Tech Brew Ride Home - Will Iran Target Tech?

Episode Date: March 31, 2026

Is the Iran war coming for US tech companies specifically? Meta unveils new smartglasses. A leak gives us a look at how Claude Code works. SpaceX is losing contact with satellites for reasons we don��t know yet. And Whoop is the big wearable player I guess we don’t talk about enough. Iran says it will target US tech companies in Middle East (The Hill) Iran’s hackers go to war (FT) The latest Ray-Ban Meta smart glasses are more customizable and expensive (Engadget) Claude Code's source code appears to have leaked: here's what we know (VentureBeat) Google commits to video generation, announces Veo 3.1 Lite (9to5Google) Another Starlink satellite has inexplicably exploded (The Verge) Whoop, a Wearable Health Device Maker, Raises $575 Million (NYTimes) Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

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with a custom color Xbox wireless controller. Learn more at Windows.com slash student offer. While supplies last, ends June 30th, turns at AKA.m.m.S. college PC. Welcome to the TechBrew right home for Tuesday, March 31st, 2026. I'm Brian McCullough today. Is the Iran War coming for U.S. tech companies specifically? Meta unveils new smart glasses. A leak gives us a look at how Claude Code works.

SpaceX is losing contact with satellites for reasons we don't know yet. And Whoop is the big wearable player. I guess we don't talk about enough. Here's what you miss today in the world of tech. Don't know if this will end up being a big nothing burger or not. I hope it is a nothing burger, but Iran says it will start targeting U.S. tech companies like Apple, Google, Meta, Microsoft, Nvidia, and Tesla in the Middle East, starting on 8 p.m. Local time on April 1st. So tomorrow, quoting the Hill. In a statement published by Sepah News, the IRGC's official news outlet, the military arm named

18 companies that accused of being involved in planning and tracking targets for U.S. attacks. This included meta. Nvidia, Oracle, Tesla, HP, Intel, and IBM. The only non-U.S. company on the list appears to be the United Arab Emirates's AI champion G-42. The IRGC advised employees to leave their workplaces immediately, noting that it planned to begin targeting those firms Wednesday at 8 p.m. local time. Iran has previously listed American tech companies as potential targets amid the conflict in early March. Iranian drones struck and damaged several Amazon data centers in the UAE and Bahrain. As tech firms and infrastructure, become targets. It has increasingly raised concerns about large-scale AI investments in the region. Countries including the UAE and Saudi Arabia have attracted significant AI spending, particularly over the past year as President Trump has embraced the Middle East as a key partner in the AI race against China, end quote. But at the same time, Iran has been known for years for its hacking armies, and this conflict has been no different. Quoting the FT, they may use keyboards

instead of rifles, but Iran's hackers who have fought Israel in the digital shadows for years are among the most battle-hardened soldiers Tehran can call on. The Iranians are throwing everything they have at this, said Chris Krebs, who was a former director of the Cybersecurity and Information Security Agency, one of the most senior civilian U.S. cybersecurity officials. It's all hands-on-deck, Krebs said, if their cyber operators are breathing, then they will be on their keyboards. Their aims vary widely from sewing fear to causing chaos, hoovering up intelligence and isolating missile targets. In the murky world of cyber warfare, it is hard to tell who even has the upper hand. But winning in cyberspace has become so critical to shaping perceptions and damaging enemy

morale that Iran has invested heavily in efforts to pierce American and Israeli firewalls. Iran has three different levels of cyber operators, whose boundaries are often blurry, analysts and former officials said, the most experienced are run directly by the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps and Iran's Ministry of Intelligence. They maintain a dizzying array of front organizations used to introduce plausible deniability for attacks and issue public threats. Iran also hires semi-autonomous hacking proxies, cybercriminals, and contractors. Finally, volunteer hacktivists have also regularly mobilized behind Tehran. Its operatives are believed by various governments and cyber experts to have doxed Israel-based employees of a large U.S. defense contractor hacked the emails of politicians in

Albania, which hosts an Iranian opposition group, and infiltrated a Polish nuclear research center. Much of its most sensitive espionage is likely to have gone unreported. Their most destructive attack attributed to them has been against Stryker, a multi-billion-dollar American medical technology company whose clients include the UK's NHS. Thousands of employees were sent home after being locked out of their computers earlier this month, disrupting supplies of critical equipment and delaying surgeries, end quote. Meta has unveiled the $499-Metha Blazor Optics and Scriber Optics with swappable nosepads and compatibility with more prescription lenses on sale beginning April 14th, quoting in gadget. The latest iteration of meta's smart glasses have arrived, and as rumored, they are more customizable, particularly for people who need prescription lenses.

Meta and Rayband parent company Esselaer Luxottica revealed two new styles of frames, the Rayban meta blazer optics, and Scriber optics, which will start at $499 a pair. The latest glasses are still considered to be part of the Gen 2 Rayban meta-glasses, but they do come with a few upgrades that make it easier to get a personalized fit. According to Esselaer Luxottica, both styles have somewhat slimmer frames, swappable nose pads, and adjustable temple tips so wearers can get a better fit. And as the optics branding implies, the new frame styles are also compatible with a wider variety of prescription lenses including progressive lenses and transition lenses. The Blazer style frames are more square, similar to the existing wayfarer glasses,

while the Scriber version is a little more rounded, like the headliner style frames. Both come in a variety of colors, including some translucent styles and are available for pre-order now on Meta's website and will be on sale April 14th. The optics lineup will also be sold at more physical retail stores, including lens crafters, Sunglass Hut, Apollo, Grand Vision Audio, Vision Express, and other locations that are part of Essela Luxottica's distribution network. The new lineup of glasses is also more expensive with a starting price of $499 compared with Meta's standard Wayfair Gen 2 model, which starts at 379. That price doesn't include prescription lenses either, which can easily run to $200 or $300 more,

depending on your setup. One benefit of that investment, though, is that Meta has consistently added new features to its smart glasses, and with the latest frames, the company is bringing some additional capabilities to all users. These include new translation support, for Japanese, Mandarin, and Arabic, as well as meta-AI enabled food and nutrition tracking. Meta-I can also summarize longer message threads rather than simply reciting a long string of messages in a given chat, end quote. Claude's source code appears to have leaked via a misconfigured NPM package, which in and of itself maybe isn't that interesting. I mean, it's worrying more than that in a second, but what is

really interesting is what we've learned about how Claude Code works. Quoting Venture Beat, the most significant takeaway for a competitor. lies in how Anthropics solved context entropy, the tendency for AI agents to become confused or hallucinatory as long-running sessions grow in complexity. The leaked source reveals a sophisticated three-layer memory architecture that moves away from traditional store-everything retrieval. As analyzed by developers like at Jimend Shutswitz, the architecture utilizes a self-healing memory system. At its core is memory.md., a lightweight index of pointers, around 150 characters per line that is perpetually loaded into the context. This index does not store data,

it stores locations. Actual project knowledge is distributed across topic files fetched on demand, while raw transcripts are never fully read back into the context, but merely gripped for specific identifiers. This strict right discipline, where the agent must update its index only after a successful file rate, prevents the model from polluting its context with failed attempts. For competitors, blueprint is clear. Build a skeptical memory. The code confirms that Anthropics agents are instructed to treat their own memory as a hint, requiring the model to verify facts against the actual code base before proceeding. The leak also pulls back the curtain on Kairos, the ancient Greek concept of at the right time, a feature flag mentioned over 150 times in the source. Kairos represents a

fundamental shift in user experience in autonomous Damon mode. While current AI tools are largely reactive, if Kairos allows Claude Code to operate as an always-on background agent. It handles background sessions and employs a process called Autoddream. The source code also provides a rare look at Anthropics' internal model roadmap and the struggles of frontier development. The leak confirms that Capibara is the internal code name for Claude 4.6, with Fenwick mapping to Opus 6 and the unreleased numbat still in testing. Internal comments reveal that Anthropics is already iterating on Capibara version 8, yet the model still faces significant hurdles. The code notes a 20 to 30% false claims rate in V8, an actual regression compared to the 16.7% rate seen in V4.

The blueprint is out now, and it reveals that Claude Code is not just a wrapper around a large language model, but a complex, multi-threaded operating system for software engineering. Even the hidden buddy system, a Tamagachi-style terminal pet with stats like chaos and snark, shows that Anthropics is building personality into the product to increase user stickiness. For the wider AI market, the leak effectively levels the playing field for agentic orchestration. Competitors can now study Anthropics more than 2,500 lines of bash validation logic and its tiered memory structures to build clawed-like agents with a fraction of the R&D budget. As the copy barra has left the lab, the race to build the next generation of autonomous agents

has just received an unplanned $2.5 billion boost in collective intelligence. While the source code leak itself is a major blow to Anthropics' intellectual property, it poses specific heightened security risk for you as a user. By exposing the blueprints of Claude Code, Anthropics has handed a roadmap to researchers and bad actors who are now actively looking for ways to bypass security guardrails and permission prompts. Because the leak reveals the exact orchestration logic for hooks and MCP servers, attackers can now design malicious repositories

specifically tailored to trick Claude Code into running background commands or exfiltrating data before you ever see a trust prompt, end quote. Ready to soundtrack your summer? With Red Bull Summer All Day Play, you choose a playlist that fits your summer vibe the best. Are you a festival fanatic, a deep end DJ, a road dog, or a trail mixer?

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video generation while announcing VO3.1 light. VO3.1 light slots under VO3.1 fast, with VO3.1 remaining at the top. The new offering is Google's most cost-effective video model. meant for high volume video applications, this model supports text to video and image to video as well as 720 or 1080p resolutions with landscape 16 by 9 and portrait 9 by 16 aspect ratios. It offers the same generation speed as V03.1 fast. On the pricing front, it is less than 50% of the cost of V03.1 fast, which is getting a price cut on April 7th. VO3.1 light is rolling out today on the Gemini API and Google AI Studio.

Google ends the announcement with the following note. making video generation more available to developers doesn't stop with the release of VO3.1 Light. Stay tuned for more updates soon. Others that the company have posted about how videos here to stay. VO is integrated into various Google products at this point, including YouTube shorts, Google Photos, Google Vids, and the Gemini app. There's also the dedicated flow tool, end quote. SpaceX says it has lost contact with a Starlink satellite after suffering an anomaly,

their words, following a similar incident in December. Quoting the verge, SpaceX isn't saying exactly what happened, but space tracking company Leo Lab says it immediately detected tens of objects in the vicinity of Starlink 34343 after the event. Latest analysis shows the event poses no new risk to the space station, its crew, or the upcoming launch of NASA's Artemis 2 mission, says SpaceX in a message posted to X. We will continue to monitor the satellite along with any trackable debris and coordinate with NASA and the U.S. Space Force. The satellite and its fragments are expected to burn up in the atmosphere within a few weeks.

SpaceX says it is working to determine the root cause. SpaceX suffered a similar episode in December when it suddenly lost communications with a satellite that also seemingly exploded. That incident occurred just a week after a near-miss with a Chinese satellite. The latest mishap occurred about 560 kilometers above the Earth, an increasingly crowded area known as low Earth orbit, where over 24,000 objects, including debris and about 10,000 Starlink satellites are currently being tracked, end quote. Finally, today, I cover the aura ring a lot on the show because I feel like it's the wearable most folks have, but it turns out that the real behemoth, or maybe the increasing one in the wearable space, is actually whoop. Although it's probably time for me to do a small disclosure that through an angel fund,

I made a small investment in a much earlier whoop round. It was a small check in the small check in the the grand scheme of things, but it was early enough that there's your disclosure. Quoting the Times, Today's wearable technology can monitor a plethora of health metrics once reserved for an annual physician's visit. One company making them is Woop, which sells wristbands that promise to help users prolong their lives through continuous tracking and behavioral coaching. The bands intended to be worn 24 hours a day, track heart rate variability, blood pressure, blood oxygen levels, and other metrics. I do envision the potential of Woop to predict that you're

going to have a heart attack before you do, said Will. Ahmed, a co-founder of the company and its chief executive. On Tuesday, Woop announced a $575 million new round of financing at a $10.1 billion valuation. The funding round was led by collaborative fund with participation from the Qatar Investment Authority, Foundry, the basketball star LeBron James and the soccer star, Cristiano Ronaldo, among others. Mr. Ahmed started the business in 2012 as a student at Harvard, where he was co-captain of the squash team. In its first few years, Woop branded itself as a performance enhancement tool for elite athletes. Star brand partners like the swimmer Michael Phelps and Mr. James helped solidify its reputation.

Today's cultural obsession with biohacking fueled by longevity influencers has expanded Woop's customer base from elite athletes to everyday health trackers rapidly accelerating its business. The company doubled its total sales last year and reached $1 billion in annual recurring revenue by the end of 2025. Much of that growth was international. 60% of Woop's sales last year were outside the U.S. Mr. Ahmed said. Woop operates on a subscription model rather than selling its trackers for a one-time fee.

It charges $199 annually for its least expensive product, discounted to $149 for the first year, which includes the fitness band and a tracking app that grades a user's health data along factors such as sleep and stress scores. The app also gives users a Woop age intended to show whether they are aging faster or slower than their biological age. Last year, Woop launched its most high-end product yet, the Woop M-G, short for medical grade. Woop MG offers electrocardiogram tests

which track the electrical activity of the heart and conducts atrial fibrillation or a fibribe detection, end quote. A listener got in touch with me last night saying they hoped I felt better, but also, ha ha, it was funny that I left a cough in yesterday's episode to prove I really was sick. Well, that was not me being cute.

I had to edit out like 30 coughs yesterday, so I guess one slipped through. If one slipped through today, trust me, that was not intentional either. Talk to you tomorrow. All. Pay off your home, travel for life, drive a Ferrari. In celebration of the world premiere of the Monopoly Big Board Buckslot Machine by Aristocrat Gaming, Yamava Resort and Casino at San Manuel is giving one person a $1.6 million dream package.

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