Data Centers in Space 🚀

Amazon and Perplexity are battling it out in court, both insisting they’re only doing it for the customer experience. Meanwhile, potential trillionaires are podcasting about ensuring they maintain “substantial influence” over the robot armies they’re building. And a third company wants to harness the power of the sun to build off-planet data centers.

Surely nothing could go wrong on this timeline.

🎭 Drama

Amazon and Perplexity Feud
Amazon sent Perplexity a cease and desist, aiming to block Perplexity’s agentic Comet browser from being used to shop on Amazon. Both companies have released statements claiming their position is in the best interest of consumers.

Perplexity argues that Amazon wants to control the shopping experience with its own AI agents—guiding customers to deals that most benefit Amazon. Amazon, on the other hand, claims Comet has security flaws and degrades the customer experience.

Amazon also argues that vendors must opt in to services like DoorDash, and AI browsers should require similar permission. That comparison feels weak for an agentic assistant–style browser; it’s more like an assistant buying batteries for you than ordering a burrito. Amazon may face customer service headaches from Comet making the wrong purchase on a user’s behalf—but at its core, this fight seems about control.

Worth keeping an eye on how agentic AI is ultimately allowed to act on users’ behalf online.

Deep Dive: Read the full cease and desist—or just have an agentic browser summarize it for you. 😉

📰 Article

From MCP to Shell: How MCP Authentication Flaws Enable RCE in Claude Code, Gemini CLI, and More
Veria Labs
Speaking of AI-agent vulnerabilities, Veria Labs shows how a malicious MCP server could let bad actors gain full control of a user’s machine when coding agents interact with it.

📰 Article

Exploring a Space-Based, Scalable AI Infrastructure System Design
Google Research
Google’s latest Moonshot project aims to build a data center in space powered by the sun. The initiative will take years and require new technology to literally get off the ground. They’re not quite trying to block out the sun like Mr. Burns… for now.

📰 Article

Elon Musk Says He Wants ‘Strong Influence’ Over the Robot Army He’s Creating
Elon secured his $1 trillion pay package—driven partly by his desire for a Zuckerberg-like grip on Tesla. Surely nothing could go wrong when he’s calling it a “robot army.”

💡 How To

This week’s banner image combines Google’s Gemini Nano Banana image generation with a Simpsons still featuring the Chrome logo. I then merged it with a previous banner image created in Ideogram. Here are the prompts:

With the original still from The Simpsons

On Ideogram (note this full prompt was for least weeks episode):

Back to Gemini:

Google Gemini’s Nano Banana is still the best for merging images without creating weird AI artifacts, but I like Ideogram and Midjourney for generating from scratch. I tend to lean Ideogram lately for its consistency with text.

Thanks for reading,

Jason