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X Money app rolls out in the US: The new feature launches for US Premium and Premium+ subscribers this week. Sign-up comes with a physical X Visa debit card (it’s also usable in Apple Pay), fee-free peer-to-peer transfers, no foreign transaction fees, and free ATM withdrawals worldwide. Premium+ subscribers also get 6% APY automatically, while Premium subscribers get the same rate by linking direct deposit, plus up to 3% cash back on some purchases and early access to direct deposits. It’s the clearest step yet toward achieving CEO Elon Musk’s stated goal of turning X into the “everything app.”
“Open” Kimi K3 release comes with a catch: Moonshot published the technical details behind the powerful Kimi K3 on Monday. Large-scale users will need a commercial license to employ the model, marking a first among the major Chinese AI labs. K3 is almost too large to run on an ordinary computer, so the vast majority of users will access through a direct Moonshot subscription or a licensed third party, rather than downloading it themselves. Still, Moonshot waited until nearly two weeks after the K3 launch to release these details. The New York Times reads this as a sign of how politically sensitive this technology has come, in both Beijing and Washington, as Chinese officials seem to be gauging just how open they want their home grown models to remain.
Microsoft launches AI cybersecurity model: MAI-Cyber-1-Flash is the company’s first model built to find vulnerabilities in complex codebases. It arrives alongside Perception, a platform that deploys AI agents to simulate attacks, detect bugs, and patch them autonomously without direct human intervention. Microsoft claims the model bests Gemini, OpenAI’s GPT family, and Anthropic’s Mythos 5 on CyberGym, the field’s leading benchmark. The model begins shipping into production immediately. This launch now puts Microsoft in direct competition with Daybreak, the security program from their former close partners OpenAI, and Mythos from Anthropic, both of which were released earlier this year.
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On Monday, Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei published a blog post laying out his concerns regarding open weight AI. The context here is key, as the piece serves as something of a rebuttal to last week’s Nvidia-led open letter, signed by the vast majority of the US tech industry except for Anthropic. Critics have since accused them of wanting to ban open models, in order to protect their own higher-cost frontier options.
Amodei denies these charges, and insists that he agrees with most of what the letter has to day. His main dispute centers around the claim that openness necessarily helps cybersecurity defenders over their potential attackers. He points to biology, where a capable enough model could help to weaponize a virus faster than any well intentioned public health organization could potentially respond, regardless of tools. (Operation Warp Speed — which fast-tracked global medicine’s COVID-19 response — took years to implement under functionally ideal conditions.)
Amodei points to more potential misuses of frontier-level models. Beyond just their capacity for aiding in cyberattacks and bioweapons, he notes their potential to assistin for authoritarian governments in dominating or repressing their own people or the world at large. He calls for advanced chips to be kept out of authoritarian hands, for a crackdown on industrial scale distillation (though specifics here remain vague), and for mandatory safety testing on all sufficiently capable models, open and closed, regardless of their origin. – Zach
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This Week in Startups
E2317: Most lab-grown meat companies have already gone under, even those with a lot of funding and early buzz. Cultivated meat is expensive to produce, and so far, there’s little demand from consumers who fear the “mad science” connotations of growing tissue in a lab. But Japan’s IntegriCulture is still standing, in part because of an innovative deal with cosmetics companies that license their technology. Go deep on this little-discussed niche industry with IntegriCulture founder Dr. Yuki Hanyu.
E2316: We’ve been told that quantum computing has been “5-10 years ago” for 30 years. On this edition of TWiST Tokyo, Jason sits down with Yaqumo CEO Kazu Nakashoji to discuss why now may be the moment that things start to change. Find out why quantum machines are so error prone, why quantum computers have such an unconventional supply chain, and and go deep on the cryptography reckoning that may be coming for your Bitcoin.
E2315: In the first episode of our week-long summer trip to Tokyo, Jason is joined by CEO Bilal Kharouni of Ekei Labs. He’s using AI and epigenetics to develop longevity treatments in Okinawa, one of the world’s legendary Blue Zones noted for its residents’ tendency to live long, healthy lives. He discusses why a smaller raise can go much further in Japan than Silicon Valley, why the best moat for biotech companies is not an AI model but their data, and why Ekei killed a burgeoning side business in order to maintain focus.
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