u/BinaryBreakaway

A Trump Administration previously ardently opposed to any real or perceived interference in AI development has suddenly broken the seals with an executive order and most recently the export control of Anthropic’s newest model, Fable 5. Anthropic made the connection between AI model development and existential cybersecurity threats and that connection has changed the face of AI development.

Anthropic is sitting on top of some of the most powerful pieces of technology in human history and has found a way to get them export controlled. As the internet collectively groans over the Trump Administration’s decision, many of these Tweets are missing two critical points:

1. The lack of AI testing and assurance is a direct hinderance to AI innovation
2. Export control processes should be understood as AI continues to grow

If we don’t get our arms around ways to test AI and be able to justify why export control decisions like this were made, we will find ourselves in the next cycle of an AI winter.

Anthropic’s gambit of pressing the fear narrative could have ended very differently. Had Anthropic accompanied these claims with announcements that it was funding or had funded a program of rigorous AI testing, it would have cut the government’s actions off before they started. Had Project Glasswing instead been a testing effort rather than a conglomeration of other billion-dollar companies, the Fable 5 story would have ended differently.

The problem is that for too long, AI testing and assurance were seen as red tape, as blockers to innovation. Instead, Anthropic’s own actions have revealed them to be the true definition of AI infrastructure. AI infrastructure, in the hardware sense, is the infrastructure that enables AI models to be trained and used by millions. The fate of Fable 5 is that it is trained but not being used by millions of eager users. Had Anthropic had AI safety and assurance infrastructure in place, this would have been prevented. The ultimate AI enabler.

Fable 5 is the outcome of a fear-based narrative about a product not coupled with testing and assurance. Small wonder that AI users trust more advanced models less than early models that were less accurate. As we’ve built models to be more capable, we’ve ignored the need to ensure they are performing. Not performance in the sense of how many tokens they use or how fast they are. Performance in the sense of testing against edge cases, preventing harms, and protecting national security. If the government is to evaluate AI models, as the Trump executive order states, it must have standardized testing to evaluate all models regardless of maker or input.

Anthropic hath wrought some of the most advanced models to date that are doing amazing things. In that pursuit, it also hath wrought government intervention from a previously non-interventionist Administration. In so doing, it has proven that AI testing and assurance is AI infrastructure and without it, we are assured of unintended consequences.

Read the whole article here: https://binarybreakaway.substack.com/p/what-hath-anthropic-wrought

Adding my voice to the chorus of commentators on the SpaceX IPO might feel like futility, but I'll let some math do the talking:

$28 Trillion Total Addressable Market

SpaceX claims that its valuation will be over $2 trillion because it will be the primary carrier of people to the Moon and Mars and likely the builder of multiple data centers in space. The cost for all of this is indeed high and doing the math without the context may have gotten you to $28 trillion. But there are some very real realities between June 2026 and a $28 trillion TAM.

Implicit in a TAM number is that the people inside that market are willing to pay that amount for bicycles for example. That’s almost always based on historical sales numbers, trends, and other analysis that leads to an informed estimate of the size of the market. A TAM in the double-digit trillions assumes that there are earthlings, companies, individuals, and governments, that are willing to part with a combined sum of $28 trillion for space services. The problem here is that the math on which such a number is based lacks the historical backing of traditional IPOs. It sounds great in a marketing piece but lacks substance.

But wait, there’s more.

The ability to launch trillions of dollars’ worth of rockets, materials, satellites, and humans into space requires common use space infrastructure that does not exist. When we refer to the “space economy” we are really only referring to the low earth orbit (LEO) economy because that’s as far as commercial space companies have thus far been willing to go. Not because the technology does not exist, but because they are not willing to eat the risk and go it alone. Without building out real space infrastructure, all the Starships in the world aren’t going to take us to Mars because now SpaceX has a legal responsibility to make money for its shareholders. Being first to go to Mars is a HUGE business risk and without infrastructure, it’s likely moot. That hard fact is the first slice cut out of the $28 trillion TAM.

Data Centers in Space

The weight of server racks can vary but is roughly 2,000-3,000lbs per rack. We will average it to 2,500lbs. In a modern hyperscale data center there are roughly 2,500-5,000 server racks, let’s use 3,000. At $1,500 per kilogram to launch any material to LEO, the costs break down this way:

• Single Server Rack: 2,500lbs (1,134kg) = $1.7 million
• Total Hyperscale Data Center Servers: 3,000 server racks at 2,500lbs each = 7.5 million pounds (3,402 metric tons or 3,402,000,000 kilograms) = $5.1 trillion

SpaceX will say that the launch cost per kilogram will drop to $20 or even lower. Maybe. If it does, it will take years, further pushing out the returns for investors. While the cost to put a single data center in space is boggling high, that’s not the end of the story.

70%

The inhabitants of 70% of the Earth’s surface do not buy compute space or data storage because they are fish.

Extremely basic orbital mechanics tells us that anything orbiting the Earth in LEO moves around 17,000 miles per hour, so it does not stay overhead long.

For a data center to transmit your data and compute to you on demand, it needs to be overhead. The principle is the same for Starlink. That’s why there are so many of them.

If that data center is on the other side of the world at the time you need it, tough luck. If the data center happens to be over the Western Pacific, its downlink does no one any good.

In order to effectively build data centers in space, you’d have to build A LOT of them…at $5 trillion a piece. If you happen to be the majority shareholder of a rocket company, this sounds just fine. If you are a government or a company that might hire SpaceX to do such a thing, this is prohibitive. This cost goes even beyond what the top 10 GDPs in the world could reasonably pay taking ANOTHER chunk out of the $28 trillion TAM.

2025 Revenue

• In 2025, the US accounted for 160 launches, of which 145 were SpaceX. Of those 145, 107 were Starlink satellites leaving 38 SpaceX launches that were not launching at SpaceX payload. Two important observations emerge:
• SpaceX accounted for 90% of US launches in 2025 and 93% of launches in 2024.
• Of SpaceX’s 145 launches, 73% were Starlink leaving a very small non-SpaceX market for the launch of LEO satellites. It is possible that SpaceX is artificially inflating the market for LEO launch capabilities because it is launching so many of its own satellites rather than satellites from outside customers.
• Just 27% of SpaceX’s launches were NOT its own gear. Starlink satellites will continue to need replacing, but the demand for launch services is inflated, another chunk of the $28 trillion TAM gone.

Read more here: https://binarybreakaway.substack.com/p/math-history-and-the-spacex-ipo

Looming above the entire AI industry is the long and dark shadow of Mythos. So dangerous was Anthropic’s latest creation that the company decided its power could only be handled by a small group of large US technology companies. Never one to be left behind, OpenAI announced that it too had a model that was so dangerous that, you guessed it, it could not be released publicly.

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The concern of both Anthropic and OpenAI was that the pace of model development had reached a moment where new models posed such a high cybersecurity threat, that public release was impossible. Effectively, the new models were finding high volumes of zero-day exploits in current and legacy systems at such a scale that the widespread release of the model would cause major cybersecurity events around the world. At heart was the concept of time to exploit (TTE) and how AI models were reducing it.

Whether Mythos and future AI models pose a catastrophic threat to our cyber systems is to be determined. Without the ability to independently test and verify the claims, observers are rightly skeptical. The timing of the Mythos claims are also not lost on even the casual observer:

1. Anthropic has a very public row with the Pentagon resulting in the loss of a major government contract.
2. OpenAI picks up Anthropic’s lost contract.
3. Rumors of an IPO for Anthropic circulate.
4. Mythos announcement made.

Regardless of whether Mythos is as advertised, its mark on the AI industry and policy conversations is absolute. Nowhere was this on greater display than when news broke last week that the signature of a new AI executive order was cancelled just moments before the signing ceremony was to begin. I’ve been directly involved in drafting executive orders on AI and other emerging technologies and having an executive order rejected by the president just moments before a signing ceremony is highly unusual. The Trump Administration has not found easy footing in its AI policy efforts over the last 15 months, but in a surprise to all of us, the non-release of an executive order is telling us more about the Administration’s position on AI than the flurry of orders before it.

What’s clear is that the Administration is making a bet on an AI policy position, that Silicon Valley knows how to win an AI race with China. Whether this is right or wrong will need to wait. Yet, without saying a word, the Trump Administration may have given the AI industry the long-sought consistency it has needed all along.

Read more here: https://binarybreakaway.substack.com/p/the-ai-executive-order-that-wasnt