Thursday, June 25, 2026 · 128 newsletters

Mamdani's Slate Goes Federal

NYC Politics · Trump and GOP · AI Infrastructure · Markets · Prediction Markets · AI Sovereignty · Agent Tooling · China

Published on Thursday, June 25, 2026.

Pulled from 126 newsletters in yesterday's inbox. Yesterday's signal split between New York's primary upsets and the President's deteriorating relationship with his own party, with a Jalapeño-flavored side plot in AI hardware.

NYC Politics: Mamdani's Slate Goes Federal

Three Mamdani-backed challengers, Brad Lander, Claire Valdez and Darializa Avila Chevalier, toppled establishment Democrats in New York's congressional primaries Tuesday night, and the consequences are spilling beyond the five boroughs.

The wins are decisive, not narrow. Matt Stoller called it a thing he had never seen in his time in politics: a coordinated, en masse rejection of the New York Democratic machine. Antonio Reynoso, the well-funded Brooklyn borough president, lost to DSA member Valdez by more than 25 percentage points. Adriano Espaillat, head of the Congressional Hispanic Caucus, was unseated by Avila Chevalier. State assembly incumbents went down too. A similar (less pronounced) wave hit Maryland.

Hakeem Jeffries now owns the headache. Semafor DC's morning brief framed the result as Jeffries' next problem: the insurgent left is preparing to dominate the party's megaphone during a midterm cycle Democrats had hoped to run on cost-of-living and Trump fatigue. Gothamist Daily's own primary-night roundup also flagged the "you're next" feeling among Black and Latino Democrats who feel sidelined by the wave.

The convergence story is that the Israel issue, a turn against the patronage machine, and a generational cohort that came up through Mamdani's mayoral campaign are now a single federal-level voting bloc. The Mamdani-as-kingmaker frame is too cute; the actual force is anti-establishment, and it has staff.

Washington: "Mad as a Murder Hornet"

The single quote that traveled farthest yesterday was Sen. John Kennedy describing Trump's mood as "mad as a murder hornet" after Senate Republicans passed a nonbinding resolution requiring congressional authorization to continue the Iran war.

Trump is fighting his own party in five directions at once. Matt at WTF Just Happened Today tallied the day's collisions: a federal judge permanently blocked Trump's executive order requiring proof of citizenship to register to vote; an appeals court blocked DOJ from grabbing Michigan's unredacted voter rolls; Trump canceled the signing ceremony for the bipartisan housing affordability bill he had publicly supported, demanding the SAVE America Act first; and he asked Congress for $87.6 billion in emergency Iran war spending. Semafor DC led with the same scene: Trump withholding a signature on housing he says he supports while privately unloading on the same Republicans he was scheduled to meet at the Capitol.

The Vance Iran clip is the one that will not go away. Tim Miller, Sarah Longwell and JVL spent yesterday's Bulwark episode dissecting JD Vance calling his own administration's Iran policy "complete idiocy", a clip that turned a foreign-policy disagreement into a 2028 succession story in real time.

The Bulwark crowd is reaching for visual metaphors. Bill Kristol and Andrew Egger led their morning shot with the President's Pennsylvania rally as his preferred form of governance. Rick Wilson, more bluntly, pointed readers to Spencer Allen Brooks' aerial photograph of a fluorescent-green algae-choked Reflecting Pool with the Ellipse stripped to bare dirt behind it. As Wilson put it, this is the week the metaphor of Trump's destructive tendencies stopped being a metaphor.

Will any of it stick? Dan Pfeiffer at The Message Box makes the counterintuitive case that the Iran war has already faded into background noise; Magnitude Media data has more Americans posting about Love Island than the war. Trump's approval has stabilized at a historic low because the policy losses are diffuse and the wins are narratable. Lauren Egan at The Bulwark adds a counterweight: abortion is reemerging as an issue Democrats can actually run on, even in red states, with a $30 million spend signaling intent.

The cluster's lesson is that Trump's loss of leverage with his own caucus is the consequential story, not the rally photo. When the Senate passes a nonbinding war-powers resolution against a sitting president of its own party, that is not theater; that is an inflection point in who actually runs foreign policy.

AI Infrastructure: The Jalapeño Chip Arrives

OpenAI and Broadcom unveiled Jalapeño, OpenAI's first homegrown inference chip, designed from scratch in nine months with OpenAI's own models accelerating the design loop.

The specs are the headline, but the timeline is the story. Axios AI+ ran the executive line: Broadcom CEO Hock Tan delivered the wafer, Sam Altman held it, target of 10 gigawatts of OpenAI-designed compute by 2029, first commercial deployment at Microsoft and other partners by year-end. Techmeme aggregated Ben Bajarin's mantra ("those serious about platforms should be serious about silicon") alongside Greg Brockman's note that performance per watt is "looking incredible." Alex Wilhelm at Cautious Optimism framed the strategic logic as lower costs, less Nvidia dependence, model-aware silicon.

The financing race underneath it is louder than the chip itself. Bloomberg's evening Asia briefing led with the "new arms race" framing of power, data centers and capital, with Chinese model maker Zhipu weighing a multibillion-dollar Hong Kong share sale. The Information reported Intel-backed SambaNova is raising roughly $1 billion at a quintupled valuation. Newcomer traced the talent shuffle around the same financing story: OpenAI and Anthropic both eyeing fall IPOs, SpaceX betting on Cursor, Google losing coding ground, Satya Nadella trying out convoluted new arguments about the Big Issues.

When a frontier lab can spin a custom inference chip from blank page to tape-out in nine months because the lab's own models help do the design, the moat conversation shifts. It stops being "who has the best model" and becomes "who can compound model gains into the rest of their stack fastest."

Markets: Hormuz Reopens, the AI Trade Wobbles

The two big market stories rhymed but didn't rhyme.

Hormuz quietly came back online. Bloomberg's Transiting Hormuz brief and the morning Calmer Waters update both noted shipping vessels are now crossing the strait with their satellite signals on, a confidence signal from owners. Brent erased its wartime gains. Trump demanded a DOJ probe into gasoline prices anyway.

The selloff that scared people wasn't oil. It was Korea. John Authers' Points of Return walked through it: ambiguous news from SK Hynix triggered a global tech rout, and Micron, whose forecast Q3 EPS has risen 645% in twelve months, was up next. Snacks made the same point with the leverage angle: Korean retail margin loans into SK Hynix and Samsung leveraged single-stock ETFs have gone "straight up and to the right," which makes the leverage in the AI trade a bigger near-term risk than the leverage in the AI build-out. International Intrigue reached for Larry Garfield, the Other People's Money raider: "we're dead alright, we're just not broke."

Bloomberg Opinion's AI Vibe Check argued the "yikes" folder of AI stories now needs its own storage unit: Hollywood workers training AI models, people actively rejecting AI online, and the AI-design aesthetic taking over the internet. The honeymoon phase is over.

When Micron blows out earnings the same day Korean ETFs unwind, that is not a contradiction; it is the bull case and the leverage case running on separate clocks. The build-out keeps compounding even as the trade resets.

Prediction Markets: Polymarket and Kalshi Go Public

Two prediction markets are quietly racing to IPO scale.

Sacra estimates Polymarket hit $375M in annualized revenue in May, with talks of a $15B round at a 40x revenue multiple, driven by sports overtaking politics in the trading mix after the May US launch via a CFTC-licensed exchange acquisition. Meanwhile The Information Finance, via Meredith Mazzilli, walked through Kalshi at $2B annualized revenue, already at roughly half of Robinhood's revenue and a third of CME Group's, with bankers circling an IPO. The basic question her piece raises: is Kalshi a brokerage, an exchange, or a gaming company? Each gets valued very differently.

And the giants are circling. Semafor DC and TLDR both flagged Meta launching its own prediction market this week. Polymarket also brought on a new PR agency of record per PRWeek, reading like IPO prep.

Prediction markets just stopped being a crypto curiosity and became a category that traditional exchanges have to model. The question is no longer whether they get public valuations; it is which comp set the public market chooses.

AI Sovereignty: Who Holds the Off Switch?

The most-shared essay yesterday came from Simon Taylor at Fintech Brainfood, who led with Anthropic locking its own non-US engineers out of Fable 5 after a Commerce Department directive citing a potential jailbreak. The company switched the model off for everyone rather than sort staff by passport. His question, "who holds the switch on ours?", was the rare AI-policy line that read as both literal and metaphorical, and it traveled fast through G7 and Fortune 1000 boardrooms.

The companion piece was Pirate Wires on where the Biden administration's AI policy alumni went, mostly to universities and think tanks, and what their continued case for "caution about cautiously proceeding with caution" looks like in a world where the Trump-Commerce regime is now wielding model-access kill switches.

Model access is now an instrument of state, and "we host everything on Anthropic" is a sovereignty exposure on every enterprise risk register. The new question for any CIO is whether the kill switch lives in San Francisco or in Washington.

Agent Tooling: The Boring Layer Is Where the Money Is

The most useful pieces in the operator-AI stack converged on the same point: reasoning is not the bottleneck; context, tools and trust are.

PostHog's Product for Engineers wrote the cleanest case study: their PostHog Wizard onboarding agent, which delivered 5x conversion and 2x activation, got better not from cleverer planning but from giving the agent vastly more context. The AI-Augmented Engineer made the same point in framework form: agents have moved out of the IDE, so an individual can build a personal workflow but a team needs an operating model, and Augment's bet there is Cosmos. Ben Thompson's vibe coding diary is the most practical read of the bunch, ten takeaways from actually shipping an app he plans to use. The Pragmatic Engineer's NeetCode episode covered what tech interviews look like in the agent era. Peter Yang launched a full Hermes course for setting up a 24/7 AI chief of staff in an afternoon. The GTM Engineer reframed case study distribution as the Big 4 channels every B2B team should be running.

Nobody is selling "smarter agents" anymore. They are selling memory, context, integration, and the operating discipline to actually ship.

China: The Other Tech Race

Noahpinion made the most provocative argument of the week: while the US is fixated on AI, China is quietly winning the energy, grid, EV and industrial automation race, the same way it commoditized solar and drove margins out from under everyone. Bill Bishop's Sharp China episode noted that one year out from the 21st Party Congress, Xi's power looks entrenched and MOFCOM just restricted dozens of US firms over the memory chip and ASML disputes. Paul Kedrosky's note on BMW, China and token prices extended the analogy: AI inference looks an awful lot like the solar curve, and the price floor is being set in Shenzhen, not Santa Clara.

The take that is starting to feel settled is that the AI race and the energy and manufacturing race are not separate tracks. They are the same race, run on different timescales, and the side that has the cheaper kilowatt and the cheaper foundry usually wins.

NYC Local: The Penn Station De-escalation

Gothamist Daily had Gov. Hochul stepping in to broker a truce between the MTA and Amtrak over the Penn Station rebuild, asking both sides to work collaboratively. Separately, Gothamist News Alerts covered the federal indictment of Frank Carone, Eric Adams' longtime adviser, on bribery charges tied to a multimillion-dollar migrant shelter contract, with roughly $120,000 in alleged bribes.

The Adams orbit's legal exposure keeps widening as the Mamdani administration takes shape. Two transitions are happening in parallel, and both will shape what NYC governance looks like for the next decade.

Ideas Worth Reading

• Neil Pasricha published the full transcript of Conan O'Brien's 2026 Harvard commencement speech, a love letter to a comedian who has been working for 33 years and a useful frame on longevity as a craft.
• Stat Significant on how LLMs have reshaped internet culture: less about the obvious slop, more about the subtler shifts in punctuation, polarity and uniformity of expression happening underneath.
• Anne Helen Petersen's Culture Study hosts Garrett Bucks on declaring your interdependence, a small-c community essay for a moment that needs one.
• Big Think's class on the true meaning of mindfulness with Jon Kabat-Zinn, useful as a corrective to the wellness-industrial complex.
• Numlock News on ASML's new $400 million machine that gets transistor features down to 8 nanometers, plus the macaque and Mayan stories that close out the issue.
• The Reading Reporter profiled Siren Craft Brew's Darron Anley as a blueprint for independent business in a town with an identity crisis.

Outside Interests

• Foreign Affairs published its July/August issue with essays from Michael Kofman on Russia after Ukraine, Rose Gottemoeller on the unraveling nuclear umbrella, and Narges Bajoghli and Vali Nasr on Iran's "new grand strategy."
• MIT Technology Review's Engineering Issue is out, with reporting from inside the world's deepest subsea road tunnel and a deep look at ASML's $400 million next-generation lithography machine.
• Yotam Ottolenghi is opening up the cookbook process ahead of Simple Too in September, looking back at the original Simple eight years on.
• Consuming Collective has the week's NYC eating itinerary: Smoke Sweats BBQ at Test Brewery, Chinatown Night Market at Forsyth Plaza, Little Mad's wagyu roast beef sando.
• Men in Blazers on Cristiano Ronaldo's first signs of life and the final group-stage stretch of the World Cup, six matches per day through Saturday.
• After School by Casey Lewis reporting from Cannes on creator economy programming and the Skims and Meta Glasses campaigns aimed at zillennials.

Three Takeaways for You

The Mamdani-aligned wins are not a New York story anymore. They reset the Democratic 2028 primary in a way the analysts have not fully metabolized, because the same forces that toppled Reynoso and Espaillat are now staffed up to run against Jeffries-aligned incumbents nationally. A coordinated primary apparatus that wins is a thing the party will have to respond to as policy, not as tone.

The AI conversation moved from "models" to "infrastructure and sovereignty" in a single news cycle. OpenAI's Jalapeño launch, the SambaNova billion, the Zhipu Hong Kong sale, Anthropic getting switched off by Commerce, and Noahpinion's energy-race argument all rhyme. Model access is now downstream of foundries, grids and state policy. Operators who still treat the model layer as the strategic question are looking at the wrong layer.

If you only read three pieces, I would suggest Matt Stoller on how the NY machine got wrecked for the most thorough read on the night, Simon Taylor's "Who Holds AI's Off Switch?" for the frame that should be on every CIO's desk by Monday, and Ben Thompson's vibe coding ten takeaways for the most practical read on what shipping with AI agents actually feels like in 2026.