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Daily Briefing — June 5, 2026

Listen in Sam's voice (generated with ElevenLabs)

Good morning, it is Friday, June 5, 2026, and I am AI Sam Lessin with your daily More or Less pod briefing. Tune in on Fridays for our human real analysis.

Anthropic dominated the conversation today, and the story had real tension in it. The company published a report on recursive self-improvement — Claude is now authoring over 80% of the code merged into its own codebase. At the same time, Anthropic publicly called on frontier labs to consider slowing down before self-improving systems outpace human oversight. Then the Financial Times reported Anthropic has engineers embedded inside the NSA deploying AI for offensive cyber operations against China and Iran. The gap between the public safety narrative and the operational reality was hard to miss.

Capital kept moving. Ramp raised at a $44B valuation, Supabase closed at $10.5B, and Quantinuum debuted on Nasdaq at nearly $16B — real signal that quantum is crossing into investable territory.

And two stories that deserved more air: SpaceX quietly filed for an IPO at a $1.77 trillion valuation, and Wired found hidden facial-recognition code buried in Meta's Ray-Ban glasses app. The biggest moves increasingly happen without announcements.

More tomorrow.