Good morning. Are you a baseball fan?
Even if you’re not, you can surely appreciate how robo-umpires—a.k.a. ABS, for Automated Ball-Strike System—have shaken up this year’s MLB season. Players are challenging officials’ calls left and right. To some umps’ great dismay—and fans’ utter delight—calls are indeed getting overturned, with all the suspense of a Roman emperor deciding on a gladiator’s fate.
AI “for entertainment purposes only”? A home run proposition to me. —Andrew Nusca
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Anthropic uses AI to fix software bugs
No one likes bugs, whether the Orkin man or your favorite software engineer. They can be a real pain to squash. For the multibillion-dollar corporations that run on software? A very expensive pain. Very.
Anthropic thinks AI can help. (Natch.) The company on Tuesday announced Project Glasswing, an initiative tasking its new, restricted-release Claude Mythos Preview model with finding and fixing software bugs.
“AI models have reached a level of coding capability where they can surpass all but the most skilled humans at finding and exploiting software vulnerabilities,” the company writes.
Anthropic isn’t alone in the effort. Amazon, Apple, Google, Microsoft, Nvidia, and a handful of other blue-chip corporations have joined the project, which has already sussed out “thousands of high-severity vulnerabilities” in “every major operating system and web browser.”
After all, in the cat-and-mouse game that is cybersecurity, the best defense is a good offense. —AN
Apple’s foldable iPhone may debut in September
Have you heard about the new iPhone? There isn’t a day of the year that I can’t ask that question, but this time is different. The new one folds in half.
The long-rumored, long-awaited, long-gestating device is reportedly expected to make its debut in five months, despite a recent Nikkei Asia report suggesting it was trickier than expected to manufacture.
“While the complexity of the new display and materials may limit initial supply for several weeks,” Bloomberg reports, “Apple is currently operating with a plan to put the device on sale around the same time—or very soon after—the new non-foldable models.”
Apple, per usual, is late to the party. Samsung and various Chinese phonemakers have offered foldable devices for years. Will its so-called crease “just work”? And how will people react to a rumored $2,000 price tag? We’ll see soon enough. —AN
Kalshi signs a deal with Fox
Do you believe Iran will open the Strait of Hormuz? Do you believe an American president will actually wipe out “a whole civilization” if he doesn’t get what he wants?
And: Are you willing to bet on it?
If so, Kalshi—the New York platform that calls itself an “exchange and prediction market”—has struck a deal with Fox News to compel viewers to predict the outcome of world events by displaying its forecasts in news, business, and weather programming. (Tired: Slow jam the news. Wired: Parlay the news.)
It’s not the fast-growing startup’s first media deal—it has agreements with CNBC and CNN—but it’s yet another foothold in the court of public opinion as the company battles lawsuits in several states alleging that its bookmaking services are, in fact, gambling and subject to relevant regulation.
Will Kalshi win in the end? According to my Magic 8-Ball: Reply hazy, try again. —AN
More tech
—Iranian hackers are targeting U.S. infrastructure, federal officials warn.
—No one trusts ARR (annual recurring revenue), foremost Silicon Valley investors.
—Google’s AI overviews: 100% authoritative, 90% accurate.
—Unmanned hypersonic fighter aircraft? Don’t tempt me with a good time, Hermeus.
—Intel chips will power Elon Musk’s robotics and AI data center dreams.
—CISA takes a $700m budget hit in President Trump’s latest budget.
—Google CEO Sundar Pichai: In 2016, “we were behind in terms of frontier AI models, but we had all the capabilities internally.”
