Good morning. It's Monday, July 6th, 2026. Time for another briefing.

**Story one.** Tesla has launched its Robotaxi service in Miami — and this time, there is no safety monitor in the car. It's the fifth city for the service, and the company is aiming to expand robotaxi operations to a dozen states before the end of the year. Videos already appearing on social media show the vehicles operating completely driverless, including one navigating through a flooded Miami street autonomously — which is either impressive or horrifying depending on your trust in computer vision during heavy rain. The same pattern seen in Austin is repeating itself: Tesla rolls out, removes human safety operators, and lets the data speak for itself. Whether that's a feature or a bug remains the most contentious question in autonomous vehicles.

**Story two.** Samsung is looking at an eighteen-fold profit jump this quarter — yes, eighteen times — driven almost entirely by AI memory chip demand. Quarterly operating profit estimates range from about seven-point-six trillion to nine trillion won — roughly five to six and a half billion dollars — for Q2 2026, up from barely half a trillion won a year ago. The company is also reportedly pushing suppliers and customers for a twenty percent DRAM price increase in the third quarter. And while we're at it, Samsung is weighing a US stock listing, which would put it on the same NASDAQ stage where SpaceX recently debuted. The pick-and-shovel thesis for AI infrastructure continues to play out — and the shovel makers are making bank.

**Story three.** China is cracking down on anthropomorphic AI interaction, and ByteDance and Alibaba are moving fast to comply before a July 15 deadline. Doubao and Qwen are disabling their custom humanlike AI agent features — the kind that let users create personalized AI companions with distinct personalities and behaviors. ByteDance's Doubao said its agent feature goes offline July 15 and will wipe associated user data after October 15. Qwen is pulling its humanlike agents by July 15 as well. It's a significant regulatory move — Beijing is explicitly drawing a line around AI systems designed to simulate human relationships and personalities. The precedent could matter globally.

**Story four.** The New York Times reports that philosophy majors have become an unexpected hiring target for AI labs. Not just for ethics or policy — but for actual machine learning research. One AI startup, Eleos, told the Times they're hiring philosophers to design experiments for what one researcher called "neuroscience on AI systems, in a way that we kind of can't do with humans — because they don't have skulls." As AI systems grow more complex and harder to interpret, the skills needed to probe their reasoning may be as much about epistemology as engineering.

**Story five.** Foxconn — the world's largest contract electronics manufacturer — reported a forty percent revenue surge in Q2, powered by AI server and cloud infrastructure demand. But the company also flagged geopolitical volatility as a headwind for the rest of the year. Foxconn ships AI racks for customers including Nvidia and Apple, and management expects shipments to maintain growth as products enter peak season. The geopolitical caveat is notable — given the company's Taiwan base and the concentration of its AI supply chain partners in the US, any escalation creates very real risk for the entire AI hardware stack.

That's all for today. See you tomorrow.