Tech Brew Ride Home

Anthropic dropped Opus 4.8 with dynamic workflows for Claude Code and raised $65B at a $965B valuation, overtaking OpenAI. Blue Origin's New Glenn exploded during testing, Amazon killed its AI usage leaderboard, and an AI startup offers free home cleaning for training data.


Anthropic launches Opus 4.8, saying it's "more likely to flag uncertainties about its work and less likely to make unsupported claims", at the same price as 4.7 (TechCrunch)


Anthropic raised a $65B Series H at a $965B post-money valuation, overtaking OpenAI's $852B valuation, and says its revenue run rate crossed $47B this month (NYT)


Blue Origin's New Glenn rocket, which exploded during testing on Thursday, was set to ferry 48 Amazon Leo satellites on Monday; Amazon paid Blue Origin $2.7B (FT)


Sources: Amazon has shut down an internal leaderboard that tracked employees' use of AI tools after workers tried to boost their scores with needless tasks (FT)


AI startup Shift launches a free home cleaning service in NYC to record first-person video with a camera-equipped cap and use it to train robots (The Verge)

Longreads


Simon Willison on how coding agents gave Anthropic and OpenAI real product-market fit, burning $1,000+/month in tokens per power user and changing enterprise pricing (Simon Willison)


Kirkland & Ellis, the world's highest-grossing law firm, is setting aside $500M to build its own AI platform rather than rely on tools available to its rivals (FT)

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Valve hiked Steam Deck prices by up to $300 as RAMageddon hits consumer electronics. Bloomberg detailed Apple's Siri overhaul ahead of WWDC, Meta rolls out subscription plans for Instagram, Facebook, and WhatsApp, and Oura unveils a 40% smaller Ring 5.


Valve hikes the Steam Deck OLED's prices due to "rising memory and storage costs": from $549 to $789 for the 512GB model and from $649 to $949 for the 1TB model (The Verge)


Illustrations based on sources detail Apple's Siri overhaul, including a new UI, a chatbot-style app, and other major iOS 27 changes, ahead of WWDC on June 8 (Bloomberg)


Meta rolls out Plus plans for Instagram, Facebook, and WhatsApp globally, and tests $7.99/month and $19.99/month Meta AI plans, and a $49.99/month creator plan (TechCrunch)


Reactor, which says its AI platform can generate video in real-time with near-zero latency, emerges from stealth with a $59M Series A led by Lightspeed (Variety)


Oura unveils the Oura Ring 5, with a 40% smaller form factor, improved sensing, and repositioned LEDs, on sale from June 4 for $399, up from the Ring 4's $349 (Bloomberg)

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Robinhood launched agentic stock trading, letting users link Claude or Cursor to dedicated accounts. Micron hit $1T market cap in record time on AI memory demand. YouTube now auto-labels AI content, a new coding benchmark crowns GPT-5.5 the clear leader, and Roku overhauls its homescreen.


Robinhood launches a feature to let users link AI agents, such as Claude or Cursor, to separate, dedicated investment accounts for trading stocks autonomously (WSJ)


Micron hit a $1T market value for the first time on May 26 after its stock closed up 19.29%, rising from $700B earlier in May, driven by high memory chip demand (CNBC)


YouTube makes its AI content labels more prominent on desktop and mobile, and will apply them automatically if it detects "significant photorealistic AI use" (Variety)


Roku launches its first major homescreen overhaul in over a decade, including a large "marquee" ad spot to tout apps or shows, in a bid to drive more engagement (Hollywood Reporter)


Datacurve releases the DeepSWE coding benchmark, a 113-task test across 91 open-source repositories: GPT-5.5 leads at 70%, GPT-5.4 got 56%, and Opus 4.7 got 54% (VentureBeat)

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Pope Leo XIV released his AI encyclical alongside Anthropic co-founder Chris Olah. Huawei claims it can match 1.4nm chips by 2031, China imposed travel restrictions on AI talent, cybersecurity hiring surged amid the AI "bug-pocalypse," and American Airlines picked Starlink for in-flight Wi-Fi.


Pope Leo XIV presents Magnifica humanitas, his encyclical on AI, calling for AI regulation, protection for children against hypersexualized AI images, and more (NYT)


Huawei says it aims to make 1.4nm chips by 2031 using its "LogicFolding" tech, which is based on its new Tau Scaling Law intended to bypass Moore's Law limits (Nikkei)


Sources: Chinese government agencies begin imposing overseas travel restrictions on individuals involved in advanced AI work, including at Alibaba and DeepSeek (Bloomberg)


As AI tools like Mythos create a "bug-pocalypse", Glassdoor says Q1 cybersecurity job postings rose 11% YoY, and executive search firms are turning away clients (NYT)


American Airlines picks SpaceX's Starlink for in-flight Wi-Fi on more than 500 planes; SpaceX already has contracts with United Airlines, Southwest, and others (CNBC)


Google Fitbit Air review: slim, comfortable, and stylish, robust tracking, seven-day battery life, and cheaper than Whoop, but can only be worn on the wrist (The Shortcut)

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Chris is back! Hear about how he uses AI personally, and how I've been up at 3 am every day for the last month churning out my own vibecoding experiment.
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