Joined By Elon Musk, Trump Holds First Cabinet Meeting Of His Second Term

SpaceX CEO Elon Musk, head of the Department of Government Efficiency, attends a Cabinet meeting at the White House (Andrew Harnik/Getty Images)

Calling in a favor

Report: FAA to cancel Verizon contract in favor of Elon Musk’s SpaceX

Remember when Jeff Bezos and Sam Altman said they didn’t think Musk would use his position in government to hurt competition?

Rani Molla

2/27/25 9:57AM

Remember a few long months ago when Amazon and Blue Origin founder Jeff Bezos (who competes with Elon Musk in his AI and rocket businesses) and OpenAI CEO Sam Altman (who competes with Musk in his AI business) downplayed the likelihood that Musk would use his government position to hurt competitors?

The Washington Post is reporting that the Federal Aviation Administration is close to canceling its 2023 $2.4 billion communications system overhaul contract with Verizon, and giving the contract instead to Musk’s SpaceX, whose Starlink satellite business competes with Verizon.

It appears Musk, who recently posted on his social media platform, “The Verizon system is not working and so is putting air travelers at serious risk,” might in fact be using his leadership position at the Department of Government Efficiency to hurt others and help himself.

To reiterate, in December, Altman said:

“It would be profoundly un-American to use political power — to the degree that Elon has it — to hurt your competitors and advantage your own businesses. I don’t think people would tolerate that and I don’t think Elon would do it.”

Bezos at the time said:

“I take it at face value what has been said, which is that he is not going to use his political power to advantage his own companies or to disadvantage his competitors. I could be wrong about that but I think it could be true... I’ve had a lot of success in life not being cynical, and I’ve very rarely been taken advantage of. It’s happened a couple of times, but not very often.”

For what it’s worth, even Verizon doesn’t quite seem to understand what’s happening to it.

Verizon Executive Vice President Joseph Russo said at an event earlier this week that Starlink’s efforts at the FAA might work in unison with Verizon’s.

“I think that can be complementary to what we’re trying to build to really run the FAA infrastructure,” Russo said. “We’re in the midst of rolling out that network. It is not operational yet today but will be shortly as we continue to build in additional reliability and performance at the FAA.”

Chris Stokel-Walker

Bot bias

6/17/26

Companies are getting AI chatbots to smear their competitors

The race to influence AI chatbots is leading to some companies to adopt shady competitive tactics.

Tom Jones6/17/26

Prediction markets have, predictably, been given a boost by the summer of sports

Major platforms like Kalshi and Polymarket have seen huge upticks in users of late, thanks in no small part to what’s felt like a recent sporting smorgasbord, with major competitions across hockey, basketball, and soccer soaking up fans’ time (and spending, clearly) at the outset of summer.

While gaming industry groups may not like it, there’s been a huge change in the methods people are using to put money on the big games, with everyone from fortunate NYC bar owners, to a far less fortunate Spanish supporter, turning to prediction markets to try and turn their sports know-how into cold, hard cash.

According to a new report from Adam Blacker for apptopia, that shift might have been even more seismic than imagined in the wake of the NBA and NHL finals and around the 2026 World Cup kicking off.

2026 World Cup Reverses Seasonal Lull for Sports Betting Apps

According to a new report from Adam Blacker for apptopia, that shift might have been even more seismic than imagined in the wake of the NBA and NHL finals and around the 2026 World Cup kicking off.

South by Southwest Conference and Festivals

Gold Tesla Cybercabs are piling up, but they’re not picking up passengers yet

Low-volume production started in April. Now people are noticing them more and more in the wild.

Rani Molla6/15/26

Millie Giles

TAKING ACCOUNTS

6/15/26

Britain announces social media ban for under-16s starting early 2027

The UK government plans to use the same model for the restrictions as Australia — but how successful has that case study been so far?

UK Prime Minister Announces Under-16s Social Media Ban

Jon Keegan6/15/26

Anthropic pulls Fable and Mythos access worldwide after Trump administration bars their use by foreign nationals

Only days after releasing two versions of its next-gen AI model, Anthropic has disabled them for users worldwide.

Anthropic says it received a Friday night order from the Trump administration to suspend access to the models for any foreign national (anywhere in the world) — a group that included some Anthropic employees. In response, the company turned off access to everyone.

Last week, the company released to the public its much-anticipated Claude Fable 5 model (and its restricted version Claude Mythos 5, which is still being tested with trusted partners). Anthropic said in a blog post announcing the action that officials cited national security concerns with the new models, while offering few specific details.

The post said that the government gave the company “verbal evidence of a potential narrow, non-universal jailbreak” of the public Fable 5 model. A jailbreak is a means by which users can evade restrictions built into the code to unlock prohibited functionality. Anthropic downplayed the significance of the attack, and said other major models, such as OpenAI’s GPT-5.5, could also be affected by the technique described.

Fears of these first Mythos-class models being misused are running high, after Anthropic warned the cybersecurity world in May that the advanced cyber capabilities of Mythos have rapidly discovered thousands of vulnerabilities in ubiquitous software, leading to the decision to restrict the full version of the model to a close group of trusted partners for testing.

This morning, Axios reported that Anthropic technical staff have flown to Washington to meet with White House officials to resolve the issue.

The Wall Street Journal is reporting that the Trump administration’s decision to take action against Anthropic was prompted by discussions that Amazon CEO Andy Jassy had with officials, including Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent. According to the report, Amazon researchers said they had been able to evade some of Fable 5’s security restrictions using specific prompts. Amazon is a major investor in Anthropic.

Anthropic is currently suing the US government to fight the Pentagon’s blacklisting of the company on national security grounds.

Statement on the US government directive to suspend access to Fable 5 and Mythos 5