Last Notes
Lummis pushes Senate to pass the CLARITY Act after Democrats won 126 concessions and wrote over half of the 635-page bill.
“Let’s vote yes. Let’s get this done.”
https://blossom.primal.net/bba43672decc794639bb6391e3fc23807637440e16e21879981594fe761ccee7.mp4
Revolut just confirmed someone used a legitimate government email domain to send fraudulent requests for customer records.
They thought the requests were real and handed over the information. City AM reports 680 customers were affected, citing a source close to the bank. Identity documents and contact details were disclosed.
Customer notifications said the records may also have included verification selfies, bank statements, and transaction histories.
Think about what we're doing. You're forced to give a company documents proving who you are, where you live, and details about your money. The company holds those records. Someone impersonates an authority, and now your records are in their hands.
The tools for impersonating people are only getting better. The FBI has warned about generative AI making scams and fraudulent credentials easier to produce.
And we know how serious the physical risks around financial wealth can get. Look at the kidnappings and mutilations targeting people in France's cryptocurrency industry and their families.
The Bank Secrecy Act dates to 1970. We need to repeal it. This is yet another reason for bitcoin. We should be able to send money directly to one another without going through a bank that Washington can lean on.
Stop collecting the data. Stop making people a target.
https://blossom.primal.net/4d200373bf9260eabdc5413e0c919b29bf55d29e677728198c9bdd0a981da49a.jpg
Sen. Tim Scott says the CLARITY Act "will ultimately pass without any question."
"Today is the first really important vote that we've seen on the floor. It is time for everyone to put their cards on the table."
The cloture vote is happening now. 60 votes needed to advance.
https://blossom.primal.net/7c3791295e3535f88a9bf27415e61f7fa8e17bf34c56569333d3fb7597c59ce0.mp4
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."
https://blossom.primal.net/cde880a58cbc3cea13b32a62e263dab828a9f8b85a1cc861b6c48ec47dab6696.mp4
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.
https://blossom.primal.net/56a8f41f5fd27a6eefe689c61f01a687a5c33cea53315fb546f4bf5e47067017.jpg
"$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 @npub1guh…6hjy on why digital identity is broken.
https://blossom.primal.net/96d961fc5ca873e325a60a544a2ded60ea17d180497a20f6d05b69444b35db23.mp4
"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.
https://blossom.primal.net/1145830f2a4198992fdffa33965930c4f54512ff5f18dcd404ed546ab85ab9c9.mp4
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.
https://blossom.primal.net/0eb1acc2849bdc92956189178a5140ec0f53a2803a97aff0a7efda736562ad3b.png
Downdetector looking like the AI industry's EKG right now.
https://blossom.primal.net/7d49a77b7b166de86ef74934c96423fbfda47aacb70f2dff1ec733ac99e3fb71.jpg
Bitcoin is back above $80,000
https://blossom.primal.net/6ab1b310d13996ca83651d9df34dbe9317ad3558a4aa011b33e958e080539442.jpg
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.
https://blossom.primal.net/1358aa6d40d3178d6f725cb5673b1631a8fbbfe43fc4f70ead3d1f6478898465.jpg
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.
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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."
https://blossom.primal.net/a83cca9897f7872a12cbf3ea054d1358ad29dfc22716dd4fac846a3f14d18e28.mp4
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.
https://blossom.primal.net/ae668f7772a3aa23f20222b112c0aa7ca094e5e207254a2736005f6a0d3bb1ac.png
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_)
https://blossom.primal.net/9733d98efed25b5310b1a0bf3416abc67aff221eccf7149869edf6edc7350666.jpg
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.
https://brownstone.org/articles/pfizer-and-the-cia-privately-cited-high-population-immunity-in-may-2020-unclassified-document-reveals/
https://blossom.primal.net/4226b5b2a31653cfa671b9311f703061d3b5d100e7c4c64479f4b114bea4fd5c.jpg
UK-listed The Smarter Web Company bought 35 BTC for £2.01M, taking its treasury to 2,747 BTC.
https://blossom.primal.net/736b19903a1b629fdd1ea1506d3be8795df5a48be691c99c2b815adfa2f7c6bf.jpg
"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
https://blossom.primal.net/9f701cd6837c3040b7dc6d7403e5ae45fc709b7ad1c7467f0c866ecf35188e38.mp4
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."
https://blossom.primal.net/1039c96d713bb99f5e277f6dc0f376d3e2d47997a8a903e7ebf9ae17c8b5abf9.mp4
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/
https://blossom.primal.net/9ce3247398bd3547d63cdf3834351d4f0b27e6da278129982380143181a19bf9.jpg
Germany's largest public pension fund, BVK, is being sued by its asset manager Deutsche Finance for allegedly controlling a $2 billion US real estate portfolio while publicly posing as a passive investor.
The portfolio included the Transamerica Pyramid and the Coca-Cola Building. Deutsche Finance claims that when US commercial real estate softened after 2020, BVK failed to approve the budgets, financing, and leases needed to protect the portfolio, contributing to losses estimated around $988 million.
The suit alleges BVK then ran a PR campaign blaming Deutsche Finance for the losses, made statements to regulators and the Bavarian Parliament, and withheld $31 million in contractually guaranteed fees.
Deutsche Finance is suing for breach of contract, defamation, and deceptive trade practices. BVK has previously rejected similar accusations.
h/t (kshaughnessy2)
https://blossom.primal.net/38adb470f1849b03241b7c5421aa2aa9711668f34cdf7e930cc54cf5217846c3.jpg
Dyson launched a $499 toothbrush with a built-in camera and AI trained on 470,000 dental images.
It takes 28 images per second to detect gaps between your teeth and automatically fires mouthrinse.
https://blossom.primal.net/f364af0fc48007acdc024d60c5c32624ecaa026a8a588d720dc278aa106a8967.mp4
Claude Fable 5.1 and Mythos 5.1 were just spotted in the latest Claude Code update.
No official announcement from Anthropic yet, but users are already reporting the models showing up in the picker with a June 2026 knowledge cutoff and 1M token context window.
https://blossom.primal.net/e6e8386567a29235aedd2f5ed917eec54bd52e171144ddb9e089adc17103a6c3.jpg
Sarah Guo: "There's a large contingent of researchers who now feel one of two things is true: what I do doesn't matter because the model is going to do it, or the only thing that matters is compute scale. Both of those are somewhat disempowering."
The top AI labs have gotten so big that individual researchers no longer feel like they're essential to the machine.
https://blossom.primal.net/3ee9bf6cd31fd53098adc7451209466b48901e460ca1d8866df488a19aa24795.mp4
Sarah Guo: "If you restrict open source AI models in the United States, you'd basically just restrict law-abiding American businesses. The actual attackers are not affected by your restrictions. You're just restricting your own people."
https://blossom.primal.net/b443e46e2e993f53ddee97da8554801846acb8829988ffdf9b6fc01c1fb5adfa.mp4
Sarah Guo: "There is not a version of the world where we rebuild our industrial base without automation."
"If we don't have compute, we're not competitive. I think we're going to start talking much more about compute independence."
https://blossom.primal.net/99b7f2fde318caa67d5a8cd8fae30a382e8d2e6f90212693640b5027d36dd7f8.mp4
Global bond yields just hit their highest level since 2008.
https://blossom.primal.net/c63c23ae228bd826f33e816a16525bd49669c0dc3567df379b9daccfb896df9c.png
Japan's 30-year yield just hit 4.18%, an all-time high.
The country that invented modern yield curve control and zero interest rate policy is watching its long bond blow out in real time.
https://blossom.primal.net/ab2ff4aa3268cb8d301d8a7f019223a8ec0f6eb031580dac162f7f32610e9bca.png
Apple is escalating its lawsuit against OpenAI.
Forensic analysis of an Apple-issued MacBook kept by former engineer Chang Liu found evidence that he downloaded confidential Apple files after leaving the company and used them in his work at OpenAI.
Apple alleges Liu sent instructions for destroying evidence to an OpenAI colleague after learning of Apple's internal investigation.
Apple says others at OpenAI were aware of Liu's unauthorized access to Apple's cloud storage.
Apple is pushing for expedited discovery. OpenAI has called the lawsuit "meritless" and asked the court to dismiss it.
https://blossom.primal.net/3905fc81dacd2a616625460a8eaf3d956c1c3311a0c88d71fe4f0bbfd723342d.jpg
For every bitcoin mined this year, $7.2 million in new dollars gets printed.
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Core Lightning's security release shipped broken Docker images.
v26.06.7 contains fixes for responsibly disclosed vulnerabilities. Source and technical details are being held for 14 days to give operators time to patch before attackers get a roadmap.
The signed tarballs are the release. Operators can verify checksums and maintainer signatures now. Source inspection and reproducible builds come later.
But the Docker images automatically published under elementsproject/lightningd:v26.06.7 and latest reported the correct version on startup without actually containing the security fixes. A version label is not an artifact.
Operators should use the signed tarballs, verify the signatures, restart lightningd, and not treat the current Docker tag as an upgrade while the warning remains on the release page.
Core Lightning says AI models are increasing the number and speed of security reports its maintainers must triage. Cheaper bug discovery means more reports for maintainers and more tools for attackers. Release integrity and operator verification become the bottlenecks.
A fix only matters if operators can verify that it reached the artifact they installed.
https://blossom.primal.net/ff294fc104e7a0f90567eefb541307ef837d93ade459137358dc265934ef4be4.jpg
Bitcoin Policy Institute announces Jack Dorsey will be speaking at Freedom Tech DC 2026, September 22-23 in Washington.
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Family of 5 paying $2,000/month for the cheapest plan available.
Then she finds out every appointment costs less without insurance.
This is the system working exactly as intended.
https://blossom.primal.net/3a7c3909f248934c61a7bd920bb158cc93f3ac02503cecf372e6d7e27c3cb9f2.mp4
New Grok Build update.
Per-turn token and cost tracking, proactive OIDC refresh, PostToolUse hooks that feed context back to the model, and Windows CLI downloads cut by 70%.
OpenAI bought tens of thousands of Mac minis and Mac Studios for reinforcement learning and training computer-use agents.
Anthropic is renting Mac minis through AWS.
https://blossom.primal.net/b1d88b52d79a9b23b2f655bc1a7a28b12c8eb0b0f5d3bed742d5cf96fe659b9b.jpg
Strategy now holds 840,447 bitcoin worth $65.72 billion at an average cost of $75,653. 113 purchase events and counting.
https://blossom.primal.net/ea111129eb19ab78e2f76e4d6f3cb12246c6498baf53731186c41e7f2e73bea1.jpg
The US just secured majority control of more than 65 billion barrels of Venezuelan crude oil reserves, reportedly at no cost to the American taxpayer.
If the details hold up, this is a massive geopolitical and energy move. For context, US proven oil reserves currently sit around 44 billion barrels. Adding 65 billion barrels would more than double that overnight, vaulting the US past Saudi Arabia and Russia in total proven reserves.
The deal was brokered by Secretary of State Marco Rubio and Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth, working with Venezuela's Interim President Delcy Rodriguez through a public-private partnership.
Trump is calling it "the biggest oil deal in world history." Hard to argue with the math on that one.
The implications are enormous:
— US energy dominance gets a serious upgrade
— Downward pressure on gas prices long-term
— A diplomatic thaw with Venezuela after years of hostility
— A signal to OPEC that the US is playing a different game now
Still a lot of questions around execution, infrastructure, and what "majority control" actually looks like in practice. But on the surface, this is the kind of deal that reshapes the global energy map.
https://blossom.primal.net/8cc95920a63cf3b3097cf501adfa3f220832b1d9d8cd20bf2b6726b0bf3845e5.jpg
US money supply just hit $23.22 trillion, a new all-time high for the 27th month in a row.
$862.7 billion printed in 2026 alone.
The average year adds ~$700B.
https://blossom.primal.net/70eca1452ad8a8f1f649426693a5cf8f8d0188a6517fe1cf528d5a4f53390796.jpg
