Tech Brew Ride Home - OpenAI To Give It Away?

Episode Date: July 2, 2026

OpenAI floated giving the US government a 5% stake to court the Trump administration. Nvidia promised to backstop cloud providers for a revenue cut, SpaceX showed investors an xAI phone prototype, Apple ramped foldable iPhone orders, and Z.ai launched ZCode. Sources: OpenAI has discussed giving a 5% stake to the US government, seeking to clear political obstacles by securing buy-in from the Trump administration (FT) Nvidia promises to financially backstop young cloud providers like Firmus that rent out its AI chips, in exchange for a revenue share through a new program (The Information) Sources: SpaceX showed investors a handset-like device prototype with AI tech from xAI, a proprietary OS, a Snapdragon chip, and a design slimmer than an iPhone (WSJ) Sources: Apple has told suppliers to prepare to produce ~10M foldable iPhones in 2026, up from 7M to 8M previously, and 80M iPhones in total across new models (Nikkei Asia) Apple reportedly orders 10M foldable iPhone Ultra models, which could sell for around $2500 (9to5Mac) Sources: Apple is in negotiations to buy chips from CXMT and YMTC, two Chinese semiconductor makers on a Pentagon blacklist, for use in devices sold in China (Bloomberg) Z.ai launches ZCode, an "Agentic Development Environment" optimized for its new GLM-5.2 model; Z.ai's GLM Coding Plan costs from $16.20 to $144 per month (VentureBeat) Subscribe to the ad-free feed. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

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free of charge. BetMGM operates pursuant to an operating agreement with Eye Gaming, Ontario. Welcome to the TechBoo, right home for Thursday, July 2nd, 2026, I'm Brian McCullough today. OpenAI floated giving the U.S. government a 5% stake to court the Trump administration's favor. InVIDIA promised to backstop cloud providers for a revenue cut. SpaceX showed investors an AI device prototype, Apple ramped up photoable iPhone orders, and ZAI launched Z-code. Here's what you miss today in the world of tech. The older I get, the more I really need a full eight hours of sleep just to function. At least that's until I tried Blueprints Longevity Mix, created by Brian. Ryan Johnson, just one scoop helps support energy, cognitive functions, mood, focus, sleep, cellular resilience, and healthy aging.

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government seeking to clear political obstacles by securing buy-in from the Trump administration. But let me pause and underline something that I just said so you don't miss it. I said, giving the U.S. government, not selling the U.S. government a 5% stake. Quote, Sam Altman, chief executive of the chat GPT maker, has argued that giving the public a financial stake in the company is the best way to share the upside of AI and has suggested a stake of the size and early conversations with the administration, according to two people familiar with the talks. The proposed arrangement would involve other U.S. AI companies handing over a similar stake, although it is not clear if the other labs would be willing to do so.

Giving the government an ownership stake could help secure good relations with the administration and would mark an attempt to address political blowback by sharing the wealth generated by AI with the public. AI labs have faced an increasingly challenging environment in Washington as the American public and politicians grow more concerned about vast data center construction and the implications of AI for jobs and cybersecurity. Open AI and its chief rival Anthropic have recently both, had the release of their cutting-edge models held up by U.S. scrutiny, while some Republicans and advisors to President Donald Trump favor much tighter regulation of the sector. The two rivals are also preparing for public listings, which would expand their ownership base and generate

big gains for current investors, although Open AIs float may not take place until next year. Altman and other Open AI. executives have suggested that each of America's leading AI developers allot 5% of their equity to a vehicle like the Alaska Permanent Fund, a Sarban Fund, that invests the state's oil wealth into stocks and pays dividends to the state governments and residents. The companies might include Anthropic as well as Google, Meta, and others, although it is not clear if any of these groups would agree with Open AI's proposal. After publicly attacking Intel's chief, President Trump has swung behind the U.S. chipmaker after the government took a 10% stake in that company. Conceptual talks between the government and Open AI were in the early stages,

and any deal might require an act of Congress to implement the people's said, but the discussions point to a potential mechanism to distribute the financial gains from the technology. Altman has been in active talks with the administration about the issue of public ownership, including Trump, Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnik, and Treasury Secretary Scott Besant, according to multiple people familiar with the matter. The Open AI chief has also spoken to Democratic Senator Bernie Sanders in recent weeks. Sanders has pushed for public ownership of closer to half of each U.S. AI company through a sovereign wealth fund, end quote. Quoting Dar Abasanjo. Intel stock is up over 500% since the Trump administration took a 10% stake in August of last year.

It makes sense for Open AI to seek a similar outcome, especially given Trump's recent interest in regulating AI models and the benefits of sweetheart government deals given a Trump administration equity stake, end quote. Well, all of this is funny capitalism lately, if you ask me. back to the so-called circular investing. Nvidia is apparently promising to financially backstop young cloud providers like Firmus that rent out its AI chips in exchange for a revenue share through a new program. Quoting the information, the back stop would come in the form of promising to rent back unused GPUs if the companies can't find AI developers to rent them, according to GPU cloud providers, Firmis, and Sharon AI, which are participants in the new program,

and three executives at other firms that do business with Nvidia. The deals are part of a program some people at Nvidia have dubbed the AI compute partnership, one of the people said. Nvidia has offered to pay a guaranteed rate for the cloud provider's unsold GPU capacity. An Nvidia spokesperson also confirmed the program, which shows how the world's most valuable firm is increasingly leaning on its financial position to become a kind of central bank to the hundreds of companies that buy its chips in bulk. GPUs are typically the most expensive part of an AI data center, so guaranteeing to rent

unsold GPU capacity makes it much easier for chip buyers with subpar credit ratings to get the loans they need. Invidia kills two birds with one stone in such deals, said a data center executive. If Nvidia only backstops the leases tied to facilities, quote, then you're stuck with how do you finance the GPUs. But if Nvidia guarantees it will pay for unused computing capacity in the facilities, The GPUs get financed and the data center gets financed as well, the person said, end quote. The journal says that SpaceX showed investors a handset-like device prototype with AI tech from XAI inside it,

as well as a proprietary OS, a snapdragon chip, and a design slimmer than an iPhone. Quote, SpaceX told investors that the project was at an early stage. The design could change and it is unclear whether such a device will be made. representatives for SpaceX and Qualcomm didn't immediately respond to request for comment. The project is a sign of Elon Musk's sprawling ambitions as he builds a leading global satellite connectivity network, grows his rocket company, and creates new AI tools. AI companies are placing a variety of bets on the future form and functionality of AI-powered devices. The Wall Street Journal has reported that Elon Musk has, in the past, Wade building a smartphone

due to frustration over how Apple controls distribution of third-party apps such as X. It isn't easy, however, for a newcomer to break into the hardware business. The idea of making a phone makes me want to die, Musk said last October, but if we have to make a phone, we will. In February, Musk denied that his company was developing a phone, pushing back against a Reuters report that SpaceX was building one that would connect directly to its Starlink satellite network. We are not developing a phone, he posted on X. But some investors in SpaceX and Tesla were told that Musk has long envisioned a consumer device to serve as a platform for his. his ventures technologies. A device could also help Musk become less reliant on other companies. Musk's XAI chatbot is typically used via Apple or Android devices.

Musk's Starlink satellite service already sells a dish to connect to the internet, and it offers cell phone service in dead zones through partnerships with companies including T-Mobile. The device prototype SpaceX recently showed to investors draws on the philosophy behind Musk's everything app, a concept he championed when acquiring social media platform Twitter, now X, in 2022, some of the people familiar with the matter said. Often referred to as super apps, these software programs are popular in Asia and incorporate services that Americans usually access by downloading separate individual apps. Users on China's WeChat and AliPay, owned by local technology giants, Tencent and Ant, respectively, tap many apps and features

available on the platforms to transfer money, order food, book travel, and play games. This model has challenged the traditional app store business. Chinese companies are turning to AI to reinvent this super app model. They are integrating AI agents into existing super apps or trying to turn popular AI chatbots into the nucleus of new everything apps, end quote. Sources say that Apple has told suppliers to produce around 10 million foldable iPhones in 26. That's up from their original estimate of 7 to 8 million and 80 million iPhones in total across all new models this year, quoting 9 to 5 Mac. The additional 80 million units of new iPhone models being introduced in the second half of 2026 would bring the total

units ordered for the year to 220 million per the report. IDC recently forecasted that Apple would ship close to 240 million iPhones in 2026. The report later says that Apple has told some suppliers to expect as many as 85 new iPhone orders in the second half of the year. As for the first foldable iPhone, Apple is expected to tag it with a premium price. IDC recently predicted that the iPhone Ultra will carry an average. selling price of $2,500, with storage options priced as much as $3,000. Apple is expected to unveil the iPhone 18 Pro, iPhone 18, Pro Max, and foldable iPhone Ultra in September. The foldable iPhone could launch after the iPhone 18 Pro models, although it's still expected to arrive this year.

Meanwhile, Apple isn't expected to replace the standard iPhone 17 with the iPhone 18 until spring. This would extend the life of the iPhone 17 on the market from the typical 12-month run to around 18 months. Apple is similarly expected to upgrade the iPhone Air introduced in September 2025 with a new model in the spring of 26, end quote. You know, you could be experiencing productivity through a whole new lens literally. Even G2 are productivity smart glasses with teleprompting, conversation support, real-time translation, and AI to help you stay on top of work and daily life. They're made to look and feel like premium eyewear with no camera and lightweight 36 gram design you can wear all day. The more context you give them, the smarter they

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to be quoting Venture Beat. ZAI, the Beijing-based artificial intelligence lab, formerly known as Jipu AI. On Wednesday, officially launched Z-Code, a free desktop application it describes as an agentic development environment purpose-built for its flagship GLM 5.2 large language model. The move marks the company's most aggressive push yet into the fast-growing AI-powered coding tool market, where it now competes directly with cursor, ClaudeCode, GitHub co-pilot, and Google's anti-gravity. Read one way, Z-code is simply another entry into a crowded market.

Red another, it is a single product that crystallizes three of the most consequential trends in enterprise software today, the race-to-the-bottom pricing of frontier AI models, the geopolitical balkanization of the AI stack, and the rapid maturation of agentic coding agents into what Gartner now estimates is a roughly $10 billion market. Unlike traditional IDs that bolt in AI on through A&A. a chat sidebar or auto-complete extension, Z-Code is best understood as an agent-first development environment. Its core design is built around long-horizon tasks. The user describes an outcome, the agent plans the work, edits files, runs checks, reviews progress, and continues across multiple

iterations until the goal is met. Z-code organizes the development experience around the Z-code agent. Deeply tuned for GLM 5.2 with emphasis on deep integration, the model, tools, and execution workflow are tuned together so that the agent fits continuous multi-step real-world development tasks. The environment supports continuous follow-up across devices, desktop, mobile remote, and Faishu slash WeChat bot, which can all keep the same workspace task moving. Sensitive commands, file changes, and high permission actions go through confirmation before execution. That remote control feature, the ability to steer a running coding agent from WeChat, Faishu or Telegram on a phone, is a differentiator that speaks directly to the Chinese developer

market where those messaging platforms dominate professional communication. You can keep checking progress and adding instructions while long-running work continues from any device with these messaging apps. The tool is free to download. Revenue flows through ZAI's GLM coding plan subscription tiers, which start at $16.20 per month for a light plan and scaled $144 per month for max, prices that undercut Anthropics Claude Code and cursors compatible tiers by significant margins. Through July 31st, Zcode is offering a promotional 1.5x effective quota bonus for coding plan subscribers with off-peak token consumption charged at 0.67x as a coefficient. The platform also supports multiple AI models and agents, including ClaudeCode, Codex,

Gemini, and OpenCode, a pragmatic concession to the reality that no single model wins every task. Z code's value proposition is inseparable from GLM 5.2, the model it was designed to showcase. ZAI released GLM 5.2 on June 16th, first to its coding plan subscribers, and subsequently as open source weights under the MIT license on Hugging Face, a sequencing decision that prioritized distribution over the traditional benchmark-led launch. The model's specifications are formidable. GLM 5.2 is a 744 billion parameter mixture of experts' architecture. with 40 billion active parameters, a genuine 1 million token context window, five times the 200,000 limit on its predecessor, and training on 28.5 trillion tokens. It ranked second globally on code

arena as of mid-June, trailing only Anthropics Claude Fable 5, making it one of the highest performing publicly available models for coding tasks. On benchmarks, GLM 5.2 performs within striking distance of the best proprietary systems. It trails Anthropics Claude Opus 4 by just one percentage point on Frontier SWE, a benchmark measuring multi-hour autonomous engineering projects while edging out OpenAI's GPT5.5. Its API pricing, a $140 per million input tokens, and $4.40 per million output, are a cost reduction of up to 82% compared to Anthropics Claude Opus 4.8 at $5 and $25, respectively. Because Z-code is a first-party tool from the same company that makes the model, it requires no manual endpoint configuration.

the model is just wired in. Z-Code's arrival cannot be separated from the geopolitical drama that has roiled the AI industry over the past three weeks regarding the clawed mythos and fable bans. ZAI's timing was surgical. On the same day, the Trump administration ordered Anthropics' most advanced models blocked for foreign nationals, Jipu announced the open-source release of GLM 5.2 with no usage restrictions. The South China Morning Post reported that GLM 5.2 would be available to all users of Jipu's new GLM coding plan subscription, priced at just a tenth of Anthropics Premium ClaudeCode and ClaudeMax tiers. The market responded accordingly. Jipu's AI market capitalization crossed $128 billion on June 22nd, driven by a 42% intraday share surge.

J.P. Morgan raised its 2026 through 2030 revenue forecast for Jipu by between 7 and 16%. Following the launch, projecting an over 534% revenue surge for 2026, and, and expecting the AI firm to turn a profit by 2028. The Fable 5 episode did more than embarrass Anthropic. It introduced a new risk category into enterprise AI procurement, sovereign access risk. When a government can disable a commercially deployed AI model overnight, the traditional evaluation criteria of developer experience, benchmark scores, and pricing becomes secondary to a more fundamental question.

Will this tool still work tomorrow? Against the entrenched coding player Z-codes pitch rests on three pillars. deep first-party integration with GLM 5.2 that no third-party editor can replicate, aggressive pricing that starts at a fraction of Western competitors, and MIT licensed open weights that allow enterprises to self-host eliminating the regulatory kill switch risk that the fable ban made viscerally real, end quote. Okay, so with July 4th coming up, the observed holiday as well as the actual holiday, I will be taking tomorrow off and also Monday off.

So the next regular news episode will be on Tuesday, July 7th, but I do have a bonus episode for you tomorrow as well as one on Monday. Two completely different and new How I AI episodes, one on how someone transformed their job using AI and one on how someone is managing their backyard with AI. Enjoy that. Talk to you on Tuesday. Hey, y'all. It's Kelly Clarkson with Wayfair. Ever order furniture online and wonder what if? Like, what if it doesn't hold up?

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