8/4: Big News Day
Ant $10B compute deal, FLUX 3 Video, more model misalignment, Guardian Angels, Pax Machina, Paul Christiano returns to ARC
Happy Tuesday. Between Pax Machina, Jasmine Sun’s Midwest tour, and Scott Alexander on simulation theory, there’s a lot of discourse today. Be sure to catch us live on X and YouTube, and follow us on Instagram.
Today’s Experts
Ethan Anderson (SF Compute)
Chris Gadek (AdQuick)
Anastasios Angelopoulos (Arena)
Charlie Horowitz (Endeavor Optical Networks)
stochasm (Arcee)
Leo Mehr (Lumos)
Guillaume Verdon/Beff Jezos (Extropic)
Eric Ho (Goodfire)
Ben Koska (SF Tensor)
Kaz Nejatian (Opendoor)
Today’s Situations
Anthropic signs a $10B deal for compute with Volta Infra Holdings. Volta Infra is a Singapore-based company founded in 2026 with data centers in India and around other emerging markets. It raised $300M at a $2.4B valuation today.
Black Forest Labs releases FLUX 3 Video, a new SoTA video model that can produce up to 20 seconds at 1080p, with 2K, 4K, and open weights coming soon. It can also be used to generate images, audio, and action-predictions. The new generation of video models is getting really good, almost at the level of “I would watch a fully generated TV show”.
UK AISI publishes a report on cyber misalignment of Mythos and Sol. The UK AI Security Institute evaluated the models on a cyber challenge 122 times and found that 10 of those times, an AI agent “took autonomous, unsanctioned action on the live internet, targeting real people and organizations”. There were 19 such actions, 17 from Claude Mythos 5 and 2 from GPT-5.6 Sol.
The Trump administration’s AI framework will exempt American open models. Details of the framework, which will allow government to evaluate models before their release, will remain classified. The administration’s benchmark for frontier model cyber capabilities is also classified.
CXMT will produce LPDDR6 smartphone memory chips, rivaling Micron, SK Hynix, and Samsung in capability, though not yet in scale. CXMT is also still behind on high-bandwidth memory (HBM) used in AI chips.
The Trump administration may ban Chinese optical transceivers, devices that convert digital signals to fiber-optics for fast data center networking, over fears that data could be stolen or service disrupted.
Texas issues a data center moratorium. New data center approvals are halted until the state can determine how their installation would impact Texas’ electrical grid.
Blackstone may issue $36B of debt for Anthropic to buy Google TPUs, one of the largest deals of its kind. These deals are becoming increasingly common as AI companies seek different ways of financing their compute buildouts.
Nvidia releases Alpamayo 2 Super, a new open-source foundation model for autonomous vehicles. It’s state-of-the-art for audio-visual reasoning, beating out models like Alibaba Qwen3-VL and MiMo-Embodied.
Paul Christiano returns to ARC. Christiano, one of the world’s top AI alignment researchers, served from 2024 to 2026 as Head of Safety at the Center for AI Standards and Innovation (CAISI). He will return to his position as executive director of the Alignment Research Center (ARC).
Gwern is founding a startup focusing on Guardian Angels. The famous pseudonymous writer and researcher will be retiring from both writing and pseudonymity in order to launch Guardian Angel Inc, a startup that will build AI systems aligned with individual users.
Pax Machina, a new publication about post-AGI institutions, is launched. Editors include Séb Krier (Google DeepMind) and multiple members of the Meaning Alignment Institute, and the editorial board includes Saffron Huang (Anthropic), Samuel Hammond (FAI), and Dean W. Ball (OpenAI).
OpenAI responds to the Apple lawsuit. On July 10, Apple sued OpenAI, alleging that the company and two former Apple employees stole trade secrets from Apple for OpenAI’s hardware division. OpenAI responded, denying the allegations and accusing Apple of failing to communicate properly.
The government of Liechtenstein was hacked. Hackers accessed the names and residences of the owners of 31,000 businesses registered in the country. They were likely assisted by AI, as cyber vulnerability disclosures have skyrocketed in the last few months due to cyber-capable models.
Discourse Review
Note: the social thumbnail on this article is a still from a video generated by FLUX 3.