Google AI Core Team Exodus | Rewire News Morning Brief

SpaceX First Unlocking Test of Restricted Stock Boosts Liquidity. Four System Builders Leave Google, Anthropic Bets on Chip Development. Competition is Shifting from the Product Layer to Capital, Talent, and Computing Power.

1｜SpaceX First Unlocking Unlocks Approximately 9.12 Billion Shares, Undergoing Liquidity Test

SpaceX's first lock-up period expired on August 6, with approximately 9.12 billion shares becoming tradable. At the estimated IPO price of $135, this corresponds to a market value of approximately $123 billion. These shares account for about 20% of this round's restricted shares available for unlocking, increasing the publicly tradable chips from less than 5% to around 12%.

The company is unlocking the shares in batches rather than all at once. Musk's shares have a longer lock-up period and cannot be traded until June 2027 at the earliest. Unlocking does not equate to shareholders selling, but during the share price pullback after the first earnings report, the sudden increase in potentially tradable chips will test the market's acceptance of SpaceX for the first time.

(Source: Reuters / Forbes / CNBC)

2｜Four System Builders from Google DeepMind Depart

Google has restructured the DeepMind management team, with Hassabis assuming the role of Chairman and Alphabet's Chief Scientist, and operations being handed over to CTO Akewukuo. Jeff Dean, Sankararaman Guma Watt, Oriol Vinyals, and Google Brain co-founder Quoc Le have left to co-found the research automation company Discovery Loop.

Dean and Guma Watt were involved in the development of systems such as MapReduce and Bigtable, while Vinyals and Quoc Le represented the Google AI research system. GOOGL fell 5.5% intraday. What the market is concerned about is not the loss of a few research papers, but the departure of individuals who can turn research into infrastructure. Google's AI organization is entering a new round of reshuffling.

(Source: Wired / Reuters / TechCrunch)

3｜Anthropic Establishes In-house Chip Team, Offering Up to $485,000 Highest Annual Salary

Anthropic is recruiting for an in-house chip team called Custom Silicon Team, requiring chip tapeout experience. The disclosed salary range for the position is between $320,000 and $485,000 annually. Its goal is to synergistically design hardware architecture with the Claude model to reduce inference costs and improve speed. It is reported that Anthropic is also in contact with Samsung's foundry division to explore customized chip production arrangements.

This is not an immediate move away from NVIDIA or cloud vendors, but an additional layer of hardware control beyond existing supply. Google has TPUs, Amazon has Trainium, and Meta is also advancing MTIA. As the computational requirements of cutting-edge models increase, labs find it increasingly difficult to treat chips as just another external procurement item. Model capability is now starting to be determined by data, algorithms, and engineering working together, with hardware design becoming the entry point for the next round of competition.

(Source: Reuters / TechCrunch / The Next Web)

4｜Meta Releases Muse Code Programming Agent to Challenge Claude Code on Price

Meta unveiled the beta version of the terminal-level AI programming agent Muse Code on Wednesday and updated the underlying Muse Spark 1.2 model. The product supports a 1 million token context window and persistent asynchronous agents, allowing users to resume tasks from a local event log after disconnection. Zuckerberg personally announced this on X.

In the rankings announced at Terminal-Bench 2.1, the performances of Claude Code, Muse Code, and OpenAI Codex are close. Based on publicly available usage-based pricing, Muse Code is priced lower than Claude Code. Meta also offers a lower tier that allows it to use code to train models. Each product has different billing methods for models, subscriptions, and caching, where unit price does not equate to total cost, but pricing is becoming a critical variable in enterprise selection.

(Source: CNBC / VentureBeat / Reuters)

5｜China Implements Multiple Countermeasures Against the U.S., Focus Shifts to Drone Supply Chain

The Ministry of Commerce issued successive announcements and ministerial orders on August 5, implementing multiple countermeasures against the United States. Export of drones and their key components, related technologies to the U.S. will undergo strict case-by-case reviews, without the application of facilitative licensing measures. Six U.S. entities including a DNA science company were placed on the counter-sanctions list, and one U.S. compliance testing company also faced retaliatory measures, while the delegated arrangements for factory inspections after relevant CCC certification have been tightened simultaneously.

Prior to this, the U.S. recently imposed additional restrictions on some Chinese products and companies. The Chinese side described the latest measures as countermeasures against restrictive actions by the U.S. The significance of drone control lies in the U.S. manufacturers' reliance on Chinese components. Frictions are now extending from finished product trade to the manufacturing stage, prompting companies to reassess certification, component, and dual-use technology compliance chains.

(Source: Ministry of Commerce / FT / NBC News)

Also Worth Knowing ↓

The Hormuz Accord is still in the text review stage, with Iran and Oman making progress on the maritime route's geographic coordinates. The technical details of the route are actually related to the sovereignty and security rules for commercial vessel passage. (Source: Al Jazeera / Bloomberg) (Continuation of yesterday's report)

ADP: U.S. private companies added only 44,000 jobs in July, the lowest in six months. The previous figure was revised down to 95,000, while job switchers' wage growth remains at 7%. Despite the slowdown in job creation, wage growth for switchers remains high. (Source: ADP / CNBC / Fox Business)

Circle announces the list of Arc blockchain validators, with BlackRock, DTCC, Standard Chartered, and Visa joining. The mainnet is scheduled to launch on September 16. Traditional financial institutions are transitioning from participating in the crypto ecosystem to operating infrastructure nodes. (Source: CoinDesk / The Block / Bankless)

JPMorgan Chase CEO Jamie Dimon leads the establishment of the cross-industry AI Risk Governance Alliance. The alliance aims to establish industry standards and risk management frameworks for AI deployment before regulation. (Source: Reuters)

Uber plans to invest $10 billion to expand its robotaxi fleet. CEO Dara Khosrowshahi stated that the partnership with Waymo is "very strong." While second-quarter performance has improved, the guidance is cautious, and autonomous driving will test the platform's cash flow and operational balance. (Source: FT / The Information / The Verge)

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