Everyone Wants To Give Back

Elon Musk promised every American kid a SpaceX share, about $10.5B worth, as Anthropic committed 5% of its shares to a public benefit fund. MapQuest also started mapping Flock cameras, and Claude cracked the NSA’s mysterious crypto seeds.

• Elon Musk says “I will give one of my SpaceX shares to every kid in America” in 2027; at SpaceX’s $146.03 Friday close, the gift would be valued at ~$10.5B (CNBC)
• Anthropic says it is committing 5% of its shares to a Public Benefit Fund, for a total of ~20% with co-founder and staff pledges, plus 2% per 50% valuation rise (Anthropic)
• Anthropic’s Long-Term Benefit Trust can seat four of seven board members and dismiss them without cause, but its governing documents and shareholder override terms aren’t public (WSJ)
• MapQuest adds a Surveillance Layer to its mobile app showing license plate readers and cameras from 10+ companies including Flock, using OpenStreetMap data (Mashable)
• MapQuest’s new Surveillance Layer maps plate readers from Flock, Vigilant, Axon, Verkada and others on Android and iOS; Flock alone has 120,000+ cameras in the US, so expect a lot of dots (TechRadar)
• Deutsche Telekom, Orange, Telefónica, and Vodafone agree to explore a joint bid to offer “direct-to-device” satellite service in Europe, challenging Starlink (FT)
• Google DeepMind says four Gemini 4 Argon agents beat Minecraft without any human help in 27 hours and 14 minutes, costing $1,620 at Argon’s planned 2027 price (The Decoder)
• Four Gemini 4 Argon agents beat Minecraft’s Ender Dragon by splitting roles and sharing tips; they wrote 2,783 programs, exchanged 229 messages, and died 605 times along the way (Engadget)
• Anthropic says Claude traced NIST’s ECDSA curve seeds to a pseudorandom number generator, challenging decades-old suspicions of an NSA backdoor in the algorithm (Anthropic)

Subscribe to the ad-free feed.