Proofs, Perps, & Probes

📈 Portfolio Pulse

🧠 OpenAI: Ten Thousand Agents, One Proof

OpenAI published a solution to the Navier-Stokes Millennium Prize Problem, produced by roughly 10,000 agents running in parallel for 88 hours on an unreleased model the company says is significantly more capable than GPT-6 Astra. The output is a 165-page proof plus a Lean formalization of finite-time blowup with bounded energy, and OpenAI will not claim the $1M prize. Hours later NYU's Tristan Buckmaster accused the company of drawing on private research stored in Codex, and the page now credits concurrent work. Separately, alignment researcher Paul Christiano joined the Foundation board and its Safety and Security Committee. Frontier compute just became an R&D input.

🦾 Anthropic: A $6B Pass & a Public Exit

Anthropic finished due diligence on Israeli startup Decart and then walked away from a roughly $6B acquisition. Decart's optimization stack makes chips work harder across training and inference, exactly Claude's cost curve. It raised $300M in May at close to $4B, so $6B was a 50% markup four months later. Days earlier, pretraining researcher Jacob Coxon resigned and left the field, writing that the labs are "gambling with our lives." Colleague Evan Hubinger publicly put the risk above 10% within the decade. Anthropic would rather carry the inference bill than the integration risk. The dissent is harder to expense.

📊 Kalshi: Perps Cleared, Payouts Reversed

Kalshi launched perpetual futures on gold and silver after CFTC approval, extending a commodities book that crossed $400M in monthly volume seven months in, four times what its crypto contracts did at the same stage. Crypto perps have run $44B notional since May. Then the operational bill. Kalshi settled its Western Michigan vs. Michigan market early, clawed the payouts back after officials restored one second and Michigan hit a 47-yard touchdown, and credited affected accounts $50. That market traded $18.6M. Each new asset class scales faster than the last. Settlement integrity is still the product.

₿ Kraken: Nasdaq Writes the Check

Nasdaq's venture arm is investing $100M in Payward at a $21B valuation, expanding the two firms' work on Nasdaq Equity Tokens, now targeted for a Q2 2027 launch. Kraken becomes a distribution channel for tokenized versions of Nasdaq-listed stocks, and those tokens carry voting rights equivalent to shares on the traditional exchange. Payward also agreed to run Nasdaq's market surveillance tools across crypto, equities, tokenized equities, futures and options. A public exchange underwriting crypto-native infrastructure is the legitimacy layer tokenized equities never had. Kraken did not buy its way into that. Nasdaq walked over.

🛡️ Anduril: Second Shot & a Lost Sub

GAO dismissed Anduril's protest on September 4 after DHS agreed to re-evaluate its excluded bid on track one of a $1.5B counter-UAS contract. Anduril already holds a track two slot, and landing both would make it the second company after Leidos on both halves of the five-year vehicle. Meanwhile Iran's IRGC paraded a captured Anduril Dive-LD near the Strait of Hormuz. CENTCOM says the vehicle malfunctioned on a survey mission and sat disabled over 24 hours, collected no sensitive data and carried no classified sonar or radar. Anduril calls it attritable by design. Losing the hardware without losing the capability is the whole argument.

🧮 Groq: The DOJ Reads the Fine Print

The Justice Department is investigating whether Nvidia structured its $20B licensing agreement with Groq to skirt antitrust scrutiny, and has sent Nvidia a formal demand for information. Groq licensed its LPU inference technology non-exclusively and stayed an independent company, while CEO Jonathan Ross and COO Sunny Madra moved to Nvidia. An outright acquisition would have needed Hart-Scott-Rodino clearance. A license plus a mass hire needs no filing at all. Reporting points to civil penalties rather than unwinding. If acqui-licensing starts getting treated as a merger, the exit that has absorbed most frontier silicon talent gets repriced.

⚛️ PsiQuantum: CHIPS Money, Signed

PsiQuantum executed definitive documentation with the Commerce Department on a $100M CHIPS and Science Act award, converting May's letter of intent. Capital goes to 300mm wafer production of barium titanate, the electro-optic thin film behind low-loss optical switches, using molecular beam epitaxy tools in Santa Clara, plus high-temperature single-photon detectors and advanced packaging. PsiQuantum is co-investing alongside the federal money. Non-dilutive capital pointed at one specific materials bottleneck is the right kind of money, because the constraint on a million-qubit machine is the supply chain, not the physics.

🚀 SpaceX: Starlink Goes to School

Argentina's Ministry of Human Capital, regulator ENACOM and Starlink Argentina signed an agreement to connect 6,000 rural schools and isolated communities. Starlink contributes the kits and 24 months of service on its Impact Plan with 2TB of monthly priority data, and ENACOM puts up roughly $11.8M for installation and technical support. Delivery runs in four tranches, two of 1,000 kits and two of 2,000. A regulator-blessed, state-funded, 6,000-site rollout is the template Starlink wants in every emerging market: consumer subscriptions converted into national infrastructure with a captive payer.

🏗️ Boring Company: $3B & 150 Kilometers

The Boring Company closed a $3B Series D at a $23B valuation led by the UAE, roughly four times its 2022 mark near $5.7B, with Sequoia, a16z, Temasek, Valor Equity, Vy Capital, Shamal Holding and Baron Capital alongside. The centerpiece is a commitment to build more than 150 kilometers of tunnel across the Emirates, on top of the Dubai Loop pilot of 6.4 km and four stations. Vegas Loop has now carried over four million passengers. When the lead investor is also the anchor customer, a capex-heavy bidding business turns into a funded backlog.

👀 Watch List

🛩️ Shield AI: X-BAT Goes to Poland

At MSPO on September 8, Shield AI signed a five-year letter of intent with Polska Grupa Zbrojeniowa and depot operator WZL-2 covering design, production, delivery and in-country maintenance of X-BAT, the AI-piloted fighter that takes off and lands vertically from ships, roads and small clearings instead of runways. Scope also pulls in Hivemind, V-BAT, repairs, training, supply chain participation and technology transfer. Division of tasks lands in final agreements the three now begin drafting. Localizing production and sustainment inside a NATO buyer is what turns a demo aircraft into a program of record.

🤖 Figure AI: $3.5B of 2027 Compute

Figure signed a strategic partnership with Nscale for up to 100,000 GPUs on NVIDIA's Vera Rubin platform, committing $3.5B initially with intent to scale beyond $6B. Initial deployment targets the second half of 2027 at Nscale's Barstow, Texas facility. Nscale is also taking a strategic stake in Figure, and the two will explore putting humanoids into Nscale's own supply chain. Figure says it is now bound by data and compute to train Helix, with its Index dataset generating 35 minutes of data every second. Pricing scarce 2027 allocation early is a bet that humanoids are training-limited, not hardware-limited.

💬 Prompt

What can I help you with?

What's the boring infrastructure layer every hot company in [sector] depends on but nobody talks about? Tell me who owns it and what happens when they figure out what they own.

📚 Content

🙌 Gas Your Friends Up

🎬 The OpenAI Movie Has a Trailer

Neon dropped the teaser for Luca Guadagnino's ARTIFICIAL, with Andrew Garfield as Sam Altman, Yura Borisov as Ilya Sutskever, Monica Barbaro as Mira Murati and Mark Rylance as Geoffrey Hinton, written by Simon Rich and set in the days around the firing and the reinstatement. The detail worth keeping: Amazon had this film and walked in June, months after committing $50B to OpenAI. Neon picked it up and put it in theaters Christmas Day.

⚓ All Four Saronic Founders, On the Record

Molly O'Shea's Sourcery got Dino Mavrookas, Doug Lambert, Rob Lehman and Vibhav Altekar each on tape and published all four interviews: America's shrinking fleet, how China wins on price, what actually slows reindustrialization, and why redundant comms are non-negotiable when a mission goes dark mid-flight. Four years in, $2.6B raised, a $9.25B mark and a $3.2B shipyard going up in Brownsville. If you only have five minutes, start at 28:18 on winning a government agreement inside 90 days of founding.

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