Altman Calls Pentagon Rush 'Sloppy,' AWS Data Centers Take Drone Strikes, and AI Proves a Fields Medal Theorem

Sam Altman admitted OpenAI's rush to forge a Pentagon deal after Anthropic was blacklisted "looked opportunistic and sloppy," adding Fourth Amendment safeguards as users mass-canceled ChatGPT.

Anthropic itself pitched the Pentagon's $100M drone swarm contest, proposing Claude to coordinate drone fleets while excluding autonomous targeting, though it was not selected.

Two AWS data centers in the UAE and one in Bahrain were hit by drones amid Iranian strikes, the first time military action has disrupted a major cloud provider.

Israel deployed Iron Beam lasers in combat for the first time, intercepting Hezbollah rockets at $4 per shot versus $50,000 per Iron Dome missile.

Math, Inc.'s Gauss completed the Lean formalization of Viazovska's Fields Medal-winning sphere packing proof in two weeks and 200,000+ lines of verified code, catching two errors in the original arguments. Lean is a programming language for writing mathematical proofs that a computer can verify.

Skeptic Daniel Litt called it the first truly autonomous formalization of a substantial result.

Stanford number theorist Jared Lichtman predicts mathematical abundance within a year, while others ask if all math could be formalized within two.

Cognition's SWE-1.6 achieved near-Opus 4.6 coding performance at 950 tokens per second, powered by 100x more RL compute.

Claude suffered a 3-hour outage as usage surged.

Anthropic launched a memory import tool letting users port data from ChatGPT, Gemini, and Copilot.

Two Claude Code instances told to find each other and build something invented a 2,495-line programming language in 12 minutes. A second pair built Battleship with SHA-256 to prevent self-cheating. SHA-256 is a cryptographic function that creates a unique fingerprint of data.

A solo researcher using Claude Code ran Karpathy's llama2.c on Apple's M4 Neural Engine for less than a watt by reverse-engineering undocumented APIs, uncovering an AI accelerator 80x more efficient than an A100 hidden in hundreds of millions of devices.

Qwen released four open models matching prior 80B-parameter performance with just 4B, all runnable on phones.

The Supreme Court declined to hear an appeal seeking copyright protection for AI-generated artwork, cementing a legal regime in which purely AI-generated works cannot receive copyrights.

Nvidia committed $4 billion to Lumentum and Coherent for next-gen optical interconnects. Optical interconnects use light instead of electrical signals to transfer data between chips, which is faster and uses less power.

ASML is pushing beyond EUV into packaging and third-generation optics.

At MWC, Qualcomm unveiled the first Wi-Fi 8 chip at 11.5 Gbps with a 50+ company 6G coalition for 2029, and debuted the first wearable NPU running 2B-parameter models on-wrist. An NPU is a neural processing unit, a chip designed specifically for AI tasks.

AMD launched the first desktop Copilot+ chips with 50 TOPS. TOPS stands for trillions of operations per second, a measure of AI processing power.

Apple is using just 10% of its Private Cloud Compute despite $4.5 billion spent.

AI demand is reviving high-voltage 765-kV power lines not built since the 1980s, with PJM approving $11.8 billion in expansion. PJM is the grid operator for 13 eastern US states.

Compute is now a traded commodity, with Ornn and Kalshi launching the first CFTC-regulated H100 price contracts. This means you can now bet on or hedge against the price of GPU compute time, similar to oil futures.

AGIBOT unveiled a full humanoid portfolio at MWC with a live store.

Xiaomi's humanoid is being tested in a real car factory, running 3 hours at 90%+ accuracy on the production line.

Hypersonix flew its DART AE at Mach 8, the first fully 3D-printed hydrogen-powered hypersonic aircraft.

Starpath unveiled nanometer-thin space solar panels at 73 grams per square meter.

SpaceX deployed 54 Starlink satellites in bicoastal launches in a single day.

The first trial combining fetal surgery with stem cells for spina bifida showed reversal of hindbrain herniation in all six patients. Hindbrain herniation is when part of the brain is pushed down into the spinal canal, a serious complication of spina bifida.

An iron nanomaterial destroyed cancer cells from within while sparing healthy tissue.

A dual-cell therapy paired lab-grown beta cells with engineered immune cells to cure type 1 diabetes without lifelong drugs.

A new milk-protein-based plastic film decomposed in soil within 13 weeks.

China's vehicles are now 12% electric, with fuel sales down 5.7%.

Podcasts have surpassed AM/FM talk radio in US spoken-word listening for the first time.

Marc Andreessen reports that in Silicon Valley many people who favored government control of AI are now opposed to it.