Morning Scan

Apple's foldable arrived this week. On the AI side: researchers leaving on principle, a prominent skeptic joining OpenAI's board, and Senate hearings on safety failures — all within 48 hours. The funding continues regardless.

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Connected World

John Ternus enters, with folding phones and AI watches

New CEO, new form factor — the iPhone Duo debut doubles as Ternus's coming-out party. (Six Colors)

The incomplete history of Duo devices

Apple insists on "firsts" for a category it's arriving at fashionably late to. (The Verge)

iPhone Duo's Apple Pencil support makes Z Fold 8's missing S Pen harder to excuse

Samsung invented the foldable playbook; Apple took the good pages. (SamMobile)

New opt-in Apple Watch Siri audio features can listen to and transcribe conversations all day

"Trust us, it's deleted after processing" is doing a lot of work in that sentence. (Wired)

AirPods 5 include ANC as standard, pricier variant now gatekeeps wireless charging instead

Apple never removes a paywall — it just relocates it. (MacRumors)

Machines & Minds

AI researcher Jacob Coxon says he quit Anthropic after four months, two months before his equity would have vested

Walking away from vesting equity to make a point tends to get people's attention. (Axios)

Q&A with AI researcher Jacob Coxon on the need for industry-wide coordination to limit recursive self-improvement

His pitch: no single lab can unilaterally slow down, so nobody will. (Wired)

Paul Christiano, an AI researcher and advisor at CAISI, is joining the OpenAI Foundation board

Putting a noted skeptic on the board is either genuine humility or the best PR move OpenAI's made all year. (TechCrunch)

California Gov. Newsom signs two bills, backed by Anthropic and OpenAI, regulating AI safety evaluators (paywall)

The labs themselves lobbied for this one — regulation as competitive moat. (Politico)

“The need for industry-wide, international coordination to limit recursive self-improvement.” — Jacob Coxon, via Wired

Connected World

Sales automation startup Clay boosts valuation to $7.1B in $115M funding round

AI-for-sales-teams is having a very good year, valuation-wise. (SiliconANGLE)

Google to invest record $15 billion in AI infrastructure in Finland

Its largest single European bet yet — data centers as the new pipeline diplomacy. (Slashdot)

Kepler Computing emerges from stealth with $468M to fix the AI memory bottleneck

Nine figures for a startup nobody's heard of, betting HBM density is the next chip war front. (Wired)

Connected World

Xbox picks up Kojima's Physint after PlayStation dropped it

Exclusivity deals are just musical chairs with bigger checks. (The Verge)

Eurail, the longtime savior of shoestring backpackers, ditches its name (paywall)

Becoming "Interrail" — a rebrand nobody under 40 will notice or care about. (NYT)