Technology

➚ MOVE FAST: Circle. The stablecoin issuer popped so much in its public market debut that trading was temporarily halted yesterday. Investors are hungry for new listings, but the frenzy was also another sign that crypto is entering the mainstream.

➘ BREAK THINGS: Back. Tim Cook may be facing a skeptical audience on Monday at the kickoff of Apple’s developer conference. The company known for always being a couple steps ahead of rivals seems to be moving backwards in the AI boom, with product misses and a lack of buzzy partnerships.

One of the many great ironies of Musk’s foray into Republican politics is that it is likely to benefit Sam Altman, a longtime supporter of Democrats and a bitter enemy of Musk’s.

Altman made a brilliant move after Trump took office by linking OpenAI’s crucial Stargate data center project to the White House, and more or less giving Trump credit for making it happen (even though it was in the works before the November election).

Trump is now threatening to cancel the US government contracts with all of Musk’s companies, including xAI, an OpenAI rival. The two companies stand to gain from Trump’s support of the United Arab Emirates effort to build massive data centers there. The UAE is a fan of Trump and Musk, but the rift between the two men could benefit OpenAI, which has spent years cultivating relationships with the country.

Another factor that helps Altman is that rival Anthropic has also alienated the Trump administration by lobbying against provisions in the “big, beautiful bill.” Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei doubled down on those efforts, calling on the White House to drop its plan to limit AI regulation.

The one thing to keep in mind, though, is that all of this could change on a dime. Trump and Musk could make up tomorrow and decide Altman is the enemy. But for now, the OpenAI CEO has displayed better political instincts than his top competitor, which matters in the hyper-competitive AI race. He just needs to keep at it for another 3.5 years of unpredictable chaos.

The US Food and Drug Administration’s new AI tool, which is still in beta testing, is struggling with some basic tasks, NBC News reported. Dubbed CDRH-GPT, the tool — intended to accelerate medical device approvals — isn’t connected to the agency’s internal systems, struggles with document uploads, and can’t access new studies because it isn’t plugged into the internet. It’s a hiccup that should get straightened out with time and represents the difficulties in using new technologies to overhaul legacy processes.

FDA Commissioner Marty Makary has pushed for AI integration into the agency’s systems and pursued an aggressive timeline for development. It’s a step in the right direction that could more quickly deliver critical medicines to patients — and it’s something previous administrations didn’t do. On Monday, the FDA announced the launch of a different AI tool named Elsa, which can summarize information. It struggles with some of the same issues as CDRH-GPT, NBC reported, although it’s not uncommon for an organization to launch a product and continue to iterate on it over time.

There have been other AI blips at the Department of Health and Human Services, which oversees the FDA. It recently released a 73-page “Make America Healthy Again” report that appeared to be researched in part by AI, NOTUS reported. The document included broken links and sources that don’t exist, which correlate with chatbot hallucinations.

The amount Anysphere, the maker of the Cursor vibe coding tool, raised in a new funding round, nearly quadrupling the company’s valuation in January to $9.9 billion, Bloomberg reported. Cursor is among the vibe coding assistants revolutionizing the software industry and tipping Silicon Valley’s scales of power, as we wrote about this week.

While Musk’s companies are caught in the crossfire between the billionaire and Donald Trump, SpaceX is making big strides outside the US. Starlink just got approval to launch commercial operations in India, a big win in the most populous country in the world after waiting three years to obtain a license. It still needs clearance from the space regulator there, among other steps, Reuters reported. But if it moves forward, it’s a lucrative market given nearly half of India’s 1.4 billion population is not online. And it follows successful efforts by Musk to expand in Africa.

Recent improvements in vibe coding are not only upending Silicon Valley’s balance of power, but they will also remake the economics of scale and the corporate processes built around husbanding and prioritizing scarce tech resources, Semafor’s Gina Chua writes.

Companies, including news organizations, may no longer need to make products that scale. Building software tools could become so simple that they could pay back a minimal investment of time by helping just a handful of people.

In recent experimentation with AI at Semafor, it was cheaper, faster, more efficient to build something, and then see who might want to use it (or scrap it if no one liked it) than embarking on the much more ponderous process that all large organizations are used to.

Vibe coding — as with any technology that suddenly shifts a good from scarcity to plenty — has the potential to upturn much of the core calculus that underpins how and what companies currently do and build.

It may suddenly become much more economically feasible to make highly customized products for thousands of people, not millions; it may be cheaper to build, test and discard tools than it is to do painstaking market research first. A core part of what many companies have done — hoard and apportion tech talent and time — may be in for a real shakeup, and soon.

Republican data-privacy advocates in Congress are criticizing the Trump administration’s effort to consolidate data from different agencies with the help of Palantir, Semafor’s Eleanor Mueller reports.

Their concern: Future presidents could abuse a trove of financial, medical, and other information on Americans. “It’s dangerous,” Rep. Warren Davidson, R-Ohio, told Semafor. “When you start combining all those data points on an individual into one database, it really essentially creates a digital ID. And it’s a power that history says will eventually be abused.” He compared a Palantir-facilitated merged database to the holy grail in The Lord of The Rings: “The only good thing to do with One Ring to Rule Them All is to destroy the Ring.”

Though Davidson is an outlier in his party, other GOP members and aides voiced similar concerns. Data privacy has divided Republicans before: Hardliners in the House derailed an effort by leadership to reauthorize a key surveillance law last year. Palantir CEO Alex Karp told CNBC Thursday that the company is “not surveilling Americans.”

The public breakdown between President Donald Trump and Elon Musk exposes a unique challenge for journalists in the Trump era: What to do when the biggest story is happening before the world’s eyes.

“What, exactly, are journalists — with our sources, our access, our experience — supposed to do here?” Semafor’s Ben Smith writes. “The most plugged-in people in Washington are reading the same tweets you are, marveling. The persons-familiar who populate so much of the reporting about Trump are no more or less familiar with his Truths than you are ... This is a feature of a presidency that sees itself as media: Journalists can become mere television critics.”