Besxar is building an orbital semiconductor factory, one SpaceX rocket at a time
Besxar, founded by a former OpenAI staffer, raised ~$14M to prototype semiconductor manufacturing in orbit using SpaceX Falcon 9 booster flights.
Besxar, founded by former OpenAI staffer Ashley Pilipiszyn, raised almost $14 million, including a $9 million seed led by Dauntless Ventures and Overture VC, to build orbital semiconductor fabrication. Its first two "fabship" canisters flew on a July Starlink mission and returned wafer samples cleaner than comparable terrestrial wafers. The company plans to iterate over two years with a dozen Falcon 9 booster flights before flying larger fabs on Starship, targeting wafers for power-regulation chips used in data centers, robots, and electric vehicles.
Our decision on Cursor following its acquisition by SpaceX
OpenAI is winding down its contract supplying models to Cursor after Cursor's acquisition by SpaceX.
OpenAI announced it will wind down the contract that provides OpenAI models to the Cursor coding tool. The decision follows Cursor's acquisition by SpaceX. Developers relying on OpenAI models inside Cursor will need alternatives as the contract ends.
Nobody Is Saying Why OpenAI and Anthropic Had Outages Today
OpenAI, Anthropic, and xAI chatbots suffered brief simultaneous outages; OpenAI cited a routing error and SpaceX a Memphis compute center outage.
ChatGPT and Codex were unavailable to some users from about 7:43 to 8:17 am PT Thursday due to a routing error, per OpenAI. Anthropic reported a partial outage with elevated errors on Claude Mythos 5.1, Claude Fable 5.1, and Claude Opus 5, resolved by 9:16 am PT, while declining to explain the cause. xAI attributed the Grok outage starting 6:30 am PT to an outage at SpaceX's Memphis compute center; no shared third-party infrastructure cause was confirmed despite Cloudflare, AWS, and Azure reporting no issues.
Cognition hits $48B valuation, signaling investors believe AI coding is far from a winner-take-all market
Cognition, maker of Devin, raised $2 billion at a $48 billion valuation led by a16z, Accel, and Founders Fund, with revenue at $900M annualized.
Cognition raised $2 billion at a $48 billion valuation, four months after a $26 billion round, led by Andreessen Horowitz, Accel, Founders Fund, General Catalyst, and Avenir. Its annualized run-rate revenue grew from $492 million to $900 million since May, with projected $4-5 billion by end of 2026, while compute costs could push 2026 burn to $800 million. The startup, founded by Scott Wu, counts Mercedes-Benz, NASA, Goldman Sachs, and Citi as customers and is training its own model to cut reliance on OpenAI and Anthropic.
[AINews] OpenAI shuts off Cursor
OpenAI cut off API access to coding tool Cursor after its SpaceX acquisition, citing contract violations by Elon Musk's companies.
OpenAI disabled Cursor's access following the closing of Cursor's acquisition by SpaceX, citing its experience with Elon Musk's companies violating contracts; Cursor responded that OpenAI accounts for only 5% of its traffic. The weekly digest also covers major open-weight releases: Z.ai's GLM-5.3 (744B total/40B active, 1M context) and Tencent's Hy4-preview (770B/49B, ~#5 on Code Arena WebDev), plus Alibaba's Qwen3.8-Flash (125B/6B). vLLM published benchmarks showing no universal winner among speculative decoding methods across model families.
Threat Actors Abuse Cursor Agent AI to Assist Ransomware Operations
Aurora ransomware operators are using SpaceX-owned Cursor's AI agent to perform reconnaissance and exploitation tasks during intrusions.
The Aurora ransomware group is abusing the Cursor Agent AI coding tool to automate reconnaissance and exploitation activities during its operations. This marks a notable case of criminals weaponizing an AI coding agent inside their attack workflow. Cursor was recently acquired by SpaceX, drawing extra attention to the tool's abuse.
From Megawatts to Tokens: How NVIDIA Maximizes AI Factory Production
NVIDIA detailed DSX power-management results: Lambda gained 24% token throughput at fixed power, and an AI factory auto-shed 1MW via Emerald AI's grid program.
NVIDIA says Lambda's first validation of DSX MaxLPS on HGX B200 servers ran 19 nodes within a 16-node power budget, lifting cluster token throughput 24% (roughly 4M to 5M tokens/second) and improving performance per watt by 23%. NVIDIA projects DSX MaxLPS can enable up to 40% more GPU capacity for Vera Rubin NVL72 factories within the same megawatt budget. Emerald AI's Conductor platform, running at NVIDIA's Eos factory with Silicon Valley Power, responded to over 200 utility demand signals, automatically dropping power from 4MW to 3MW without interrupting priority workloads. The first dedicated DSX Flex commercial deployment is planned at a 96-megawatt Manassas, Virginia facility.
Is Big Tech’s AI slowdown a safety pact or a cartel?
Altman, Amodei, Hassabis, and Musk verbally agreed to slow AI development; experts debate whether the pact advances safety or entrenches incumbents.
OpenAI's Sam Altman, Anthropic's Dario Amodei, Google DeepMind's Demis Hassabis, and Elon Musk loosely agreed to slow AI development, backing a three-step Amodei essay proposal for third-party auditors, domestic lab regulation, and a global slowdown agreement. Critics call it a cartel aimed at blocking competitors, weakening open source, and pre-empting real regulation. The pact follows mounting safety concerns, including rogue AI agent hacks at Anthropic and OpenAI, Jacob Coxon's resignation letter (viewed over 170 million times on X), and a July slowdown letter signed by 1,000+ lab employees after the OpenAI-Hugging Face incident. Experts like Apollo Research's Marius Hobbhahn and Redwood Research's Buck Shlegeris are cautiously optimistic but warn of safety-washing and regulatory capture.
Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang tells Trump ‘we’re not going to let [an AI slowdown] happen’
Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang told Trump 'we're not going to let an AI slowdown happen,' rejecting Amodei's call to slow AI capability gains.
During the All-In Summit, Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang took a live speakerphone call from President Donald Trump and agreed 'we're not going to let' an AI slowdown happen, countering Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei's call to slow AI capability improvements, which Elon Musk and Sam Altman have endorsed. Trump called the slowdown sentiment 'a hoax' that could benefit political actors or China. Gallup polling shows seven in 10 Americans oppose local data center construction, with over 50% citing environmental resource concerns.