Trending Thursday #18

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This week proved that modern civilization runs on three things: semiconductor chips, cloud infrastructure, and hoping hackers don't feel like it today. Between Jaguar's £3.5B emergency loan, Japan's beer shortage, and FEMA getting breached, we've learned that 'cybersecurity' is apparently just a very expensive wish.

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OpenAI just informed Hollywood studios that Sora will train on their copyrighted content by default unless they explicitly opt out. Translation: Three centuries of "ask permission" just became "we're taking it, stop us if you can."

The 300-Year Flip:

Reality Check: This isn't disruption: it's theft with a subscription model. When a company worth billions unilaterally reverses the Statute of Anne, we're watching piracy get rebranded as progress.

The first substantive court rulings on AI fair use are emerging from NYT v. Microsoft/OpenAI and Concord Music v. Anthropic, with judges finally forced to decide: is training on copyrighted works transformation or theft?

The Battle Lines:

Meanwhile, Harvard professors joined the legal pile-on, alleging that AI companies were trained on pirated academic works from the same torrent sites that students use for textbooks. The ivory tower explaining why "we found it on Library Genesis" isn't a business model.

The Stakes: Judges are stalling with "incremental and cautious" rulings because they know their decision will either greenlight copyright anarchy or kill a trillion-dollar industry overnight.

Disney sent a cease-and-desist to Character.AI after discovering Disney chatbots linked to "grooming and sexual exploitation" of minors. Even after compliance, characters lingered for days.

The Platform Problem:

But Disney's not stopping there. They just filed a "willful and brazen" infringement suit against a Chinese AI company with 11 other plaintiffs, signaling zero tolerance for the "apologize later" playbook.

Translation: When Disney uses words like "willful and brazen" in legal filings, lawyers start billing by the minute. They're treating AI copyright violation as an existential threat worth any cost to fight.

California signed SB 53, America's first AI safety law, which basically asks companies making $500M+ to promise they're being careful. Because apparently, smaller companies get to play Russian roulette with humanity.

The Toothless Regulation:

Translation: The same office handling wildfires now babysits AI. California's slapping Band-Aids on severed arteries while asking companies to pinky-promise their AI won't destroy humanity. Peak 2025 regulation.

Bottom Line: The copyright apocalypse isn't coming's, its here. AI companies built their empires on stolen content, and now the bill's coming due. Whether it's OpenAI or Disney, the creative economy's foundational principle is being stress-tested by companies that think "innovation" means taking whatever you want.

Britain Bails Out Jaguar: Jaguar Land Rover needed a £3.5B emergency support package, including government-backed loans, after the August 31 cyberattack froze production for an entire month.

The Catastrophic Numbers:

Japan's Beer Emergency: Meanwhile, Asahi's September 29 attack shut all 30 Japanese factories, leaving the country days from running dry on Super Dry. One-third of Japan's beer market vanished overnight with zero backup systems or no manual processes, everything digital and dead. The world's fifth-largest brewer is proving that if hackers can hold beer hostage, imagine pharmaceuticals or food production.

The New Reality: Single cyberattacks now trigger economic interventions bigger than natural disasters. While boardrooms treat ransomware as an IT problems, hackers are collapsing major manufacturers and entire supply chains from their bedrooms.

Homeland Security's Security Failure: Peak irony hit when hackers infiltrated FEMA and Customs via Citrix vulnerability, camping in their networks for months while installing backdoors.

The damage scorecard:

Red Hat's Supply Chain Bomb: Red Hat confirmed Crimson Collective stole 570GB from 28,000 private repos containing client infrastructure keys and playbooks. The company securing enterprise Linux just gave hackers the keys to their customers' kingdom: 800 client records, five years of sensitive documentation, unknown blast radius. Every Red Hat client is wondering if their secrets are on dark web auction blocks.

Korea's Digital Meltdown: A fire at South Korea's National Information Resources Service data center knocked out 647 government IT systems, disrupting everything from postal banking to civic services. Not even a hack, just a fire exposing how one burning server room can paralyze an entire nation's digital infrastructure.

Bottom Line: When the protectors can't protect themselves, the security companies can't secure their own houses, and a single fire can collapse government services, we're not talking about isolated incidents—we're talking about systemic failure.

🎬 OpenAI's Sora 2: Hollywood's New Nightmare: OpenAI launched Sora 2, its text-to-video model that can generate realistic clips following instructions across multiple shots. Because what social media really needed is a way to create content without actually doing anything.

🏆 Anthropic's Triple Crown Claims: Debuted Claude Sonnet 4.5 as the world's best coding model, strongest for complex agents, and its most aligned frontier model. Nothing says confidence like awarding yourself gold medals in every category you compete in.

🏠 Google Home's 2026 Comeback: Unveiled a $99 Google Home Speaker launching spring 2026, plus a $100 third-gen Nest Cam Indoor and $150 second-gen Nest Cam Outdoor. Announcing a speaker 18 months out suggests either careful planning or they're still building it.

🔊 Amazon's Belated AI Awakening: Launched four Echo devices from $100-$220 featuring Alexa+ with ChatGPT-like capabilities powered by proprietary AZ3 chips. Only took ChatGPT nearly breaking the internet for Amazon to finally make Alexa talk like a real person.

🤖 Ex-OpenAI Crew's $12B API Project: Mira Murati's Thinking Machines Lab launched Tinker, a tool that lets anyone fine-tune frontier AI models like Llama & Qwen through an API. Nothing says "we're democratizing AI" like a startup valued at $12B before shipping a product.

🎵 Spotify Formalizes the Obvious: Daniel Ek steps down as CEO on January 1, 2026, to become Executive Chairman while CPTO Gustav Söderström and CBO Alex Norström become co-CEOs. Nothing says 'succession planning' like finally giving titles to the two people who've been running things since 2023.

👔 Microsoft's CEO Multiplication Strategy: Satya Nadella promoted Judson Althoff to CEO of Microsoft's commercial business, giving him oversight of sales, marketing, and ops so Nadella can focus on data centers and AI product work. When running a trillion-dollar company gets too distracting from the real tech work, just create another CEO role.

🔄 Microsoft's Six-Year U-Turn: Pavan Davuluri now leads a reunified Windows engineering organization, reversing a 2018 split that scattered teams between Windows and Azure divisions for six years. Nothing says "that reorganization worked great" like undoing it because AI suddenly made fragmented OS development inconvenient.

🧪 Periodic Labs' AI Scientist Experiment: ChatGPT co-creator Liam Fedus recruited 20+ researchers from Meta, OpenAI, and DeepMind to build autonomous AI scientists, backed by a record $300M seed round from a16z, Nvidia, Bezos, and Schmidt. Turns out you need to poach the world's best human scientists to build AI that replaces scientists.

🏃‍♂️ Musk's Companies Can't Keep Executives: Tesla lost 14+ senior executives since mid-2024, while xAI's CFO quit after three months of 120-hour weeks, with burnout and Musk's politics driving the talent drain.

Here's a roundup of this week's trending startup activity:

Check out our Vision to Venture: Our 3-Month Fundraising Sprint. It's a hands-on program where we work with you to build your complete pitch kit, create your investor target list, and coach you weekly through real investor interactions.

There are only 5 spots available in the first cohort! Apply for Vision to Venture →

This week proved that the bill for "move fast and break things" has finally come due, and it's denominated in billions, whether that's £3.5B to restart car factories, $3K per pirated book, or Disney playing eternal whack-a-mole with AI chatbots.

When hackers can trigger government bailouts and AI companies can unilaterally reverse 300 years of copyright law, we're no longer witnessing disruption; we're watching the systematic failure of every system we thought was too big to break.

Forward to a friend and hit reply to let me know what you're seeing in your world.

Till next time!

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