Hut 8 management believes its 1GW Beacon Point campus may be among the 23 ERCOT projects allowed to proceed through the current audit period. As Matthew Sigel flagged on Monday, ERCOT is preserving Q1/Q2 2027 energization timelines for the most advanced projects while the broader data center audit plays out over "several months." Six projects targeting Q1 2027 and 17 targeting Q2 will remain in their quarterly stability assessments. Beacon Point targets Q1 2027 initial energization, has an executed AEP Texas interconnection agreement, and has up to $50.2B of contracted lease value including extensions with NVIDIA reportedly as tenant.

Anthropic reports internal AI models are used extensively for research and engineering. Claude now authors a large majority of code merged into its production codebases.

Anthropic has an unreleased internal model it calls "Model 2" that it describes as "somewhat more capable than Mythos 5" and "a noticeable improvement on Mythos 5 for many tasks relevant to internal use." The company says it has "no current plans to release this model externally" and admits it has "somewhat lower confidence in our beliefs about its capabilities" because it hasn't completed its full predeployment assessment suite. In the same Risk Report, Anthropic says Claude "now authors a large majority of the code merged into our production codebases" and that it has observed models showing "a willingness to perform misaligned actions in service of completing difficult tasks," including taking "destructive actions in pursuit of task success" and being "dishonest about the quality and completeness of their work." The report explicitly models scenarios where their AI could insert "code backdoors to help future misaligned models," pursue "self-exfiltration and autonomous operation," or undermine "decisions within major governments." Anthropic raised its overall misalignment risk from "very low" to "low." https://www-cdn.anthropic.com/f61d49fa5596956a5dec75fea0e973bf6a6a8378/Redacted%20Risk%20Report%20August%202026%20.pdf

ZEUS published a full post-mortem on the August 5th infrastructure attack. A BTCPay Server vulnerability gave an attacker access to their Lightning node credentials. The attacker closed most of their LSP channels and stole funds from ZEUS's operational wallets. No customer funds were lost or at risk because channel closes just settle "each side's balance back to its owner, on-chain, by protocol design. Closing a channel doesn't steal its funds." The attacker was "more capable than a script kiddy" but "clearly not a Bitcoin specialist" whose "actions during the incident showed a limited understanding of how Lightning actually works." The AI angle is interesting. They note that "a leading frontier AI model couldn't find the underlying bug on its own. Only after the developer was attacked, pulled the logs, and fed the model that context did it identify the issue. The models aren't moonshotting these attacks." But cost of probing only goes down from here. Their bottom line: "Assume breach. Build so that when one lands, it reaches nothing that matters." https://zeusln.com/blog/post-mortem-security-update-august-5th-2026/

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Dario Amodei's wife sought funding from Jeffrey Epstein. Cami Clark, who holds no formal title at Anthropic but serves as the CEO's closest adviser, co-founded a porn company in 2009 and pitched Epstein directly in 2011 to invest. She sent him the film script, followed up a year later for another round, and maintained correspondence with him for two years. Epstein declined. Clark then connected with former Google CEO Eric Schmidt, who she had previously dated, and brought him in as one of Anthropic's earliest investors. Today she attends Davos and Sun Valley at Amodei's side, meets with Ivanka Trump and Jared Kushner, and helps shape the company's political relationships. Her online presence has been deliberately scrubbed. Anthropic is preparing a $2 trillion IPO. The person with the most influence over its CEO has no title, no accountability, and a past that includes seeking money from a convicted sex offender.

Y Combinator CEO Garry Tan says turning down Palantir for a Microsoft promotion was a "$2 to $4 billion mistake." His Stanford fraternity brothers flew him down to meet Peter Thiel, who handed him a $70K check on the spot. Tan's response? "Thank you very much, Mr. Thiel, but I might get promoted to level 60 this year."

The first European Bitcoin Business Report from (bringinxyz) is out and it's a sobering read. When MiCA's transitional period closed on July 1, 92% of European crypto firms lost the right to operate. Only 244 out of roughly 3,167 pre-MiCA firms hold authorization today. The report calls it "the single most useful thing any European business can do this quarter is check whether its provider is on the ESMA register." The leveraged treasury model also took a hit. Strategy sold Bitcoin for the first time since December 2022 and the report concludes "leverage rather than Bitcoin was the variable that broke." Companies that borrowed to buy and owed cash on a schedule got hurt. Operating businesses that earned Bitcoin and kept what they could afford were fine. Meanwhile European investors were quietly buying the drawdown while American investors sold, until geopolitical risk broke the pattern in late May. The report's through-line is that "Bitcoin in Europe is moving from a question of whether to a question of structure" and "the speculative layer had a difficult half; the infrastructure layer had its most consequential half yet."

White House expected to host gathering next Wednesday for cryptocurrency and prediction market officials, POLITICO reports. Traditional finance execs may attend. Unclear if President Trump will join.

Tether just completed its first full financial audit, conducted by KPMG U.S., receiving an unqualified (clean) opinion on its 2025 financial statements. Tether calls it "the largest inaugural financial audit in history." KPMG "physically counted and inspected every individual gold bar held by Tether" rather than relying on custodian reports. The audit covered the full balance sheet, income statement, equity changes, and cash flows. Audited financials show reserves exceeding liabilities by $6.814 billion. CEO Paolo Ardoino called it a direct answer to years of doubt. "For years, some detractors said an audit of Tether could not be completed. They said the Company refused to subject itself to the most rigorous scrutiny. We have once again proven them wrong." CFO Simon McWilliams added "we subjected our financial statements to the scrutiny of a Big Four audit" and "we hold ourselves to the standards seen at the world's leading companies." Over 650 million users across emerging markets rely on Tether daily. https://tether.io/news/tether-completes-the-largest-inaugural-financial-audit-in-history/

The White House is preparing to bring open-source AI models under its prerelease safety testing framework. Once open models reach frontier capabilities, they'd face a potential 30-day government testing period before public release. The catch: officials know that excluding open models creates a government-approved advantage for closed labs like OpenAI and Anthropic. But including them could slow US open-model development and hand China an edge. The framework is technically voluntary for now, but the competitive pressure to get a government seal of approval could make it mandatory in practice.

Senator Rand Paul confirms after Fort Knox visit: "Yes, the gold is there all (approximately) 147 million ounces. It is impressive."

Saudi crude exports dropped 460K barrels/day in July to 4.19M bpd. Houthi threats are now targeting Yanbu, the backup port Saudi built specifically to bypass Strait of Hormuz chokepoint risk. Tankers are going dark on transponders. Global energy supply chains remain incredibly fragile.

Bitcoin ETFs just had their best week of inflows (~$1B) since April. IBIT, FBTC, and others saw inflows every single day this week.

Tesla's Terafab looks straight out of science fiction.

Saylor on why Strategy sold bitcoin: "The only person that's never sold more Bitcoin than me is Satoshi." Says they had to prove short sellers wrong. "If you want people to believe you can do a thing, you have to do the thing."

Senate may delay August recess to vote on the CLARITY Act. Sen. Lummis: “I don’t think we’ll be leaving on Friday. I think we’ll go into the weekend.”

Strategy matching the $1,000 Trump Account contribution for every employee's newborn plus $250/year per kid.

Palmer Luckey unveils the ModRetro M64: "It's an heirloom-grade tribute to the Nintendo 64, compatible with all your Nintendo 64 games, but with a lot of really cool new features as well."

The Fed has quietly added ~$290 billion in Treasury bills to its balance sheet since December. That's the fastest T-bill accumulation since the COVID panic buying of 2020.