Tech Brew Ride Home - Crypto Takes An "L" In The Senate

Episode Date: September 16, 2026

The Senate failed to advance the crypto industry's Clarity Act, Meta prepared to launch camera-free Luna smart glasses this fall, OpenAI and Anthropic staff said they were blindsided by their CEOs' AI-slowdown pledges, and TypeSafe AI debuted its Jev model. The US Senate fails to advance the Clarity Act, dealing a major blow to the crypto industry's push for a comprehensive market structure framework; crypto falls (CNBC) Sources: Meta plans to release a camera-free pair of smart glasses this fall; the new model has six mics to let users speak with Meta's AI chatbot and Muse (The Information) Sources: OpenAI and Anthropic staff felt blindsided by Dario Amodei's and Sam Altman's calls to slow the frontier; some fear evaluators may compromise security (Financial Times) TypeSafe AI debuts Jev, a model using "Reinforcement Learning for Calibrated Decisions" to produce typed probabilistic decisions that software can use directly (The Register) iPhone 18 Pro and 18 Pro Max review: manual camera exposure controls and image quality improvements, but $100 more than the 17 Pro and expensive storage tiers (The Verge) Subscribe to the ad-free feed.

Welcome to the Tech Brew Ride Home for Wednesday, September 16th, 2026. I'm Brian McCullough today. The Senate failed to advance the crypto industry's Clarity Act. Meta prepared to launch camera-free Luna smart glasses this fall. Open AI and Anthropic staff said they were blindsided by their CEO's AI Slowdown Pledges and TypeSafe AI debuted its Jev Model. Here's what you missed today in the world of tech. Every day shareholders meet to discuss important matters about the companies you invest in. Now you can make your voice. heard too. Vanguard investor choice makes it easy to set your proxy voting preference for your eligible Vanguard index funds, whether you hold a Vanguard fund directly or through another brokerage from all it takes is a few clicks to select your proxy voting preference and be heard on important shareholder topics like executive pay and director elections. Visit vanguard.com slash investor choice to learn more. It's your shares. It's your voice. It's easy. Vanguard investors own

shares of our index funds and those funds own shares of the companies they invest. Vanguard Marketing Corporation distributor. The United States Senate has failed to advance the Clarity Act, dealing a major blow to the crypto industry's push for a comprehensive market structure framework. Quoting Bloomberg, the procedural vote leaves the bill stalled on Capitol Hill after months of negotiations aimed at building bipartisan support. Republican leaders have released a revised version of the bill Sunday, adding new ethics restrictions to address Democratic concerns about public officials profiting from crypto ventures.

Those changes weren't enough, however, to resolve the remaining opposition. The vote was a stunning loss for the crypto industry, which had exuded confidence that enough senators would vote to advance the bill. Leading up to the vote, Democrats expressed frustration that Republican negotiators didn't meet their demands regarding ethics to address profits gained from crypto ventures by President Donald Trump and his family. The compromise we had was a good ethics compromise that would have bought a lot of Dem votes, said Senator Rubin Gallego of Arizona, a key Democratic negotiator before the vote. Gallego charges Republicans with caring, quote, more about making sure the president keeps making money than actually bringing regulations and

consequently failing the whole system. The price of Bitcoin was last down 3%. Well, Coinbase and Circle shares slid 8 and 10%, respectively amid a broader market sell-off. The vote on the motion to proceed attracted 50 votes for and 40, against far below the 60 votes needed to clear the procedural hurdle. The bill would establish a framework for crypto, divide oversight between the Securities and Exchange Commission, and the Commodity Futures Trading Commission, set registration requirements and strengthen protections against money laundering. For the crypto industry, the significance of Tuesday's vote was on whether the act could move forward for Senate debate and consideration. Even if successful, it would still need

to then survive further Senate negotiations and votes, then clear the House. before reaching President Trump's desk. Though executives and investors say legislation would lend certainty and help attract long-term capital, much of the industry has resigned itself to the likelihood that regulatory momentum may have to be built outside of Congress. The SEC, for example, has proposed allowing startups to sell as much as $75 million worth of tokens without registering, while the CFTC recently approved the first Bitcoin perpetual futures in the U.S. The failed vote likely means the crypto industry will have to wait until next year for clearer rules. Senator Cynthia Loomis, Republican Wyoming, the top champion of the crypto industry in the Senate,

told reporters earlier Tuesday that it's over if the Clarity Act procedural vote failed. Also complicating bringing the bill back up for consideration is the midterm election in seven weeks. Senators are scheduled to leave Washington in early October and not return until after the election. The house recesses even earlier, heading out of town at the end of this week. Members, especially those in tight races, are eager to return to their home states and hit the campaign trail. The information says that Meta plans to release a camera-free pair of smart glasses this fall. The new model will have six mics to let users speak with Meta's AI chatbot and muse. Quote, the new glasses model internally.

codenamed Luna has six built-in microphones that will allow users to speak with Meta's AI chatbot, and its recently launched Consumer AI Agent Muse, one of the people said. It also has a button on the side that can be used to quickly activate meta-AI and speakers like those in its existing models that direct sound toward the user's ears without covering them. In addition, the glasses have slimmer temple arms than previous meta-smart glasses, such as its ray-band models, making them look more like ordinary eyewear. Meta could unveil the Luna glasses at its annual Connect developer conference scheduled for next Wednesday and Thursday, the person said.

The company is targeting October for shipments of Luna, which will come in two styles called Clubmaster and another called Burbank, the person added. Luna is part of an ambitious new set of plans for its wearable devices that Meta established earlier this year, the information previously reported. Meta hopes Luna can broaden the appeal of its wearable devices and offer an alternative to its flagship ray-band smart glasses, two of the people said. Those devices have become popular with consumers, but also have faced increased scrutiny over privacy concerns with some people misusing the devices to secretly record and harass

members of the public in pursuit of viral videos and engagement on social media, according to multiple reports. Those glasses are designed with an LED light that blinks when the camera is recording, providing a visual signal to people nearby, but some users have covered or removed those. Meta last month rolled out a software update to prevent the smart glasses camera from recording if that LED has been covered. Meta estimates that less than 0.1% of all glasses sold have been tampered with, Meta's vice president at Wearables, Alex Himmel, recently told semaphore. With no camera, Luna would avoid some of the privacy concerns associated with camera-equipped smart glasses

while still allowing users to interact with Meta's AI through microphones and speakers, much like the Rayban meta and Oakley meta smart eyewear, which have the meta-a-chatbot built in. The absence of a camera could also make the glasses less conspicuous in settings where people may be sensitive to being recorded, end quote. Sources are telling the FT that OpenAI and Anthropic staff felt blindsided by Dario Ammo dies and Sam Altman's recent calls to slow the frontier. Some folks fear evaluators may compromise internal security. Quote, staff at the makers of Claude and Chad GPT are rushing to implement recommendations from their respective chief executives Dario Amadai and Sam Altman to slow AI's rate of progress to avert disastrous consequences following a series of dire warnings from researchers.

The two chiefs have become increasingly vocal in recent months about the need to pace the frontier of AI model development, culminating in a rare show of unity between the two rivals last weekend. Despite their public comments, little is in place internally to implement the new proposals, according to several people close to the companies. Staff inside OpenAI and Anthropic, as well as the safety researchers they would rely on to conduct this work, were blindsided by the weekend's announcements. Though many employees agree about the need to slow down, they also fear that putting it into practice could jeopardize their work. A particular issue inside both companies is the plan to embed outside evaluators within the labs to oversee model development. Some fear this could compromise the security of their prize technology, according to people familiar with internal discussions, with one describing it as a source of, quote, conflict. Amo Dai, who left Open AI to found Anthropic in 2021 over safety concerns on Saturday proposed that external testers should have employee-like access to the leading labs, including badges, laptops, entry to offices, and access to internal tools.

Leading AI companies already engaged third parties to test their models for performance and safety, but Amadai's proposal would substantially increase. their role. Altman said it was a, quote, great idea and that Open AI would follow suit. However, their consensus is far from complete. OpenAI said it wanted to work with other labs, but that its approach to the issues was more pragmatic than that of Anthropic. OpenAI also said it had already taken concrete steps, including pausing certain frontier training to pace development while Anthropic has not put its research on hold. Implementing the chief executive's commitments to increase access for third-party experts while balancing security and data protection will also pose big practical challenges, according to people

close to both companies. Some staff members are concerned about granting outsiders too much access to systems that are both extremely powerful and the focus of intense competition in the tech industry. AI labs already have strict security measures for employees, including only granting access to certain systems or restricting training data. In recent months, OpenAI has tried to further restrict access to protect intellectual property and sensitive information and to prevent rogue employees from tampering with systems. The company said providing meaningful access while protecting sensitive systems requires careful design. Right now, most third-party organizations have much, much less access than even the lowest access full-time employees. So probably

there will need to be some kind of binding requirement to establish this across the industry, said Miles Brundage, a former OpenAI researcher who is now executive director at the AI Verification and Evaluation Research Institute. Anthropic said it has long worked with third-party assessors and intends to embed an evaluator within the company in the near future. The independent organizations that act as evaluators have gained prominence this year after security breaches by AI agents during testing and development at OpenAI and Anthropic. Two nonprofits, Metter and Redwood Research led an investigation into OpenAI's agents July attack on AI developer hugging face for reviewing tens of thousands of logs for more

than 1,200 agents, end quote. Fall is almost here, which means less time in the sun and way more time in your car. Whether you're headed to a big meeting, picking up the kids from school, or starting your cross-country road trip, you'll want to stay connected on your drive. With AT&T connected car, your eligible vehicle can become a Wi-Fi hotspot so you and your passengers can happily stream, browse, and even email from the road. Got a gamer in the back seat, help keep them connected and in the game with AT&T connected car. Being on the road more doesn't mean you have to put your whole life on pause. Stay connected no matter where you're going. See if your car is eligible at ATT.com slash tech brew. That's ATT.com slash tech brew. Requires eligible vehicles, service and coverage not available everywhere. Restrictions apply. Do you spend your afternoons anxiously consuming coffee, energy drinks, or nicotine just to avoid crashing? Well, I'm here to tell you you don't have to live like that. Ultra pouches can help you.

you feel energized and focused without any nicotine or caffeine. How? They use clinically proven neutropics and adaptogens that are designed to lift your energy. Made alongside neuroscientists, these plant-powered pouches are used by entrepreneurs, athletes, and engineers alike. And it's clear to see why 90% of ultra pouches users saw significant improvements in their overall focus levels. Choose from delicious flavors like cool mint, tropical, watermelon, and blue rags.

and see how Ultra Pouches makes you feel. New customers can use code TBRH to get 15% off at Take Ultra.com. That's take ultra.com for 15% off with code TBRH. Interesting rays with an interesting new idea. Something called TypeSafe AI has debuted Jev, a model using reinforcement learning for calibrated decisions to produce typed probabilistic decisions that software can, used directly, quoting the register. TypeSafe AI, a startup bestowed with $40 million in funding

on Tuesday declared itself a maker of frontier models with the release of Jev, a new type of AI model intended for interaction with machines rather than people. Instead of returning natural language in response to a text-based prompt, TypeSafe AI designed Jev to return typed, probabilistic decisions for use by other software or AI models. Type safety in programming is a way to catch errors that arise when software processes an unexpected type of data, as might happen if an operation tried to divide an integer by a text string. By providing typed, structured values, Jev can avoid the parsing and validating that might be done to process text responses from LLMs. This approach can be useful for scenarios where interactions with an AI system need to be

constrained to a limited set of answers. It can, for example, play Doom when fed structured data describing the player's game state, but it's more likely to be used for sorting customer service problems than other business workflows. With Jev, the developer starts with a state value, which can be a JSON object or simply a string, like MyCard was charged twice. The model gets presented with state information through a set of question primitives, choice score null, each of which returns a different type of structured response with probabilities. Jev is a System 1 model, which relies on a different architecture called reinforcement learning for calibrated decisions or RLCD. Diego Al-Mieda, co-founder and CEO of TypeSafe AI is a former Open AI researcher and one of the co-inventors of reinforcement learning for human feedback or RLHF and chat GPT.

TypeSafe was founded to pursue an alternative path for AI research focused on machine-native AI, said Almeida in a statement. I spent years working on miles designed to make AI better at interacting with people, but if AI is going to fundamentally change how work gets done, people can't be the only consumers of intelligence. While natural language responses from the likes of chat, GPT, or Claude can be wrapped in other code to produce constraint sets of responses, Jev's appeal follows from its efficiency. TypeSafe claims that LLMs generally have variable response times that can stretch into minutes. Jev's response time supposedly ranges from 70 to 500 milliseconds.

40 to 200 times faster than traditional LLMs. The model achieves this speed by using parallel processing. LLMs like OpenAIs GP-T-5-6 terra predict the next token in a sequence and thus operate sequentially. The System 1 architecture returns all outputs at once. The name Jev is a reference to 19th century English economist William Stanley Jevons, known for Jevons Paradox, who argued that technology efficiency related to coal usage increased coal-corps. consumption rather than reducing it. The name also reflects the AI industry's bet that greater token efficiency will increase token consumption even as token prices decline, end quote.

Finally, the first iPhone 18 Pro and Pro Max reviews are out, since these are the phones most of you will probably get if you're upgrading this cycle. I figure we would get the Verge review summary as per usual. Basically, it's all about that new camera aperture, quote, possibly an even bigger deal than the launch of a new $1,200 phone is the release of iOS 27 and with it the new, new AI Siri. We previewed it in detail earlier this summer and it continues to impress me, particularly its ability to search across email and messages all at once. This keeps feeling more and more like a superpower the longer I use it. We also noted when it debuted that Siri as an AI chatbot is much less chatty and eager to keep you engaged than the likes of Gemini or

chat GPT, which is something I also appreciate the more I use it. iOS 27 has just gone fully public this week, and it will be interesting to see how people take to the new Siri. It has a lot of work to do to earn the trust of the public that it can do anything more complex than setting a timer reliably, but Siri seems to be on the right track at least. Finally, unlike Siri, the 18 Pro's big hardware update is much less visible. The aperture is hard to see without the right light and the help of a macro lens. It's as small as my thumbnail and it's under layers of optical glass. Most people who buy this phone probably won't go looking for it, and that's fine. It's the kind of feature you can live with in the background and just jump into to help here and there unseen when you need it.

You don't need to know what it is or how it works, which is kind of the point of personal technology anyway. So why make a big deal out of such a small thing? Is the defining feature of Apple's new phones really an iris as thin as a human hair that most people will never see? I think two things are true at once. Adding a major new hardware feature to the world's most popular camera is notable to those of us who pay attention to such things, but it's also beside the point. An iPhone camera's most important job is to always take a usable photo by default no matter what. This new aperture mechanism provides some benefits to that end, and on top of that, allows a more hands-on photographer access to camera controls that weren't there before. But the first part of that mission is the most important, and the 18 Pro upholds that mandate.

Most people who use this phone will never touch the aperture control, and that's fine. They might get a picture of a menu that's fully in focus, thanks to the camera dropping down an F-stop or a night shot that's a little more detailed thanks to a brighter maximum aperture. Otherwise, it will feel like the same camera they've come to expect from a pro iPhone. As long as you don't expect a revolutionary new camera experience, then the 18 Pro is what it should be. A little better than the version that came before it. Nothing more for you today. Talk to you tomorrow. Thank you.