Radically different
This is today’s edition of The Download, our weekday newsletter that provides a daily dose of what’s going on in the world of technology.
Less than two weeks after scrapping an executive order on AI, President Donald Trump signed a new one on Tuesday. Promising to promote innovation and security, the policy represents a turning point in the White House’s AI governance—but is likely to attract criticism from both opponents and supporters of stricter regulation. Here are five key points from the order:
1. It’s created a voluntary review system: tech companies will be asked to share frontier models with the government for review 30 days before they plan to release them.
2. There’s no mandatory licensing: the government will not require permits before software can be deployed.
3. It establishes a dedicated AI cybersecurity clearinghouse: the new hub will coordinate security checks with the private sector.
4. It’s a watered-down version of the order Trump shelved last month: the earlier version requested models 90 days before their release.
5. But it’s still a move towards stronger AI oversight: the policy marks a clear departure from the White House’s previous hands-off approach.
Plus: here’s why a previous Trump administration’s AI policy was a distraction and how AI is already making online crimes easier.
The defense-tech company Anduril has shared new details about the augmented-reality headset for the military it’s prototyping with Meta, including a vision for ordering drone strikes via eye-tracking and voice commands.
Quay Barnett, who leads the effort at Anduril following a career in the Army’s Special Operations Command, aims to optimize “the human as a weapons system.” His vision is cyborg-inspired: drones and soldiers will see together, share information seamlessly, and make decisions as one.
—James O’Donnell
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The must-reads
I’ve combed the internet to find you today’s most fun/important/scary/fascinating stories about technology.
1 President Trump has signed an AI order that expands model oversight
The long-awaited executive order aims to mitigate security threats. (NYT $)
+It asks companies to submit models voluntarily for tests before release. (NPR)
+ It’s a slimmed-down version of the order Trump shelved in May. (WSJ $)
+ And marks a strategic shift in his AI strategy. (Reuters $)
+ A war over AI regulation is coming to the US. (MIT Technology Review)
2 SpaceX plans to raise $75 billion in IPO at $135 per share
The company intends to sell 555.6 million shares. (Reuters $)+ The fixed price breaks from the traditional IPO process. (Bloomberg $)
+ Morningstar says the valuation should be nearly 50% lower. (BI)
3 Meta has scaled back plans to track workers’ clicks and keystrokes to train AI
All staff can pause it for 30 minutes, with some fully exempt.(The Information $)
+ The changes follow a fierce backlash to the tracking plans. (Reuters $)
+ AI is supercharging surveillance. (MIT Technology Review)
4 Microsoft wants to ‘make users addicted’ to its new AI assistant
According tointernal documents for the “Scout” tool. (404 Media)
+ Microsoft launched the assistant on Tuesday. (TechCrunch)
5 Mathematicians fear that AI threatens their field
A new declaration raises concerns about AI’s trustworthiness. (Ars Technica)
+ It arrives a week after OpenAI said it solved a famous math problem. (WSJ $)
+ A startup wants to change how mathematicians do math. (MIT Technology Review)
6 Scientists have found a way to supercharge computer worms with AI
The worm could target any known flaw in the world’s computers. (NYT $)
+ AI supercharging scams. (MIT Technology Review)
7 Google must let UK publishers opt out of AI search features
Online publishers can choose not to appear in the AI Overviews. (BBC)
+ Google is now testing features for sites to exit AI search. (Reuters $)
8 America’s data center build-out is falling way behind schedule
60% of those planned for completion in 2027 aren’t yet under construction. (WSJ $)
+ Nobody wants a data center in their backyard. (MIT Technology Review)
9 EVs are getting cheaper worldwide—except in the US
The US is short on supportive policies and affordable Chinese EVs. (Rest of World)
10 The European Parliament is ditching Google for… Quant
The French search engine is the new default on in-house computers. (Politico)
+ The switch comes amid a broader push to wean the EU off US tech. (FT $)
Quote of the day
—Dan Coatsworth, head of markets at AJ Bell, tells CNBC that SpaceX’s IPO price looks overloaded with expectations.
One More Thing
Marseille’s battle against the surveillance state
Heading toward Marseille’s central train station, Eda Nano points out what looks like a streetlamp on the Rue des Abeilles. But this sleek piece of urban furniture is not a lamp. It’s a video camera, with a 360-degree view of the narrow street.
Nano, a 39-year-old developer, wants to make Marseille residents more aware that they’re being watched. She’s part of a growing group of activists resisting the rise of policing cameras in their hometown.
Find out how the rebellious port city of Marseille is fighting the surveillance state.
—Fleur Macdonald
We can still have nice things
A place for comfort, fun, and distraction to brighten up your day. (Got any ideas? Drop me a line.)
+ These aerial photos of solar farms transform renewable energy into abstract art.
+ Open a window over Earth’s water with this hypnotic 4K atmospheric film made from satellite imagery.
+ Spend three relaxing hours with David Attenborough narrating this collection of extraordinary wildlife moments.
+ Radiohead sounds beautiful on traditional Japanese instruments in this koto performance of “Weird Fishes/Arpeggi”.
Jakob Uszkoreit went from inventing the “T” in ChatGPT to putting the “AI” in Alnylam’s RNAi therapeutics.
After over a dozen years at Google, where he’d co-authored the seminal “Attention is all you need” paper that laid the foundations for artificial intelligence models like GPT, Uszkoreit in 2021 left a job at Google Brain to start Inceptive Nucleics. The company is building “AI foundation models of life” — models that will hopefully learn so much about how biology operates that they will be reusable across many different tasks without having to be trained specifically to do them.
On Wednesday, Alnylam and Inceptive announced a new, three-year strategic collaboration worth up to $2 billion, with $30 million up front in cash and equity in the startup. The additional payments will be predicated on the co-discovered drugs achieving preclinical, regulatory, and commercial sales milestones. In 2025, Alnylam’s total revenues were $3.7 billion.
A fourth major health insurer is suing HaloMD over its use of the No Surprises Act’s arbitration process, arguing that the middleman deceived arbitrators by sending them a “sham letter” and misleading price data.
Highmark Health, a Pennsylvania-based Blue Cross Blue Shield licensee with over 7 million members, claims in a complaint filed June 1 in U.S. District Court in Western Pennsylvania that HaloMD and one of its clients, a neuromonitoring provider called Bromedicon, submitted more than 450 ineligible disputes with the company and won more than $3.9 million. Like the three Blue Cross plans before it, Highmark wants those awards tossed and its money returned.
“Defendants’ scheme is not a good faith attempt to obtain fair reimbursement,” Highmark’s complaint says. “It is a deliberate effort to wrongfully extract inflated payments from Highmark.”
Would you take a payment to ramp down your electricity use? Would it change anything if you were doing so to help power a local data center?
Google just signed a new deal to help pay for a virtual power plant (VPP) in the largest power grid in the US. The agreement is with Voltus, a leading VPP and distributed energy resources platform.
Voltus will set up the virtual power plant, grouping together devices like electric vehicles and smart thermostats. It’ll pay customers to participate, and the company will dial back power or use the stored energy during times when the grid is stressed. Google will foot the bill for setting it up, and the extra capacity generated by the project will help run its data centers in the region.
This is one of the most concrete examples so far of a tech giant using a VPP to help meet energy demand for data centers. But there are still some lingering questions about just how far this sort of program can go, and what the limits are.
Last year, it felt as if everyone was talking about data center flexibility. A high-profile study from Duke University found that if data centers agreed to decrease their energy demand for roughly 40 hours per year, a whole bunch of them (about 100 gigawatts’ worth) could come online without making new power plants or transmission equipment necessary.
The underlying reason is that our power grid is designed not for our average energy use, but for the absolute maximum: the brutally hot July evening when everyone is blasting their air conditioners, watching Love Island, and microwaving popcorn. If a data center is willing to refrain from pulling so much power during those high-stress times, the grid can happily support it the rest of the year.
One lingering question here is about incentives: How would you get data centers to agree to this? After all, they might not have a very flexible load, especially now that AI use is more widespread—training a model can easily be delayed or shifted, but customer demand is more immediate. Giving up computing capacity could mean losing revenue.
Regulation is one approach that could work here. One proposal in the US would allow new data centers to come online years sooner if they agree to lower demand when the grid is nearing its max. And a new Texas law requires large users to switch to backup power or curtail their demand in emergency situations.
Another approach is for data center operators to pay for other people to be flexible.
Voltus announced a new program in September that allows data centers to finance flexibility on their local grid. The company calls it “Bring your own capacity.” Google is now the first named customer taking advantage of this program.
In the new agreement, Voltus will pay people who agree to participate in the virtual power plant. The plant will be part of PJM, the grid that covers much of the US East Coast. The company says it will be able to aggregate up to 100 megawatts of distributed energy resources each year. The plant should be operational in 2027, according to Voltus.
This isn’t Google’s first foray into flexibility; the company has agreements with utilities across the US to limit or shift its own energy demand, which can help free up grid capacity. As the company pointed out in a blog post earlier this year, though, there are limits on how flexible a data center can be, and not every facility will be able to ramp down its power demand.
“There is no one solution for expanding grid capacity and we’re continuing to explore all options, including the many avenues for load flexibility,” said Michael Terrell, Google’s global head of advanced energy, in an emailed statement in response to written questions.
Once again, I’m wondering about incentives here. These companies are asking homes and businesses to be flexible. Will they agree?
A recent study in California looked at local people’s willingness to participate in managed electric-vehicle charging. Essentially, the program pays people to give up control of when they charge their EVs. This is another way to help smooth out electricity demand and ease the burden on the grid.
The problem? Not many people signed up. With no economic incentive, only 1% of EV owners enrolled in managed charging. At $40 per month (about 15% of their power bill), only 4.6% did.
This is a different situation and a different region from the one in which Google is working with Voltus. (It’s worth noting that the companies aren’t sharing how much they plan to pay the participants, which will obviously be a big determinant in participation for this kind of project.)
But this study shows that even with money on the table, people may not always jump at the chance to cede control of their electricity demand. And it certainly feels relevant that about 70% of Americans oppose AI data centers in their area, according to recent Gallup polling.
Being flexible sounds like a great idea in theory, and these financed VPPs could provide an immediate route to meeting energy demand. But as we move from idea to implementation, it’ll be interesting to see whether trial runs work as intended.
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The sequel to last week’s graduation speeches that garnered boos for AI: Comedian Ronny Chieng addressed Harvard’s graduating class and told them their mission was to “destroy AI,” which prompted a roar of approval.
He wasn’t referring to uses of AI in medicine and physics, he specified, but rather offloading writing and creating to AI. The journey of making and learning and figuring out is “the point of all of this,” he said. “Why would I want AI to take that away from me?”
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Good morning. Yesterday was a brutal day for biotech stocks, but one company withstood the broad selloff. We also look at investor excitement for longevity startups and yet another licensing deal made by Eli Lilly.
Shares of Legend Biotech soared over 40% yesterday after the company disclosed early data on its in vivo CAR-T therapy that showed promise in Non-Hodgkin’s lymphoma.
Good morning, everyone, and welcome to the middle of the week. Congratulations on making it this far, and remember there are only a few more days until the weekend arrives. So keep plugging away. After all, what are the alternatives? While you ponder the possibilities, we invite you to join us for a delightful cup of stimulation. Our choice today is maple cinnamon French toast. Meanwhile, here is the latest menu of tidbits to help you on your way. Have a wonderful day and please do stay in touch. …
Cigna will stop covering GLP-1 weight loss drugs including Novo Nordisk’s Wegovy and Eli Lilly’s Zepbound in its employee health plan effective July 1, Reuters reports. In a document circulated to employees on June 1, Cigna suggested those currently using the drug can choose to pay with cash through manufacturer sites or TrumpRx. The cash-pay purchases will not apply toward a deductible or the amount of spending required before enrollees can use their health coverage. The price of weight loss drugs has been falling in 2026 with the launch of Novo’s Wegovy pill and Lilly’s oral Foundayo, with prices that start at $149 per month for the lowest dose. Americans have been increasingly pushed to the cash-pay market and, at the same time, employers have been cutting back on their coverage of the drugs.
Taking weight loss drugs for at least three years could prevent thousands of knee replacements a year, The Guardian writes, citing new research. The study, published in Regional Anesthesia & Pain Medicine, found that taking GLP-1 medications for one year was associated with a 1.4% reduced risk of knee replacement surgery at the three-year follow-up point and a 2.8% lower risk after eight years. But the greatest reduction in risk was with newer weight loss drugs and longer treatment. Taking semaglutide or tirzepatide for three years was associated with a nearly 5% lower chance of needing knee replacement at the eight-year follow-up assessment.