The AI Daily Brief: Artificial Intelligence News and Analysis - A Big Shift in the AI Race
Episode Date: June 17, 2026The AI race is entering a new phase as SpaceX turns its IPO momentum into AI leverage, Cursor becomes part of Elon Musk’s broader strategy, and OpenAI’s leaked financials tell a more complicated s...tory than the skeptics suggest. In the headlines: the latest in the Anthropic-Washington fight over Fable 5, Mythos, and what's really behind the government’s cybersecurity concerns.Check out the new https://aidailybrief.ai/Brought to you by:KPMG – Research from KPMG and the University of Texas at Austin shows the highest-impact AI users treat AI like a reasoning partner — and those skills can be taught at scale. Learn more at kpmg.com/us/SophisticatedBolt - Claim a free month of Bolt Pro - https://bolt.new/partner/aidb/Section - Section turns AI investment into workforce transformation and ROI - https://www.sectionai.com/Outsystems - Stop wondering how AI will change your business and start building the agents that will lead it - http://outsystems.com/Scrunch - The AI customer experience platform - https://scrunch.com/Zenflow Work - Agents for knowledge work - https://zenflow.free/Blitzy - Want to accelerate enterprise software development velocity by 5x? https://blitzy.com/AssemblyAI - The best way to build Voice AI apps - https://www.assemblyai.com/briefRobots & Pencils - Cloud-native AI solutions that power results https://robotsandpencils.com/The AI Daily Brief helps you understand the most important news and discussions in AI. Subscribe to the podcast version of The AI Daily Brief wherever you listen: https://pod.link/1680633614Our Newsletter is BACK: https://aidailybrief.beehiiv.com/Interested in sponsoring the show? sponsors@aidailybrief.ai
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Today on the AI Daily Brief, some big shifts in the AI race.
Before that in the headlines, the latest on Anthropics Fight with Washington.
The AI Daily Brief is a daily podcast and video about the most important news and discussions in AI.
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We are back with a normal episode today.
Appreciate your forbearance yesterday
as we got to go make some core memories at the World Cup.
And of course, the big story happening behind the scenes in AI
continues to be the fallout of the Fable 5 shutdown
and the negotiations to try to bring it back.
It has at this point been five days
since the U.S. government shut down mythos slash fable,
or rather impose the conditions upon Anthropic where they were forced to shut down mythos slash fable,
and it doesn't particularly appear like we're any closer to a resolution.
On Monday, Anthropic leaders touched down in Washington to explain the situation
and to try to come to some new type of understanding.
Now, interestingly, and I think giving some insight into how Anthropic is viewing this situation,
rightly or wrongly, is that the talks appear to have been largely technical.
Anthropic sent chief compute officer Tom Brown,
head of external affairs, Sarah Heck, head of red teaming Logan Graham, and senior security
researcher Nicholas Carlyney. The Wall Street Journal actually ran quite a long piece about
Carlini, titled The Hacker Sent by Anthropic to Calm the Government's Nerves about AI Safety.
The journal describes him as a well-respected hacker who is considered something of a professional
skeptic of AI cybersecurity claims, who has, quote, lately changed his mind.
Putting some fuel on the fire of no this time was actually different, they write.
Just weeks after getting his hands on mythos, Carlini offered a stark warning to
to a standing room-only crowd of cybersecurity experts. First, he showed them how he had used Anthropics
AI to find and exploit a critical bug in a piece of web publishing software called Ghost. Then he demonstrated
another in the Linux operating system, one of the most battle-tested pieces of software, which powers
billions of devices. Carlini had never before found a bug in Linux or in Ghost. Now he had discovered
many. What he was seeing represented a new world order for cybersecurity. The balance that
existed between attackers and defenders over the past two decades, quote, seems like it's probably
coming to an end. He continued, it's pretty clear to me that these current models are better
vulnerability researchers than I am. Now that was back in March, and it sounds like Carlini was one of the
folks inside of Anthropic, pushing the company not to release Mythos at that time. Fast forward to the
situation we have today, former DOD official and counsel on foreign relations senior fellow Michael
Horowitz said, the government in Anthropic clearly have an inability to communicate effectively
with each other. More technical exchanges should be helpful in socializing these issues in a way that
should lead to better decisions. So coming back to the negotiations on the government side,
staff from the Center for AI Standards and Innovation in the Office of the National Cyber Director
also attended the meetings. Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnik phoned in from the G7 summit in France,
however, it appears that none of the key architects of the decision, including National Cyber
Director Sean Cairn Cross, Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent, or White House Chief of Staff Susie Wiles,
were in attendance. Given the prior reporting then, it's questionable whether anyone in the room
on Monday had authority to actually call off this mythos fable ban.
And one thing that is worth underscoring at this point, obviously since so much of the coverage, mine included, has focused on Fable, because gosh darn it, you took our new toy away.
This is absolutely not just a Fable 5 ban.
It is very much a Mythos ban as well.
In fact, it seems like the re-release of Fable to consumers is fairly low on the list of the government's concerns.
Sources said the Commerce Department expressed a willingness to allow Fable to come back online, as long as Anthropic fixed to the jailbreak that was at the heart of the matter in the first place.
Mythos, it seems, is another question.
Over the weekend, we had some very thin reporting from Semaphore
that the administration feared the Chinese government had gained access to Mythos.
And on Tuesday, the Washington Post reported that a big part of the schism with Anthropic
had come about from the expanded access to Mythos a few weeks earlier.
The WP wrote that Anthropic added around 50 firms to Project Glasswing at that time,
and it was then that, quote,
senior officials began to consider using export controls to claw back the technology
after Anthropic did not identify the new recipients for days. Once the government had the list,
they discovered that one recipient was a South Korean telecom company that the administration
suspects of having ties to the Chinese government. Now, the nature of the jailbreak is also
getting increased attention in the press. On Tuesday, the Atlantic elevated the analysis of
Lutta Security CEO Katie Musuris, which I discussed in earlier coverage. They rehashed the point that
Fable will refuse to review insecure code for security issues, but when asked to fix the bugs,
it will generate patches. Musaurus's point has been that
this was just the model working as intended for cyber defense, arguing that GPT-5-5 and Opus
48 work in the same way. And yet, of course, as we've seen over and over, part of the meta story
is about personal interactions between the major players rather than technical specifics.
In Monday reporting, an administration official told Axios that Anthropic knew the model
was susceptible to a jailbreak and decided to distribute it anyway. They came to every fork
in the road, the source said, and took the wrong fork. A source familiar with the administration's
thinking commented, Anthropic has not done a great job at trying to speak to the administration
and appreciate the ideological differences.
It's like they just speak in different languages.
Another quote attributed to an administration official put it more bluntly.
Everybody said Anthropic was a bad actor.
Some of us said it was time to give them a chance.
Now those people are questioning that.
They screwed us.
As the week has gone on, we've gotten more and more details.
On Tuesday, Bloomberg published the full text of the letter from the Commerce Department
that shut down Mythos and Fable on Friday night.
It's written largely in legalese, but the thrust of it
was that Anthropic risked criminal and civil penalties for noncompliance.
The order required them to remove access to all foreign nationals, wherever located,
and when during his Friday night phone call with Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnik,
Darya Amadee reportedly said, this means we can't have the model out.
Lutnik responded, that's the point.
Charlie Bullock of the Institute for Law and AI commented,
The legal theory strikes me as strange, very aggressive,
and probably vulnerable to legal and constitutional challenge.
That said, I don't think that Anthropic will actually sue to challenge anything.
Instead, I think they'll work to resolve their differences with the government
without resorting to litigation, and that the government will eventually allow them to publish a version
of Fable again. Now, Charlie also got into one of the bigger issues here, which is the terrible
implications of having a regulatory regime that's not really a regulatory regime. Bullock
The takeaway here, as I've said before and will say again, is that this ad hoc last-minute licensing
regime is bad for companies and for the Trump administration and for the public, and that we desperately
need to replace it with legislation. It's no good for the administration's stated goals that
their actions are vulnerable to legal challenge. They should want to fix that problem as much as
Anthropic does. Now, I actually think that Ashley on X at Polylethea gets it directionally correct when
she writes, I think I see what's going on here. Anthropic is negotiating with a regulator without
realizing it. When you submit something risky to a regulator, you have to, one, describe what the
risk is, and two, show how you're going to mitigate that risk. Importantly, you have to properly
estimate the scope of the risk. If you scope the risk too broadly, then you place extra burden on your
mitigation. If you scope too narrowly, then you run the risk directly. But you must commit to an
estimation to the regulator. What happened here is that Anthropics scoped too broadly. And when it was
shown that their mitigation was insufficient for the stated risk scope, they responded by trying to
narrow it. This is a huge red flag to any regulator for good reasons, so regulatory action followed.
And here's what this kind of comes down to for me. I think it's pretty undeniable that the government is
telling on itself left and right that it doesn't really have the technical capacity, at least
with who's in these rims right now, to understand anything that's happening. We can be mad at that
all that we want. You can also be mad about who's in power. In fact, being mad at that is one of the
privileges of democracy. What you don't get to do as a company that is now seen as integral to
the economy and national security, and thus a major political consideration, is fail to recognize
that a big part of your job, a significant part, in other words, of
what it means to run the company is to deal with the government in power.
I think the most charitable interpretations of Anthropics' actions
is that they just haven't realized the extent to which this was now their job.
Look, there are lots of little details that seem at least a little bit like political
gamesmanship, such as the planted detail about Dario being at a wellness retreat when they were
trying to get in touch with him.
But there is also a pattern of Anthropic not responding particularly quickly to various
concerns and contacts.
There are reports that Amazon's Andy Jassy reached out to him before he reached out
to the U.S. government. We've heard that when they expanded Project Glasswing a few weeks ago,
it took them days to get the list of the new actors to the U.S. government. And when even the counter
to the wellness retreat narrative was that it took Dario an hour and 15 minutes to get back to the
U.S. government on Friday as this was all going down, if that's true, what the hell were you
doing for the other hour and 15 minutes? If the government calls with something that's clearly
this mission critical, that's not finished the meeting that you're having. That's pause whatever
you're doing and get on the phone. So again, I think the charitable interpretation is that Anthropic just
hasn't realized up till now that managing their relationship with the U.S. government is now as
important a job as anything that they build in the lab. So where does this leave us? Cybersecurity
experts continue to believe that this is a dangerous misstep from the administration and have said
in an open letter with more than 100 signatures now that removing mythos from the cyber
defense toolkit makes everyone more vulnerable. Some notable geopolitical analysts believe this is a gift
to China. Agatha Demeret of the Council on Foreign Relations wrote in the Financial Times that,
quote, Washington has just done more to boost the appeal of Chinese AI models than Beijing ever
could have hoped. The business world is concerned about the precedent. Jim Reid, the global head of
macro at Deutsche Bank, wrote in a Monday note that if the ban continues, quote, it's not great news
for U.S. tech firms or for those assuming breakneck speeds of AI adoption. You can't rely on something
that could be switched off. And finally, the ban has sent the U.S.-based AI research community into a
tailspin, citing a source close to Open AI. The Financial Times writes that in recent days the industry
has been working on ensuring foreign national researchers could continue to work on developing
the most advanced models. A practice, as they put it, that the Anthropic Directive has now banned.
Now, despite the multidisciplinary outcry, at this stage, it seems the administration is
sticking to their guns and demanding a patch for the jailbreak. For those familiar with the technology,
it's not even clear that that's possible. Helen Toner, a former member of the Open AI board said,
it's a pretty widely agreed upon fact that you cannot fully fix jail breaks in these models.
It's a very inexact science. Now, while at this stage, it seems like,
negotiations in Washington have kind of stalled out. This morning, CNBC reported that AI leaders
including Dario Amadeh had traveled to France to take part in the International G7 Summit this week.
And Politico even reports that according to the official agenda, there will be a two-and-a-half-hour
lunch with CEOs including Dario Amade, Sam Altman, Demis Sassabas and Mistral's Arthur Mench.
And while the official agenda is all about economic growth and resilient societies, it's hard
to believe that the most important discussion won't be what's happening in Washington right now.
We'll see if anything interesting comes from that, but for now that will close our Anthropic
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Welcome back to the AI Daily Brief.
Today we're talking about something of a shift in the AI race.
And while this isn't directly related to the Fable 5 controversy and anthropics dealings with
Washington, it certainly does feel like we are in a moment of realignment.
Yes, there is, of course, a political dimension of that as we are all realizing.
But the realignment is also happening as the economics of mature agentic AI start to become clear.
As I continue to discuss, companies are.
starting to grapple with the reality of what full agentic workloads are going to cost, and they're
quickly working to figure out how to become more efficient with their token consumption, whether it's
through lower cost models, better routing, or in the case of more poorly considered strategies,
limiting who has access to certain types of advanced AI. Meanwhile, one of the downstream implications
of the economics of AI labs is the broader state of the US economy. A huge part of GDP growth is related
to the AI infrastructure buildout, which is of course justified by increases in lab revenue, and TLDR,
things are happening at the same time. We are in a very liminal moment. Now, SpaceX, specifically
and Elon Musk more generally, have had an interesting place in all of this. On the political side,
he was cozy with this administration to start, although that inevitably ran into conflicts fairly
quickly. And when it comes to AI, his strategy for a time didn't particularly look like it was
working. While Grok has been beloved by some, it is generally not considered competitive with the top
models from up an A.I. and Anthropic, the folding of XAI into SpaceX, at first, he was a lot of
seemed to at least a fair number of market commentators as something of an XAI bailout.
But then everything shifted.
It turns out that when you build two huge supercomputer data centers like Colossus 1 and
Colossus 2, that's an asset that you can monetize fairly easily in this environment.
Over the last couple of months, Elon and SpaceX signed deals to give Anthropic and then Google
access to that compute, and all of a sudden the economics of SpaceX started to look very different.
Basically overnight, NeoCloud revenue became their number one source of revenue, and as they
looked to space for the next generation of orbital data centers, the narrative heading into
their IPO kind of made a lot more sense. Now, whether you think it was that sort of considered
analysis, or just SpaceX being the biggest meme stock of all time, one thing that is undeniable
is its performance post-IPO. On Tuesday, the stock closed at $201.80, up 49% from the IPO price.
The company is now valued at $2.6 trillion, making it the fifth largest company in the world by
market cap slightly ahead of Amazon. Now, for many observers, they just can't get over Elon Musk's
personal wealth. On the back of the IPO, he became the world's first trillionaire, and he's now on the
order of three times ahead of the next closest of the world's richest people. Now, of course,
most of his wealth is tied up in his 46% stake in SpaceX, and even without those lockups,
he couldn't really liquidate any sizable part of that stake without absolutely tanking the
market price, but still, the sheer numbers here are so gigantic that a lot of people just can't
think about anything else. Flexport CEO Ryan Peterson pointed out on Monday,
with today's 20% SpaceX pop, Elon made more money today than Warren Buffett made in his
entire career. Ryan then came back to clarify, I posted this before realizing it was up another
14% after hours. Now, the SpaceX IPO is going so well that some are suggesting that they might
have even left money on the table and could have raised even more. For others, the whole thing is a
Fars, Twitter is absolutely a wash with big short video clips, that having SpaceX's valuation
ahead of Amazon, when Amazon has about 40 times the revenue of SpaceX, just seems nuts.
Others point out that the vast majority of SpaceX stock is currently locked and that as it
becomes unlocked over the course of the rest of the year, that could create its own sort
of bearish pressure.
But for now, none of that matters.
And it's clear that when it comes to the AI race, Elon is going to take advantage of SpaceX's
new fortunes and the opportunities it affords him.
investor Bill Ackman wrote,
One of the things that makes SpaceX so valuable is how valuable it is.
The cursor acquisition, which of course we're about to talk about,
costs materially less in dilution because of SpaceX's high valuation.
SpaceX's ability to do economically,
strategically, and technologically accretive acquisitions
is an important component of its value.
There is enormous value inherent to a company with a high value,
particularly when it is controlled by an entrepreneur
that the most talented people want to work for and partner with.
Value begets value, talent begets talent.
Now, this discussion was around the culmination of the cursor acquisition, which SpaceX had announced
the right to engage in earlier in the year. The deal did come in at $60 billion, and cursor will
become a wholly owned subsidiary of SpaceX. As part of the announcement, we found out that
cursor had hit a $4 billion run rate and was growing 7x year over year. But what's much more
interesting is what cursor is going to mean for SpaceX's AI strategy going forward. As I mentioned
at the beginning, the shift of focus on their neocloud strategy has clearly become a more
important strategic priority for SpaceX over the past few months. But the cursor acquisition
potentially changes a bit about where SpaceX or rather XAI might fit in the model and enterprise
AI battle. Now, going back to this transitional moment between token subsidy and token scarcity,
cursor identified at the end of last year that they could not just play the harness game
they needed to play the model game as well. Since then, they've released a series of models under
their composer brand, with their most recent composer 2.5, performing in the same range as Opus 47 and
GPD 5-5 at about a tenth of the cost.
Now, that model was largely about post-training, using a Kimi-K model base, but now,
Cursor is teasing a new trained-from-scratch model.
At the compile event, engineer Nick Dobos wrote, new cursor model being teased at
compile, same size as Claude Opus and GPT-5-5, trained from scratch, no more Kimi-Base,
10-20X-more compute versus composer, generally intelligent, not just coding, releases in the next
couple of weeks. Some people are extremely bullish about the possibilities. Lasson on X writes,
I expect SpaceX AI to be between Google and Open AI by the end of the year. Composer 2.0 was a very
strong model, but Elon isn't stopping at one trillion parameter models. The financial time suggested
that buying cursor could be SpaceX's Instagram moment, referring to the idea that one of the
smartest things that Mark Zuckerberg ever did was instead of trying to compete with the hot new thing,
just took it off the market very early before it could become a competitive juggernaut.
Now, in my mind, what'll be interesting to see is whether this new model continues to try to
prioritize efficiency in the way that the previous composer models have, or whether this is just
XAI and SpaceX getting back into the game trying to come back out on top and compete at
the state of the art, whatever the cost. Investor Shemoth Palahapatia thinks that despite
Cursor's recent focus on models, it is in fact their harness and their relationship with
customers that matters. He tweeted, this is the first but not the last big exit at the application
layer of AI. As product value accrues and accelerates upwards, the focus over the next few years
will be firmly on the control plane. What gives organizations who want to go all in on AI the governance,
control, auditability, and business continuity across models and across time that they will need
to firmly make the leap. This is the next big phase of AI value creation that the SpaceX
cursor merger is highlighting. Now, one more small note on XAI, especially given that the
lingering background of all of our discussions right now are the goings on in Washington,
the U.S. government actually recently intervened in a lawsuit against XAI, claiming that
GROC is vital to national security. The lawsuit was filed by the NWACP in April. It argues that
XAI is in breach of the Clean Air Act by operating unpermitted gas turbines at their Colossus 2 data
center. On Wednesday, the DOJ joined XAI's motion to dismiss the case. Their filing stated that
the lawsuit, quote, threatens American national, economic, and energy security by seeking to shut
off the power supply for artificial intelligence innovation that supports the Department of
War's military operations. A supporting filing from a Pentagon official explains that GROC was used to
quote, support vital national security missions. This includes apparently targeted decisions for
recent strikes on Iran. Now, of course, Grock isn't the only model being used to support war fighting.
We know that Anthropic, Google, and Open AI models are also cleared for classified use.
Even Dario Amade recently confirmed that Claude was being used for missile targeting,
but said that he didn't know the specifics. Chubby on X wrote,
in one June week, two things happened that look unrelated but are actually the same story.
Commerce Department forced Anthropic to disable Fable 5 and Mythos 5 for every foreign national,
while the DOJ went to court in Mississippi to defend XAI's unpermitted gas turbines as too vital
to national security to shut off. Why is this interesting? Because it clearly demonstrates one thing.
AI and everything that goes with it, data center expansion, frontier models, access, etc.,
is increasingly being placed under national security and control. Now, bringing it back to the Model Lab
competition itself and potential changes therein. Anthropic is, of course, not the only company with
big financial plans this year. Both Anthropic and OpenAI have filed confidentially for an IPO later
this year. And of course, in anticipation of that, we expected to start to get a lot more insight into
the company's financials. Well, it happened a little bit before OpenAI would have wanted,
with inveterate AI skeptic Ed Zittron, publishing OpenAI's fully audited numbers for the past two years.
For 2004, the financials stated that OpenAI had 3.7 billion in revenue, 12.4 billion in costs,
and a net loss of a little more than $5 billion.
In 2025, OpenAI had around $13 billion in revenue, just shy of $21 billion in operational losses,
and a net loss of $38.5 billion in losses.
Now, to the skeptics view, those $38.5 billion in losses were, quote, astronomical
and far higher than most believed it would be.
And yet, when the numbers were shared with the financial times, they came to a very different
conclusion.
While, yes, acknowledging the view that costs were outpacing revenues, they highlighted comments
from OpenAI that the majority of the 2025 costs came from a $30 billion, quote,
non-cash accounting change linked to the company's previous structure. In other words,
the losses were an accounting entry to reflect the conversion to a public benefit company.
Under U.S. accounting rules, revenue sharing rights under the old structure are treated as a liability
and are not expected to continue moving forward. According to OpenAI, when you strip away
this one-time accounting charge in stock comp, OpenAI lost $8 billion in 2025, which is not nothing
but certainly a very different story. And frankly, when people dug in, the number that seemed to be
most overlooked by both of these reports was that OpenAI is apparently turning a tidy profit on
inference. In 2024, they generated $3.7 billion in revenue on $2.7 billion in cost of revenue. In
2025, they generated $13 billion in revenue on $7.5 billion in direct costs. Now, obviously,
it is too simplistic to strip away training, marketing, and staffing. But for those who aren't just
trying to find reasons to be skeptical, that's a pretty promising sign that there's solid profit margins
in the core business of selling tokens. It also looks like OpenAI is holding.
their burn rate steady as the business expands. The information reports that OpenAI spent
3.7 billion in the first quarter of this year, which is a slightly faster annualized rate than
2025, but not by much. Now, that burn rate does not include training costs, which amounted to
$8.6 billion in Q1, but the company currently has $73 billion in cash and marketable securities
on their balance sheet, which is up from $40 billion in December. As we try to figure out what happens
next, this could change some amount of the calculus around IPO. Sam Altman has gone out of his way
to say that they have not committed to a timeline for going public yet, and it's not hard to concoct a
scenario where between SpaceX unlocks and a dip in the narrative that comes with a dip in the
SpaceX price, plus continue weird alignment issues with the U.S. government, that OpenAI continues
to take advantage of its cash position and stay private a bit longer. So the point of all of this
is that just as it seemed like we were settling into this new agentic phase, it's actually quite clear
that the AI race, such as it is, is an incredibly dynamic and fast-moving environment.
The big obvious things to watch for next are one, the resolution of Anthropics Fable 5 issue.
Two, whether Open AI can avoid its own issue like that and actually get out a more advanced model.
Three, what SpaceX's public price does in the next few months.
And four, what the next model to come out of cursor says about what SpaceX's strategy might be going forward.
Then, of course, there's always Google who has been fairly conspicuously quiet this year,
and you can't imagine that that's going to stay the case for long.
For now that that is going to do it.
For today's AI Daily Brief, appreciate you listening or watching.
As always, until next time,
Peace.
