France just pulled every last ounce of gold it had stored at the New York Fed. 129 tonnes worth ~$15 billion.

But they didn't ship it home. They sold the bars in New York and bought new ones in Paris. 26 transactions over 6 months. The Bank of France says it was just a routine upgrade to meet modern bar standards.

Maybe. But the structure tells a different story.

If you can just withdraw your gold, you withdraw your gold. You don't sell it and rebuy on the open market unless withdrawal isn't as simple as it should be.

France's entire 2,437-tonne gold reserve is now in Paris. Zero in America. And Germany is staring at 1,236 tonnes still sitting in the Fed's vault, with growing calls to bring it home.

The official line: "not politically motivated." The signal: sovereign nations are quietly reducing their dependence on the American financial system, one gold bar at a time.

Iran just cut all diplomatic channels with the U.S.

No talks. No back channels. Nothing.

Yesterday Trump was floating another deadline extension.

Today there's no one left to negotiate with.

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President Trump is scheduled to speak live with the Artemis II astronauts tonight at 10 PM.

Anthropic's revenue run rate just hit $30 billio, up from $9 billion at the end of 2025. That's 3.3x growth in four months.

OpenAI was last reported at $25 billion in early March, though both numbers are moving fast. The gap between the two largest AI companies has closed far quicker than anyone expected.

The difference is where the money is coming from. Anthropic generates the bulk of its revenue from enterprise customers, over 1,000 businesses now spend more than $1 million a year on Claude, up from around 500 just two months ago. OpenAI still draws heavily from consumer subscriptions. Both models are working, but enterprise contracts tend to be stickier and higher-margin.

To keep up with demand, Anthropic signed a deal with Google and Broadcom for multiple gigawatts of next-generation TPU capacity coming online in 2027, building on a $50 billion commitment to US-based AI infrastructure announced last year. That's power-plant-scale energy consumption for a single AI company.

A year and a half ago, Anthropic was widely viewed as a safety-focused research lab running a distant second. Now it's neck and neck with the company that kicked off the entire AI boom, and it got there by selling to enterprises, not consumers.

Anthropic just signed a deal with Google and Broadcom for multiple gigawatts of next-gen TPU capacity.

Their revenue run rate hit $30 billion, up from $9 billion at the end of 2025.

UnitedHealth jumped 11% today after CMS finalized 2027 Medicare Advantage rates with a 2.48% increase, $13 billion more than what insurers got last year.

The January proposal was nearly flat. The final number was 2.5x higher. That's how Washington works. Propose low, finalize high, and let the lobbyists fill in the gap.

Medicare spending is already one of the biggest contributors to the federal deficit. This just made it bigger.

Helium shortages are biting, a key semiconductor input, mostly from Qatar, now largely offline. The US is in pole position.

"Qatar and Exxon's LNG replacement isn't being built in the Middle East. It's in Texas. Watch these data points, not Trump tweets." - @JOHN ARNOLD

Two narratives on the Strait of Hormuz, petroyuan rising, or US-engineered disruption.

"Most oil is moving through diplomatic back channels and quid pro quo trades. Locals say their main concern isn't insurance. It's not getting blown up." - @JOHN ARNOLD

If you were a state actor trying to disrupt Bitcoin, engineering a quantum panic that forces untested cryptography into the protocol would be a pretty good play.

"Not attributing bad faith, but that's an unintended consequence worth thinking through." - @JOHN ARNOLD

San Diego’s Cajon Pass Deli just turned on Bitcoin payments through Square.

Owner’s reaction when paid in sats?

“Why would I want to convert it to USD? I want to keep it as Bitcoin.”

.(nvk) just released llm-wiki v0.0.10.

llm-wiki is an open-source tool inspired by Andrej Karpathy’s idea for building persistent personal knowledge bases with LLMs.

Instead of stateless chats that forget everything, it lets AI agents compile raw documents into a structured, interlinked Markdown wiki that keeps improving over time.

This update brings better research quality, session persistence, and reliability fixes.