Copilot meters to $600, Whitacre quits OSS, SoftBank pledges €75B to France

Sources

I Am Retiring from Tech to Live Offline simonwillison.net

I Am Retiring from Tech to Live Offline I’ve seen a lot of posts on forums from people threatening to quit their careers over AI. This is not one of those: Chad Whitacre is taking concrete steps, starting with this typewritten, scanned letter I’m retiring from tech. Well, “retiring” is euphemistic. I’m stepping away from tech, and that includes Open Source. […] AI was the last straw. Have you heard of that island off India where the indigenous population kills any outsiders fool-hardy enough…

‘What a joke’: Github Copilot’s new token-based billing spurs consternation among devs techcrunch.com

The golden age of Microsoft’s Github Copilot appears to be at an end.

SoftBank says it will invest up to €75 billion to build French data centers techcrunch.com

The goal, the firm said, is to develop and operate up to 5 gigawatts of additional data center capacity.

Quoting Karen Kwok for Reuters Breakingviews simonwillison.net

Anthropic calculates run-rate revenue by taking the last 28 days of consumption-based sales times 13, then adding monthly subscription revenue times 12, per a Reuters Breakingviews source. The hybrid formula inflates headline numbers versus a straight annualization of recent sales.

Meta is reportedly developing an AI pendant techcrunch.com

Meta is developing an AI-powered pendant, extending hardware bets that already include Ray-Ban smart glasses. The neck-worn form factor signals a play for always-on ambient assistants beyond the face, though release timing and pricing remain unreported.

Anthropic opens Milan office to support Italian enterprise, research, and developers anthropic.com

Anthropic’s new Milan office is its first in Italy, aimed at supporting local enterprise customers, research institutions, and developers. The expansion continues a European buildout as Claude competes with OpenAI and Mistral for regional business deployments.

I put Google’s 24/7 AI assistant Gemini Spark to work, and it’s actually pretty useful techcrunch.com

Gemini Spark, Google’s always-on AI assistant, automates everyday tasks like summarizing inboxes and planning local outings. Early hands-on testing finds it genuinely useful, but its split from the main Gemini app leaves its product positioning unclear.

How one founder’s bet on ‘the old school web’ is paying off theverge.com

Craig Campbell, a former Meta engineer who sold an e-commerce startup in 2022, passed on AI funding to launch a plain website instead. The contrarian bet on the ‘old school web’ is paying off as Google Zero erodes traditional search referrals.

AI grifters are creating fake Black people to sell Shein junk theverge.com

Dropshippers are using AI to fabricate Black women like ‘Aliyah’ — a fake country-western seller pleading for views — to hawk cheap Shein goods on TikTok Shop. The digital blackface scheme exploits parasocial sympathy to move low-margin inventory.

Quoting Daniel Jalkut simonwillison.net

Indie developer Daniel Jalkut, quoted via John Gruber, argues the AI discourse is broken on both ends: detractors overstate the harm and enthusiasts overstate the promise. The line captures a growing fatigue with absolutist takes inside the developer community.

(AINews) Founders and Forward Deployed Engineers latent.space

a quiet day lets us highlight the new AIE WF focuses

How the Pope’s Magnifica Humanitas offers a template for individuals to meet the AI moment technologyreview.com

Pope Leo XIV’s new encyclical on artificial intelligence includes a statement that warrants serious attention from technologists and policymakers: “Technology is never neutral.” Magnifica Humanitas (“Magnificent Humanity”) is a clarion call to all people to act with courage and solidarity as we enter an age already being transformed by artificial intelligence, the greatest change in…

The AI Hype Index: AI gets booed in graduation season technologyreview.com

It is one thing to say AI will change the world. It is another to expect the class of 2026 to applaud it. In fact, when former Google CEO Eric Schmidt told University of Arizona graduates that their task is to help shape AI, he was met with a resounding chorus of boos. “I can…

As the browser wars heat up, here are the hottest alternatives to Chrome and Safari in 2026 techcrunch.com

We’ve compiled an overview of some of the top alternative browsers available today aiming to challenge Chrome and Safari.

The SpaceX IPO is great for Elon Musk and terrible for you theverge.com

I haven’t seen anything as stupid as the WeWork IPO document in a very long time - that is, until Elon Musk filed to take SpaceX public. WeWork was a joke. SpaceX is a threat. And if Musk and his bankers have their way, you are going to be their bagholder. Lots of the top-line […]

(AINews) Cognition raises $1B in $26B Series D latent.space

coding is an uncapped TAM market

References

GitHub Blog (official announcement by Mario Rodriguez) github.blog

A single agentic request can consume vastly more compute than a simple autocomplete, making the old request-based model unsustainable; paid plans now include a monthly allotment of AI Credits equal to their subscription price, with overage at $0.01 per credit.

Visual Studio Magazine — ‘You will get less, but pay the same price’ visualstudiomagazine.com

Developers using the new billing preview tool discovered projected monthly bills ballooning from a flat $39 to over $600 based on current agentic usage patterns; the official announcement thread received hundreds of downvotes.

GitHub Community Discussion #192948 (top comments) github.com

Unused credits do not roll over at month end, and GitHub has eliminated ‘fallback experiences’ — once credits are exhausted users are cut off rather than dropped to a cheaper model. Commenters call request-based billing ‘user-oriented’ and the new scheme akin to ‘paying for video-game currency that disappears.’

r/GithubCopilot thread on usage-based billing reddit.com

Microsoft ‘baited’ the community with unlimited access to build ecosystem dependence before flipping the switch… if the per-token cost equals a direct API call, there is less incentive to stay locked into GitHub — the value moat is gone.

Medium — ‘When Cursor silently raised their price by over 20%’ medium.com

Cursor’s June 2025 shift from a 500-request ‘fast’ tier to a $20 credit pool pegged to API costs produced surprise weekly overages as high as $350, establishing the industry template GitHub is now copying.

Livemint — ‘Goodbye Copilot’ backlash coverage livemint.com

One widely shared user case showed monthly spend projected to jump from $29 to nearly $750 under the new model; some heavy users saw bills move from $50 to over $3,000, prompting the ‘end of the golden age’ framing.

Reddit r/hypeurls discussion reddit.com

Many tech workers expressed ‘envy,’ sharing their own desires to leave ‘corporate BS’ and ‘constant performance reviews’ for simpler lives… Conversely, a vocal minority criticized the announcement as ‘performative’ or ‘hypocritical,’ arguing that a digital ‘I’m leaving forever’ post is a play for social media engagement.

news.hada.io coverage of the transition fr.news.hada.io

Control of the Open Source Pledge at Sentry has been transferred to Vlad-Stefan Harbuz… Whitacre will remain available via post-office mail and limited online access through August 2026 to facilitate the appointment of his successor to the board.

news.hada.io profile of Whitacre’s post-tech plans es.news.hada.io

Whitacre launched an offline print publication titled Gift… The magazine is not available online; the first issue can only be obtained by sending $10 to a P.O. Box in Sewickley, Pennsylvania.

alcazarsec.com HN daily digest hn.alcazarsec.com

Maintainers reported a ‘deluge’ of AI-assisted security reports and ‘slop’ pull requests that have increased the workload for projects like curl by four to five times… SQLite formally updated their policies (via AGENTS.md) to refuse all ‘agentic code’.

Vellum.ai analysis citing Peter Steinberger vellum.ai

Peter Steinberger, creator of OpenClaw, acknowledged a similar phenomenon he termed ‘AI psychosis,’ characterized by an addictive cycle of ‘just one more prompt’ that leads to severe work-life imbalance and FOMO.

Ford Foundation ‘Roads and Bridges’ context / DHH rebuttal as cited in peer coverage fordfoundation.org

DHH argues that open source is a ‘monumental achievement’ precisely because it operates outside of market terms… Whitacre himself acknowledged this ‘stiff opposition’ in his final podcast episodes, wrestling with DHH’s view that ‘there is no crisis’.

NetworkWorld — analyst commentary on Stargate networkworld.com

SoftBank CFO Yoshimitsu Goto recently acknowledged that the project is moving ‘slower than usual’ due to complexities in site selection and stakeholder negotiations.

Tom’s Hardware tomshardware.com

Stargate AI data centers for OpenAI reportedly delayed by squabbles between partners… OpenAI, Oracle and SoftBank disagreed on who would have ultimate control of the planned data centers.

Stocktwits / SoftBank financing stocktwits.com

SoftBank recently sold its entire $5.8 billion stake in NVIDIA, a move Masayoshi Son described as a painful necessity due to the company’s ‘need for money’ to fund OpenAI-related projects.

The Decoder the-decoder.com

SoftBank has formed a majority-owned joint venture with French startup Sesterce to develop a 1 GW ‘AI Factory’ at the Bosquel site, with potential off-take from Mistral AI and OpenAI via Microsoft.

La Relève et la Peste (French environmental outlet) lareleveetlapeste.fr

A coalition including La Quadrature du Net argues the new PINM law ‘tramples on environmental democracy,’ and an interactive map tracks 47 new facilities currently in development across France.

Data4 / EDF press release data4group.com

Data4 has signed a long-term Nuclear Production Allocation Contract (CAPN) with EDF to secure dedicated shares of nuclear output — a model that gives hyperscalers predictable low-carbon baseload France’s competitors lack.