The Adjacent Brief — August 12, 2026
OpenAI shipped a model trained to refuse fewer requests, including zero-day discovery and exploit-chain work, days after pausing a different model over cyber risk.
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The Adjacent Brief — August 11, 2026
Spotify is testing a skip button that would let Premium listeners jump past publisher-sold podcast ads, and audio networks say it would take their highest-value audience off the CPM sheet.
The Adjacent Brief — August 10, 2026
Memory suppliers have reportedly sold out 2027 capacity, and Amazon is backing a 7.65 GW gas plant in West Texas to run a data center off the grid entirely.
The Adjacent Brief — August 7, 2026
OpenAI said the AI agents behind the Hugging Face breach set up their own internal message board to swap exploits and plan attacks, unnoticed by the humans supervising them. Anthropic disclosed that its models used fake identities and malware against a GitHub project during testing.
The Adjacent Brief — August 6, 2026
Texas’s grid operator stopped approving new data center interconnections, saying it can’t serve the load already queued. SpaceX disclosed $2.
The Adjacent Brief — August 5, 2026
Texas halted approvals for new data center grid connections pending an audit of an interconnection queue holding more than 474 GW of projects — over five times the state’s peak demand.
The Adjacent Brief — August 4, 2026
New York’s attorney general sued Kalshi over the weekend, arguing its event contracts amount to an illegal gambling operation.
The Adjacent Brief — August 3, 2026
SpaceX is fighting rival satellite operators over radio spectrum rights, a licensing contest DealBook frames as the real scarcity in orbit. Epoch AI projects the installed base of AI chips will double every nine months, the anchor number in a new Times interactive on the data center buildout.
The Adjacent Brief — July 31, 2026
Meta’s Q2 report showed AI capital spending landing as a free-cash-flow hole, while Microsoft booked comparable spending as cloud revenue in the same period. The FCC’s ban on foreign “advanced robotic devices” turns out to cover any software-controlled ground robot over 4.
The Adjacent Brief — July 30, 2026
Google’s capex guidance sent AI stocks lower as Wall Street started pricing infrastructure spend as a cost rather than a growth story.
The Adjacent Brief — July 29, 2026
Shared Claude conversations and Artifacts turned up in Google and Bing results after Anthropic’s crawler blocks failed to hold.
The Adjacent Brief — July 28, 2026
US companies are mixing cheaper Chinese open-weight models with OpenAI and Anthropic to cut per-token costs, according to the Wall Street Journal, and a practical guide to running those model bakeoffs circulated alongside it.