Ziad Matar

🕴🏻 parallel entrepreneur 🏃🏽 accidental athlete 🍔 chief BBQ officer 🍸 amateur mixologist 🤓 geek ••• all views expressed are mine

[Ziad Matar @wirelessly]

A residual $17 MUSD financial interest in a China JV, disclosed in a 2025 SEC filing, was sufficient to trigger concern despite SK Telecom's minimal direct China operations. A very low threshold for what constitutes a problematic China connection in the current tense environment.

[tokenando @TokenandoAI]

SK Telecom has been identified as the South Korean company whose inclusion in Anthropic's Project Glasswing programme triggered US government concern and the export control directive issued on June 12, 2026. The concern centred on SK Telecom's historical relationship with China Unicom, including a 2004 joint venture, a $1bn bond investment in 2006, and a residual $17m financial interest disclosed in a 2025 SEC filing, despite SK Telecom having divested the majority of its stake in 2009.

Anthropic expanded Project Glasswing to approximately 150 institutions across 15 countries on June 2, 2026, including SK Telecom alongside Samsung Electronics and the Korea Internet and Security Agency. The White House ordered Anthropic to revoke SK Telecom's access; Anthropic complied immediately. A separate jailbreak allegation from Amazon compounded the crisis, resulting in the Commerce Department directing Anthropic to restrict Fable 5 and Mythos 5 to US citizens only.

Bloomberg subsequently reported that select early preview users have retained access to a Mythos preview environment despite the broader shutdown, which cut off commercial customers across the EU, UK, Canada, and India. Anthropic and the White House remained in active negotiation over restoration terms as of June 19, 2026.

Full details via Wired / https://t.co/LNm3dha3yz

🤖 made with AI

[Ziad Matar @wirelessly]

When the US starts doubting the effective execution of export controls, that they have been circumvented or are at risk of circumvention... the world should expect tighter restrictions!

[tokenando @TokenandoAI]

US Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick has raised concerns directly with ASML executives, alleging that one of the company's EUV lithography machines may have reached China in violation of export restrictions. ASML denied the claim, stating it has never shipped an EUV system to China and circulated documents in Washington to support that position.

The episode follows months of escalating pressure. The Dutch government has already revoked licences for older deep ultraviolet machines. A bipartisan group of US lawmakers introduced the MATCH Act in April 2026, which would extend restrictions to all DUV immersion tools and ban servicing of equipment at SMIC, Hua Hong, and CXMT.

China accounted for 33% of ASML's sales in 2025 and is projected to fall to around 20% in 2026 before any further restrictions take effect. A servicing ban, even without new sales restrictions, would degrade the performance of machines already installed in China.

Full details via Bloomberg / https://t.co/Nobe2lvLQo

🤖 made with AI

[tokenando @TokenandoAI]

📰 The Daily brief / Friday June 19, 2026

/ US Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick raises concerns with ASML that an EUV lithography machine may have reached China in breach of export restrictions, as the MATCH Act threatens further curbs on Dutch chip tool sales

/ SK Telecom's historical ties to China Unicom identified as the trigger for the US government order that forced Anthropic to revoke Mythos access and issue a broader export control directive on June 12, 2026

/ Select early preview users retain access to Anthropic's Mythos model despite the Commerce Department directive that cut off all commercial customers across the EU, UK, and Canada

/ FERC votes unanimously to require 6 regional grid operators to process AI data centre power connections within 90 days, against a current process that can take years

/ Meta signs contracts for 1.6GW of AI computing capacity with data centre developer Crusoe across sites in Texas and Missouri, adding to a portfolio that already includes Oracle, Microsoft, and Google

/ 2 studies in "Nature" show specialised AI systems matching or exceeding physician accuracy, while a supplementary finding reveals the performance advantage nearly disappears when the same setup runs on a newer base model

🤖 made with AI
✅ reviewed by the Tokenando team
🔗 links and details in following posts

[Ziad Matar @wirelessly]

Straight off the press…

[tokenando @TokenandoAI]

On the evening of June 12, the most powerful model Anthropic had ever released was switched off. A US Commerce Department letter ordered it to block every foreign national from Fable 5 and Mythos 5. Nationality cannot be verified at the interface, so both went dark for everyone, worldwide.

That same weekend, Satya Nadella made the case for owning your AI rather than only renting it. He calls it token capital. The companies that had not treated AI as a strategic asset learned the cost on Friday.

Issue VII of The Compute is out.

https://t.co/qiFK4cUtkS

[tokenando @TokenandoAI]

📰 The Daily brief / Thursday June 18, 2026

/ JPMorgan removes Anthropic's Claude from approved tools for Hong Kong staff, following Goldman Sachs's same move in April 2026

/ Macron leads G7 push for a "trusted partners" scheme to restore allied access to Anthropic's blocked Mythos 5 and Fable 5 models

/ Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei urges G7 leaders to resist AI fragmentation, with OpenAI and Google DeepMind backing a US-led standards coalition

/ Microsoft sells access to OpenAI models in China via Azure, with ByteDance on track to spend more than $1bn a year on the service

/ ASML CEO Christophe Fouquet warns that Elon Musk's $119bn Terafab chip plant is an opportunity only if ASML avoids becoming supply-constrained

🤖 made with AI
✅ reviewed by the Tokenando team
🔗 links and details in following posts

[tokenando @TokenandoAI]

At the G7 summit in Evian-les-Bains, French President Emmanuel Macron led allied efforts to negotiate a "trusted partners" scheme that would restore non-US access to Anthropic's Mythos 5 and Fable 5 models, disabled for all foreign nationals on June 12.

Macron said on June 17 that he expected progress "in weeks" and warned that if the US could "from one day to the next turn off the switch," it would damage allied economies and the commercial prospects of US AI firms. German Chancellor Friedrich Merz and Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi also raised concerns. No formal agreement was reached; a G7 ministerial on AI standards is planned for September 2026.

Full details via The Next Web / https://t.co/xVQHbjdIwA

🤖 made with AI

[tokenando @TokenandoAI]

Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei addressed G7 leaders and roughly a dozen technology executives at a closed-door working lunch in Evian-les-Bains on June 17, urging them to "resist the temptation to splinter" over AI governance.

Speaking in front of US President Donald Trump, Mr Amodei called for international cooperation on structured access to frontier models, chip trade that excludes China, and coordinated responses to AI risks in cybersecurity and bioterrorism. OpenAI CEO Sam Altman backed the position and proposed an international forum for model testing standards. Google DeepMind CEO Demis Hassabis also called for a US-led coalition. The lunch took place 5 days after the Trump administration ordered Anthropic to disable Mythos 5 and Fable 5 for all foreign nationals.

Full details via CNBC / https://t.co/e7GpY37cu6

🤖 made with AI

[tokenando @TokenandoAI]

ASML CEO Christophe Fouquet said on June 17 at the Vivatech conference in Paris that Elon Musk's proposed Terafab semiconductor facility in Texas is an opportunity for ASML, but only if the company avoids becoming supply-constrained.

Terafab has filed an initial investment of $55bn, with a potential total of up to $119bn. Mr Fouquet confirmed direct talks with Mr Musk and described him as "very serious." ASML is the sole global supplier of extreme ultraviolet lithography machines required for advanced chip manufacturing; each High-NA EUV system costs approximately $400m. TSMC, Samsung, and Intel already hold multi-year order positions with ASML.

Full details via Crypto Briefing / https://t.co/SaGO3Tl54I

🤖 made with AI

[tokenando @TokenandoAI]

Microsoft announced the global general availability of Copilot Cowork on June 16, 2026, shifting from flat-rate bundling to usage-based billing denominated in Copilot Credits at $0.01 per credit.

The tool runs complex multi-step agentic tasks autonomously within Microsoft 365 and requires an existing Microsoft 365 Copilot licence as a prerequisite. Billing is then calculated separately across model use, context retrieval, tool calls, and runtime. At launch, Cowork runs on Anthropic models including Opus 4.8 and Sonnet 4.6, with GPT-5.5 available to Frontier tier customers.

Microsoft simultaneously disclosed to Axios that it is exploring a fine-tuned version of DeepSeek V4, hosted on Azure, as a lower-cost model option, with a decision expected within weeks. Frontier programme customers who used Cowork between March 30 and June 16 will not be billed until July 1, 2026.

Full details via Axios / https://t.co/QiifUNnW7w

[tokenando @TokenandoAI]

📰 The Daily brief / Tuesday June 17, 2026

/ HSBC and Google Cloud announce a multi-year AI partnership targeting more than $100m per project in revenue or cost savings across 200 new use cases

/ Huawei unveils a vertical chip-stacking architecture it claims will reach 1.4-nanometre equivalent density by 2031 without the EUV lithography machines blocked by US export controls

/ Microsoft launches Copilot Cowork on usage-based billing at $0.01 per credit and discloses it is exploring a fine-tuned DeepSeek V4 model hosted on Azure as a lower-cost option

/ Brookfield-backed data centre operator Csquare files publicly with the SEC for a New York Stock Exchange listing, targeting up to $650m in a deal that covers 64 facilities across 21 US markets and the UK

🤖 made with AI  
✅ reviewed by the Tokenando team  
🔗 links in comments

[Ziad Matar @wirelessly]

@MichaelDell 💯 building @TokenandoAI with my son and helping him build his future 🤖

[Axios @axios]

Microsoft eyes DeepSeek for enterprise AI https://t.co/hWmHLqTR4g

[Marty Kausas @marty_kausas]

Here's our forecasted Claude spend, broken down by team.

Engineering is highest at $3.1k/person/month.

No surprise. The interesting part is who's right behind them.

[tokenando @TokenandoAI]

📰 The Daily brief / Monday June 16, 2026

/ OpenAI spent $34bn in 2025 against $13bn in revenue, with $17.2bn going to Microsoft, as the company files confidentially for an IPO that could value it above $1tn

/ Sovereign AI responses from South Korea, India, Canada, the EU, and the UK following the US Commerce Department export control directive that forced Anthropic to disable Fable 5 and Mythos 5 globally.

/ Anthropic sends senior technical staff to Washington for Commerce Department talks, as over 100 cybersecurity executives argue the government's jailbreak-free standard is technically unachievable

/ Apollo Global co-president Scott Kleinman warns at SuperReturn Berlin that law firms, accounting firms, and consulting practices face material AI disruption, as Apollo cuts software exposure to below 10%

/ Kingboard Laminates shares rise more than 550% from their February 2024 low as AI data centre demand drives an 85% profit increase and a price-to-earnings ratio of 86 times against a sector average of 17 times

/ Accenture executive argues in the Financial Times that HR functions must extend governance frameworks to cover AI agents, citing internal productivity gains of 45% and a projection that more AI agents than humans will use ERP software by 2030

🤖 made with AI
✅ reviewed by the Tokenando team
🔗 links in following posts

[tokenando @TokenandoAI]

Anthropic sent senior technical staff to Washington for Commerce Department talks on June 16, following CEO Dario Amodei's direct calls with Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent, Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick, and National Cyber Director Sean Cairncross in the preceding 48 hours.

The government gave Anthropic a 90-minute ultimatum on June 12 to disable the models voluntarily. When Amodei declined without more information, the formal export control letter followed.

Over 100 cybersecurity executives signed an open letter arguing the capability at issue is already present in GPT-5.5, Opus, Sonnet, and the Chinese Kimi 2.7 model, and that the government's standard, if applied consistently, would halt all new frontier model deployments.

Full details via Bloomberg / https://t.co/JmfuY7MKuW

[tokenando @TokenandoAI]

Apollo Global co-president Scott Kleinman told SuperReturn International in Berlin that law firms, accounting firms, and consulting practices face material disruption from AI, and that PE firms holding positions in those sectors need to reassess whether the underlying business models remain viable.

Apollo entered 2025 with software exposure at roughly 20% across its private credit funds and has since halved that figure, with a target below 10%. Kleinman described Apollo as now "massively underweight" software, directing capital toward critical infrastructure instead.

Blackstone president Jonathan Gray made similar observations in late 2024, mandating AI risk quantification in investment memos for rules-based sectors including legal and accounting.

Full details via Financial Times / https://t.co/EWpda8xfOl

[tokenando @TokenandoAI]

An Accenture executive, writing in the Financial Times, argues that HR functions must extend governance frameworks to cover AI agents operating alongside human employees, treating performance management, accountability, and workforce planning as applying to both human and digital workers.

Accenture reports 45% productivity gains within its own HR function from AI deployment, a 30% improvement in proficiency for priority skills, and a 40% increase in internal fill rates. The company projects that by 2030 more AI agents than humans will be using enterprise resource planning software.

Only around 7% of organisations currently use AI to drive an internal-first mobility strategy.

Full details via Financial Times / https://t.co/HmNUMWFXjQ

[Ziad Matar @wirelessly]

"Every company is going to have to build what I think of as human capital and token capital. Human capital comprises the knowledge, judgment, relationships, ingenuity, and pattern recognition of its people, while token capital is the firm’s AI capability it builds and owns."

[Satya Nadella @satyanadella]

https://t.co/vLmiBKTtX3

[tokenando @TokenandoAI]

Simon Willison and Arvind Narayanan published analyses on June 11 and 14, 2026, arguing that the structural reasons software engineers have not been displaced by AI are durable rather than temporary.

The argument rests on a decide-execute-deliver framework: AI has compressed the execution layer of software development, but the decision layer, which requires understanding user needs and organisational priorities, and the delivery layer, which requires accountability for production systems, resist automation for structural reasons.

A Harvard Business Review survey found that 21% of executives had made large headcount reductions in anticipation of AI, while only 2% had done so due to actual AI implementation.

Full details via Normal Tech / https://t.co/HyC4OGZhCQ

[tokenando @TokenandoAI]

France's Choose France summit on June 1, 2026, produced announced AI investment commitments of €93bn, with SoftBank's pledge of up to €75bn for 5 gigawatts of AI data centre capacity in northern France accounting for the majority.

The EU's parallel plan for 5 AI gigafactory data centres has been delayed, with bidding pushed from May to July 2026. Only 2 of the 5 centres are fundable before the EU's next budget cycle begins in 2028, and the number of expected bidders has narrowed from approximately 70 companies to approximately 10.

The Anthropic export control episode broke the weekend before the G7 summit in Évian, complicating the transatlantic AI investment narrative French President Emmanuel Macron had been constructing.

Full details via France 24 / https://t.co/DZxb69vzNb