A doctor is blowing the whistle on real medication prices before insurance markup. Z-Pak: $3. Metformin: $2. Losartan: $3. "The big insurance companies bought the pharmacy benefits managers so now those PBMs responsible for negotiating better drug prices instead increase the prices."

Two days after Anthropic shipped Fable 5.1, OpenAI responds with Astra. Early benchmarks have Astra ahead on several key categories, though Fable 5.1 still leads on others. Two frontier model releases in three days.

"$3 trillion in fraud across federal programs. More than 4,000 breaches per year. Deep fakes fooling automated systems. And it's only accelerating with AI." (GeraldGlickman) and @MartyBent on why digital identity is broken.

"Using your biometrics as an identifier is not good. See China. It results in a world where people are just fundamentally less free." (GeraldGlickman) on digital identity and the broken security model.

Bernie Sanders and Greg Casar just introduced the "Ban Artificial Superintelligence Act." The bill bans any AI that "exhibits or can easily be modified to exhibit capabilities that match or exceed human cognitive performance" or has "sufficient capabilities to plan and execute the disempowerment of humanity." Violators face "the corporate death penalty" and up to 20 years in prison.

Downdetector looking like the AI industry's EKG right now.

Bitcoin is back above $80,000

Mark Zuckerberg announces Muse Spark 1.3, calling it Meta's "biggest jump" yet on coding and agentic work with "frontier performance almost too cheap to meter." Open weights release coming soon.

The Digital Chamber and the Illinois Blockchain Association are suing to block Illinois' first-in-the-nation 0.2% tax on digital asset transactions. Their core argument is Illinois is taxing technology, not economics. A tokenized Treasury security gets taxed. The same Treasury held in book-entry form does not. A stablecoin transfer gets taxed. A dollar sent by ACH does not. As the complaint puts it: "Illinois has not taxed a new kind of property; it has taxed an old kind of property recorded in a new way." The plaintiffs argue the law violates the Illinois Uniformity Clause and the US Constitution's Commerce and Due Process clauses by imposing different tax treatment on economically identical assets based solely on the ledger technology used to record them. Noncompliance is a Class 3 felony. The law takes effect January 1, 2027.

SEC Chair Paul Atkins says the CLARITY Act will be voted on in the Senate on September 15 and calls for "statutory grounding" of digital asset regulation "to make sure that it is sustainable and lasting into the future."

Eric Balchunas says over the past six months, Bitcoin has had a lower correlation to US stocks than gold, small caps, emerging markets, and even treasuries.

The Trump administration filed a brief backing OpenAI against the New York Times in its copyright lawsuit. The DOJ told the court that "the United States has a strong interest in this court rejecting any argument that training LLMs on copyrighted texts violates copyright law," citing national security. The filing calls AI training on copyrighted material "extraordinarily transformative" and fair use. The government is officially siding with AI companies over content creators. h/t (AndrewCurran_)

Newly unclassified documents released by Senator Rand Paul reveal that on May 7, 2020, CIA Chief Operating Officer Andy Makridis led a briefing with Dr. Scott Gottlieb, the former FDA commissioner and Pfizer board member. In that briefing, Gottlieb told the CIA that national seroprevalence was "about 20-25%," while discounting the Santa Clara and Los Angeles antibody studies that were being attacked in public. Three weeks earlier, Gottlieb had publicly estimated national exposure at around 5% and treated Santa Clara as a hotspot outlier. By the time of this private CIA briefing, he was giving the agency a number four to five times higher. "Why the massive difference between what he was telling the CIA privately so early in the pandemic versus what he was saying publicly?" This document was classified for more than six years until Senator Paul released it on August 29, 2026.

Brownstone Institute

Pfizer and the CIA Privately Cited High Population Immunity in May 2020, Unclassified Document Reveals

The Fauci-focused document tranche contains nugget as part of CIA report. CIA Chief Operating Officer Makridis led briefing with Gottlieb.

UK-listed The Smarter Web Company bought 35 BTC for £2.01M, taking its treasury to 2,747 BTC.

"The boom and bust narrative may die. Bitcoin's volatility is the angst of a young child. Mature assets trade differently. We're two years into the ETF era. That's nothing." - Joe Carlasare

AI safety researcher who investigated the OpenAI agent hack: "This might be the clearest warning shot we ever get for loss of control. Much more concerning things will happen, but it may never be as clear as this before it's far too late."

Steak 'n Shake launched "Tesla Tallow Tuesday." All Tesla drivers get free beef tallow crinkle-cut fries and a free jar of grass-fed tallow cooking oil today.

OpenAI says its next model Astra is the first to hit "Critical" cybersecurity capability. That means it can find zero-day vulnerabilities and build working exploits across hardened systems without human guidance. "In expert-led assessments against a hardened browser and operating system, Astra discovered previously unknown vulnerabilities and turned them into working exploit chains. It built a full browser-compromise chain that escaped the sandbox and executed commands on the host." In testing, Astra scored 100% on ExploitBench and discovered two actual zero-days during evaluation. OpenAI delayed parts of development after the Hugging Face agent hack, paused frontier training for two weeks, and hardened its training infrastructure. On jailbreak resistance, Astra refuses 91.5% of disallowed cyber requests vs 59% for the previous model. Access to advanced cybersecurity capabilities will initially be limited to a small group of testers. https://openai.com/index/path-to-astra/