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Friday, June 5, 2026 · 122 newsletters

End of Co-Intelligence

Recursive Self-Improvement · SpaceX IPO · Trump Permanency · AI Commerce · Stablecoins · China · Founders · Marketing · NYC · Markets

Published on Friday, June 5, 2026.

Pulled from 122 newsletters in yesterday's inbox. The day the AI conversation turned a corner that frontier labs had spent years pretending was still distant, and the markets started pricing the first $1.7 trillion bill for it.

AI: Anthropic Said the Quiet Part

Anthropic published internal data on recursive self-improvement showing more than 80% of code merged into its own codebase is now written by Claude, that the typical Anthropic engineer ships eight times the code they did in 2024, and that on open-ended engineering tasks Claude's success rate jumped from 26% to 76% in six months. Techmeme led with the company's own framing: AI autonomously building a more capable successor, happening faster than they expected.

Ethan Mollick used the same day to retire his own thesis. His 2024 book Co-Intelligence was built on the premise that AI was a cooperative partner with humans at the center. He now says the co-intelligence era is over, citing a study showing coding agents producing seventeen times more code and Anthropic's 80% number as proof that the relationship has flipped. AI is not the helper anymore. The work product belongs to it first.

Microsoft moved to undercut its supplier on the same day. Bloomberg Technology reported Microsoft's AI chief telling staff the company will build cheaper in-house models, while Runtime ran a piece on Microsoft's challenge to "OpenClaw," the open-source agent that Jensen Huang has told every company to have a strategy for. Apple, separately, will launch a new Siri in September running on Google's cloud with Nvidia chips, per The Information, which also reported Meta plans to charge up to $200 a month for a planned agent called Hatch.

The labor read landed at the same time. Bloomberg's Evening Briefing put numbers on the tech-sector AI firing spree: more than 38,000 announced cuts in May, the most since August 2024, and roughly 123,000 year-to-date, up 65% over 2025. Alex Wilhelm at Cautious Optimism called the spending side of it "token regret," with Uber and Microsoft both struggling to cap how many tokens their engineers burn; Sam Altman publicly acknowledged the budget bottleneck the same afternoon. MIT Technology Review covered the legal stress with a piece on how courts are coping with a flood of AI-generated lawsuits, with pro se filings more than doubling since 2023.

The conversation has moved past "Will agents work?" into "Who pays for them, who buys them, who is fired by them, and who owns the IP that the agent writes?" Anthropic answered question one for itself out loud: the agent owns the code.

SpaceX IPO: $1.7 Trillion and Photos of Rockets

SpaceX set a target IPO price of $135 a share for a $1.7 trillion to $1.78 trillion fully diluted valuation, per The Information AM. The FT's Editor's Digest framed it as a test of the limits of the AI boom, paired with Anthropic's own $1tn-plus IPO filing the same week and OpenAI expected imminently. Catherine Rampell at The Bulwark ran the most pointed take: SpaceX is being granted special treatment to enter the major indices without meeting standard inclusion rules, which means your 401(k) is about to involuntarily fund a money-losing rocket company that lost $4.9 billion in 2025 and nearly that much in Q1 2026 alone. Privatize gains for Musk, socialize costs for the rest of us. (Wall Street has not asked for permission.)

Bloomberg's morning briefing led with the AI rally facing a test as futures fell, Broadcom dragging chip stocks lower despite reporting 48% revenue growth. The Wrap closed the day with S&P 500 gains while chip stocks dragged the Nasdaq 100. The Daily Upside flagged that Amazon dethroned Walmart from the top of the Fortune 500 after a 13-year run, $717B in revenue versus Walmart's $713B, with Alphabet leading the profit list at $132B. Alex Wilhelm and Litquidity both noted that Benchmark just raised $1.25B to back mature startups, a Benchmark-aping-a16z move worth watching.

The political pricing in this IPO is doing more work than the financial pricing. SpaceX's valuation requires you to believe it is also an AI company and a connectivity company and a social media company, which is how Musk is selling it as the only diversification trade you will ever need. Anthropic's $1tn filing the same week is the cleaner story; SpaceX is the messier one.

Politics: Trump's Permanency Project

Bill Kristol named the throughline at The Bulwark: Trump announced his acting AG Todd Blanche would become "permanent attorney general," a formulation Kristol calls strange unless the rest of the administration is also planning on permanency. The same day brought a rare House rebuke, with four Republicans joining a war powers resolution requiring Iran withdrawal absent congressional approval, and a Senate vote-a-rama in which Semafor DC tracked 12 Republicans voting to redirect Trump's $1.776 billion "anti-weaponization" slush fund and seven defecting on White House ballroom funding.

Judd at Popular Information explained why this matters: the DOJ has been telling Senate Republicans the fund is "not moving forward" while privately keeping the door open and pressuring Republicans to advance a reconciliation bill funding ICE and Border Patrol. The fund would, in practice, be a vehicle for paying January 6 rioters. WTF Just Happened Today added that Trump pledged $700 million for coal revival, will not re-nominate Bill Pulte for DNI after bipartisan pushback, and that John Bolton is expected to plead guilty to retaining classified information.

The Democratic side of the fight is louder than usual. Brian Beutler at Off Message argued Democrats should pursue partisan domination, not because dominance is normatively appealing but because the alternative is a fascist cult and timidity has lost two of three presidential elections to the worst candidate ever to run. Dan Pfeiffer at The Message Box used Jill Biden's new book to relitigate the trust deficit the party still has not addressed. Paul Krugman detailed how the administration kept most tariffs in place after the Supreme Court ruled them illegal, by invoking a different obscure law. Matt at Crooked Media reported that ICE under Mullin is dodging headlines but not changing tactics, citing Sen. Andy Kim and recent reports of detainee suicides, families separated for a second time, and Louisiana staff using a banned chokehold.

The piece worth reading is Rick Wilson on Bari Weiss and the CBS bust-out, which uses The Sopranos as the frame for CBS firing Scott Pelley after 37 years, after Pelley said in a staff meeting that Weiss "does not love this place." It is the most clearly written press-capture piece in weeks. Mary Trump joined Lincoln Square's new "Six Questions" show with a clinical diagnosis of her uncle's accelerating cognitive decline: "There is no worst. He will always get worse."

AI Commerce: The Channel Mix Is Inverting

A cohesive thread across operator newsletters: AI is no longer a perception metric, it is a referral channel. Tracey Wallace at Contentment flagged that ChatGPT's May "branded link update" doubled OpenAI referral traffic to monitored brand sites overnight, with brand-homepage share of OpenAI referrals jumping from 3.5% to 24% industry-wide. Nik Sharma at Workweek shared Lebesgue data across 35,000 Shopify brands showing sessions from AI tools converting at 3.6% versus 1.23% for Google Search, roughly three times higher. The interpretation: shoppers arrive with their minds half-made-up because ChatGPT, Perplexity, or Claude already did the comparison work for them.

Marketing Letter called it the quiet war for AI citations, with Google rejecting llms.txt, ChatGPT citation patterns changing overnight, and DuckDuckGo's anti-AI search booming. Daniel Murray at The Marketing Millennials ran a separate provocation that 98% of newsletter clicks are not real, paired with Workweek's new identity-graph product as the first real attempt to tie newsletter clicks to closed deals at the account level. Justin Oberman wrote the inverse: opening AI on a call and pasting in someone's work makes everyone on the call think you are stupid, because the moment violates what Erving Goffman called impression management. The technology is fine; the front-stage performance is what gets killed.

Modern Operators framed it as "context is the new capital." Hyper covered the brand-to-personalities shift in creative direction, with senior creative roles open at Darkroom, Lululemon, and Thesis. Guillermo Flor at Product Market Fit walked through 12 Claude Skills to automate B2B outbound, the operator's version of the same story: the baseline just moved.

Money: Stablecoins About to Get Strange

Linas reported that Stripe, Visa, Mastercard, and Coinbase are working on a joint stablecoin that could strand Circle's USDC, which currently supplies nearly a quarter of Coinbase's revenue via the Circle deal. Daniel Webber at FXC Intelligence covered MoneyGram's CEO on its own stablecoin launch and Europe's cross-border payments priorities. Bankless led with Venice's privacy-AI token hitting a new ATH as Bitcoin fell to $63.4k, with a tie-in to Inference Capital Markets and a Diem callback for context.

Newcomer reports Founders Fund is launching a TV-style game show featuring Sam Altman, Bryan Johnson, Dylan Field, Trae Stephens, Palmer Luckey, Ryan Petersen, Cyan Banister, and Moxie Marlinspike playing Mafia. They filmed it at the PayPal Mafia photoshoot venue (Tosca Cafe). A16z used the same day to publish "A16z's Global Mission", an America-and-allies framing of where the firm is taking its capital next. Two unrelated firms, same posture: the venture media play is now part of the product.

China: Seizing the Commanding Heights

Bill Bishop at Sinocism covered Xi Jinping's call to seize the commanding heights of science and technology across six industries of the future, alongside a 34-article State Council law that will implicate domestic firms, foreign businesses, foreign governments, PRC financial institutions, and individual investors. Bishop also covered the absence of Taiwan mentions in Pete Hegseth's Shangri-La Dialogue speech (not necessarily a Beijing-readable shift), the expulsion of NYT journalist Vivian Wang, the 37th Tiananmen anniversary, and Steph Curry's new Li-Ning endorsement deal.

Dexter Roberts at Trade War noted China further tightening restrictions on data and tech outflows. Trivium China flagged SAIC building a 200 million euro EV plant in Galicia, Spain, expected online in 2028 producing 120,000 vehicles a year under the MG brand. The signal is consistent across all three: Beijing is moving up the value chain and into Europe at the same moment the US is busy selling chips back to itself.

NYC and Local: Mamdani's City, Espaillat's Reckoning

Gothamist tracked Adriano Espaillat reckoning with uptown's leftward shift ahead of next year's primary, while a separate Gothamist piece reported the NJ AG charging a cop with stealing a journalist's camera gear at the Delaney Hall ICE protest, where prosecutors used the journalist's AirTracker to find the officer's house. Emily Sundberg at Feed Me covered Cobble Hill getting its own Deuxmoi-style anonymous gossip account, Pace Gallery's mass layoffs, and the New York Tech Week Peptide Party. Her guest columnist Teddy Kim notes the summer box office is, in his word, scary.

Ideas Worth Reading

Outside Interests

Data Worth Noting

Three Takeaways for You

The Anthropic post is the single most important piece in yesterday's inbox. Recursive self-improvement is a phrase the field has deliberately avoided saying about itself in the present tense, and a frontier lab using it in a public, non-hypothetical context, paired with the 80% number on its own codebase, is a real regime change. Mollick framed it correctly: the co-intelligence era is over. What replaces it is still being negotiated, but the IP question, the labor question, and the procurement question are all going to be answered faster than the policy stack is ready for.

The market is now pricing two parallel things that you should not confuse. Anthropic's $1tn IPO filing is a legible tech-company story with a defensible product narrative. SpaceX at $1.77 trillion, with $4.9 billion in losses last year and special index-inclusion treatment, is a political pricing story that uses AI as the rhetorical wrapper. If your retirement money sits in broad index funds, you will be holding both, and the second one will move in ways the first one will not.

If you only read three pieces today, start with Ethan Mollick's "Co-Existence and the End of Co-Intelligence" for the inflection, Catherine Rampell on the SpaceX index-inclusion play for the markets read, and Rick Wilson on the CBS bust-out for the press-capture story everyone else will be catching up to next week.