Cuts, CRISPR, & Countdowns

📈 Portfolio Pulse

🦾 Anthropic: Cheaper Models, Stranger Biology

Opus 5.5 shipped September 22 at $4 and $20 per million tokens, a 20% cut, with cache reads down 60% and Anthropic claiming Fable 5.1-level work at about 40% less to run than Opus 5. Sonnet 5.5 and Haiku 5.5 follow in weeks. Two days later its new life sciences group published a result: roughly 950 Claude agents spent 21 hours and 210M tokens combing more than 200,000 reverse transcriptases and surfaced a novel enzyme system with CRISPR-like repeats. Anthropic has not shown it works as a gene editor. It also launched Claude Marketplace, letting enterprises spend committed Anthropic dollars on 2,000-plus partner connectors. The IPO moved to November at up to $2 trillion.

🧠 OpenAI: Half Price & a Board It Can Ignore

GPT-6 Sol and Luna launched September 22 at half the API price of the 5.6 tier, $2 and $10 per million for Sol, $0.10 and $0.50 for Luna, and OpenAI says those are permanent rather than promotional. Sol makes about half the factual errors of GPT-5.6 Sol on OpenAI's internal factuality test. It landed the same afternoon as Opus 5.5. Separately OpenAI stood up an independent Advisory Group on Mathematics and AI at the Institute for Advanced Study, nine mathematicians, after 25 Fields Medalists signed a letter objecting to the labs. The group cannot slow or redirect the work. One of the nine signed that letter.

🚀 SpaceXAI: Orbit Monday, Grok Unmoved

We told you September 22. It is now September 28. Starship Flight 14 is targeted for Monday morning from Starbase, with Super Heavy B21 moved to the pad early last week. It remains the first orbital attempt after thirteen suborbital flights, carrying 26 Starlink V3 satellites to a 275km orbit across roughly six revolutions and nearly ten hours, ending in a Pacific splashdown. No tower catch. NASA separately added $946M for Crew-15, 16 and 17, taking CCtCap to $5.92B through 2030. On the model side, Grok 4.7 shipped September 21 at $2 and $6 per million tokens, unchanged from 4.6, with CursorBench 4.0 up to 46.3% from 40.4% and a lead on EEBench and the Harvey legal agent benchmark. In a week when two rivals halved their prices, holding yours is the other way to take share.

📊 Kalshi: A Margin Ask & a Public Argument

Kalshi Klear filed a Regulation 40.5 request with the CFTC on September 22 seeking a risk-based margin system on selected event contracts, institutions only, limited to self-clearing members meeting capital thresholds. Elections, economics and commodity events qualify. Sports, culture and mention markets stay fully collateralized. Every US prediction position is fully collateralized today, so this is the change that lets a desk run a book. The next day Senate Banking Republicans met Tarek Mansour privately and all eleven committee Democrats wrote Chairman Scott demanding a public hearing instead. Margin is the product question. Jurisdiction is the bigger one.

🛡️ Anduril: Building the Base Inside Taiwan

Anduril published new Altius milestones with Taiwan alongside an expanded local investment: onboarding Taiwanese suppliers, growing its workforce there, standing up a branch office, and widening collaboration with the National Chung-Shan Institute of Science and Technology. Taiwan's Army has already put Altius-600M against maritime targets in live fire at Jiupeng, and Taipei signed in August for more than 2,000 Altius drones under an NT$26.9B deal. Palmer Luckey has been loud about US arms-approval delays costing business. Local production is the hedge, and it is what turns a sale into a program.

⚓ Saronic: First Steel at Port Alpha

The Navy selected Saronic to build LCU 1700-class landing craft under a firm fixed-price Other Transaction agreement, part of a $280M push that also went to Conrad Shipyard and Master Boat Builders. These are crewed heavy-lift craft, 170-ton payload and roughly 1,200 nautical miles of range, moving troops and vehicles from amphibious ships onto beaches with no port required. It is the first build at Port Alpha in Brownsville, production starting 2028 and deliveries in 2029. We like booked revenue.

🧪 Perplexity: Publishing Its Own Breach Data

Perplexity red-teamed SPACE, the sandbox behind its agent runtime, with nine models across 216 runs, then published the results itself. No VM escapes. Four models did bypass network policy in 11 of 54 limited-network runs, since patched, and Perplexity says the same class of bypass worked on 8 of 10 third-party sandboxes it tested, naming E2B, Vercel and Modal. Days earlier it disclosed that Perplexity Computer runs on GLM 5.2, Zhipu's open-weights model, and that a live A/B across roughly 100,000 users per arm cut tool-call failures from 2.24% to 1.77% while user dissatisfaction barely moved. Every number here is self-reported.

👀 Watch List

⚡ Crusoe: $100M of Contracted Inference ARR

Thinking Machines Lab signed a $65M-a-year agreement to run production inference on Crusoe Cloud, serving its Inkling models plus GLM 5.2 and 5.3 on a dedicated NVIDIA HGX B200 deployment with Quantum-2 InfiniBand. Crusoe used the announcement to disclose that Crusoe Managed Inference has passed $100M in contracted ARR less than a year after launch. That lands a week after a $3.9B Series F at $30.9B. A disclosed software ARR line is how a company that looks like power and racks argues it is selling something with software margins.

🚁 Zipline: Eight Years, One Government

Côte d'Ivoire approved an eight-year public-private partnership taking Zipline from one distribution centre in Daloa to ten, reaching a projected 12 million people and 2,200-plus health facilities, roughly a third of the country. The government pays the operating costs. Zipline funds its own infrastructure from a $150M US grant that Washington conditioned on exactly this, winning African government contracts that cover the running costs. Sovereign contracts with an eight-year tail are what turn drone logistics into recurring revenue.

💬 Prompt

What can I help you with?

Give me five things people in my industry pay for today that will be free in three years. Then tell me what they'll pay more for instead.

📚 Content

🐎 400 Years in One Frame

A man on a rearing horse on open plains, and a B-2 in the clouds above him. Both still in active service.

🤖 Resistance Is Futile

Brad Gerstner on the personal super assistant he and Bill Gurley called two years ago: perfect memory, works nonstop, and now inevitable. The sharper half is about the aggregators. Insurance, travel, shopping, every business built on being the place you go to compare options, gets disintermediated the moment an agent compares options on the fly. He calls the resistance futile and lands on "adapt or die."

🌳 Touch Grass

Go offline for a few weeks. Rewire the algorithm to show you only what makes you happy.

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