Tech Brew Ride Home

Jensen Huang resigned as Nvidia CEO amid the spy scandal, with CFO Colette Kress stepping in as interim. Trump pitched Tim Cook as his successor, the board reportedly eyed Apple’s Johny Srouji, and Google launched its Gemini 4 Hydrogen model.

Jensen Huang resigns as Nvidia CEO, president, and board member; CFO Colette Kress will serve as interim CEO as the board considers candidates; NVDA drops 5%+ (Nvidia)

Trump called Jensen Huang on Tuesday and urged him to keep fighting for his job, viewing the spy scandal mainly through the lens of adultery and Nvidia as too big to fail (NYT)

Inside Jensen Huang’s final hours as Nvidia CEO: broken, saying “whatever” and “I don’t care” after weeks of denials, with a congressional testimony expected in the coming weeks (Bloomberg)

Trump says Tim Cook is the “only one man” to replace Jensen Huang as Nvidia CEO, adding “A Legend replaces a Legend!” and Huang “has done a fantastic job” (9to5Mac)

Nvidia’s difficult search for Huang’s successor: Apple’s Johny Srouji, Arm’s Rene Haas, AMD’s Lisa Su, AWS’s Matt Garman, Micron’s Sanjay Mehrotra, Google’s Amin Vahdat, and son-in-law Nico Caprez all in the mix (Bloomberg)

Google launches Gemini 4 Hydrogen, calling it a major upgrade over Gemini 3.8 Flash, at $1.50/1M input and $7.50/1M output tokens across its 1M context window (Google)

Gemini 4 Hydrogen replaces 3.8 Flash across Google’s products, running 2.5x faster in high mode, cutting “fabricated claims” 5x, and scoring 54 on the Artificial Analysis index vs. 50 for Argon (Ars Technica)

Longreads

Forward-deployed engineers, the role Palantir made famous, are drawing $586,000 to $1.45 million a year as companies start hiring them in-house (WSJ)

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Anthropic kicked off its IPO roadshow, with bankers already eyeing a higher price, and launched Claude Sheets, Meetings and Whiteboards to take on Microsoft and Google. Nvidia hired Wachtell to probe Jensen Huang; Ring unveiled security robots, and Reddit launched Reviews.

Anthropic launches its IPO roadshow, saying the company and shareholders plan to sell 825M Class A shares at $70 to $78 each, listing on the Nasdaq under ANT (Anthropic)

Anthropic plans to push ahead with its IPO later this month despite AI market volatility, aiming to start trading Thursday or Friday next week, with some investors now pushing for a lower valuation (WSJ)

Anthropic’s bankers are weighing raising the IPO price above the $70-$78 range after heavy investor demand, which could lift the valuation to $1.5tn or more and the raise past $100bn (FT)

Anthropic unveils office tools, including a video call assistant, a data dashboard, and spreadsheet service Claude Sheets, competing with Microsoft and Google (Bloomberg)

Anthropic unveils Claude Meetings, Sheets, and Whiteboards, plus interactive connectors that embed apps like HubSpot, Adobe, and Atlassian inside Claude, with Claude Data now generally available (The Verge)

Nvidia hires former acting US attorney Joon H. Kim and his law firm Wachtell Lipton to conduct a probe into Jensen Huang’s affair with an alleged Chinese spy (The New York Times)

Jensen Huang and Alice Huang’s relationship dates back to at least 2023, facilitating $7.5B+ in Nvidia chip shipments via Chinese companies since then (The Information)

Amazon’s Ring unveils the $249 Ring Drone Cam and the $999 Ring Rover Cam, both using its AI Pilot to navigate interior spaces, under new subbrand Ring Robotics (ZDNet)

Ring launches a home security drone that flies room to room and a roving enterprise security robot, both run by its AI Pilot system (TechCrunch)

Reddit launches Reddit Reviews, a built-in hub using AI to turn subreddit comments into product pages with pros, cons, and sentiment, starting with 10K items (The Verge)

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Trump said the FBI was looking into Jensen Huang’s affair, and Nvidia’s stock sank 4.3%. Uber launched in-app parking in 15 cities. Anthropic released Mythos and Fable 5.2, which it says formalized Fermat’s Last Theorem and solved black hole problems.

rump says the FBI is “looking into” Jensen Huang’s affair, and the Nvidia CEO told him that he “had absolutely no idea that the person in question was a spy” (AP)

A Commerce Department probe into Megaspeed for allegedly smuggling Nvidia chips to China was handed to the DOJ after Nvidia’s general counsel emailed investigators and invoked the name of a top Commerce official (NYT)

Sources: Jensen Huang has used Heller, a crisis PR firm known for handling sex scandals, since at least October 2025, well before his affair became public (Wired)

Huang’s fate now rests with a weak, long-tenured Nvidia board with no successor in sight and a CEO with 50+ direct reports, raising a governance crisis (Semafor)

Uber launches Uber Parking, an in-app parking reservation tool powered by its SpotHero acquisition, in 15 US cities, including Chicago, NYC, and San Francisco (The Verge)

Anthropic releases Mythos 5.2 and Fable 5.2, saying they are “best for the most ambitious, open-ended technical work”, with outputs up to 30% faster than 5.1 (Anthropic)

Fable 5.2 and Mythos 5.2 post new benchmark highs while API prices drop 20% to $8 per million input tokens and $40 per million output; Mythos stays reserved for vetted Project Glasswing users (VentureBeat)

Anthropic says during prerelease testing Mythos 5.2 and Fable 5.2 formalized the proof of Fermat’s Last Theorem and solved two open black hole physics problems (The Verge)

About 1,000 Fable 5.2 agents turned the Fermat proof into a computer-verifiable one in 30 hours and coded a working OS in eight days, though the black hole papers haven’t been peer reviewed (Gizmodo)

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Jensen Huang’s scandal blew up: Nvidia’s board opened a probe after he admitted an affair with an alleged Chinese spy, Rubio’s memo surfaced, and shell firms got H200 approvals. Also, I covered Apple’s John Ternus pushing Siri toward agents.

Sources: US officials believe Jensen Huang had a romantic relationship with Alice Huang, who they allege was recruited to spy for China’s top spy agency, MSS (Financial Times)

Nvidia’s board launched a probe into whether Jensen Huang was targeted by a foreign spy plot, after he admitted to the board he’d been intimate with an executive US intelligence determined to be a Chinese spy; Huang apologized and will keep leading Nvidia during the inquiry (The New York Times)

Jensen Huang’s scandal poses a rare crisis in US corporate history, given the national security stakes, his centrality to Nvidia, and its role in the AI race (Semafor)

Sources: John Ternus wants more urgency in Apple’s AI efforts, pushing Craig Federighi to move beyond Siri AI tweaks to agentic and other advanced capabilities (Bloomberg)

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