Tech Brew Ride Home - Piracy Is Back!

Episode Date: February 6, 2026

Claude Opus 4.6 arrives to crown Anthropic’s very good week, at least, for them it was good. You thought tech was spending big to build out for AI, but this week we’ve seen how big. Crypto seems to have really hit a sharp bear market. And in the Weekend Longreads Suggestions, tv piracy is back, baby! Anthropic Releases New Model That’s Adept at Financial Research (Bloomberg) Anthropic debuts new model with hopes to corner the market beyond coding (The Verge) Big Tech to Spend $650 Billion This Year as AI Race Intensifies (Bloomberg) Europe Accuses TikTok of ‘Addictive Design’ and Pushes for Change (NYTimes) Bitcoin Falls Below $70,000 as Market Faces a ‘Crisis of Faith’ (Bloomberg) Weekend Longreads Suggestions: Inside Elon Musk’s $1.25 Trillion AI and Space Megamerger (WSJ) Everyone is stealing TV (The Verge) Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

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GoogleFi Wireless is not subject to data traffic deprioritization during times of high network usage. Welcome to the TechBrew right home for Friday, February 6, 2026. I'm Brian McCullough today. Claude Opus 4.6 arrives to Crown Anthropics' very good week, at least very good for them. You thought tech was spending big to build out for AI, but this week we've seen exactly how big. Crypto seems to have really hit a sharp bare market and in the weekend long review suggestions, TV piracy is back, baby. Here's what you missed today in the world of tech. attackers don't need exploits when they can just use your allowed tools against you. That's why Threat Locker enforces default deny at execution,

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Learn more at Threatlocker.com slash tech brew ride home. That's Threatlocker.com slash tech brew ride home. It's been a hell of a week for Anthropic. They've literally moved the markets globally with their product announces, quoting the journal. The viral moment for Anthropics models is the most important thing that's happened in AI since Chad GPT's launch, said Dean. a senior fellow at the Foundation for American Innovation who writes an artificial intelligence newsletter. It's definitely interesting, he said, end quote.

Well, yesterday there was another announced. Anthropic released Claude Opus 4.6, which it says can analyze company data, regulatory filings, and market information to create detailed financial analyses. Quoting Bloomberg, Opus 4.6 is also meant to be better at a range of other work-related functions, including making spreadsheets and presentations, as well as software development. Shares of financial services companies slumped following the release with fact-set research systems falling as much as 10%, while S&P Global, Moody's, and NASDAQ, all turned sharply lower. OpenAI also introduced an update on Thursday to its AI coding agent, Codex that's meant to further streamline the process of writing and debugging code and can be used to build software like complicated games and apps. The chat GPT makers stressed that the product's capabilities extend beyond writing software to a range of other related documentation and presentation work,

such as helping to create slide decks and analyze user data, end quote. But let's come back to Claude Opus 4.6, quoting the verge. Anthropic called the new model a direct upgrade from its predecessor in a release, noting that it can better take on complex multi-step tasks and get, quote, much closer to production-ready quality on the first try than what we've seen with any model. Documents, spreadsheets, and presentations will need less back and forth on iterations. It's available starting today with the same pricing as its predecessor,

and according to the company, its particular strengths are in agentic coding, tool use, search, and financial analysis. But most of all, it seems that with this release, Anthropic wants to expand Claude's current hype beyond just coding and corner the market on other types of knowledge work. With Opus 4.6, it invested in making the model better at creating presentations in PowerPoint and documents in Excel. The blog post included a plug for co-work, Anthropics' recent release. that's a non-tech worker-friendly version of Claude code, in hopes that users in non-technical industries will explore the use cases for research, marketing, and more. This is the first version of an Opus model where we have a one million context window offered in beta. The company said, we just had such positive feedback about Opus 4.5 that one of the key features people wanted was a longer context window,

so they could work with Claude across more documents. Anthropics said in the blog post that it ran the most comprehensive set of safety tests for Opus 4.6 of any of its models to date. New evaluations included ones for user well-being, more complex tests on whether Opus 4.6 could refuse potentially dangerous requests, and updated tests for how well the model could secretly perform harmful actions. The model also displayed heightened cybersecurity abilities per the company, so it included six new cybersecurity probes to track potential misuse, end quote. Amazon reported earnings yesterday, which weren't great, the street's not happy, but blah, blah, blah, because what's been the real theme of the week? CapEx numbers. Amazon announced that their

CAPEX spending this year will hit at least $200 billion. So the most of any of the big boys that has been announced this week. In fact, combined Alphabet, Amazon, Meta, and Microsoft have forecast $650 billion in 2026 capital expenditures an estimated 60% year-on-year increase. Quoting Bloomberg, the special. pending plan by Alphabet, Amazon, Meta, and Microsoft, all in pursuit of dominance in the still-nacent market for AI tools is a boom without parallel this century. Each of the company's estimates for this year is expected either near or to surpass their budgets for the past three years combined. They would set a high watermark for capital spending by any single corporation in

any one of the past 10 years, according to Bloomberg data. By contrast, the largest U.S.-based automakers, construction equipment manufacturers, railroads, defense contracts, directors, wireless carriers, parcel delivery outfits, along with ExxonMobil, Intel, Walmart, and the spun-off progeny of General Electric, 21 companies in total are projected to spend a mere combined $180 billion in 2026, according to estimates compiled by Bloomberg. The search for a comparison to the spending projections, which came as the four reported earnings in the past two weeks, requires going back at least as far as the telecommunications

bubble of the 1990s and perhaps to the buildout of the U.S. railroad networks and the the 19th century, the post-war federal investments in interstate highways or New Deal-era relief programs. The ever-larger numbers in total an estimated 60% increase from a year ago means yet another acceleration in the wave of data center construction taking place around the world and in the financing boom required to pay for all of it. The sprint to build these sprawling facilities, which hold racks of humming servers powered by expensive processors, has touched off an unprecedented level of borrowing, pinched energy suppliers, and brought developers into conflict with communities worried about rising power and water costs. It also raises the risk that construction spending by

a narrow set of affluent companies already accounting for a rising share of economic activity in the U.S. will distort big-picture economic data. The four companies see the race to provide AI compute as the next winner-take-all or winner-takes-most market, said Gil Loria, an analyst at D.A. Davidson, and none of them is willing to lose. but the street continues to be nervous about all of this. Altogether, the four companies have lost over $950 billion in market value since dropping their latest earnings and outlooks. Amazon shares slid 8% Friday in New York trading, end quote.

Yeah, but the argument they're all collectively making is that the demand is there. They're just spending and building to stay ahead of that demand. Also, with these earnings announcements this week, Amazon, Google, and Microsoft reported a collective $1.1 trillion in backlop. of cloud computing revenue in their latest earnings, including Microsoft's $625 billion worth of backlog all by itself. It'll be interesting to see if this leads to anything. The EU says that TikTok's addictive design is illegal under the DSA, citing the app's infinite

scroll and recommendation algorithm in preliminary findings. I mean, what those words just described is TikTok's entire product. So if that all is illegal, then all of TikTok is illegal. legal. Quoting the Times. On Friday, the regulators released a preliminary decision that TikTok's Infinite Scroll auto-play features and recommendation algorithm amount to an addictive design that violated European Union laws for online safety. The service poses potential harm to the, quote, physical and mental well-being of users, including minors and vulnerable adults. The European Commission, the 27-Nation Blocks executive branch, said in a statement. The findings suggest

TikTok must overhaul the core features that made it a global phenomenon or risk major fines. European officials said it was the first time that a legal standard for social media addictiveness had been applied anywhere in the world. Tick-Tock needs to change the basic design of its service, the European Commission said in a statement. TikTok said it planned to challenge the findings through every means available to us. The commission's preliminary findings present a categorically false and entirely meritless depiction of our platform. The company said in a statement, TikTok, which has more than 200 million users in Europe, should limit infinite scroll features, create new screen time limits, and change its recommendation system. The

European Commission said. No timeline was given on when authorities will make a final decision in the case. TikTok now has a chance to respond to the allegations. It faces potential fines of up to 6% of its global revenue for violations of an EU law called the Digital Services Act. TikTok has been under EU investigation since 2024 for the, quote, rabbit hole effect it has on users, particularly young people. A Pew Research Center report last year found that 16% of American teenagers said they were on TikTok almost constantly. Social media platforms have also been drawing tougher scrutiny from European leaders. This week, Prime Minister Pedro Sanchez of Spain said much stiffer oversight was needed,

vowing to ban social media for children under 16 and to hold tech executives criminally liable for illicit content spread on their platforms. Social media has become a failed state, he said in a speech, adding, we are fighting back, end quote. Study and play. Come together on a Windows 11 PC. And for a limited time, college students get The best of both worlds. Get the Unreal College deal,

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yesterday, its lowest level since November 2024 and down around 50% from its October 2025 peak, as global markets and crypto have been falling generally. Quoting Bloomberg, the market is currently navigating a crisis of faith, said Shilang Tang, managing partner of monarch asset management. While earlier legs of the decline were driven by crypto-specific liquidations, the recent pressure is tied to wider cross-asset stress. Some $722 million of bullish positions across tokens have been liquidated in the past 24 hours, coinglass data shows. Markets entered a period of synchronized selling Wednesday with the NASDAQ 100 down more than 2% and losses spreading across software, chipmakers, and other rate-sensitive corners of the equity market.

Stock declines continued Thursday with most benchmarks in Asia and Europe. lower. Unlike equity markets, however, Bitcoin and other tokens had already been sliding for months. Crypto sentiment is currently in extreme fear as the market has been routed over the last week, said Andrew 2, head of business development at crypto market maker efficiency frontier. If $72,000 doesn't hold for Bitcoin, it's highly likely we will visit 68 and then potentially even decline back down to the lows of 2024 after the initial rally. Skepticism about Bitcoin's role as a safe haven during market stress is growing. The token is now down almost 20% just since the start of the year, and the broader crypto market has lost over $460 billion in value in the past week.

At current levels, Bitcoin has returned to an area that was a strong resistance level from March to October 2024. Alex Kupitelich, chief market analyst at FX Pro said in a note on Thursday, this explains the current interest of bargain hunters, end quote. Time for the weekend long read suggestions. First up, this whole SpaceX-X-X-A-I merger. apparently it was fast-tracked because SpaceX had a technical breakthrough in orbital data center technology last fall that they believe made this all feasible, quoting the journal. SpaceX had for years been developing technologies such as computing nodes that would be helpful for AI satellite networks. Former employees say by this fall it had a breakthrough in its

attempts to figure out how to build and launch data centers into space, according to people familiar with the matter, after devoting more resources towards solving technical issues. But competitors were pushing forward, too. Sam Altman investigated OpenAI partnering with or acquiring Stoke Space, a startup rocket maker over the summer. During an event in Italy in October, Jeff Bezos said that shifting data centers to orbit made sense to him, too. Later that month, Elon Musk took to his social media platform X

and suggested that solar-powered AI satellites were the future. He posted about the topic several more times in November. What had been a medium- or long-term goal for SpaceX, developing orbital data centers, became a matter of utmost. urgency for Musk mid-last year, according to people familiar with the matter, end quote. And then from the verge, piracy is back, apparently, thanks to the high cost of all of those streaming services. Quote, it's called the Superbox, and it's being demoed by Jason, who also has homemade

banana bread, okra, and canned goods for sale. People are sick and tired of giving DISH Network $200 a month for trash service, Jason says. His pitch to rural, would-be cord cutters, buy a superbox for three to four hundred instead, and you'll never have to shell out money for cable or streaming subscriptions again. I met Jason through one of the many Facebook groups used as support forums for rogue streaming devices like the Superbox to allow him and other users and sellers of these devices to speak freely. We're only identifying them by their first names or pseudonyms. Superbox and its main competitor, VC Box, are gaining in popularity as consumers get fed up

with what TV has become. Pay TV bundles are incredibly expensive. Streaming services are costlier every. year, and you need to sign up for multiple services just to catch your favorite sports team every time they play. The hardware itself is generic and legal, but you won't find these devices at mainstream stores like Walmart and Best Buy, because everyone knows the point is accessing illegal streaming services that offer every single channel, show, and movie you can think of. But there are hundreds of resellers like Jason all across the United States who aren't bothered by the technical

and legal difficulties of these devices. They're all part of a massive informal economy that connects hard to pin down Chinese device makers and rogue streaming service operators with American consumers, looking to take cord-cutting to the next level. For years, tech-savvy TV fans have found ways to watch live sport events and other TV programs in shady ways, either by paying for bootleg streaming services or watching free on sketchy websites plastered with porn ads. Superbox and VC Box have simply turned all of this into easy-to-sell products with a thin layer of legal deniability.

VC Box guides users to a pirate stream. streaming service called Heat. Superbox's service is Blue TV. You won't find apps for either service on Google Play or any other app store. Users who have tried report that it's impossible to run them on any other third-party device suggesting that they were custom built or on behalf of makers of Superbox and VC Box themselves. The boxes don't ship with the apps pre-installed, but they make it really easy to do so. VC Box, for instance, ships with an Android TV launcher that has a row of recommended apps displaying download links to install apps for the heat streaming service with one click. New Superbox owners won't have trouble accessing the apps either. Once you open your packaging,

there are instructions, Jason says. Follow them to a T. Once downloaded these apps mimic the look and feel of traditional TV and streaming services, VC Box's Heat, for instance, has a dedicated heat live app that resembles Sling TV, Fubo, or any other live TV subscription service, complete with a program guide and the ability to flip through channels with your remote control. Superbox's Blue TV app does the same thing, while a separate Blue playback app even offers some time-shifting functionality, similar to Hulu's live TV service. Natalie estimates that she can access between 6,000 and 8,000 channels on her Superbox, including premium sports networks and movie channels and hundreds of local Fox, ABC,

and CBS affiliates from across the United States. Heat and Blue TV also each have dedicated apps for Netflix-style on-demand viewing, and the services aren't shy about the source of their programming. Heats VOD Ultra app, helpfully lists movies and TV shows categorized by provider, including HBO Max, Disney Plus, Stars, and Hulu. Some of this content may be ripped directly from legitimate services, similar to the way rogue service operators gain access to live TV feeds. Another possibility was highlighted in a 2019 indictment of pirate streaming service operators

to offer their paying customers a Netflix-like experience, even for movies that were still in theaters. The defendants allegedly went old-school and downloaded videos from newsgroups and torrent sites with the help of automated scripts. Most VC box and Superbox users don't seem to care where exactly the content is coming from as long as they can access the titles they're looking for, end quote. No bonus episodes for you this weekend.

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