Hello friends,
Hannah is off this week so you’ve just got me, but I can tell you that we’re both really looking forward to the AI for the rest of us summer social on Wednesday July 22nd. As noted last week, this is not a traditional meetup with talks, it’s a gathering for the community to celebrate how much we’ve grown together. You can grab your spot here. Thank you to our sponsor Rezonant for making this happen.
I’m sure lots of you have been glued to the World Cup, but I’m afraid football is not really my sport. I was, however, back at Lord's cricket ground last Saturday with my eldest to watch day two of England and India contesting the first women’s Test match to be staged at the ground, a mere 142 years after the men. We were lucky enough to both be able to go into the pavilion, a rare treat on match days, and we had a brilliant view from the top balcony. We had a fantastic time, although unfortunately from an England point of view India's early wickets set the tone for a day in which the visiting side continued to exert control in every session. Congratulations to India’s young pace-bowler Kranti Gaud, who made history as the first woman to get her name on the Test Honours Board at Lord's after her remarkable five-wicket spell.
Have a great week,
Charles
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What’s Charles reading this week?
Whilst using LLMs to generate software code is an area where AI appears to have clear market fit, a number of high profile open source software projects, including the Zig Programming Language and QEMU, actively ban artificial intelligence (AI) and Large Language Model (LLM) use to protect human creators and ensure legal safety. Linus Torvalds, the Linux supremo and reformed potty mouth, has however taken a pragmatic position. On lore.kernel.org, the archive for Linux kernel mailing lists, Torvalds responded to a discussion about some negative sentiments toward AI thus:
“I realize that some people really dislike AI, but this is an area where I'm willing to absolutely put my foot down as the top-level maintainer.
Linux is not one of those anti-AI projects, and if somebody has issues with that, they can do the open-source thing and fork it.
Or just walk away.
AI is a tool, just like other tools we use. And it's clearly a useful one.
It may not have been that "clearly" even just a year ago, but it's no longer in question today.
There are other questions around AI (like what the economy of it will actually look like in the end), but "is it useful" is no longer one of those questions. Anybody who doubts that clearly hasn't actually used it.
Yes, it can also be a somewhat painful tool, both for maintainer workloads and just from a "it keeps finding embarrassing bugs” standpoint.
But the solution is not to put your head in the sand and sing "La La La, I can't hear you" at the top of your voice like some people seem to do.
The solution is to make sure those LLM tools _help_ maintainers instead of just causing them pain. There's no question on that side.
We're not forcing anybody to use it, but I will very loudly ignore people who try to argue against other people from using it.”
Australian Prime Minister Anthony Albanese has delivered a landmark speech outlining the nation’s AI policy, which will require data centre builders to contribute more energy than they consume and mean AI companies must reach agreements with local artists and media before using their content. “Let me make this crystal clear – not everything produced in Australia is up for grabs,” Albanese said.
Ireland’s Commission for Regulation of Utilities (CRU) issued an emergency regulatory direction in November 2021 that imposed a de facto moratorium on new data centre grid connections. Despite this, a report from the country's Central Statistics Office revealed that data centre consumption rose to 7,663 GWh in 2025 from 6,973 GWh in 2024, a 10% rise in a single year. Meanwhile, consumption by the rest of the country increased by just 2% within the same period. Data centres accounted for 23% of Ireland's total electricity consumption in 2025.
We’ve mentioned a few times the anti-AI backlash that seems to be gaining momentum, particularly in the US. This week New York became the first state to pause all construction of data centres using 50 megawatts of power or more, after Democratic Governor Kathy Hochul announced a one-year moratorium on Tuesday, as Jasper Ward reported for Reuters. The state-wide ban won’t be lifted until the state figures out what “consistent standards” for responsible data centre development in New York should look like. US protests have led to the cancellation of over 75 data centre projects in the US in Q1 2026.
At the same time, Dan Robinson at The Register reports that “Amazon Web Services is facing a lawsuit alleging it published false and misleading statements about the water use and sustainability of its Northern Virginia datacenters, "falsely" portraying those operations as environmentally responsible”. The case has been brought by an ex employee.
You may have heard that Musk is very keen on the idea of orbital data centres, and that his company SpaceX is developing "Starmind" to power artificial intelligence (AI) with solar energy in space. The company aims to launch prototype AI satellites by early 2027 and reach commercial operation by 2028. The goal is to avoid terrestrial power and cooling limits. I’ve honestly always thought the whole idea was economically bonkers, but if you are interested in how it might work and what’s involved, Ars Technica is publishing a fantastic series (one, two of an eventual three) that is well worth a read. Oh and meanwhile Musk and Altman, who are the CEOs of two of the most valuable companies on the planet, continue to trade ungrammatical barbs on the subject on X (an XCancel link for those, like me, icked by X itself), something that would have been hard to imagine happening not all that long ago.
Our next story has already been very widely reported but I nevertheless thought we should note it here. In 2024 Jony Ive, Tang Tan (served as VP of product design at Apple, leading iPhone and Apple Watch product design) and a bunch of other mostly-former Apple people founded io, a startup planning to build an AI device. In 2025 OpenAI bought io, for $6.5bn, and made Tang Tan head of hardware. Then on Friday, just after Hannah and I finished writing last week’s newsletter, Apple sued Tang Tan, OpenAI, io and Chang Liu, another former Apple employee also now at OpenAI.
In the filing, Apple says that Tan “directed job candidates still working for Apple to bring ‘actual parts’ from Apple to their interviews for ‘show and tell’ sessions in which he and his team at OpenAI can elicit still more Apple confidential information.”
The suit also claims that Chang Liu, who worked at Apple for eight years and was a senior system electrical engineer before departing to join OpenAI in January 2026, not only took Apple data before leaving, but continued to access Apple systems after he left and took more data (he had access because of a bug). It further contends that Liu coached other Apple employees joining OpenAI to take more Apple data before leaving, and on how to avoid Apple security checks.
Three things that struck me as interesting about this. The first is that OpenAI’s hardware efforts are being led by Ive, and the complaint goes out of its way to avoid mentioning him. Second, the complaint states that “Apple and OpenAI have a commercial relationship involving the integration of OpenAI’s ChatGPT into Apple Intelligence”. That agreement is not at issue here, but I have to say I struggle to see how that Apple Intelligence partnership can continue after this. Third, these legal woes, not to mention the botched launch of the new desktop app, are a risk to OpenAI as it gears up for what’s expected to be an historic IPO.
Meanwhile Fidji Simo, OpenAI’s head of product and business, who was a potential replacement for Sam Altman, went on a medical leave of absence earlier this year and has now had to step down entirely.
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