Tech News — 2026-06-19#

Story of the Day#

The Trump administration’s aggressive and chaotic export controls on Anthropic’s new Fable 5 and Mythos models dominated the week, culminating in a bizarre twist where President Trump casually dismissed the startup as a national security threat. Amidst the forced foreign-access revocations and accusations of Chinese ties via SK Telecom, Anthropic still managed to quietly poach Nobel laureate John Jumper from Google DeepMind.

Top Stories#

Subquadratic Claims Breakthrough on LLM Bottleneck · MIT Technology Review Miami startup Subquadratic says it has solved the quadratic attention bottleneck that makes large language models so computationally expensive and power-hungry. By ditching dense attention for a dynamic sparse attention mechanism, its SubQ model purportedly processes up to 12 million tokens at a fraction of the cost of current frontier models. While independent evaluations show promise, the industry remains cautious until the model is widely available.

Amazon MGM Drops Sam Altman Biopic · Slashdot Amazon MGM has quietly abandoned Luca Guadagnino’s nearly completed film about OpenAI CEO Sam Altman’s brief 2023 ouster. The decision to drop the unflattering movie comes conveniently after Amazon expanded its multibillion-dollar cloud partnership with OpenAI, prompting the studio to seek a new distributor for the project.

Hyundai Takes Full Control of Boston Dynamics · Slashdot Hyundai is buying out SoftBank’s remaining 9.65% stake in Boston Dynamics for $325 million. This outright ownership signals that Hyundai is done treating the robotics lab as a viral R&D showcase and fully intends to deploy the electric Atlas humanoid robot into its commercial manufacturing pipelines by 2028.

EU to Classify AWS and Azure as Gatekeepers · Slashdot The European Commission is preparing to officially designate Amazon Web Services and Microsoft Azure as “gatekeepers” under the Digital Markets Act. This move brings cloud infrastructure under strict European antitrust rules for the first time, which would force the US tech giants to ensure better interoperability and data portability for their customers.

Unpatchable Apple BootROM Exploit Detailed · Slashdot Security researchers have disclosed “usbliter8,” a permanent BootROM hardware exploit affecting Apple devices equipped with A12, A13, S4, and S5 chips. While it requires physical USB access and DFU mode, the flaw allows attackers to bypass signature checks and boot modified software before iOS loads, and it fundamentally cannot be patched by Apple.

NASA Taps Relativity Space for 2028 Mars Mission · Slashdot NASA has selected Relativity Space—now led by former Google executive Eric Schmidt—to build and launch the Aeolus orbiter to Mars in 2028. The rapid-timeline mission aims to gather unprecedented daily atmospheric data on the Red Planet, offering a crucial lifeline to a 3D-printing rocket startup that has recently faced serious fundraising challenges.

Also Worth Knowing#

• Meta Lobbies Congress For Protection From Child-Harm Lawsuits (Slashdot): Meta is reportedly trying to negotiate legal immunity into the Kids Online Safety Act to shield itself from thousands of lawsuits over youth platform addiction.
• US Tells ASML It’s Concerned China May Have Top Chip Tool (Bloomberg): The US Commerce Department formally warned Dutch equipment maker ASML that one of its advanced lithography machines may have bypassed export controls into China.
• Barret Zoph is out at OpenAI again after just five months (The Verge): OpenAI’s head of enterprise AI sales has departed yet again, creating a vacuum in a critical revenue-driving role right before an anticipated IPO.
• Norway imposes broad restrictions on AI for elementary school kids (Engadget): Citing declining test scores, Norway will ban generative AI tools for students aged 6 to 13 to ensure they don’t skip foundational reading and math skills.
• Nothing cancels this year’s CMF phone due to RAM prices (The Verge): High memory prices have killed off the successor to the CMF Phone 2 Pro, as the company claims it cannot build a meaningful upgrade at a budget-friendly price point.