Marketplace Tech

Meta responded to plummeting morale this week with a pledge to do better with company snacks. Plus, the new AI augmented reality smart glasses everyone's talking about, and not in a good way. But first, SpaceX is acquiring the AI coding startup Cursor a week after it's IPO took off like a rocket.

The company hit a $2.5 trillion valuation at one point, but has dropped since then. Marketplace’s Meghan McCarty Carino spoke with Paresh Dace, senior writer at Wired, to learn more.

AI has ushered in a golden age for scams. There are the deepfake kidnapping calls, the vibecoded ecommerce websites and one of the latest, according to a recent article in the Hollywood Reporter, is a casting scam targeting aspiring actors. Marketplace’s Meghan McCarty Carino spoke with labor and media reporter Katie Kilkenny who wrote about how this scheme typically unfolds.

Last week, the Trump Administration ordered Anthropic to cut off access to its most advanced AI models — Mythos 5 and the pared-down public version, Fable 5 — from foreign nationals due to reported security weaknesses in Fable's safeguards.

In response, Anthropic shut them down for everyone including the handful of companies that had been granted access to Mythos.

One of those companies is Mozilla, which said Mythos identified about 270 bugs in its Firefox browser that had slipped through previous reviews.

Marketplace’s Meghan McCarty Carino spoke with Mozilla chief technology officer Raffi Krikorian about the government essentially hitting a kill switch on the system.

More on this

What to know about the Anthropic models takedown - from The Hill

Mythos and Fable can make us all safer. Shutting them down is reckless - from the Transformer Substack

Federal spending on Y2K reaches $8.38 billion - from CNET

Demand for power is growing thanks to the rapid expansion of data center infrastructure across the U.S. But as utility bills continue to rise, states and grid operators are turning to address problems in grid infrastructure. Reliability and affordability are among the largest concerns for regulators and consumers alike. On July 23rd, the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission will hold a meeting with PJM Interconnection LLC, the nation’s largest electric grid operator, to address these issues. “Marketplace Tech” host Meghan McCarty Carino spoke with Ethan Howland, a senior reporter at Utility Dive, about how these problems may get addressed, and what’s at stake for the United States power grid.

On today’s episode, Marketplace’s Meghan McCarty Carino walks us through how AI is making it harder to break into the cybersecurity sector.