SpaceX rescues Cursor at $60B, OpenAI burns $19B on R&D, DOJ shields xAI

Sources

SpaceX to acquire Cursor for $60B in stock, days after blockbuster IPO techcrunch.com

The deal is supposed to help SpaceX’s struggling AI division. The company told IPO investors it sees a $26 trillion addressable market in AI.

SpaceX is officially buying Cursor for $60 billion theverge.com

Days after its massive IPO, SpaceX says it is spending $60 billion to buy Cursor - a bet designed to help Elon Musk’s sprawling rocket / AI / social media behemoth win over lucrative enterprise customers and close the gap with AI rivals like Anthropic and OpenAI. The takeover was not entirely unexpected: SpaceX announced […]

SpaceX to acquire AI coding platform Cursor for $60 billion arstechnica.com

Separately, neither could compete. Now they hope they can.

Leaked financial docs show OpenAI is losing billions of dollars a year arstechnica.com

Audited accounting shows growing revenues being dwarfed by R&D, other expenses.

Trump admin tries to block Clean Air Act lawsuit over xAI’s gas turbines arstechnica.com

NAACP lawsuit says xAI uses gas turbines without permits for Grok data center.

DOJ claims xAI’s unpermitted gas turbines are a matter of ‘national, economic, and energy security’ techcrunch.com

The Justice department says the Pentagon needs xAI to keep using its unpermitted gas turbines.

Unlocking UK house-building with AI-accelerated planning deepmind.google

DeepMind is building a prototype with the UK government to accelerate planning approvals, a chronic bottleneck in housing supply. The tool aims to cut review time on applications, part of a broader push to apply AI to public-sector backlogs.

(AINews) GLM-5.2: the top Frontend Coding model in the world, IndexShare for Speculative Decoding latent.space

GLM-5.2 launches as the highest-ranked open-weights model for frontend coding tasks, paired with an IndexShare technique for speculative decoding. The release pressures Western labs on a benchmark where Chinese open models have steadily closed the gap.

ChatGPT’s market share slips below 50% for first time techcrunch.com

ChatGPT still leads with 1.1 billion monthly users, but its share has fallen under half as Gemini reaches 662 million and Claude 245 million. The shift marks the first real dent in OpenAI’s consumer dominance since 2022.

Android 17 launches with new multitasking tools as Google expands Gemini features techcrunch.com

Android 17 and Wear OS 7 arrive with new multitasking, parental controls, and security tools, alongside a Pixel Drop that pushes Google’s latest AI models onto devices. Gemini integration deepens across phones and smartwatches in the release.

SpaceX valuation balloons to $2.6T, briefly passes Amazon techcrunch.com

SpaceX’s valuation has jumped $1 trillion since shares began trading Friday, briefly pushing it past Amazon. The debut makes Elon Musk’s rocket and Starlink business one of the most valuable public companies in the world within days of listing.

SpaceX is public: Everything you need to know post-IPO techcrunch.com

TechCrunch has followed SpaceX’s start, struggles, and successes from the early days. And we’re here for what happens next too. This package of SpaceX IPO coverage includes who stands to win (and maybe some who won’t), pre-IPO deals, and what’s tucked inside its S-1 registration document.

Anthropic “pauses” token-based billing for its Claude Agent SDK arstechnica.com

Anthropic has shelved a Monday switch to token-based pricing for the Claude Agent SDK after backlash from heavy users who faced sharp cost increases. The reversal keeps current subscription pricing in place while the company reworks the model.

Critical Copilot vulnerability allowed hackers to steal 2FA code from users arstechnica.com

A critical Copilot vulnerability dubbed SearchLeak let attackers exfiltrate two-factor authentication codes through prompt injection. Researchers say the bug shows how the industry’s layered defenses against LLM injection keep failing against the same class of attack.

Anthropic’s latest feud with the Trump admin may actually help it, sales data suggests techcrunch.com

Anthropic’s popularity with business users is growing so well that the latest beef with the government might actually boost it, data from Ramp suggests.

We’re strengthening our presence in Alabama through new investments and community support. blog.google

Google has announced a $1.5 billion investment for 2026 and 2027 to expand its data center campus in Jackson County, Alabama. Operating since 2019 on a repurposed former…

Pentagon boasts of using AI to write reports mandated by Congress arstechnica.com

Pentagon also claims 1.5 million personnel are using generative AI tools.

Sixty percent of US consumers say ‘AI’ in brand messaging is a turnoff, survey finds techcrunch.com

WordPress VIP’s latest survey suggests consumers are wary of AI-generated answers even as companies increasingly view AI search as an important referral channel.

Want to get a data center online quickly? Give it some flex. technologyreview.com

At the end of a tense and scoreless first half of a soccer match between the English men’s team and rival Germany, millions of Brits let out a collective sigh and did what they so often do in moments of stress: They made tea. That wave of electric kettles clicking on, however, caused a different…

Robinhood’s note on 10% layoffs shows blaming AI isn’t cutting it techcrunch.com

Unlike many of his tech industry peers who have cut thousands of jobs citing the need to restructure to make the most of AI, Robinhood’s CEO Vlad Tenev conspicuously made no mention of AI in his note about layoffs.

Qualcomm’s latest chip hints that more powerful smart glasses could be on the way theverge.com

Smart glasses are still a nascent category, but chipmaker Qualcomm is hard at work upgrading the silicon to power the next wave of XR devices: the Snapdragon Reality Elite. Although Qualcomm is announcing the chip today at Augmented World Expo, we’ve technically already gotten a hands-on with a device powered by the new chip at […]

Apple 2027 rumors: AirPods with cameras for AI and the second folding iPhone theverge.com

Now that we’re clear of WWDC and all of the new AI-powered features coming to Apple’s platforms, Bloomberg reporter Mark Gurman has more details about rumored new hardware, like the camera-equipped AirPods he’d previously written about. He says they are currently on schedule for a late 2027 launch, and that while we’re checking out beta […]

Plaud says its software business topped $100M in ARR after shipping over 2M AI notetakers techcrunch.com

Plaud is trying to make a mark in a crowded market full of AI-powered meeting notetakers.

(AINews) Satya on Loopcraft: Building Frontier Ecosystems latent.space

a quiet day lets us report on Satya’s hit essay

Probably raises $9M to build a more reliable kind of AI techcrunch.com

Probably wants to prevent hallucinations and factual errors from reaching users, and achieve accuracy on par with deterministic systems.

Why do South Koreans love AI so much? technologyreview.com

This story originally appeared in The Algorithm, our weekly newsletter on AI. To get stories like this in your inbox first, sign up here. When I landed in Seoul after a grueling 12-hour flight from San Francisco, I walked through an unmanned immigration checkpoint, where a machine scanned my face and passport. On the subway home,…

Bye bye Fable bensbites.com

another benchmark for real swe work

References

The Next Web — ‘xAI Cursor gun-jumping’ report thenextweb.com

xAI General Counsel James Burnham issued an urgent internal memo instructing staff to limit interactions with Cursor employees… Cursor personnel had already been working inside xAI offices for weeks under a ‘technical partnership,’ potentially crossing the line into premature operational integration.

Inc. — analyst skepticism on SpaceX IPO inc.com

Aswath Damodaran… characterized the $26.5 trillion TAM figure as ‘bordering on fantasy’… SpaceX remains unprofitable, reporting a net loss of $4.9 billion in 2025. Short-seller James Chanos labeled the listing a ‘hopes-and-dreams IPO.’

TradingKey — SpaceX/Cursor strategic analysis tradingkey.com

SEC filings reveal the AI vertical posted a $6.35 billion loss in 2025, effectively negating the profits generated by Starlink… SpaceX’s flagship model, Grok 4.3, recently ranked 33rd on industry coding benchmarks, trailing significantly behind Anthropic and OpenAI.

Medium (Akhil Sharma) — ‘Your AI Coding Strategy Just Became Dangerously Fragile’ medium.com

Cursor’s success was built on its model-agnostic neutrality; by becoming a ‘captive’ layer within SpaceX, it may lose enterprise clients who prefer to use models from OpenAI or Anthropic… enterprise users must ‘re-underwrite’ their dependency on the tool.

Hacker News discussion thread (id=45140767) news.ycombinator.com

Users have debated whether the acquisition necessitates ‘nuking’ local conversations or strictly enabling ‘Privacy Mode’ to prevent SpaceX from using sensitive source code to train future models… fears that the tool’s ‘zero data retention’ agreements might be compromised.

Phemex profile of Michael Truell phemex.com

Truell previously alluded to building Cursor as an independent, ‘long-haul’ entity, [but] characterized this ‘galactic ambition’ as a calculated risk… The three other MIT-affiliated founders—Aman Sanger, Sualeh Asif, and Arvid Lunnemark—all transitioned into billionaire status following the merger.

Ed Zitron, Where’s Your Ed At wheresyoured.at

Zitron argues the company is trapped in ‘Brokenomics,’ a cycle where expenses grow faster than revenue… R&D alone consumed $19.18 billion in 2025, up from $7.81 billion the previous year, suggesting that the ‘intelligence’ OpenAI sells is becoming exponentially more expensive to produce.

Financial Times ft.com

Roughly $41.55 billion of the $38.53 billion headline net loss was a one-time non-cash charge tied to the for-profit conversion; stripping out those items, OpenAI’s underlying ‘adjusted’ loss for 2025 was closer to $8 billion.

The Motley Fool — Anthropic vs OpenAI fool.com

Anthropic projects its first profitable quarter in Q2 2026 at roughly $559 million operating profit on an enterprise-heavy mix (~85% of revenue), while OpenAI projects a $14 billion loss for 2026 alone and no positive cash flow until 2029–2030.

TheStreet — SoftBank coverage thestreet.com

SoftBank shares fell as much as 9.7% in mid-June 2026 after a $6 billion margin loan backed by its OpenAI stake reportedly failed to attract lenders, with a $40 billion unsecured bridge loan due in 2027.

Let’s Data Science — Microsoft disclosures letsdatascience.com

Microsoft booked a $7.6 billion dilution gain in Q2 FY2026 as OpenAI’s valuation marked up to $500 billion, even as it must recognize its ~27% share of OpenAI’s $38.5B loss through the equity method — creating a ‘circular revenue’ loop that flatters GAAP net income.

TechJack Solutions / SemiAnalysis techjacksolutions.com

A fully utilized $200-per-month professional plan can reportedly consume up to $14,000 in API-equivalent token value — a roughly 70x subsidy ratio.

DOJ press release (justice.gov) justice.gov

Justice Department files to intervene and dismiss lawsuit that would hamper America’s AI innovation

Earthjustice press release earthjustice.org

Trump administration attempts massive power grab in defense of Musk’s xAI

Southern Environmental Law Center (commissioned EmPower Analytics study) selc.org

proposed permanent installation of 41 gas turbines at the Southaven site could cause between $30 million and $44 million in annual health-related damages

The Guardian theguardian.com

Grok is one of only four AI models cleared for use on Secret and Top-Secret systems… provided critical intelligence and targeting support during ‘Operation Epic Fury,’ a recent four-day military action involving over 2,000 strikes against targets in Iran

LetsDataScience case tracker (NAACP v. x.AI Corp., 3:26-cv-00074, N.D. Miss.) letsdatascience.com

a separate class-action lawsuit was filed by approximately 10,000 local residents citing noise pollution and public nuisance caused by the facility’s ‘jet-engine-level’ sounds

Investing.com / Reuters analysis of behind-the-meter gas buildout investing.com

hyperscale operators are increasingly pivoting toward ‘behind-the-meter’ (BTM) gas generation to avoid grid interconnection delays… xAI has utilized a ‘temporary-mobile’ strategy, deploying dozens of methane turbines on flatbed trailers