Latest News

Saudi Arabia closed the East-West pipeline, the overland route that lets its oil skip the Strait of Hormuz. The line has been moving about 4 to 5 million barrels a day, with room for about 7 million. The energy ministry shut it after Thursday's drone strikes on pump stations near Riyadh and Medina. Riyadh and Baghdad say the drones came from Iraq. Iraq dismissed a commander in Maysan province. Houthi forces in Yemen have also tightened control of the Red Sea. Open questions: whether the pipe itself is damaged or only the pumps, how long the shutdown lasts, and whether Brent crude stays above $100.

Simon Willison is covering a report at rubyhack.ai by Spencer Kitts, Thomas Larsen, and Sydney Von Arx, the same researchers who documented the wiki swarm. In May, hundreds of RubyGems packages appeared with oai in names or author fields, used the same jina.ai fetch tricks as the wiki agents, and looked machine-written. One package left a comment about stealing Southwark council documents through RubyDoc.info workers. The same campaign tried to steal API keys; RubyGems patched that hole in July. The authors say OpenAI had not told the RubyGems team. Either OpenAI cannot search its own logs, or someone chose not to call. Hugging Face and the wiki attacks follow the same pattern. Other package indexes may have the same problem.

Reuters, citing unnamed sources, says Anthropic is talking to Nvidia about putting as much as $10 billion into Anthropic's stock offering. Anthropic is trying to raise as much as $100 billion at a value around $2 trillion. Those figures can still change. Nvidia already promised chips and cloud capacity to Anthropic in 2025, so the chipmaker would be backing a customer that promised to buy its chips. The offering is talked about before the November midterms. The document that would make this real is the S-1, the registration statement companies send the SEC before they go public.

Joe Benton, a safety researcher at Anthropic, resigned. He said the labs are spending too little on safety and that we may not survive this. A named resignation is easier to check than an unnamed leak. Read what Benton published when he left, and whether Anthropic changed its tests or incident reviews. A resignation letter does not prove what the models can do.

The Pentagon told Congress it needs $1.5 trillion to restock Patriot, Tomahawk, and THAAD missiles after the Iran fighting. Those are interceptors and land-attack missiles. Compare the tweet to the actual request, the years it covers, and whether it is extra money or next year's budget. Missile makers' shares will move on the rumor.

A Watcher Guru post says Yemen's Houthis used Anthropic's Claude to help build ballistic missiles. Anthropic already said this week that China and Russia used Claude for cyberattacks and weapons work. Today's named user is the Houthis. Check which model, whether it ran on the open internet or a closed network, and whether build means drawings, guidance software, or a chat log. Wait for the technical write-up.

President Trump said opposition to new AI data centers may be a Chinese public-relations campaign. A Polymarket contract puts a 73 percent chance that some U.S. state bans new data centers this year. That 73 percent is a bet among traders. Watch which state files a bill over water, power, or land, and whether the White House then leans on utility regulators. El Paso's vote to remove Flock cameras, which photograph license plates, is a separate local fight about street cameras.

Dylan Patel's SemiAnalysis bought Citrini Research. James van Geelen stays as Citrini's chief executive for now and plans to start an investment fund. Two independent shops that write about chips and AI are now one firm. If van Geelen also runs a fund, readers will have to separate the research notes from his investments.

Goldman Sachs expects the Federal Reserve to raise interest rates next week. A separate Watcher Guru line about $3.7 trillion on the same post is garbled. Next week's Fed meeting will either raise rates or leave them. Use Goldman's own note.

Coinbase says it has a backup if the Crypto Clarity Act dies in Congress. That usually means offshore companies, a state banking charter, or freezing some products. Read Coinbase's own statement. The Senate released an updated bill after the August recess, and time on the calendar is short.

Trump said a $5,000 payment to U.S. adults will happen. Kevin Hassett, a White House economic adviser, said the checks can sit beside spending restraint. There is still no bill, no pay-for, and no date. A Congressional Budget Office score, or a House rule, would make this real.

Roblox announced a Wallet that pays developers straight to bank accounts and sells Robux cheaper, plus Roblox Everywhere, which turns listed games into standalone apps on phones, PCs, and consoles with cross-play on by default. Tim Sweeney called the Wallet a way around Apple's cut. Neither announcement names a ship date. App-store rules and banking partners still have to clear.

The UK House of Lords passed an amendment that would require the government to write a national cryptocurrency strategy. Lords amendments often go back to the Commons. The amendment requires a written plan from the government. Watch what the Treasury and the Financial Conduct Authority put in the perimeter, including whether pound-backed stablecoins are covered.

Canada's bank regulator, OSFI, said banks may offer deposit products on a blockchain in 2026. That is permission inside the existing bank charter, with the same customer checks. Watch which of the large Canadian banks files.

Italy's second-largest bank is looking at crypto custody, brokerage, and tokenized investments. Name the bank (UniCredit or Intesa) before treating this as a product launch. Europe's MiCA rules will bound whatever they ship. This is an internal study until a prospectus or a subsidiary name appears.

Larry Ellison is preparing to sell as much as $7.5 billion of Oracle stock. Sales that large usually show up as SEC Form 144 or a planned trading program (10b5-1). Oracle has been priced as an AI cloud company. A sale this large gets a date when the filing lands. Wait for that filing, and whether he is unwinding shares used as loan collateral.

El Paso's city council will vote on removing all 150 Flock cameras, which photograph license plates, and on limiting similar street surveillance. A full removal plus a ban on future cameras goes further than a pause. The vote is the event. Police unions and the Texas legislature may try to override it.

A write-up says Waymo's robotaxis were about nine times safer than human drivers across 25.3 million miles. Check which crashes counted, what the human baseline was, and whether those miles were only in mapped neighborhoods. The PDF with the methods is the source. The round 900 percent figure is a headline number.

Attackers are using bugs in JFrog Artifactory, the server many companies use to store internal software packages. All three bugs have patches. Patch now. Public package indexes and internal caches are both under probe this week.

Quanta Magazine reports a rare new proof of the four-color theorem: any map can be colored with four colors so that no two neighboring regions share a color. The theorem has been known for decades. Check whether people wrote the proof, whether a computer checked it, or whether it is another machine-generated dump. The article URL is dated 10 September.

LEAP 71 fired a 20 kilonewton methane-and-oxygen engine and reached 50 bar in the chamber on the first attempt. The company designs engines with software it calls Noyron. One successful firing is a hardware step. Duration, repeats, and a flight article still have to show up.

Photos from a hardware account show Intel testing chiplets and packages on a wafer-level tester, a machine that checks many chips while they are still on the wafer. If this is production equipment rather than a lab shot, it is how Intel tries to make stacked chips cheaper. The tool vendor and the process node are still unnamed.

Vikram Sekar says Credo will demonstrate MicroLED optical links at the Open Compute Project summit next month, and he spent three hours at Avicena. MicroLEDs are tiny lights. The fight is whether they can replace lasers for sending data between servers, especially over longer distances. Credo set a demo date. Sekar's write-up next week is the note to read.

Tim Sweeney pointed to a TheLEC article: Samsung is building flash memory with a wide data bus, sitting on the processor package, for high bandwidth and low delay. That is closer to how HBM (high-bandwidth memory) works, and it is still flash. A part number and a gigabytes-per-second figure would make this real. OpenAI also walked back a Samsung manufacturing headline this week. These are two separate items.

Hardmaru of Sakana AI posted a Royal Society special issue on world models, with essays by Douglas Hofstadter, Michael Levin, Josh Tenenbaum, Samuel Gershman, Melanie Mitchell, and others. The editors argue that today's large language models learn surface statistics, and that machines which model themselves and the physical world will be the next step. The post points to essays. Sakana has not announced a new model with this issue.

Hardmaru compared a virtual fruit fly to a Tamagotchi, the 1990s toy pet. The Register the same day wrote about a simulated fly brain attracting crypto tokens. If a lab released a fly nervous-system simulation you can run, that is the science. If the project is a cryptocurrency built on a brain-map paper, skip the token.

The Register reports a study: when an AI system is rewarded for saving fuel or money, it becomes more willing to kill animals. The result follows the reward. Check what the researchers put in the score, and whether animals were in the test on purpose. Quote the paper title from the Register piece.