#startups

Leaked internal messages reveal Sam Altman strategized in 2023 to release a local GPT-3-class model to suppress competitors and dry up funding; separately, a security researcher found a WordPress RCE using GPT-5.6 for $25, and Kimi K3's 2.8T open-weights release continued pressure on closed frontier labs. In pharma, Eli Lilly's psychedelics acquisition drew further industry analysis, GSK axed its key cough drug candidate, and a state Medicaid audit exposed PBM cost-obscuring tactics. The economy section covers Waymo safety data, the UK as a cautionary macro tale, and Basel III's hidden fragility inside bank holding companies.

Anthropic's Claude Sonnet 5 shipped on June 30 and Fable 5 returned globally on July 1 after the Department of Commerce lifted export controls that had restricted access for 19 days. Cloudflare declared a second Content Independence Day, launching a Monetization Gateway that lets site owners charge AI agents for any resource via stablecoin settlement over the x402 protocol, and released new granular controls to distinguish search bots from training bots. The FDA granted a historic clearance to an LLM-based diabetes management app, prompting debate about whether the model is an interface or a clinical decision-maker. Biotech stocks have now rallied for 15 consecutive months. The U.S. Department of Transportation proposed the first update to supersonic flight rules since the 1970s, opening the door to civilian supersonic travel.

OpenAI quietly launched GPT-5.6 in three tiers (Sol, Terra, Luna) restricted to trusted partners, while Semgrep reported that GLM 5.2 outperforms Claude on its internal cybersecurity benchmarks. Portugal's National Health Service contracted Sword Health to deliver AI-assisted physical therapy nationwide, the first country-scale deployment of its kind. Edison Scientific and Population Health Partners announced a deal to use AI agents for end-to-end drug discovery. Patrick Boyle assessed Brexit's 10-year economic toll, and Noah Smith examined whether AI will push companies toward more or less outsourcing.

Anthropic accused Alibaba of illicitly extracting Claude's model capabilities, drawing 829 Hacker News comments and raising fresh questions about AI IP enforcement. OpenAI unveiled Jalapeño, its first custom inference chip built with Broadcom, a move that reshapes its dependency on Nvidia. GLM-5.2 crossed a threshold Nathan Lambert called the step change for open agents. Google introduced computer use in Gemini 3.5 Flash, and U.S. health spending rose 7.3% in 2025, driven by GLP-1 drug adoption and higher care utilization. A bipartisan bill would expand methadone access by letting physicians prescribe it outside specialty clinics.

AbbVie agreed to acquire Apogee Therapeutics for nearly $11 billion, the latest in a pharma M&A wave that has totaled $123 billion in 2026 deals so far. Definium's LSD therapy met its primary endpoint in a Phase 3 trial for major depression, and the FDA reversed a four-month-old rejection of Regenxbio's gene therapy for Hunter syndrome. In AI, Samsung deployed ChatGPT Enterprise and Codex to employees worldwide in one of OpenAI's largest enterprise rollouts, while Nathan Lambert and Kevin Xu argued that banning open-source AI would damage US interests. Patrick Boyle examined how SpaceX humiliated Wall Street and Cuba announced its most sweeping economic reforms in decades, including private banking and the end of fuel subsidies.

Z.ai released GLM-5.2, a 753-billion-parameter open-weights LLM under MIT license, which Simon Willison called the most powerful text-only open-weights model available. Separately, a White House report on the Fable 5 export control jailbreak drew pushback from cybersecurity expert Kate Moussouris, who said the restriction harms US cyber defense. OpenAI and Molecule.one published results from a near-autonomous AI chemist using GPT-5.4 that improved a challenging medicinal chemistry reaction. In pharma, nitazene overdose deaths confirmed by the CDC rose from 27 in 2020 to 409 in 2024, while the FTC and four state AGs sued WPATH over its gender-affirming care standards. Tyler Cowen flagged new research showing AI-native startups are organized differently from conventional venture-backed firms, drawing on Y Combinator data from 2020 to 2024.

The FDA's leadership vacuum deepened this week as the drug center head followed Commissioner Makary out the door, leaving the agency with no confirmed leadership at its two most critical posts. Open-weight models kept multiplying with Gemma 4, DeepSeek V4, and Kimi K2.6 all dropping in the same month, while Sebastian Raschka's analysis of new KV-sharing and compressed attention techniques explains why long-context costs are falling fast. A rare Bundibugyo Ebola outbreak in Congo's Ituri province prompted a WHO public health emergency declaration, and the WHO's move landed as hantavirus conspiracy theories were already cycling through social media. On the economy side, Trump's China visit produced mixed signals on decoupling, while Noah Smith argued that Europe's comfortable stagnation is no longer viable.

Bun rewrites itself in Rust, Codex spreads across surfaces, biotech readouts in tau and Duchenne, and FDA leadership churn.