Good morning. A lovely little profile of activist investor Bill Ackman for you to read this morning, courtesy of UnHerd colleague Jeff John Roberts.
Ackman’s Pershing Square Capital Management, you may recall, owns multibillion-dollar stakes in Amazon, Microsoft, and Uber. (By the investor’s telling, the first two are AI infrastructure bets; the last is a bet on the platform’s profitable dominance.)
“Most people have hobbies or interests,” Roberts writes. “Bill Ackman has obsessions.” (Best of luck to you, Andy, Satya, and Dara.)
More tech news follows. Have a productive day. —Andrew Nusca
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What will the White House do about China’s new AI models?
The recent release of Moonshot’s Kimi K3 flagship AI model—so in demand that the IPO-bound Chinese company paused subscriptions lest its servers get a lil’ too spicy—has Washington up in arms.
First, a quick primer: Kimi K3 launched on Thursday. It is currently the largest open-weights model ever built, with 2.8 trillion parameters, the internal “tweaks” that help an AI system turn an input into an output. It’s multimodal, it’s efficient, it’s great at coding, it’s great at agentic applications, and it’s cheaper than the U.S. competition—particularly for long context tasks.
The Americans, committed to global AI dominance, have not taken the news well.
Over the weekend, current and former AI advisors to President Donald Trump turned their knives on U.S. AI companies for failing to keep up with China. Call it tech on tech violence: In one corner, Silicon Valley (Bay Area branch); in the other, Silicon Valley (Beltway branch).
On social media, outgoing AI czar David Sacks lamented U.S. companies’ guardrails on their AI systems: “Woke lobotomized models are the enemy of American competitiveness,” he posted, criticizing Anthropic for making the U.S. “less competitive.”
Under Secretary of Defense Emil Michael piled on, calling Dean Ball, OpenAI’s head of strategic futures, a “supreme idiot” for disputing Sacks’ criticisms of the executive’s own Kimi analysis.
Former White House policy advisor Sriram Krishnan notably took a less confrontational stance, complementing Silicon Valley venture capitalist Bill Gurley’s take on open weight AI models, which naturally ended with “We need to let the free market work.”
It’s the shock of DeepSeek R1 all over again.
The renewed philosophical divisions among the techies pose a problem for President Trump. His administration has lately advocated for more AI intervention, putting it at odds with Sacks and company. American voters are growing distrustful of AI companies, putting them at odds with free market advocates during an election year.
And: Just how did a Beijing startup manage to produce such a powerful AI model with all those national security restrictions in place? Let the hand-wringing continue. —AN
Hackers are exploiting WordPress vulnerabilities to take over websites
WordPress is urging users: Update your website now.
The web’s dominant content management system patched two critical security vulnerabilities last week—so critical, in fact, that WordPress enabled forced updates to facilitate it.
The “WP2Shell” flaws allow hackers to take over people’s websites if they’re running an older version of WordPress (versions 6.9.0 through 6.9.4 and 7.0.0 to 7.0.1). And that’s precisely what’s happening, according to several cybersecurity firms.
“The attack has no preconditions and can be exploited by an anonymous user in a stock install of WordPress with no plugins,” writes Searchlight Cyber. And as SOCRadar notes: “WordPress security company Patchstack has logged exploitation attempts, and Hexastrike reported seeing attacks in its honeypots over the weekend of July 18-19 … watchTowr has also observed in-the-wild exploitation attempts.” Delightful.
WordPress is believed to power about 43% of all websites on the Internet, or roughly 500 million, well ahead of Shopify, Squarespace, and Wix. Using the organization’s own tool, the vast majority of sites running WordPress right now—3 in 4—run the versions susceptible to the flaws.
However: Only a fraction of them remain at risk. Sites hosted by WordPress parent Automattic were updated early, and others have been secured thanks to automatic updates and other cybersecurity protections that may be in place. —AN
Anduril and Archer built an autonomous attack rotorcraft
The annual Farnborough Airshow in England lifted off the proverbial runway on Monday and though there’s plenty of news to digest—Airbus engine updates, Boeing order commitments, hybrid-electric propulsion—the stuff that’s stolen the show so far is all about the battlefield.
One of those highlights comes from two American defense tech companies.
Archer Aviation and Anduril Industries announced this week that they’re collaborating on an autonomous aircraft platform for both commercial and military use.
The military version, dubbed Thunder, is a Group 5 autonomous attack rotorcraft intended to complement crewed aircraft like Boeing’s AH-64 Apache helicopter. (“Group 5” is the Pentagon’s term for the largest drones, a.k.a. unmanned aircraft systems.)
Thunder isn’t a retrofit to an existing design, the companies say; it’s built specifically for the needs that Anduril heard from its customers. Among them: Keep attack helicopter crews alive.
Its first flight is planned for next year.
Archer, meanwhile, will share its commercial take on the platform later this week. The company is known for developing electric air taxis. It struck a 2021 deal with United Airlines to use 100 eVTOL—“electric Vertical TakeOff and Landing”—aircraft to, for example, bypass Manhattan’s snarled traffic en route to LaGuardia or JFK airports.
Its Midnight eVTOL hopes to receive full FAA certification as early as next year. —AN
More tech
—Z.ai built a 1 gigawatt data center that uses only Chinese AI chips.
—EU fines Alibaba €550 million. The largest DSA fine to date goes to AliExpress for failing to prevent the sale of illegal products in its online marketplace.
—Tencent may acquire SuperPlay. A deal could value the fast-growing Israeli game developer north of $1 billion.
—Google co-founder Sergey Brin spent $82 million to fight California’s wealth tax.
—CuspAI fundraises at a $2.6 billion valuation. The British startup, backed by Jeff Bezos and Kleiner Perkins, hopes to reduce or eliminate rare earth minerals in chipmaking.
—The largest Hong Kong IPO since Alibaba? Zhongji Innolight, which makes optical transceivers, hopes for an $8 billion debut.
—“Synthetic insider” attacks, enabled by AI deepfakes, are keeping corporate IT up at night.