Fed and Bank of England Rate Decisions This Week: The Hold Is Expected, the Dissents Are Not
The Federal Reserve announces its rate decision Wednesday at 2 p.m. ET, with Chair Kevin Warsh’s press conference following at 2:30. The Bank of England…
Trump’s Tuesday With Zelensky and Netanyahu: One Status Update, One War Council
My instinct, every time a headline reads “Trump meets [foreign leader], no breakthrough expected,” is to file it under theater and keep scrolling. Nine times…
Semis are already in a regime where every headline this month has been read bearishly
Semis are already in a regime where every headline this month has been read bearishly regardless of direction, which is the real setup to understand…
Meta, Microsoft, and Apple Earnings: What $725 Billion in AI Capex Has to Prove
Wednesday brings Meta and Microsoft, both reporting after the close. Thursday brings Apple, also after the close. Alphabet already set the tone on July 22,…
Distillation Becomes Washington’s Newest AI Panic After Moonshot’s Kimi K3
There is a word doing laps around Washington this week, and it sounds like something you’d do to corn mash in a shed in Kentucky.…
Shein’s Hong Kong IPO Prospectus: The $99 Million Loss Is Accounting, the 2.9% Operating Margin Is Not
The number in every headline is the wrong one to underwrite. Shein’s draft Hong Kong listing prospectus shows a $99 million net loss for the…
OpenAI, Anthropic and Google Are Giving Teachers Free AI Tools — the Expiry Dates Tell You Why
Every major AI company is now shipping a free product aimed at schools. OpenAI put ChatGPT for Teachers out last November, free for verified US…
Nvidia Would Guarantee $250B of OpenAI’s Ohio Data Center Debt — But Not the Chips Inside It
The Wall Street Journal reported Sunday that Nvidia is discussing roughly $250 billion in financing guarantees to let OpenAI lease a 10-gigawatt campus that SoftBank’s…
Defense Primes Hit Record $4.1B in Venture Rounds as Lockheed Martin and BAE Systems Chase Drone and Autonomy Startups
Global defense contractors have participated in a record $4.1 billion of venture capital rounds for military technology startups so far this year, according to Dealroom…
Bab al-Mandab Transits Fall to 11 Vessels After Houthi Strikes on Jizan and Yanbu, Hormuz Stays Below 10
Commercial traffic through the Bab al-Mandab Strait dropped to 11 cargo vessels on Sunday, the lowest single-day count in months, following Houthi missile and drone…
Maritime Traffic OSINT: How to Analyze AIS, Satellite Imagery and Port Activity
Shipping is the most observable large-scale economic activity on the planet. Roughly 100,000 commercial vessels above 100 gross tons are trading at any moment, most…
Conferences Are a Terrible OSINT Channel and Still Worth Attending
I’ll put my own position first, because it’s harsher than the one I’m about to argue against. Conference programming is close to worthless as a…
Cheap Visual Manipulation Does Not Need to Persuade Anyone to Work
Well-resourced intelligence services have been able to alter photographs convincingly since the 1930s and video since the 1990s. Nothing about the upper bound of the…
Total Visual Coverage Will Make Open-Source Verification Harder, Not Easier
The design assumption underneath every open-source investigation of the last fifteen years is that an image is something a person eventually looks at. Collection was…
OSINT Tools and Methods: A Working Overview of the Modern Collection Stack
Most people who ask me about OSINT want a tool list. They want the twelve browser extensions and the one Python framework that turns a…
DeepSeek Pauses Its $1.5 Billion Second Round: The Leaked Liang Transcript and China’s Compute Gap
On 25 July 2026, DeepSeek verbally informed prospective backers in its second funding round that the investment agreements they expected to sign within days would…
China’s Bid for an Alternative AI Order: WAICO, Open Models, and 5,000 Training Slots for Developing Countries
On 16 July 2026, representatives of twenty-nine states signed the founding agreement of the World Artificial Intelligence Cooperation Organization in Shanghai, one day before the…
Japan, South Korea and Taiwan Have Become AI Export Economies. Everything Else Is Shrinking.
The headline numbers coming out of north-east Asia in 2026 are the best in a generation. Taiwan grew 8.63% in 2025 and expanded at an…
South Korea Signed $700 Billion in AI Deals While Its Retail Investors Were Liquidated. What Comes Next.
In the last week of July 2026, two things happened to South Korea at once. Its two largest companies signed the biggest supply commitments in…
Google told the world it’s going to spend more money on AI chips. And chip stocks went down.
That’s backwards on its face. If you buy from someone, and you announce you’re increasing your order by $15 billion, your supplier’s stock should go…
Identity Verification Is Splitting in Two Directions as Physical Security Spending Compounds
The following assessment synthesizes five items from a single day’s corporate and government disclosures. Individually, each is a routine announcement — a funding round, a…
AI Infrastructure, Chip Sovereignty, and Platform Power: A 24-Hour OSINT Digest
The following digest synthesizes open-source reporting from a single 24-hour reporting cycle spanning corporate disclosures, government evaluations, court filings, and financial reporting across the technology,…
OSINT Digest: PLA Sorties Fall to Three-Year Low as Hormuz Threats Outrun the Incident Record
Two stories this week reward anyone willing to count rather than react. The first is that Chinese air activity around Taiwan has fallen off a…
US-Iran War Situation Report: Hormuz Traffic Collapses as Oil Breaks $95 and Strikes Reach Night Twelve
The last twenty-four hours produced the clearest divergence yet between official US messaging on the Strait of Hormuz and the observable behavior of commercial shipping.…