Ukraine has decided to retaliate against Russian attacks on its data centers by targeting those in Moscow. At the same time, the activity of bots supporting conservative rhetoric on social media has declined.

It's a variation of the butterfly effect: Ukrainian strikes on Russian data centers have had repercussions on the other side of the world, on a North American continent preparing for highly charged parliamentary elections. This Sunday, the shutdown of three data centers hosting a large portion of Russia's cloud services led, according to many observers, to a dramatic drop in bot activity on American and European social networks, particularly X, owned by Elon Musk.

Oren Etzioni and MIT professor Max Tegmark debated AI risks in a New York Post video, splitting over whether this summer's OpenAI sandbox breakout was rogue AI or human error. They agreed that corporate self-regulation won't work and that AI systems should get only the access they need.

Spokane County is growing, and reliable Internet access matters more each year to its families, students, entrepreneurs, and employers. At Comcast, we are proud to continue expanding our high-speed broadband network to serve new communities and offer greater broadband choice throughout the county.

Today, our network extends more than 2,800 miles across the local footprint, with Xfinity and Comcast Business products and services available across Spokane County. That footprint reflects decades of construction, upgrades, and collaboration. It also gives us a strong foundation for reaching more residents as communities expand and their connectivity needs evolve.

If AI falls, Democrats can build an enduring political majority—but only if they reject handing a lifeline to Altman, Musk, and the rest of the industry.

After Barack Obama surged to the White House in 2008, his administration was hobbled by the perception that it had rescued the bankers who had crashed the global economy, held nobody accountable for the destruction that was unleashed, and left ordinary people to fend for themselves. Current events may soon rhyme with that fateful episode.

Just like before, there is an overleveraged, underregulated sector at the heart of our economy that could cause devastating consequences should it hit a liquidity crunch. Perhaps the biggest difference is that this time, the executives and billionaires have learned from 2007, and are already looking to justify golden parachutes in advance. Progressives can learn from 2007, too.

E-Meida reports…

In a recent debate, Minnesota attorney general candidate Ron Schutz pledged to insulate himself from his vast stock portfolio if elected. The Republican, in a close race with Democratic incumbent Keith Ellison, has faced questions about conflicts of interest related to his 174 stock holdings. Each investment exceeds $10,000, many of them in Fortune 500 staples like Coca-Cola, McDonalds and Disney.

But Schutz is also deeply invested in Meta, Microsoft, Google’s parent company and more than a dozen more corporations looking to build, use or maintain hyperscale data centers.

It’s the latest example of how data centers are shaping races across Minnesota and the country.

It’s a cliché to say that technology is changing war. But today, the pace of change is severe, not only because of advances in fields such as artificial intelligence, but also because of a range of trends and phenomena at the intersection of tech and geopolitics that are changing what it means for nations to compete, and to fight and defend themselves.

Today’s guest is Steve Feldstein, a senior fellow in the Democracy, Conflict, and Governance Program at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace and the author of Bytes and Bullets: Global Rivalries, Big Tech, and the New Shape of Modern Warfare, published by St. Martin’s Press.

The artificial intelligence industry is rapidly reshaping every facet of life, from the popularity of chatbots and disruption of the workplace to the industry’s insatiable demand for energy and water straining our communities and environments. The majority of Americans are concerned about AI’s growing role in society, and a significant portion – 45% – believe that the government is doing too little to rein in AI’s effects on children and young people. 

While President Trump’s coziness with AI oligarchs has been a defining feature of his administration, AI companies are hedging their bets on Democratic leaders as well. AI-focused political action committees are spending millions to back AI-friendly Democratic candidates as well as Republicans. 

The Revolving Door Project is tracking AI companies that have hired senior level Democrats who staffed the Biden administration – figures who are likely to be in positions of power for a future Democratic administration. Thus far, we’ve tracked over 100 former Biden admin senior staff from the White House and other executive branch agencies who have gone on to AI industry companies including OpenAI, Anthropic, Meta, and Amazon.

Meta’s Superintelligence Lab released a pair of new state-of-the-art models on Monday, Muse Wonder and Muse Wonder Full, representing the company’s first attempt at a frontier model.

Where Muse Spark aimed to be a lightweight model that could perform at low latency, the Wonder models are larger and said to be more capable, with higher benchmark scores and better results on complex tasks like coding.

According to Meta’s testing (presented in the model card), Wonder and Wonder Full achieve comparable benchmark scores to Fable 5.1 and GPT-6 Astra.

“Together, they mark the next step on our scaling ladder and a major leap toward personal superintelligence,” Meta’s blog post about the models reads.

Amazon Leo whiffed on its original plan to launch services by mid-2026, but the company says it remains on track to get there later this year as it continues to accelerate the buildout of its fleet of low-Earth orbit (LEO) satellites.

Amazon Leo has deployed 396 broadband satellites via 14 launches so far, with only four that have been deorbited, company communications manager Zack Brown explained in this blog post.

The current, deployed fleet is big enough for Amazon Leo to proceed with an initial service launch. Amazon Leo has not announced a specific date, but it still expects to pull the trigger before the end of the year.

A failed initial public offering from an Nvidia-backed “neocloud” called Firmus, run by a man with a criminal record, suggests the AI bubble is getting ready to burst.

Before we get to the Good and the Bad news, after the jump for paid subscribers only, I want to highlight an important but little-noticed story that has implications for the AI bubble, and particularly, for the most valuable company in the world, Nvidia. Nvidia is the center of the AI revolution, with its software layer CUDA and its AI chips dominating training and inference for models. It is worth $6 trillion, and its CEO, Jensen Huang, is now a global superstar who regularly sits down with national leaders and puts Donald Trump on speakerphone at major conferences.

Nvidia, despite its immense profits and prestige, is known for doing something a bit scuzzy, called “circular financing.” That is, it invests in its own customers so they can buy its chips. Sometimes it goes through multiple layers, like investing in OpenAI, which buys from Oracle, which buys from Nvidia. But there are a host of smaller AI companies in which Nvidia, as well as hedge funds and banks, have put a lot of money. And one of them, a little noticed AI data center company called Firmus, tried to sell shares to on the stock market this week. Yet investors revolted, and the company had to scrap its initial public offering.

Aside from Nvidia, Firmus was backed by blue chip financial firms Jane Street and Blackstone, and it was set to become Australia’s biggest IPO ever, at $30 billion in valuation. So this failure is a big deal, and it raised eyebrows all over Wall Street.

Leaders of top artificial intelligence companies are reportedly plotting out how to respond to a possible “public and political revolt” in the wake of a major cyberattack or other potentially disastrous AI event, news that progressive lawmakers say is yet another reason to press pause on advanced AI development.

“Big Tech oligarchs are secretly preparing for a ‘catastrophic AI event’ that could threaten our banking, healthcare, internet, electricity, and water systems,” Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.) wrote in a Friday social media post, citing reporting from Axios. “They’re racing to build a technology they can’t control and that threatens humanity. CONGRESS MUST PAUSE ADVANCED AI DEVELOPMENT NOW.”

Nicolas Cage is drawing a hard line in the digital sand against artificial intelligence, revealing that he likely won’t work with Amazon again after refusing to sign an AI waiver for his now-canceled Prime Video series "Spider-Noir."

Microsoft says its homegrown Maia chips will handle most of the AI work behind Copilot and its other products, with the new Maia 300 rolling out in 2027.

The company says the new chip does more AI work with the same amount of electricity than the GPU-based systems that power most AI today.

The TV San Antonio (TVSA) project is envisioned as an outdoor podcast studio — a production and community space that will support TVSA programming, 

The city’s Historic and Design Review Commission has approved a request from the City of San Antonio to build a podcasting studio behind the Plaza de Armas Building downtown. 

The Calder Alley “Secret Garden” TVSA project is envisioned as an outdoor podcast studio — a production and community space that will support TVSA programming, interviews, events and other public-facing content, a city spokeswoman said.

TVSA Public is the city’s public access television channel which offers residents a place to create, produce and share non-commercial, educational or entertainment shows at no cost. 

“Trust the model the least”: Satya Nadella sets out seven rules, including an emergency brake, for running AI models inside companies.

Microsoft chief executive Satya Nadella says companies should assume any advanced AI model they deploy could be compromised, and contain it from the start. He set out the case in a long article on X on Saturday.

“Think of it like an emergency brake. An authorized person should always be able to pause or shut down a model mid-task,” Nadella wrote.

He said engineers could trace traditional software to a specific code path. Today’s models cannot. Companies cannot tie a model’s behaviour to its training data or its weights, he wrote, yet they give these systems sensitive data and let them take “mission-critical actions”.

Antitrust law can help preserve a competitive marketplace for artificial intelligence.

As with paradigm-shifting technologies before it, artificial intelligence raises myriad policy implications for decision makers and analysts alike.

The federal policy debate around AI often focuses on it as an application: think “AI for drones,” or “AI for manufacturing.” The political debate is focused on AI’s insatiable demand for energy: think “nukes for AI” or NIMBYism and data center buildouts. The debate in Congress surrounds the role that states play in AI regulation and whether they can or should be preempted by a federal national standard.

But for antitrust purposes, the AI debate is less about how the technology is applied, or powered, or even regulated. The antitrust debate is rightly about competition within the AI technology stack itself. 

An exhaustive report conducted by a team of Penn State researchers has found first responders in Pennsylvania’s rural counties — most of the counties in the state — are regularly hampered by communications and technology limitations that threaten public health and safety.

“We believe that the world should accept some bad things happening for the benefits of this technology and people having the agency.” That’s how OpenAI cofounder and CEO Sam Altman recently explained how his company’s approach to strict safety guardrails differs from Anthropic’s.

For him, perhaps that’s the cost of doing business. But to the vast majority of people, that’s simply not a trade they’re willing to make—or, more accurately, would be willing to make if they had any say in how AI governance operates.

Nobody elected Altman to make that choice, and as of late, no one in the United States federal government seems willing to stop him.

This is Part 1 of a short series on Internet Exchange Points (IXPs) and why being “closer” to an IXP—measured in degrees of separation (hops)—is often a practical proxy for network quality.

If you’ve heard “Six Degrees to Kevin Bacon,” this is the same idea applied to networks: instead of asking how many co‑star links connect an actor to Kevin Bacon, we ask how many network hops connect a home/business (via its local infrastructure) to the nearest IXP. That “IXP number” can be defined in multiple ways (logical, physical, weighted), but the intuition is the same: fewer steps usually means easier, higher quality access.

In network infrastructure, degrees of separation refer to the number of intermediate hops—both physical and logical—between a secondary distribution node (like a school switch or neighborhood fiber cabinet) and an Internet Exchange Point (IXP). These degrees impact network quality in measurable ways, particularly performance, resilience, bandwidth efficiency, and autonomy.

Put simply: an IXP is like a local highway interchange for Internet traffic. If your traffic can get onto that interchange quickly, your users usually get faster and more stable service.

The rules behind ‘permissionless innovation’

The first panel examined “permissionless innovation.” The term describes the freedom to develop and offer products or services under established rules, without seeking case-by-case approval from a regulator or network owner.

Harvard economist Shane Greenstein pointed to podcasting’s use of RSS, an open web format for distributing updated content. RSS lets developers reach listeners without negotiating access to a company-owned platform. Legal protections mattered as well: Christopher Lewis, president of the communications policy advocacy group Public Knowledge, highlighted how Section 230 reduced the legal risks of hosting users’ contributions.

Access to inventions offered an earlier example: A 1956 antitrust settlement required AT&T, then the national telephone monopoly, to license its existing U.S. patents royalty-free. The settlement opened discoveries - including the transistor - from Bell Labs, AT&T’s research arm, to other manufacturers.

A 2020 study published in the American Economic Journal: Economic Policy estimated a 17 percent increase in follow-on innovation building on Bell patents during the first five years, measured through subsequent patent citations. The gains came primarily from young and small companies outside telecommunications equipment, including the early semiconductor makers Texas Instruments and Shockley Semiconductor.

How Legal Guardrails Shape Innovation