🚀 FP! Week In Review, Briefly #35

Also: Key Up Wing and Down Wing news from the week that was

In Case You Missed It ...

😵‍💫 AI anxiety and the 3+ confusions of Bernie Sanders (Tuesday)

⤵️ The axis of US decline: anti-data center, anti-AI, anti-nuclear (Wednesday)

🚀 SpaceX and the economics of space (Thursday)

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⤴️⤵️ Up Wing/Down Wing

A selection of pro-progress and anti-progress news items from the past week.

⤴ Up Wing Things

Space, energy & infrastructure

• There’s More to Space Stocks Than SpaceX - WSJ

• Elon Musk’s SpaceX pitches investors $1.78tn valuation in historic IPO - The Washington Post

• Goldman Sachs expects SpaceX’s AI revenue to increase 100-fold by 2030 - FT

• Who’s Excited for SpaceX’s I.P.O.? Space Nerds. - NYT

• It Was a Messy Week for Jeff Bezos’ and Elon Musk’s Space Race - WSJ

• Solar sails edge closer to reality, but interstellar travel is another story - Phys.org

• How to Stop a Killer Asteroid - The MIT Press Reader

• X-energy submits Xe-100 for UK regulatory assessment - World Nuclear News

• Nineteen years on, companies team up for US new-build project - World Nuclear News

• Google pushes water standards amid data center backlash - Axios

AI economy, investing & policy

• Anthropic files for blockbuster initial public offering - FT

• OpenAI and Anthropic May Be Rivals, but Investors Aren’t Picking Sides - WIRED

• Alphabet to sell up to $80bn in shares to fund its AI build-out - FT

• Venture Capital Turns to Hardware Bets as AI Threatens Software Companies - WSJ

• Artificial Intelligence and the Global Economy: A Decade of Transformation Toward the 100-Year Economic Quarter (2025–2030) - SSRN

• How AI Could Improve Economic Policymaking - WSJ

• AI Boosting Business Formation - Apollo

• The US Exports Intelligence - Marginal REVOLUTION

• Javier Milei: Argentina invites AI to free itself - FT

• China’s comparative advantage is industrial policy - FT

• Texas is becoming America Inc’s centre of gravity - The Economist

AI jobs & labor

• How One Tech Company Created 13 New Types of Jobs Because of A.I. - NYT

• AI Made My Expertise More Effective - WSJ

• AI Is Taking Over the Most Cursed Job in the World - WIRED

AI in business, industry & products

• How small businesses can leverage AI - MIT Technology Review

• Uber’s AI Doubts Are Just Normal Growing Pains - Bloomberg

• From 15 hours to one minute: How AI/ML is speeding up GM’s development - Ars Technica

• From Cow-Milking Robots to Weed-Zapping Lasers, Farmers Are Embracing A.I. - NYT

• What Are A.I. Agents Actually Doing? - NYT

• Nvidia Introduces First PCs Designed for AI Agents - WSJ

• Nvidia expands AI push with Cosmos 3 world model - Axios

Science, health & medicine

• Inside the Trump-backed push to bring AI doctors into American medicine - The Washington Post

• The blood cancer that became solvable - Works in Progress Magazine

• Cancer jab can eradicate entire tumours in patients, trial shows - The Guardian

• Pancreatic cancer halted by virus injection in three patients - New Scientist

• The science around GLP-1 drugs and cancer is suddenly getting a lot more interesting - The Washington Post

• We May Already Have an Anti-Aging Vaccine - RealClearScience

• Jeff Bezos Is Funding a Wild Hunt for the Brain’s ‘Core Algorithm’ - WIRED

• A golden age of maths is dawning and mathematicians are freaking out - New Scientist

Transport & housing

• Joby Demonstrated its Air Taxi in Manhattan, but You Can’t Fly in It Yet - NYT

• Berkshire Is Convinced the American Dream of Homeownership Will Stay Alive - WSJ

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⤵ Down Wing Things

Data centers, power & the build-out

• America’s Data Center Build-Out Is Falling Way Behind Schedule - WSJ

• 60% of planned US data center capacity not under - WSJ

• Americans Now Blame Data Centers for Their Rising Power Bills - Heatmap News

• China fueling U.S. data center resistance, AI groups claim - Axios

AI policy, regulation & risk

• U.S. Officials Discuss Taking Financial Stakes in AI Industry - WSJ

• Trump plan to test AI models has a problem—US security teams were gutted by DOGE - Ars Technica

• The White House’s Missing AI Rule Book Is a Growing Liability - Bloomberg

• Florida sues OpenAI and CEO Sam Altman over ChatGPT - Axios Tampa Bay

• Scientists Find Way to Supercharge Dangerous Computer ‘Worms’ With A.I. - NYT

• How AI could make wars go nuclear - Vox

• China Aims A.I. at Predicting Who Could Pose a Political Risk - NYT

AI companies & models

• Anthropic faces AI spending backlash before IPO - Axios

• Meta Keeps Delaying the Release of Its New AI Model to Developers - WSJ

• The skeptic’s guide to humanoid robots going viral on the Internet - Ars Technica

AI skepticism, sentiment & culture

• Nearly Half of Americans Are Pessimistic About AI’s Effect on Their Lives - Heatmap News

• ‘More harmful than helpful’: young people sour on AI - FT

• The Hallucinatory AI Math - WSJ

• Meet the Sad Wives of AI - Wired

• His Chatbot Nearly Ruined Him. To Recover, He Had to Destroy It. - WSJ

AI, jobs & the professions

• Is A.I. Replacing Tech Workers or Providing an Excuse for Job Cuts? - NYT

• Mathematicians warn of AI threats to profession as industry encroaches - Ars Technica

• AI is ushering in a new era of colonialism - Axios

Science, business & space

• Donald Trump’s proposed grant rules could destroy US science, researcher warns - FT

• Another red alert for American science - Science

• How Rachel Carson’s Silent Spring changed the world in 1962 - New Scientist

• American capitalism has taken an apocalyptic turn - The Economist

• How long will it take to rebuild Blue Origin’s launch pad? We asked some SpaceX vets. - Ars Technica

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↕️ Which Wing Things?

SpaceX, Blue Origin & the space race

• Massive Blue Origin rocket explosion gives edge to Elon Musk in space race - The Washington Post

• SpaceX IPO: Elon Musk Capital Needs Are Out of This World - Bloomberg

• SpaceX Needs to Get to $5 Quadrillion to Rival Mag Seven Magic - Bloomberg

• Can the stockmarket swallow Anthropic, SpaceX and OpenAI? - The Economist

AI energy & data centers

• The Electricity Economy Is Having Its Moment - Heatmap News

• How to Fix the Fastest-Rising Electricity Prices in the U.S. - Heatmap News

• AI is turning energy into the hottest business in America - Axios

• Phoenix Is a Data-Center Mecca—and Test Case for How to Pay for AI’s Power Needs - WSJ

AI policy, regulation & national security

• Trump Signs Executive Order Seeking Oversight of A.I. Models - NYT

• The Government Is Finally Taking A.I. Risk Seriously - NYT

• OpenAI diverges from White House on AI safety rules - Politico

• Top AI CEOs Call for Law Protecting Against Biological Weapons - WSJ

• US National Security Agency using Anthropic’s Mythos for cyber attacks - FT

• The China-US tech truce is fragile - FT

• Opt-In Surveillance Is Approaching - AI Frontiers Substack

AI labs, self-improvement & existential risk

• Inside Alexandr Wang’s bid to revive Meta’s AI edge - FT

• The race to build AI that can improve itself - FT

• Anthropic warns AI could soon help build its own successors - Axios

• Anthropic Urges Global Pause in AI Development, Flags ‘Self-Improvement’ Risk - WSJ

• Anthropic’s relentless race to the top - FT

• AI Agents Plunged the Tech World Into Chaos. Here’s Exactly How That Happened - WIRED

AI capabilities, consciousness & philosophy

• A guide for the perplexed on AI - FT

• Why AI can solve hard math problems but can’t count - The Argument

• Top AI labs expand research into machine ‘consciousness’ - FT

• No, Artificial Intelligence Is Not Conscious - The Atlantic

• Robotics: Humanoid Hands Are Physical AI’s Anti-Hype Test - Bloomberg

• The Pope’s AI Vision and Its Limits - Project Syndicate

AI economy, jobs, education & society

• How much value is AI really creating? - FT

• U.S. Capitalism at a Crossroads: Three Questions the Country Now Faces - WSJ

• 5 ideas for how we survive the possible AI jobs apocalypse - The Washington Post

• Classrooms lean into analog learning in the AI era - Axios

• How to Raise ‘AI-Native’ Kids - The Free Press

• China’s Rise in Drug Development Looms Over U.S. - NYT

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Essays and Q&As

😵‍💫 AI anxiety and the 3+ confusions of Bernie Sanders

Bernie Sanders wants Washington to seize half of America’s biggest AI companies. In a New York Times op-ed, the Vermont socialist proposed a one-time tax, paid in stock, handing the government 50 percent of OpenAI, Anthropic, xAI, and others—plus board seats and voting power.

Why it matters: This would be an unprecedented act of government intervention in private enterprise, justified by the claim that since AI is built on humanity’s collective knowledge, its wealth must benefit humanity.

A big puzzlement: Sanders is confused on three fronts:

• How innovation benefits society. He downplays cancers diagnosed earlier, productivity gains, cheaper goods, and scientific breakthroughs. There’s more to ROI than government checks.

• AI’s trade-offs. A government owning half of OpenAI has every incentive to keep it growing, not slow it down. Sanders seems confused.

• AI being like oil. Data is an input, not a scarce product. No working GPT existed before OpenAI. What a tired analogy.

Up Wing Up Shot: Social-media-ready politics, not serious policy.