TLDR 2026-03-02

HOW TALKS BETWEEN ANTHROPIC AND THE DEFENSE DEPT. FELL APART

Emil Michael, the Department of War's chief technology officer, had been negotiating with Anthropic for weeks on a $200 million AI contract. The talks had hit an obstacle as Anthropic would not allow its technology to be used for purposes such as the surveillance of Americans. Michael demanded that Anthropic's CEO, Dario Amodei, get on the phone to discuss the issue, but he was told Amodei was in a meeting with his executive team and needed more time. Michael had been hammering out a deal with OpenAI on the side, so the Department of War designated Anthropic as a security risk and cut it off from working with the government.

SPACEX WEIGHS CONFIDENTIAL IPO FILING AS SOON AS MARCH

SpaceX may file for its initial public offering as soon as this month. The firm expects to submit its draft IPO registration to the US SEC in the next few weeks, keeping it on track for a June listing. It could be seeking a valuation of more than $1.75 trillion. The listing could raise as much as $50 billion.

GOOGLE QUANTUM-PROOFS HTTPS BY SQUEEZING 15KB OF DATA INTO 700-BYTE SPACE

Google has implemented a new Merkle Tree Certificate system in Chrome. It uses Merkle Trees to provide quantum-resistant assurances that a certificate has been published without having to add most of the lengthy keys and hashes. Cloudflare is enrolling roughly 1,000 TLS certificates to test how well the system works. The Internet Engineering Task Force standards body has formed a new group to develop a long-term solution for generating the distributed ledger.

‘WORLD'S LARGEST BATTERY' TO PROVIDE 100-HOUR IRON-AIR STORAGE FOR GOOGLE DATA CENTER

Google is building a new data center in Pine Island, Minnesota, that will be powered by 1.9 gigawatts of clean energy from wind and solar. It will use a 300-megawatt iron-air battery with a 30-gigawatt-hour capacity and 100-hour duration. Iron-air batteries store electricity by making rust and then reversing the rusting process to release energy when needed. While these batteries are heavier and less efficient than their counterparts, they are almost three times cheaper. Google will fund the installation of many smaller batteries across the grid to increase power capacity and make the system more reliable.

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LESSONS FROM BUILDING CLAUDE CODE: SEEING LIKE AN AGENT

Designing tools for models is as much of an art as it is a science. It depends heavily on the model, the goal of the agent, and the environment it's operating in. Developers need to experience often, read outputs, and try new things. This post provides a useful framework for designing agents with tools that are shaped to their own abilities.

APPLE REPLACING CORE ML WITH MODERNIZED CORE AI FRAMEWORK FOR IOS 27 AT WWDC

Apple plans to replace Core ML with a modernized Core AI framework to help developers better leverage modern AI capabilities with their apps in iOS 27. The shift from 'ML' to 'AI' is an acknowledgement from Apple that 'machine learning' is a dated term that no longer resonates with developers or consumers. The general purpose of Core AI will remain the same, but there will likely be new ways to incorporate AI features into apps. Apple will announce iOS 27 at its WWDC conference in June.

I'D LIKE TO ANSWER QUESTIONS ABOUT OUR WORK WITH THE DOW AND OUR THINKING OVER THE PAST FEW DAYS

OpenAI CEO Sam Altman recently held an Ask Me Anything on X to discuss the company's recent decision to work with the Department of War. In the thread, he answered questions around whether society should prefer a democratically elected government or unelected private companies to have more power, whether the government should nationalize OpenAI or other AI efforts, and the work it takes to keep society safe. Katrina Mulligan, OpenAI's Head of National Security Partnerships, and Boaz Barak, a computer scientist at OpenAI, were also present in the thread to answer questions.

ANTHROPIC'S CLAUDE OVERTAKES CHATGPT IN APP STORE

Anthropic's Claude has dethroned OpenAI's ChatGPT in Apple's App Store. The sudden surge in rankings is almost certainly due to public backlash at a recent decision by OpenAI to work with the Department of War to deploy AI without restrictions on mass domestic surveillance and fully autonomous weapons. Anthropic was recently labeled a supply-chain risk to national security for refusing to amend its safety policies for its work with the government.

LET'S TALK ABOUT THE HUMANOID ROBOT IN THE ROOM

Humanoid robots are like self-driving cars, but significantly more complex, and we still haven't fully solved self-driving, so it is unlikely that we're close to having general-purpose humanoid robots at home.

THE THIRD ERA OF AI SOFTWARE DEVELOPMENT

Cursor is moving towards helping developers build the factory that creates their software.

THE PLATFORM FOR BUILDING AGENTS

Cloudflare's Agents platform allows developers to build agents in an environment designed for durable execution, serverless inference, and pricing that scales.

A FIRST GUIDE TO BUILDING APIS WITH AI

This post contains notes on building APIs in an AI-first world from someone who has maintained many APIs but only has basic working-professional knowledge of building APIs at scale, securing APIs, and related subjects.

THE TWO VIEWS OF RATIONALITY

It's important to distinguish between what's scientifically true and what's empirically useful.

AMAZON TRIES ITS LOW-COST APPROACH TO WINNING THE AI RACE

Amazon's winning formula for many years has been to sell the thing everyone wants but charge less for it.