THE RUNDOWN

The official account for Gibney's four-hour documentary on Elon Musk has been permanently banned from TikTok, with the platform offering no immediate public reason. This isn't the first time the film has hit resistance from social media, but TikTok's move — timed just before the release — raises obvious questions about who's applying pressure and why. It's a reminder that the platforms carrying our public conversation have very little obligation to explain themselves.

Sam Altman has confirmed OpenAI is working on a humanoid robot — one that can operate in a world built for humans, not machines. Altman's being refreshingly honest though: he says the physical body isn't the hard part. The real challenge is the 'brain' — the AI system that has to reason, adapt and make decisions in unpredictable real-world situations. That framing tells you a lot about where OpenAI sees its actual edge, and it's worth following if you're tracking the AI space closely.

Autonomous AI agents — the kind that browse the web, fill forms and complete tasks on your behalf — are running into a new wall. Website owners are starting to actively block them, updating their terms of service and technical settings to keep these bots out. It's a fascinating tension: the same AI companies promising 'agents that do everything for you' are finding the open web isn't actually open to that idea. Expect this to become a serious security and legal battleground over the next year.

After significant backlash, Meta has updated its terms of service to remove language that appeared to give itself permission to scrape content from news sites and other web pages for AI training. A company spokesperson insists nothing has actually changed in how Meta crawls the web — which is either reassuring or deeply unconvincing, depending on how much trust you have in that company right now. Publishers are watching closely.

Replit's CEO confirmed over the weekend that OpenAI is replacing Anthropic's Claude as the platform's default AI model. Claude will still be available, but OpenAI is now the front door. It's a notable win for OpenAI in the increasingly competitive race to become the default 'brain' powering developer tools — and a quiet setback for Anthropic, which has been growing fast but is clearly fighting for every major partnership.

Internal data from Anthropic shows its team has become significantly less junior over the past year, and employees are spending more time in meetings than before. That might sound like boring HR news, but for a company that's positioned itself as a scrappy, safety-focused AI lab, it signals a real maturation — and the growing pains that come with scaling fast. Fewer junior hires usually means the easy-growth phase is over.

SpaceX has been making serious moves to position Starlink as a genuine alternative to traditional mobile carriers like AT&T, T-Mobile and Verizon. Telecom analyst Walter Piecyk breaks down why this is both an audacious and expensive gamble — satellite-based mobile coverage sounds revolutionary, but the economics of competing with entrenched carriers at scale are brutally difficult. For African markets where coverage gaps are real, though, this is a story worth tracking carefully.

Canada has announced plans for a new surveillance law that would put fresh pressure on encrypted communications — joining a growing list of governments around the world quietly chipping away at digital privacy protections. Whether it's backdoor demands, data retention rules or outright bans, encryption is being squeezed from multiple directions at once. For anyone who cares about private communication, this trend should be deeply uncomfortable.

HTC has launched smart glasses that do most of what Meta's Ray-Ban glasses do — music, calls, a camera — but without the social media platform watching everything you do with them. In a market where Meta is the dominant player, HTC is betting that some people will pay for the same features without handing their data to a social network. It's a smart niche to go after, and the timing, with AI agents and scraping controversies dominating the news, couldn't be better.

Mercedes' performance brand AMG has revealed its first ground-up electric SUV, and it's pushing 1,150 horsepower. This isn't an existing model with an electric powertrain dropped in — it's been designed from scratch around the EV platform, with three axial flux motors delivering performance that puts most supercars to shame. It won't be affordable, but it shows where the top end of electric vehicle technology is heading.

From platform censorship to robot brains to the quiet death of open browsing — it's been a heavy news day. The through-line in most of these stories is control: who has it, who wants more of it, and who's quietly losing theirs.