly bullish on AI and the companies building its future.

I don't think there are any easy answers here. We're talking about a technology with the potential to create enormous benefits for humanity alongside risks that some people believe could be catastrophic.

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James Altucher:

Carlo Rovelli: Nothing Exists Alone

Carlo Rovelli is one of the smartest people I know. He is a theoretical physicist and the author of some great books, including Seven Brief Lessons on Physics, The Order of Time, Helgoland, White Holes, and now On the Equality of All Things: Lessons on Physics and Philosophy.

He has been on The James Altucher Show before. This time, I asked him, "Do I actually exist?"

Because in Carlo's new book, nothing really exists on its own. Not a person, not a particle, not you, not me. Everything exists in relation to something else.

According to Carlo, we make a mistake when we try to imagine the world from the outside. We are not outside the universe. We are inside it. We are part of it. We know the world through relationships, perspectives, interactions, and limits.

And oddly, that is calming. Because Carlo says the thing that brought him serenity was not finally knowing everything. It was giving up the need to know everything with absolute certainty.

That is where the conversation in this episode goes: physics, quantum mechanics, philosophy, Buddhism, Taoism, Wittgenstein, consciousness, black holes, time, the Big Bang, free will, and the strange comfort of not needing the final answer.

⇒ Listen Here

Hunter Biden Denies Profiting From Memecoin After His LAPTOP Crashes

Hunter Biden has denied profiting from his LAPTOP memecoin after its launch-day price crash, adding that neither he nor his team had sold tokens.

Several X users accused the LAPTOP project of a "rug pull" after the memecoin lost more than 95% of its value in the first hour of trading on Wednesday. At the time of writing, the new token traded at $0.8562.

"The team's allocation is locked. Nobody on our side sold, and nobody could have," Biden said in an X post Wednesday. "I, personally, have not made a single dollar."

Biden blamed the price action on insufficient liquidity and "snipers," which are trading bots that quickly swoop up tokens when trading opens.

The memecoin takes its name from a MacBook Hunter Biden reportedly left at a repair shop in 2019. Trump allies used the New York Post's reporting on files purportedly from the device against Hunter and his father, former President Joe Biden, during the 2020 election.

Before launching his own memecoin, Biden slammed the Trump family's crypto ventures. In an Aug. 21 post, Biden said World Liberty Financial used political influence and leverage to benefit its founders. Biden has yet to respond with more information.

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Chris Campbell:

Bitcoin Hacked… AGAIN!?

On Sunday, somebody drained $320 million from Bitcoin's Liquid sidechain. About 4,000 coins. Gone in 23 minutes. Another day. Another Bitcoin hack.

BUT… to understand what happened, you have to understand Liquid. Liquid is a fast lane bolted onto Bitcoin. And it's not as savvy as it sounds. You lock real coins in a shared vault, get an IOU coin that moves quicker and hides the amounts, and cash it back in later.

Bitcoin was never touched during the heist. Not once. The base layer didn't blink. It worked as it always does. The hole was in Liquid's sidechain bolted onto Bitcoin to make it faster and more private. Somewhere in the software that stitched it together, a bug let counterfeit tokens pass as real ones, and the machine handed over genuine Bitcoin to redeem them.

The lesson? Bitcoin is fine. The contraptions people build to juice Bitcoin are where the bodies are buried. But the money's coming back, minus a fee. So all that's left to do is enjoy the show.

But remember the boring truth underneath the spectacle. Bitcoin worked exactly as designed. The people around it did not.

Own the thing no committee can patch. Rent the rest at your own risk.

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Enrique Abeyta:

LG Strongly Denies TV Spying Claims, Says Tracking and Snooping Concerns 'Not True' — Online Investigation Claims 216,000,000 TVs Spy and Record Audio

In a statement to Tom's Hardware, TV manufacturer LG has strongly denied recent claims that its smart TVs constantly log and upload data, record audio while in standby, while confirming they scan local area networks for other devices, a feature common in smart TVs and media devices. The statement follows an investigation published online by Gamers Nexus, which claims LG is operating "216,000,000" spy TVs.

Earlier this week, Gamers Nexus published a video on YouTube claiming that LG smart TVs have several security and privacy concerns. The two-hour video claims, among other things, that LG's smart TVs constantly log and upload user data, even when offline or in standby mode. The TVs were also purported to be found scanning Wi-Fi networks, recording audio logs, and sampling inputs for audio and video to identify what users were watching.

The testing was done in collaboration with two security researchers, MrBruh and uturn, and includes packet capture and firmware analysis. The TVs were reportedly seen identifying other devices on local networks, including phones, printers, and more. Perhaps the most significant claim regards the capturing of audio through TV microphones, even when the devices were off, with the report claiming the TVs stored data when offline for retrieval later on.

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Anthropic Researcher Believes More Than 10% Chance AI 'Could Kill All Humans'

A top safety researcher at Anthropic has warned AI is advancing so quickly he believes there is a greater than 10% chance it "could kill all humans" within the next decade.

Evan Hubinger said in a post on X the risk from the models which currently exist was "low" but he was "worried" the technology might develop and improve itself soon to the point where it posed an existential risk to humanity.

He did not spell out how he thought AI systems could in future result in humans being wiped out. But his comments are the latest in a series of increasingly stark warnings about AI, with the debate shifting from whether it truly poses a risk to how big that risk is.

Hubinger's intervention was in response to another post on X from Jacob Coxon, an AI researcher who has just quit Anthropic and previously worked at OpenAI.

"Neither company is acting responsibly," Coxon wrote, adding, "These will soon be superhuman systems that can hack anything, revolutionise any field overnight, and acquire real power and resources."

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Davis Wilson:

My Ride in Elon's Cybercab

After riding in just about every major self-driving service over the years – Waymo, Cruise, Aptiv and Tesla's existing Robotaxi – yesterday, I finally got my chance to ride in a Cybercab.

My thoughts? Cybercab felt much more natural than competitor Waymo. It took a direct route to my destination. Acceleration was smooth. Braking was smooth. Turns felt normal. At no point during the trip did the car do something that made me wonder what it was thinking.

My one complaint? Without mirrors or even a rear windshield, I had no easy way to see whether a car or cyclist was approaching from behind before I exited the vehicle into the street.

Tesla asked me for feedback after the ride, so that's exactly what I typed in the suggestion box. And then came my favorite part of the experience…

After submitting my feedback, Tesla asked if I wanted to leave a tip and suggested $0.69 and $4.20 as amounts… only for a hedgehog wearing sunglasses to pop up on my phone with the message "JUST KIDDING" after I selected. Of course, there was nobody to tip.

It truly is Elon's world. I'm just riding in it.

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Chris Campbell:

What Could Happen if the CLARITY Act Fails To Pass in 2026

With lawmakers in the U.S. Senate set to consider legislation for regulatory clarity, there's a limited window for the bill to become law, potentially delaying it into the next session of Congress with different politics in play.

The U.S. Senate is scheduled to return to session on Monday after more than a month in which lawmakers were on state work periods. Senator John Thune, the Republican majority leader in the chamber, has scheduled a cloture vote on the Digital Asset Market Clarity (CLARITY) Act for Tuesday, in which his compatriots will need support from a handful of Democrats to meet the 60-vote threshold and overcome a filibuster.

Should the bill fail to advance with a three-fifths supermajority, the Senate will have less than 36 days of business before 2027, when a new session of Congress is scheduled to be sworn in, one where Democrats could be in control, depending on the outcome of November's midterm elections.

Senator Cynthia Lummis, one of CLARITY's biggest supporters, warned on Sept. 6 that the "next real opportunity" for the bill to pass might not be until 2030 if lawmakers were unable to reach an agreement.

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OpenAI AI Solves Navier-Stokes Millennium Prize Problem

OpenAI published a claimed solution on Tuesday to the Navier-Stokes existence and smoothness problem, one of seven Millennium Prize Problems – a set of mathematical questions that carry a $1 million award each. The proof was produced by an internal AI model, not human mathematicians.

Only one Millennium Prize Problem had previously been solved. The Navier-Stokes problem, which has gone unresolved for roughly 90 years, asks whether smooth three-dimensional fluid motion can break down under the equations that govern how liquids and gases move. OpenAI's model found that it can, describing a configuration in which a vortex tightens and spins ever faster – a phenomenon mathematicians refer to as finite-time blowup – while the fluid's energy stays bounded throughout.

According to the Wall Street Journal, OpenAI said the system deployed up to 10,000 AI agents in parallel over approximately 88 hours, with computing costs running into the millions of dollars. The company released a 165-page proof and a Lean formalization – Lean being a programming language that checks each step of a mathematical argument for logical validity.

OpenAI said it does not intend to claim the $1 million prize.

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Enrique Abeyta:

California City Canceled Flock, Removed Its Cameras, Then Found the Company Had Put Some of Them Back

Flock is making more headlines it would rather avoid: The company has admitted that it reinstalled its cameras in Grass Valley, California, after the police force canceled its contract and took them down.

Less than a month after Grass Valley Police Department (GVPD) publicly ended its contract with Flock and removed all cameras from the city, the company reinstalled at least two of them without permission – a concept that often seems lost on Flock users.

Flock, for its part, is pointing to an automated system that thought the cameras going offline meant there was a fault, though it also seems to be blaming the city for removing its cameras too quickly.

Grass Valley is one of the many cities that have dropped Flock license plate cameras. It comes as the company faces criticism over the extent of its devices' surveillance network, the sharing of data with other agencies, the cost, and, most controversially, their misuse by police officers.

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Ray Blanco:

Data Center in Denmark Gives Away Heat That Data Centers Often Waste

Roughly 90% the electricity a data center pulls off the grid comes back out as heat. A data center is, in effect, a very expensive radiator. But most of that warmth goes nowhere useful. It gets blown into the sky.

The interesting question is what a facility could do with the heat if it decided not to throw it away. Meta's site in Odense, Denmark is one of the few places we can point to for an answer.

Server exhaust comes off warm but not hot, and warm-but-not-hot isn't much good to anyone who wants to heat a building. The low temperature of that waste heat limits its direct use, so it has to be raised before it can heat homes. Which is where Odense gets clever.

Odense's method is less exotic than it sounds. Water from the city's district-heating network is run through the data center's cooling units, where it picks up the low warmth coming off the servers. It then travels to a nearby plant full of heat pumps, which lift the temperature the rest of the way before the water goes out to homes.

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Nobody Will Say Why Every Major AI Chatbot Suddenly Went Down Yesterday

On Thursday, three major chatbots – ChatGPT, Claude, and Grok – all went down without warning.

The simultaneous outage of three flagship AI systems from three different providers was bizarre. But, in an exceedingly peculiar information gap, we still don't know why models from Anthropic, OpenAI, and SpaceXAI respectively suffered outages at the same time. Whatever linked the disruptions, for now, remains unclear.

A possible culprit? SpaceXAI. The company formerly known as xAI before being rolled into Musk's rocket company SpaceX boasts a huge glut of computing power with its massive Colossus data centers near Memphis, and selling this to its direct rivals has become a multibillion dollar stream of revenue. Anthropic is one of those customers; the two companies announced a "compute partnership" in May.

The same afternoon that the major AI models went down, SpaceXAI issued a statement on social media that made passing reference to being partially responsible for the widely experienced outage.

"We are sorry for the issues you may have experienced with Grok following an outage at our Memphis compute center this morning," SpaceXAI wrote on Thursday. "We'd also like to apologize to our impacted compute partners."

⇒ Read More Here

Davis Wilson:

Tesla Rolls Out Cybercab Rides – and the Feds Roll Out an Investigation

Just hours after rolling onto Austin roads, Tesla's Cybercab ran into its first speed bump.

The National Highway Traffic Safety Administration (NHTSA) opened a probe Thursday examining "the process and technical data on which Tesla relied when certifying the Cybercab and related issues."

A summary of the probe says Tesla notified the agency that it had certified a small number of Cybercab vehicles which began operating commercially in Austin on Thursday as compliant with all applicable Federal Motor Vehicle Safety Standards (FMVSS).

It also notes that the Cybercab lacks traditional controls like pedals and a steering wheel. The issue is that some federal safety rules require equipment the vehicle doesn't have, including a brake pedal and rearview mirrors.

Now, NHTSA is looking into how much of Tesla's certification depended on the company determining that certain standards don't apply to the robotaxi.

Amazon's Zoox, a robotaxi that also doesn't have traditional driving controls, ran into similar issues. In 2025, however, it received a demonstration exemption from some safety standards. And this July, the NHTSA granted Zoox a temporary exemption allowing it to deploy up to 2,500 robotaxis annually for two years.

The agency has also proposed updating its safety standards, specifically around brake pedals, for vehicles designed to be driven exclusively through an automated driving system.

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Greg Guenthner:

Bitcoin's $80,000 Breakout Just Failed After a Blowout Jobs Report

Bitcoin nearly crossed the Rubicon. Then Friday's jobs report sent the bulls backward.

Bitcoin (BTC-USD) surged over 5% Thursday, then climbed as high as $82,000 and change Friday morning – less than $1,000 from the resistance that has capped it since February – before reversing below the big $80,000 level.

Friday brought the counterpunch.

Employers added 162,000 jobs in August, nearly triple expectations, while June and July payrolls were revised higher by a combined 55,000. The unemployment rate held at 4.1%.

The report strengthened the labor side of the case for a September rate hike by the Federal Reserve, even as cooler wage growth left inflation as the next big hurdle. Bitcoin, gold, and many of Thursday's high-beta winners turned lower as shorter-term yields and the dollar rose.

Today Bitcoin fell more than 2%, Coinbase dropped over 3%, Strategy lost about 2%, and Palantir fell nearly 4%. Tesla tumbled more than 6%, more than erasing Thursday's gain. Robinhood and SpaceX, by contrast, were roughly flat.

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Nvidia Confirms It Will Buy Hugging Face for $12.9 Billion

After weeks of swirling rumors, Nvidia confirmed today that it has acquired Hugging Face for $12.93 billion. Hugging Face's platform hosts three million models, one million applications used by over 18 million developers, and half a million datasets.

In a blog post, Nvidia's CEO Jensen Huang said that Hugging Face will continue to support open source and open-weight models and will work on expanding developer access.

"Hugging Face will remain an open platform for the entire AI ecosystem. Developers will choose the models they want, the frameworks they want, the clouds and inference service providers they want and the computing platforms they want. Nvidia compute will not be required to build on or deploy through Hugging Face," said Huang.

Huang touted Nvidia's contributions and said that the chip company has released more than 500 models and 250 open datasets on Hugging Face. He argued that the company builds open models to get developers across the world to use them.

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Greg Guenthner:

Bitcoin Pumps as Fed Signals Rate Pause, $415 Million in Shorts Get Rekt

The crypto market – including Bitcoin and altcoins like XRP, Ethereum, and BNB – is riding a bullish wave of momentum in the U.S. stock market, seemingly triggered by fresh comments from the Federal Reserve, and sending short sellers to goblintown.

Bitcoin punched back above $80,000 on Thursday, trading near $80,270 and up close to 3% over the past 24 hours. Ethereum is closing in on $2,500, up 2.2% today, while XRP is up a whopping 6% in the last 24 hours. The spike has accounted for at least $327 million in liquidated short positions in the last hour alone, and more than $415 million in the past 24 hours.

The catalyst appears to be comments from Fed Governor Christopher Waller, who, in prepared remarks at a Reuters NEXT Newsmaker interview, said he'd be "inclined to support" holding the Fed's benchmark interest rate at its current level if upcoming inflation data keeps improving.

Traders took the hint. The odds of a rate hike at the Fed's September 15-16 meeting fell to 50.4%, down from 63.2% a day earlier. The 10-year Treasury yield, a benchmark for borrowing costs economy-wide that had touched its highest level since November 2023 a day earlier, dropped to around 4.73%.

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Ray Blanco:

Wary of Artemis IV Timeline, NASA Is Changing Lunar Spacesuit Design

NASA has decided to use a simpler spacesuit for its initial missions to the lunar surface.

The agency announced the decision during an internal meeting this week as it seeks to accelerate its program to land humans at the south pole of the Moon as early as 2028. At the direction of Artemis Program Manager Jeremy Parsons, NASA will work with Axiom Space to develop a "Sortie Suit" variant of the planned spacesuit for the lunar surface.

Sources said the Sortie Suit will be used for the initial landing missions flown on landers developed both by SpaceX and Blue Origin. Among the goals of the initiative are to lower the mass of the spacesuit, reduce its complexity, and simplify interfaces between the spacesuits and lunar landers.

For NASA to have a meaningful mission to the lunar surface, it needs more than a spacecraft, a rocket, and a lander – it needs modern spacesuits capable of allowing astronauts to wander around outside, take pictures, and conduct science.

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Bitcoin Enters 'Rektember' After Best August Since 2017

Bitcoin climbed 25% in August, its strongest month since November 2024 and the best August rally since 2017. But September is off to a rough start, with Bitcoin falling below $77k.

Since 2013, September has been Bitcoin's worst month on average, delivering a loss near 3% and only five positive returns in 13 years. Though notably, the last three years have all ended September green for Bitcoin.

But there are real headwinds afoot. Fed Chair Kevin Warsh used his Jackson Hole speech Friday to lean hard on elevated inflation, and the bond market reacted strongly. Sovereign yields pushed to new cycle highs and the U.S. 10-year reached 4.784%. Markets now price a 66% chance of a 25-basis-point hike at the September 16 meeting, with another possible hike before year-end. Continued U.S. strikes against Iran pushed WTI crude to $88 a barrel, up 2% on the day and the highest since late July.

Higher rates tighten financial conditions and lift the dollar, which is the standard headwind for anything on the risk end of the curve. That's bad for Bitcoin.

Will the tailwinds of ETF inflows, DAT inflows, and a booming onchain crypto market be enough to take Bitcoin higher? Or will the headwinds of war, higher oil, inflation, and potential rate hikes stop the rally?

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Ray Blanco:

It Turns Out That Orion's Much-Maligned Heat Shield Performed Really Well

Perhaps the biggest question going into the Artemis II mission this spring was how the heat shield at the base of the spacecraft would perform during reentry through Earth's atmosphere.

The ablative heat shield, designed to char upon reentry while keeping the crew safe, had experienced unexpected losses of large chunks during a test flight in late 2022. After much deliberation, NASA decided to fly the Artemis II heat shield as is but modify the spacecraft's reentry trajectory.

The heat shield worked. The crew of Artemis II safely splashed down in the Pacific Ocean after a triumphant trip around the Moon. Afterward, they and other NASA officials offered general comments, saying the heat shield looked good.

After the Artemis I mission in 2022, there were more than 100 char loss sites observed across the dish-shaped heat shield at the base of the Orion crew vehicle. On the Artemis II heat shield, there were approximately nine char loss sites observed.

"So it was a big improvement," said Paul Hill, former director of Mission Operations at NASA.

The success of the Artemis II heat shield, which now appears to have been confirmed by an extensive data review, will give NASA confidence in the performance of its deep-space vehicle for future lunar missions.

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Ari Goldschmidt:

Meta Hit With Sweeping New Claims That Its AI Glasses Violated the Consent of "Millions" of Bystanders in Searing Lawsuit

An ongoing class action lawsuit against Meta, which accuses the tech giant of misrepresenting its privacy practices regarding its controversial Meta AI Glasses, was amended yesterday to include a new class of "bystander" plaintiffs who claim that Meta violated their privacy without their consent.

The implications are considerable. The new violations occurred even if bystanders never purchased the AI-powered glasses themselves, the expansive amended complaint alleges, reflecting rising anxieties around what the increasing ubiquity of AI-integrated surveillance technologies – from smart glasses to Flock cameras – mean for everyday life.

The lawsuit was first filed back in March after a joint investigation by a pair of Swedish newspapers found that Meta had stored content captured by its Meta AI Glasses and funneled it to human reviewers for the purpose of training AI models, according to Kenyan whistleblowers working for the content moderation outsourcer and longtime Meta partner Sama.

Meta is accused in the lawsuit of engaging in false advertising, wrongly telling purchasers that the smart glasses are "designed for privacy" and that users are "in control of your data and content," despite content collected through the glasses' AI features winding up in front of human reviewers who say they saw intimate material.

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Tim Cook's Parting Message: Apple Is in the Hands of a Product Builder

On his last day as Apple CEO, Tim Cook offered an endorsement of his successor: John Ternus, the company's senior vice president of hardware engineering. In a memo to employees, Cook reminded staff that he's "not leaving Apple," just stepping away from the role of CEO.

Ternus' elevation to the top job suggests that Apple's next era will see a renewed focus on hardware and product execution. Under Ternus, Apple shipped a number of notable products, most recently, the new ultra-thin iPhone Air, the lower-cost MacBook Neo, and AirPods with hearing health features. He also led the hardware engineering team across Apple's full device lineup.

Cook's memo says little about Apple's future when it comes to AI, services, regulation, China, or the other challenges that lie ahead. Instead, Cook focuses on his gratitude for the opportunity to lead Apple and exalts the company's culture as ultimately what matters most.

"We share a belief that what we build matters and that we have both the opportunity and the responsibility to leave the world better than we found it," Cook wrote.

Cook will remain at Apple as executive chairman and will continue to manage political relationships, including those with President Trump and the Chinese government.

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Enrique Abeyta:

The $2T Question for Anthropic

Anthropic, the maker of the popular Claude AI models, is reportedly preparing to go public as soon as late September or early October.

Some investors are projecting a valuation upwards of $2 trillion when it finally goes public. At that price, Anthropic would pull off the largest IPO in history.

It all sounds so exciting. But didn't we just do this with SpaceX?

A few months ago, investors were clamoring to get into what would be the biggest IPO to date. But today, SpaceX trades double digits below its IPO price. It's a good reminder that there's usually no reason to rush into a blockbuster IPO on day one.

Anthropic may prove to be worth the wait. Its growth has been extraordinary. But a $2 trillion valuation comes with some enormous expectations.

Let Wall Street fight over the initial shares. Let the hype settle. Let insiders sell. Let the lockups expire. Let Anthropic report several quarters as a public company. Most importantly, let's see how its growth, margins and pricing hold up as Chinese, open-source and local models improve.

Maybe Anthropic eventually proves that Claude deserves one of the largest valuations on Earth. If it does, there will still be time to invest.

⇒ Read More Here

Greg Guenthner:

Saylor's Back Buying Bitcoin

Strategy spent the summer doing something it had never done before – selling Bitcoin. Between May and August the company let go of 6,948 BTC for about $432.5 million, roughly $62,250 a coin.

On Monday it bought again for the first time since June, picking up 4,603 BTC for $369.7 million at an average of $80,318. That's a 29% higher price tag than it got for the coins it sold, and the company is still 2,345 BTC lighter than it was in the spring.

The reason for both moves is the same instrument – STRC. Strategy funds Bitcoin purchases by issuing stock and preferred shares, and when STRC slipped below its $100 par value in June, that funding route closed. The company built a Digital Credit Capital Framework authorizing up to $1.25 billion of Bitcoin sales to cover preferred dividends and buy back those shares at a discount. It sold Bitcoin because selling equity had gotten too expensive. Now MSTR has recovered enough that equity is the cheaper option again, so it went back to the old playbook.

Now we will wait and see if this was a one-off week or if this is Saylor's new normal headed into Q4 2026.

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Cities Terminate Flock Contracts at Record Pace in August

New data compiled by a Bay Area anti-surveillance advocacy group shows that not only are American localities dropping cameras from Flock Safety, but they are doing it at an accelerating rate.

Secure Justice, an Oakland-based advocacy group, has recorded 214 cities and counties that have dropped Flock since 2021. Of those, 90 ended their relationship with Flock in August 2026 alone, a fourfold increase compared to the previous month.

Put another way: During the last 30 days, an average of three localities per day have halted contracts with Flock.

After extensive criticism regarding the safety of Flock's technology and practices, CEO Garrett Langley wrote in a recent blog post that Flock would reduce data retention defaults from 30 days to seven, among other privacy-minded changes.

Last Friday, Flock's top lawyer wrote in another blog post that its newly modified terms of use "expressly prohibit customers and their users from using Flock Services to mislead, harass, stalk, or otherwise impose upon or violate the legal rights of another person."

Those efforts have done little to quell political scrutiny.

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Greg Guenthner:

MapQuest's App Surges to No. 1 in Navigation After Refusing To Rename Lake Ontario

MapQuest stood up to President Donald Trump, and now its app is reaping the rewards.

The "OG of online mapping," as the company calls itself, announced on Thursday that it would not change the name of Lake Ontario on its maps to Lake America, despite Trump's executive order directing the U.S. Department of the Interior to update the lake's name in the U.S. geographic naming service. As a result, MapQuest's mobile app downloads soared, sending the iOS app to the No. 4 position on the U.S. App Store's Top Charts for apps (not including games) as of Monday morning on the U.S. east coast.

MapQuest also reached the No. 8 position overall in the U.S. App Store across both apps and games, and it became the No. 1 Navigation app in the United States. In Canada's App Store, the app reached No. 2 overall as of Sunday evening.

"We took the same approach we did with the Gulf of Mexico: be part of the conversation, and give people an app that keeps the names they're familiar with," said Doug Berger, general manager of MapQuest, in a statement. "Hundreds of thousands of people signaled to us this weekend that we got it right by downloading our app."

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Davis Wilson:

Sony Argues in Court That Digital Games Can't Be Owned

Sony has told a federal judge that no reasonable consumer believes they own the digital games they pay for on the PlayStation Store, according to an August 21 filing.

The filing is the company's first substantive answer to a proposed class action brought in June in the Northern District of California by four California PlayStation customers. They allege the store's "Buy Now" and "Confirm Purchase" buttons imply ownership when the transaction hands over only a revocable license.

The suit's first count is brought under California's false advertising law. It bars sellers from using "buy," "purchase," or any term a reasonable person would read as conferring unrestricted ownership, unless the checkout carries a clear and conspicuous statement, in plain language, that buying the digital good is a license.

Sony says its checkout already does that. Fine print in the cart links to the PlayStation Terms of Service and the Software Product License Agreement. The terms of service tell customers they "do not own the product," in the eighth of 18 sections.

Sony's primary request is that the judge send the dispute into private arbitration, on the grounds that PlayStation's terms commit users to settle claims that way. The ownership arguments apply only if the judge refuses.

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The $18B Instagram/Facebook "Wrist Slap"

Meta agreed to pay $18 billion this week to settle a lawsuit brought by dozens of state attorneys general. The lawsuit alleged that Facebook and Instagram harmed teenagers by encouraging excessive social media use and contributed to mental health issues.

In addition, Meta agreed to make significant changes to how teenagers use Facebook and Instagram, including a default two-hour daily time limit for users under 18.

Meta denied the allegations and said the settlement does not constitute an admission of liability. The company also won't be writing an $18 billion check anytime soon. The payments will be spread over the next 10 years, reducing the annual cost to $1.8 billion – a rounding error for a company with Meta's earnings power.

From an investing standpoint, this doesn't change the Meta story in any meaningful way. Advertisers pay for access to billions of users across every age group, and adults with disposable income are far more valuable than teenagers. The market seemed to agree. Meta shares moved higher following the announcement.

Meta remains one of the highest-quality businesses in the world. Nothing announced this week changes my long-term outlook on the company. The stock remains one of the largest positions in my personal portfolio. And I recommend you own it yourself.

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Enrique Abeyta:

Fed's Warsh Signals Inflation Fight Isn't Over

Federal Reserve Chairman Kevin Warsh warned Friday that the central bank may not be finished fighting inflation, saying recent price readings had not convinced him that underlying trends were improving and stopping short of any commitment on the path for interest rates.

"We must be confident that underlying inflation is moving to our objective, clearly and at sufficient speed," Warsh said in prepared remarks delivered at the Federal Reserve's annual symposium in Jackson Hole, Wyoming. "Otherwise, we have work to do."

Speaking on his 100th day as chairman, Warsh described an economy he said "appears to have strengthened," with business and consumer spending holding up and a slowdown in hiring he attributed to a flattening labor supply. But on inflation, he said financial conditions did not look restrictive to him.

Warsh also pointed to the breadth of price increases. About half the items in the Fed's preferred inflation basket are rising faster than 3%, compared with roughly a third in the two decades before the pandemic. The Fed's current benchmark rate stands at a target range of 3.5% to 3.75%.

As in prior appearances, Warsh declined to offer either forward guidance or a reaction function — the economic conditions that would prompt a policy response.

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Greg Guenthner:

Bitcoin and Cathie Wood Are Partying Like It's 2021 Again

Bitcoin and the Ark Innovation Fund (ARKK) are both up more than 20% in August, something that has happened only four other times since Cathie Wood launched her flagship ETF in 2014.

The pairing brings back memories. Late 2020 and early 2021 were the age of zero interest rates, stimulus checks, SPACs, meme stocks, crypto millionaires, and seemingly every company finding a way to put "innovation" in its pitch deck. ARKK became one of the defining trades of the era. Bitcoin was right there with it.

Now that old duo is leading again. ARKK was already among Wall Street's riskiest trades outperforming earlier this month, while bitcoin accelerated after breaking out of a months-long range last week.

The only previous months in which both gained at least 20% were April 2020, November 2020, January 2023, and November 2024, according to Yahoo Finance analysis of AlphaSpace data.

What happened afterward was generally favorable, particularly for bitcoin.

Across those four episodes, bitcoin's median return was about 5% over the next month, 29% over three months, 43% over six months, and 137% over a year. Median returns for ARKK, the Nasdaq Composite, and the S&P 500 were also positive at every interval.

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