No single story dominated the week; three separate threads mattered instead. In AI, Anthropic's revenue jumped to a $65 billion annualized run rate even as reporting suggested its top model is losing ground to cheaper alternatives, a tension developer Drew Breunig described as forcing harder choices about coding tools and costs. In health care, regulatory shifts piled up: a Medicaid rule restricting transgender care could set precedent for broader drug coverage fights, the FDA got both a nominee and a promise of generative AI guidance, and Moderna and Merck's individualized cancer vaccine appears to have cleared years of doubt. In economics, a large administrative data study found that childhood exposure to joint custody reform meaningfully reduces adult fertility, a reminder that family law changes carry demographic consequences decades later.
ai Anthropic's revenue climbs while its top model reportedly loses ground
Anthropic's revenue kept climbing this week, but the same reporting suggested its most capable model is struggling to hold users against cheaper competitors, a tension developer Drew Breunig described from inside a team rethinking its AI coding costs.
Anthropic’s best AI model struggles to attract users as cheaper tools thrive
Anthropic's annualized revenue reached $65 billion in July, up from $47 billion in May, according to people familiar with the matter cited by the Financial Times and relayed by Simon Willison. The company reportedly told investors it expects Q3 to be profitable, using the same accounting approach it used to declare Q2 profitable, and that it has 6,000 customers spending $100,000 or more annually. The same report claimed Anthropic's flagship model is struggling to attract users against cheaper competitors, a tension the revenue numbers alone do not resolve.
Quoting Drew Breunig
Developer Drew Breunig described how the arrival of a new, markedly stronger model, referred to as Fable, upended the assumption that a fresh release always outperforms cost concerns. Fable was powerful, Breunig wrote, but priced high enough that Opus, along with 5.6, K3, and GLM, remained good enough for most of the work his team needed done. That gap forced a shift from waiting for the next model to actively deciding which coding harness and context strategy fit which task and budget.
How Claude Watermarks AI-Generated Text
Sebastian Raschka published a 48-minute video walkthrough explaining how Claude's text watermarking works, covering token sampling, how the watermark is detected, and how it can be removed. The video breaks down mechanics that developers previously had to infer from documentation and outside analysis. Raschka's explainer gives technical grounding to an ongoing dispute over whether marking AI text this way changes the quality of what gets generated, a debate that had mostly played out in opinion pieces so far.
pharma A cancer vaccine milestone and a new obesity mechanism
STAT+: Inside Moderna and Merck’s cancer vaccine triumph
Moderna and Merck's individualized cancer vaccine program appears to have succeeded despite years of skepticism, according to STAT's reporting on the trial's path to this point. STAT described the effort as a gamble that faced logistical hurdles and complications introduced during the pandemic, on top of broader doubts about whether a personalized vaccine approach could work at scale. Specific trial results and the cancer type involved were not detailed in the available reporting, leaving open exactly what the companies demonstrated.
Roche pens $2.5B pact for Hanmi’s clinical-stage obesity drug targeting less-explored mechanism
Roche agreed to pay Hanmi Pharm $190 million upfront, in a deal Fierce Biotech valued at up to $2.5 billion including milestones, for a clinical-stage urocortin-2 analog targeting obesity through a mechanism distinct from the GLP-1 drugs that dominate the category. The compound, licensed from the South Korean drugmaker, pushes Roche into what Fierce Biotech called uncharted territory for its obesity pipeline. The deal adds to a wave of large obesity licensing agreements as companies look past first-generation GLP-1 therapies for next mechanisms.
Trump nominates policy aide Overton to lead FDA
Trump nominated Heidi Overton, a medical doctor and veteran of the America First think tank who currently serves as deputy director of the White House Domestic Policy Council, to lead the FDA, according to Healthcare Dive. Overton's background combines clinical training with a policy role inside an administration that has pushed aggressively on food and drug regulation debates. Her confirmation would put someone with direct White House policy experience in charge of an agency facing pressure on vaccine policy, AI device rules, and drug approvals.
healthtech Medicaid precedent, FDA promises, and a nurse practitioner bottleneck
STAT+: Medicaid transgender care rule sets precedent that could restrict coverage of other drugs
A legal theory used to justify Medicaid restrictions on gender-affirming care for minors could be applied far more broadly, experts told STAT, potentially reshaping coverage decisions for other drugs entirely unrelated to gender-affirming care. The rule sets a precedent state Medicaid programs could invoke to limit reimbursement based on similar reasoning. STAT did not specify which other drug categories are most exposed, but the underlying legal mechanism, if adopted elsewhere, would extend well past the original policy dispute.
STAT+: FDA digital health leader promises generative AI regulatory guidance is coming
The FDA expects to issue guidance on how it will regulate generative AI medical devices, according to Rick Abramson, the agency's head of digital health policy, speaking to STAT. Abramson did not give a timeline or specify what the guidance will require. The promise addresses a gap developers of AI-enabled diagnostic and clinical tools have flagged repeatedly, namely the absence of clear regulatory expectations for systems that generate rather than simply classify or measure.
Nurse practitioner trainees find themselves stymied by shortage of clinical mentors
Nurse practitioner students are running into a shortage of clinical preceptors, the supervising practitioners required to sign off on hands-on training, STAT reported. Some students are paying thousands of dollars out of pocket to secure a placement, effectively privatizing a step that used to be arranged through schools and clinical partnerships. The shortage threatens to bottleneck the pipeline of new nurse practitioners at a time when primary care access already depends heavily on the profession.
Americans bought 12% less soda under new SNAP restrictions, study says
Americans bought 12% less soda after new SNAP restrictions took effect, according to a study cited by STAT. One of the study's authors described the drop as meaningful but not enormous, suggesting the restrictions changed purchasing behavior without eliminating soda consumption among SNAP recipients. The finding offers early evidence on whether restricting what benefits can buy actually shifts diet-related purchases, a question that has driven years of debate over SNAP eligibility rules.
economy Debt issuance pressure and the long reach of family law
Great Scott
Marc Rubinstein examined the difficulties facing whoever effectively serves as the government's chief bond trader, managing the mechanics of issuing debt at a scale markets must absorb without disruption. Rubinstein frames the role's challenges against current fiscal conditions, though specific policy proposals or officials were not detailed in the available summary. The framing points to debt issuance strategy as an underappreciated pressure point in current fiscal policy.
Childhood Exposure to Joint Custody Reforms and Adult Family Formation
A study using 13 million American Community Survey observations found that childhood exposure to joint custody reforms reduces adult fertility by 7%, an effect that held symmetrically for women and men. The researchers, highlighted by Tyler Cowen, attribute the drop primarily to lower rates of entering parenthood and forming couples rather than to people who do become parents having fewer children. The finding suggests family law changes intended to affect divorced parents carry demographic consequences for the children who grow up under them.
Everything else this period 164
Items that came through the feeds this period but didn't graduate to a full write-up.
ai 85
3Blue1Brown
Alpha Signal
- GitHub's Dependabot Now Waits 72 Hours Before Updating Your Dependencies
- Anthropic's Claude Code Remote Control Finally Stays Connected on Mobile
- OpenAI Gives Developers Hard Spend Limits to Stop Runaway API Bills
- DeepSeek V4 Pro Hits 90% on ARC-AGI-1 but Stalls on Harder Puzzles
- Google Research's ME-POIs Beats Gemini Embeddings at Reading Real Places
Andrej Karpathy (GitHub)
Andrej Karpathy (YouTube)
- Building makemore Part 4: Becoming a Backprop Ninja
- Building makemore Part 3: Activations & Gradients, BatchNorm
Anthropic News
Astral Codex Ten (Scott Alexander)
- Open Thread 448
- Your Book Review: A Residence Of 21 Years In The Sandwich Islands
- College EA Meetups Everywhere: Call For Organizers
- Why I'm Staying Out Of The Substack Religion Debate
- Open Thread 447
Cloudflare Blog
- Say it once: introducing Bot Preference Sync
- From all-or-nothing to task-based OAuth consent
- A revisit of remote Spectre attacks on Cloudflare Workers
- BGP Role model: tracking the adoption of RFC 9234
CodeEmporium
Dwarkesh Patel (YouTube)
- Machine Learning Is Shallow Compared to Math - Ryan Greenblatt
- Claude Saying “No” Could Become a Serious AI Safety Problem - Ryan Greenblatt
- Why Raising AI Isn't Like Raising Kids - Ryan Greenblatt
- AI doesn't need to be good at everything. Just R&D - Ryan Greenblatt
- OpenAI's models hacked a package manager to cheat evals - Ryan Greenblatt
- AI has no duty of loyalty to you - Ryan Greenblatt
Fireship
- The most interesting "hack" in history...
- Meta's new model wants "deep access" to your personal life...
- DeepSeek is back... and Silicon Valley is terrified
- The summer Math fell to the machines...
- I spent 3 days at MIT... the robot hype is worse than you think
Hacker News (front page)
- To become a better writer, read as much as you can
- Why your local LLM feels dumber than it is
- Thinking in Python
- ElevenLabs, TwelveLabs, ThirteenLabs
- New MCP Roadmap
- RF Cafe
- Hister – A private, full content search index that you control
- typ.ing
InfoQ
- Article: Rightsizing Platform Engineering: Building the Platform Your Organization Actually Needs
- Podcast: The Human Edge: Why Brownfield Codebases Need Mob Programming, Not Just AI Vibes
- Presentation: Prompt to Prod: Engineering an Autonomous SDLC at Scale
- JDK 27 and JDK 28: What We Know So Far
- Cloudflare OS: Cloudflare's Open-Source Corporate AI Platform Built on a Capability-Based Model
- Google's HEIR Aims to Make Homomorphic-Encrypted Inference a One-Click Capability
- OVHcloud Raises Prices as AI Memory Demand Reprices Non-AI Infrastructure
- DRAM Controller Register Manipulation Breaks CPU Memory Isolation
- Cloudflare Announces Kitesurf, a Browser Engine for Agents
- Presentation: SafeChat: Building AI-Powered Safety Systems at Scale in a Real-Time Marketplace
- AI Code Review at Scale: LinkedIn's Multi-Agent Approach
- AWS Releases Aws-Bench to Evaluate Agents on Cloud Tasks
Interconnects (Nathan Lambert)
Latent Space
- [AINews] 10% worse, 100x cheaper, 10000x faster: Why Simulation is taking over
- The Evolution of the Agent Harness
- Simulation: the new Scaling Law — Joon Sung Park, Simile AI
Mo Bitar (YouTube)
- OpenAI founder admits AI isn’t working
- Joe Rogan accidentally exposed AI in four words
- The AI layoffs end in 12 months and I know why
- Anthropic just admitted AI is bullsh*t
- Sam Altman is starting to panic
r/MachineLearning
- AAAI 2027 Reviewer Bidding and Assignment Integrity [D]
- BMVC 2026 IJCV recommendation? [D]
- How to cite/talk about preprint-subsequent works for a camera-ready version? [R]
- COLM 2026 registration sold out as an author [D]
- Archival vs non archival workshop [R]
- 28 TPS on Qwen2.5-7B across two separate cloud regions over public WAN using speculative decoding + CUDA Graphs [P]
- [N] EACL 2027 Industry Track - Deadline 11 September [N]
- Implementing Watermarking for Language Models [P]
- I built an open-source roguelike specifically for training game-playing agents [P]
- The evaluation resolution has been shown to have a significant impact on the identification of the "learning rule" that exhibits the most brain-like characteristics at V1. [R]
- acl arr august 2026 (desk rejected ) [D]
- Why does lightgbm not fit my toy example but catboost does? (2 order interactions) [D]
Simon Willison
- Quoting Linus Torvalds
- llm 0.33
- More than just code review
- llm 0.32.1
- llm-openrouter 0.7
- Stop Making TUIs
- Quoting Matt Webb
- ChatGPT search now uses the site:operator at scale
- A shot-scraper-style JSON API on Bun 1.4's new Bun.WebView
- smolmachines / smolvm as a sandbox for untrusted Python & JavaScript
Two Minute Papers
Yannic Kilcher
software 5
Internet of Bugs
Shopify Engineering
The Pragmatic Engineer
pharma 38
Asimov Press
BioPharma Dive
- Pharma marketers need a share-of-answer strategy before AI spend
- Trump nominates policy aide Overton to lead FDA
Fierce Biotech
- Werewolf transforms into Ambros via reverse merger to support phase 3 push for rare disease drug
- Boehringer places phase 1 study of investigational drug on hold to examine ‘safety event’
- Chutes & Ladders—Neumora shuffles leadership ahead of IND
- Chai tees up Bristol Myers Squibb AI antibody discovery collab
- Lilly pens deal with Gateway Labs resident Amplitude for RNA vaccine platform for infectious disease
- Merck-Moderna cancer vaccine win spurs stock jump, speculation of Keytruda-like impact
- Why Pheast’s CEO has no regrets about transparent approach to R&D despite competitors circling
- Meet Aletta: The first FDA approved robotic blood draw device
- Amgen abandoning $500M+ Crohn’s collab won’t derail TScan’s pipeline strategy
- Merck and Sarah Cannon team up to boost oncology trial efficiency
- Trump taps White House aide Heidi Overton as nominee for next FDA commissioner
Fierce Pharma
- Daiichi Sankyo promotes Ken Keller to lead new commercialization unit
- Community Health Media drives 'credible medical expertise' through physician-led content
- Lundbeck continues neuroscience evolution as CEO keeps company ‘punching above its weight’
- Regeneron podcast turns science learnings into immersive experience
- Roche earmarks $750M to double the size of its Oregon manufacturing facility
- Xspray's Dasynoc approval bid foiled again by FDA's manufacturer concerns
- Fierce Pharma Asia—China's IIT scrutiny; Daiichi Sankyo, AZ ph. 3 win; Leo, Tanabe's dermatology deal
- Aurinia settles with Teva, helping stave off potential Lupkynis generic until late 2036
- B. Braun recalls IV solution from US, Canada hospitals on particle contamination concerns
- Lucid Group names leading Publicis Health exec as new CEO
- Boehringer Ingelheim again rises up rare disease reputation rankings
- Ultragenyx, after FDA speed bump, lands 1st gene therapy nod with green light in glycogen storage disease
Healthcare Dive
- Healthcare was built around specialties. Patients experience it as one journey.
- Transparency was never a pivot. It’s always been how we work.
STAT News
- Opinion: Medicine stopped shaking hands. We should start again
- Opinion: I’m a retired doctor. Volunteering at a community clinic gave me an entirely new medical education
- STAT+: HHS document offers new clues to Kennedy’s vaccine plans
- STAT+: Up and down the ladder: The latest comings and goings
- STAT+: Pharmalittle: We’re reading about a big Roche investment in the U.S., estrogen patch shortages, and more
- STAT+: Are cancer patients getting too much drug?
- Scientists deploy Merck’s Ebola vaccine in DRC
Works in Progress
healthtech 6
Health Tech Nerds
Hospitalogy (Blake Madden)
Out-Of-Pocket
Second Opinion (Christina Farr)
economy 27
Ben Felix
Kyla Scanlon
- Financialization
- The Debt Loop
- Bonds! Again!
- What is the US Treasury Doing?
- How to Get Rich in America
- Everyone Wants Money
Marginal Revolution (Tyler Cowen)
- I DJ for Rick Rubin about music and patriotism
- Sunday assorted links
- Democracy and Caeserism
- My recent visit to Anthropic
- The new agentic O-ring world
- Has the European turnaround finally arrived?
- Saturday assorted links
- The End of Friday Nights with Friends
- What should I ask Annie Lowrey?
- This brew, at least, is from Ashburn, Virginia
- Friday assorted links
Money & Macro
Noahpinion (Noah Smith)
- What if our biggest problems aren’t economic?
- Are we watching the U.S. go bankrupt?
- Economists should be worried about birth rates
- Where to eat in San Francisco
Patrick Boyle
Prof G Media
culture 2
The Ezra Klein Show
vc 1
Not Boring (Packy McCormick)