Tech Brew Ride Home - Drone Ban

Episode Date: December 23, 2025

I hope you weren’t expecting Santa to leave a drone under the tree this week. Europe is forcing Apple to pair nicely with others. More signs of the AI fueled debt explosion. And in the year of the stablecoin, the rise of stablecoin-based banks. U.S. Bans New China-Made Drones, Sparking Outrage Among Pilots (WSJ) Pentagon Adds Grok-Derived Products to Something Called the ‘AI Arsenal’ (Gizmodo) iOS 26.3 Brings AirPods-Like Pairing to Third-Party Devices in EU Under DMA (MacRumors) AI debt boom pushes US corporate bond sales close to record (Financial Times) A $309 Billion Bet Fuels 24/7 Dollar Banking Without Borders (Bloomberg) Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

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Google Fi Wireless is not subject to data traffic deprioritization during times of high network usage. Welcome to the Tech Brew Ride Home for Tuesday, December 23rd, 2025. I'm Brian McCullough today. I hope you weren't expecting Santa to leave a drone under the tree this week. Europe is forcing Apple to pair nicely with others, more signs of the AI-fueled debt explosion, and in the year of the stablecoin, the rise of stablecoin-based neobanks. Here's what you missed today in the world of tech. You may have noticed that your CRM system has become crazy with bots and agents of late at the TechBrew Ride Home. We love AI, but not when it's used to commit fraud or launch ransomware. Fortunately, Momoto, the creator of continuous verification, now offers the next generation of Continuous Captcha. Momoto Continuous Captcha diverts only the agents and bots attempting to gain access to your CRM

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To learn more, head to mimoto.ai.ai slash ride home. That's mimoto.com. The FCC has banned imports, marketing, and sales of new foreign-made drones and components, including those from China's DJI and Hotel, citing national security concerns, quoting the journal. U.S. officials have made efforts for nearly a decade to ban popular China-made drones used by government agencies and hobbyists alike, citing national security concerns. This week, Washington is getting what it wants. The Federal Communications Commission on Monday banned all drones and critical components made in a foreign country and all communications and video surveillance equipment for major Chinese drone manufacturers SZDJI technology and Ahtail Robotics.

The designation means the companies, their subsidiaries and partners won't be able to import, market or sell new drone equipment in the U.S. The FCC decision doesn't cover models currently in stores or already purchased, although the Commission does have the ability to retroactively add older models to its list of barred equipment. The push to outlaw Chinese drones goes back to at least 2017 when the Army ordered soldiers to stop using DJI drones due to cybersecurity vulnerabilities. Washington has over the years flagged risks that the Chinese Communist Party could

access data collected by DJI drones and potentially manipulate or interfere. with the drones. Federal officials cautioned utility operators against using DJI drones to inspect dams and power grids, and the Defense Department labeled DJI a Chinese military company, a designation DJI unsuccessfully sued to get revoked. The FCC said that a White House-led group informed the commission on Sunday that drones from foreign countries posed unacceptable risks prompting Monday's ban. DJI has said the company welcomes a national security review and that independent reviews, including those from U.S. government bodies have found its drones are secure. Its users can fly the drones without an internet connection and any collected images and data

are stored locally. The ban has been met with uproar from a large swath of the nearly half a million certified American commercial drone pilots. DJI accounts for around 70 to 90% of commercial local government and hobbyist drones in the U.S. Many pilots are hoarding DJI drones and parts sending last-ditch letters to their congressional representatives and the White House and forecasting the demise of their livelihoods that rely on China-made drones for which they say there is no Western replacement. I am American-made through and through. I drive a Chevy pickup truck, said Eric Ebert, a dire Indiana-based owner of the construction site monitoring firm Falcon unmanned systems. But American drones can't compete,

he said. Dron pilots have gone on buying sprees for aircraft batteries and spare parts to try to extend the life of their fleets. Ebert has a team of seven drone pilots who monitor the construction of solar and wind turbine installations across thousands of acres. His company stocked up on three dozen drones and related equipment, knowing what 2026 looks like for us. Buying DJI products has been more challenging in the past several months as U.S. Customs and Border Protection has held up DJI shipments at ports due to concerns about the company using forced labor in its manufacturing. DJI denies that allegation, end quote. The Pentagon has partnered with XAI to embed the company's frontier AI systems based on the

GROC family of models directly into GenAI.mill as soon as next year, quoting Gizmodo. The Pentagon is now armed to the teeth with frontier AI systems based on the GROC family of models, according to a press release issued Monday. Are you trembling now, ISIS? Does the word GROC send a chill down your spines? This expansion of what the release calls the U.S. A.I. Arsenal is apparently being slotted into the Pentagon's more expansive AI platform called Gen.A.I. Dot Mill launched earlier this month with Google's Gemini for government built into it, according to an earlier press release. U.S. Secretary of War Pete Texeth apparently provided the following quote for that release. AI tools present boundless opportunities to increase efficiency,

and we are thrilled to witness AI's future positive impact across the war department. If you're imagining the Pentagon using AI in chillingly lethal ways, GenaI.mills sounds much more Dilbert-ish. If you were worried the Pentagon's Aaron chairjackies were going to be stuck using Gemini for government, I have great news. They'll also have, when the software is implemented in early 2026, exciting new AI products from an Elon Musk-owned company, which will enable the secure handling of controlled unclassified information in daily workflows, along with access to real-time global insights from the X platform, providing war department personnel with a decisive information advantage, end quote. An April executive order from President Trump sought to revolutionize

efficiency in the Pentagon by ordering reviews with goals like eliminate or revise any unnecessary supplemental regulations or any other internal guidance, the usual idea of improving everything by cutting red tape. Anyway, now the military's bespoke AI platform will include a second set of models to apply to everyone's AI intensive tasks, so things are getting very efficient over there. But while the Trump administration has been unusually friendly to the whims of AI's cheerleaders, there's bipartisan precedent for this kind of thing. For instance, Google's former CEO Eric Schmidt's involvement in a Biden-era effort to significantly increase AI-related spending on defense and security programs in the federal government was called out by Senator Elizabeth Warren

as a potential conflict of interest. And XAI and Google are far from the only tech companies seeking to intertwine their interests with those of the defense industry. But it's currently hard to picture GROC being a crucial link in the kill chain or something like that. This feels more like the Defense Department issuing a press release about a new supplier of toner with a bit of dot-com bubble flavor thrown in. It's like the Pentagon is announcing that every desk at the Pentagon, currently equipped only with CompuServe, will now get its very own AOLCD ROM 2, end quote. The European Commission says Apple will bring AirPods like pairing and iPhone notification access to third-party devices under the DMA and iOS 26.3 sometime next year, quoting Mac rumors.

Here are the new capabilities that Apple is adding. Proximity pairing. Devices like earbuds will be able to pair with an iOS device in an airspace. AirPods-like way by bringing the accessory close to an iPhone or iPad to initiate a simple one-tap pairing process. Paring third-party devices will no longer require multiple steps. Also, notifications. Third-party accessories like smartwatches will be able to receive notifications from the iPhone. Users will be able to view and react to incoming notifications, which is functionally normally limited to the Apple Watch. Notifications can only be forwarded to one connected device at a time and turning on notifications for a third-party device disables notifications to an Apple

watch. The European Commission says that developers can test third-party TV, smartwatches, and headphones with the new features in iOS 26.3 with the functionality to be fully available in Europe in 2026. iOS 26.3 offers, quote, another step towards a more interconnected digital ecosystem to the benefit of all EU citizens, according to the European Commission. iOS 26.3 is expected to launch at the end of January. The changes to proximity pairing and notifications are only available for device makers and iPhone and iPad users. in the European Union, end quote. Study and play.

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UN must be 21 to enter. U.S. companies sold $1.7 trillion worth of investment-grade bonds in 2025, nearing the 1.8 trillion 2020 record driven this year by AI infrastructure borrowing, of course. Goldman says AI makes up about 30 percent of this borrowing. Quoting the FTE, this is just the tip of the iceberg, said Aaron Spalzbury, head of U.S. investment-grade bonds at Inside Investment. It's very safe to say that we will have more issuance next year, the market is preparing for that. Corporate borrowing costs over the summer fell to their lowest level relative to U.S. Treasuries since the end of the last century, as trade tensions eased and riskier assets rallied with additional interest rates paid by top-rated

companies falling to as low as 0.74 percentage points over government debt. They have since increased slightly to just above 0.8 percentage points as investors respond to what has been called a flood of AI-related issuance. Doubts about the miscells. match between AI borrowing and current revenues, for example, at Oracle's quarterly earnings, where revenue undershot, expectations, and data center spending overshot have sparked selloffs in tech sector equity and debt. Investors say issuance in 2026 is likely to break the COVID record and put further upward pressure on companies borrowing costs. Next year's debt sales will be driven not just by the AI buildout, though J.P. Morgan estimates that sector will need

to borrow $1.5 trillion by 2030. More than $1 trillion in debt is. maturing in each of the next three years, which will require large refinancing deals, according to Dan Mead, head of the Investment Grade Syndicate at Bank of America. A busy pipeline of M&A deals should also lead to big bond sales to fund takeovers. We expect a similarly busy 2026 with the potential for it to be the largest issuance year ever for investment-grade bonds, said Mead. In a separate note, Mickelson wrote that the amount of financing the tech sector needs next year is so big that life insurance companies, large buyers of long-dated bonds, may

exceed their internal limits on exposure to a single bond issuer, end quote. We've talked a lot this year about stablecoins taking over the world, so let me introduce you to stablecoin-powered neobanks like Rizond and Dakota that are offering dollar-denominated digital banking services to customers worldwide, quoting Bloomberg. While the U.S. has a vast banking industry, which includes fintechs like Chime Financial and Mercury Technologies, these companies are mostly vying for customers and countries where options are more limited and currencies are inflation-prone. The model relies on stablecoins to serve as rails powering faster and cheaper services such as dollar accounts, payments, and cross-border

transfers. Other than Rizzon, providers in the space include altitude, fuse, cleva, plasma 1, and cast, most of which were founded over the past few years and typically lean on providers like Stripe's bridge and privy platforms for digital wallets, payments, compliance, and even token issuance. Stablecoins are one set of primitives on top of which you can build and then serve people in any region so it takes your audience from just being in one country to the whole world. Zach Abrams, co-founder of Bridge, said in an interview, these banking startups are growing as the stablecoin market booms, fueled by fresh U.S. legislation and backing from President Donald Trump's administration.

The total market value of stablecoins has grown about 50% since the start of the year to reach $309 billion, of which roughly $99% is dollar-denominated. The political embrace for stablecoins stems in part from a belief by top officials, that dollar-peg tokens will safeguard the Greenback's role as a global reserve currency. In a February speech, Federal Reserve Board Governor Christopher Waller said, quote, stablecoins have the potential to maintain and extend the role of the dollar internationally. Companies in the space are looking to take it even a step further. There was an opportunity that could go beyond just exporting a U.S. dollar,

and that was the idea of exporting a U.S. bank account itself and making that available globally. Ryan Bozarth, co-founder and chief executive officer of Dakota, a stable coin infrastructure provider that also offers financial accounts, said of its founding story, we came up with this idea of an internet-native financial account. Founded in 2022, Dakota started by offering dollar-denominated business accounts and today has more than 700 clients, roughly 70% of which are based outside the U.S., Bozarth, a former Coinbase executive said, it operates in more than 100 jurisdictions and clients are often crypto businesses that have historically struggled to access banking services, he added. Now the company is bundling infrastructure it built for itself to offer services,

including orchestration and custody, to other startups. Behind the scenes, each Dakota client is assigned a unique blockchain address, crypto's equivalent of a bank account number. Clients can deposit in fiat currencies, which are then instantly converted to USDC, or Dakota's own stablecoin, DKUSD, which is not exchange traded. Once the funds are cryptified, Dakota says it can move money faster and cheaper than traditional correspondent banks, slashing transfer times from days to minutes and fees to nearly zero, it says. Keeping the funds in stablecoins reduces the need for foreign exchange transactions.

When Ismail pays Starlink with his Risen card, for example, the transaction is denominated and processed in dollars end to end, rather than as a Kenyan shilling to dollar for an exchange transaction when local banking rails are involved. These stablecoin-linked visa cards are offered through providers like payments infrastructure company Rain or Stripes Bridge. They allow users to spend their balances or withdraw cash at local ATMs. If the recipient wants local currency, though, the Neobank needs to route the funds through a local banking partner. This tax on additional costs. Some firms, for example, will charge a currency spread on top of the actual exchange rate of up to 1% of the transaction's fiat value.

It's not just the tech infrastructure that aspiring banks can get off the shelf from firms like Stripes Bridge or Dakota, but also the regulatory licenses, compliance checks, and network of local bank partners needed to onboard new customers and integrate with local economies. The Neobank provides the front-end experience while the regulated activity happens through partners allowing global reach without country-by-country licensing. Ari Redboard, Global Head of Policy at Blockchain's firm TRM Labs said. Launched just a few months ago, Risen is currently active in 147 countries with more than 120,000 installs.

Risen co-founder and chief executive officer, Ignis Sourner. Vila said in an interview. Even with growing momentum, stablecoin-powered neobanks still face plenty of hurdles, including operating in an increasingly crowded market. They compete with established remittances, companies like Western Union and MoneyGram International, as well as fintech behemists like Remitly Global and Revolut Limited that have brand recognition and are rapidly adding stablecoin support. There is lots of competition, especially from actual neobanks, said Lex Sokolin, a co-founder at Venture Capital firm Generative Ventures. But I think the end client is going to be different, likely younger, more tech-savvy, and more global.

Their reliance on crypto infrastructure may leave them in a regulatory gray zone in certain jurisdictions, and access to banking rails can be fragile if dependent upon a local banking partner whose risk appetite or regulatory mandate may change. Local governments may also become uneasy about a rising share of commerce taking place in a foreign currency, according to Jana Pache, founder and director of Markets Evolution, a London-based fintech consulting practice. If you're a central bank or a government, this means that you're seeing outflows from your local currency and that creeping dollarization, Pache said, end quote. Nothing more for you today. Talk to you tomorrow.

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