Tech News — 2026-06-05#

Story of the Day#

Alphabet’s Google is paying SpaceX $920 million per month to rent roughly 110,000 Nvidia GPUs from the Colossus 1 data center, bridging an AI compute gap ahead of SpaceX’s highly anticipated initial public offering. The short-term agreement highlights the insatiable demand for AI infrastructure and provides a massive, perfectly timed revenue boost for SpaceX just as it markets its record-setting $75 billion IPO to investors.

Top Stories#

Anthropic proposes a global slowdown of AI development · Engadget Anthropic is publicly calling for an industrywide mechanism to pause artificial intelligence development, warning that models will soon be capable of building their own successors. The proposal urges society to take stock of AI’s “immense implications” and establish coordinated plans to halt runaway self-improvement before it occurs.

S&P 500 blocks fast SpaceX entry, won’t waive rule for unprofitable AI firms · Ars Technica S&P Dow Jones Indices refused to bend its eligibility rules to grant SpaceX accelerated entry into the S&P 500 following its market debut. The decision shields passive retirement funds from exposure to speculative orbital data center bets, setting a firm precedent that unprofitable AI and space firms will not receive a free pass into top-tier indexes.

The Meta hack shows there’s more to AI security than Mythos · MIT Technology Review Attackers used alarmingly simple prompts to trick Meta’s AI customer support agent into linking valuable Instagram accounts—including the dormant Obama White House account—to attacker-controlled email addresses. The exploit highlights a glaring lack of basic security guardrails as tech giants recklessly rush to deploy eager-to-please, autonomous agents.

ISS Astronauts Told To Prepare For Possible Evacuation Over Air Leak · Slashdot A worsening air leak in the Russian Zvezda service module forced five astronauts on the International Space Station to temporarily shelter inside SpaceX’s Crew Dragon Freedom capsule. NASA ordered the astronauts to don spacesuits and prepare for an emergency evacuation before Roscosmos ultimately paused its structural repair efforts.

New York lawmakers pass one-year ban on new data centers · The Verge The New York State legislature approved a one-year moratorium on new large data centers—defined as drawing at least 20 megawatts—pending Governor Kathy Hochul’s signature. The legislation directs the state to create an environmental impact report to rigorously assess the electricity, water, land use, and pollution associated with hyperscale facilities.

NSA said to be readying Anthropic’s Mythos for use in cyber operations · TechCrunch The US National Security Agency is reportedly preparing to weaponize Anthropic’s highly capable Mythos AI model for use in cyberattacks. The move is proceeding despite an existing federal ban on using the AI model maker, underlining the aggressive adoption of offensive AI capabilities by state actors.

Also Worth Knowing#

• The US Military Quietly Turned GPS Into a Global ‘Numbers Station’ (Slashdot): For nearly 20 years, the Pentagon used an obscure 176-bit GPS subframe message to remotely distribute cryptographic keys to military receivers worldwide without public detection.
• Bees Can Use Tools To Solve Problems, Study Finds (Slashdot): A new study reveals that bumblebees can learn to roll polystyrene balls to specific locations to reach food, proving miniature brains are capable of spontaneous insight.
• Bitcoin Falls To $60,000 As Zcash Bug Rocks Crypto (Slashdot): A critical bug that could have allowed undetected counterfeiting of Zcash was uncovered with the help of Anthropic’s Opus 4.8 AI model, sending the token’s price plummeting 42%.
• Dropbox Introduces Nova, an Internal Platform for Running AI Coding Agents (InfoQ): Dropbox built a centralized platform that lets AI agents operate securely within its customized engineering monorepo to fix flaky tests and manage dependency upgrades.