☕️ Phil Spencer retires after 38 years as Xbox chief

Hi there, this is your daily ☕️ Techpresso.

In today's Techpresso:

🎮 Phil Spencer retires after 38 years as Xbox chief

🔊 OpenAI plans an AI smart speaker with camera

❌ Supreme Court blocks tariffs costing Apple billions

💰 OpenAI targets $600 billion in compute spending by 2030

🛡️ Anthropic launches Claude Code Security

🇺🇸 US plans Tech Corps to counter China AI exports

Plus: 🎁 12 other news you might like, 🧰 5 tools, and 📚 5 papers.

🎮 Phil Spencer retires after 38 years as Xbox chief LINK

Phil Spencer is retiring from Microsoft after 38 years at the company, including 12 years leading its gaming division, as Xbox faces declining revenue and increased business challenges.

Asha Sharma, who joined Microsoft in 2024 from Instacart and has worked on AI products, will replace Spencer as CEO of gaming and report directly to Satya Nadella.

Sharma told gaming employees she would "recommit to core Xbox fans" and promised not to "flood our ecosystem with soulless AI slop," calling games "art, crafted by humans."

🔊 OpenAI plans an AI smart speaker with camera LINK

OpenAI is working on a $200 to $300 smart speaker with a built-in camera, part of a broader push into AI-powered hardware that also includes smart glasses and a smart lamp.

The speaker could identify objects on a nearby table, listen to conversations, and support facial recognition for authenticating purchases, with a team of over 200 employees building the project.

The smart speaker could ship in early 2027 at the earliest, while smart glasses may not arrive until 2028, and the project has already faced delays over technical, privacy, and logistical issues.

❌ Supreme Court blocks tariffs costing Apple billions LINK

The Supreme Court ruled 6 to 3 that Trump's sweeping "Liberation Day" tariffs were illegal because he imposed them without Congress, costing Apple around $2 billion in fees paid to the government.

Chief Justice John Roberts wrote that IEEPA does not authorize the president to impose tariffs, and Justice Kavanaugh warned that the refund process for billions collected from importers will be a "mess."

Beyond direct tariff fees, companies like Apple spent hundreds of millions reorganizing manufacturing and distribution, while smaller US firms were put out of business with no clear path to recovery.

💰 OpenAI targets $600 billion in compute spending by 2030 LINK

OpenAI now projects it will spend a total of $665 billion on training and running AI models through 2030, raising its cumulative cash burn estimate by roughly $111 billion compared to previous forecasts.

Revenue more than tripled to $13.1 billion in 2025, but adjusted gross margin fell to 33 percent from 40 percent the prior year, as inference costs alone quadrupled during that period.

OpenAI does not expect to become cash-flow positive until 2030 and is negotiating a funding round exceeding $100 billion at a $750 billion valuation, with SoftBank, Amazon, Nvidia, and Microsoft involved.

🛡️ Anthropic launches Claude Code Security LINK

Anthropic has launched Claude Code Security, a tool built into Claude Code that scans codebases for security vulnerabilities and suggests patches, though humans must review and approve every fix.

The company says Claude Opus 4.6 has found over 500 vulnerabilities in production open-source codebases, including bugs that went undetected for decades despite years of expert scrutiny.

Cybersecurity stocks dropped sharply after the announcement, with CrowdStrike falling 8 percent, Cloudflare 8.1 percent, Okta 9.2 percent, and SailPoint 9.4 percent on the same day.

🇺🇸 US plans Tech Corps to counter China AI exports LINK

The U.S. government is creating a "Tech Corps" volunteer program, run through the Peace Corps, to send people abroad and promote American AI products as it competes with China for influence.

Chinese open models from Alibaba, Minimax, and Moonshot rank among the most downloaded on Hugging Face and OpenRouter because they are cheaper, customizable, and can run on local infrastructure.

Volunteers with STEM degrees will spend one to two years helping integrate American AI into farms, hospitals, and schools, but a Brookings fellow said persuasion alone won't overcome economic realities.

Other news you might like

• OpenAI staff debated alerting Canadian police about violent ChatGPT logs months before a deadly school shootingLINK

• NASA targets March 6 for Artemis 2 launch to take astronauts around the MoonLINK

• Tesla loses bid to toss $243 million verdict in fatal Autopilot crash suitLINK

• Lucid cuts hundreds of workers in latest blow to EV industryLINK

• Wikipedia blacklists Archive.today, starts removing 695,000 archive linksLINK

• Smart glasses in court are a privacy nightmareLINK

• Web scraper sued by Google claims Google is the one scraping the webLINK

• Sam Altman says companies ‘AI washing’ by blaming unrelated layoffs on AILINK

• Apple researchers develop on-device AI agent that interacts with apps for youLINK

• Andrej Karpathy talks about "Claws"LINK

🧰 Trending tools

Rork Max: a no-code platform that builds, monetizes, and publishes iOS apps with integrated RevenueCat billing and analytics for non-developers.LINK

git-lrc: a pre-commit hook that runs AI-powered code reviews on diffs to catch silent bugs, security issues, and unintended changes before they land.LINK

WANotifier: automates WhatsApp marketing workflows including lead capture, customer engagement, and conversions using Meta's official API without additional markup fees.LINK

Prism Videos: creates short-form videos with AI-generated assets, timeline editing, and reusable templates—all in one browser-based platform without downloading files.LINK

Mines.fyi: interactive map visualization displaying all US mines with operator information and site details from MSHA public datasets.LINK

📚 Trending papers & reports

Large language models fail at basic logic: LLMs struggle with simple reasoning tasks like counting objects or following straightforward rules consistently.LINK

Large language models hit accuracy ceiling: adding more computing power and data beyond a certain point yields diminishing returns, with performance gains eventually plateauing completely.LINK

Graphs capture complex group interactions optimally: when modeling how multiple things interact together (not just pairs), standard graph structures can represent any pattern as well as fancier mathematical tools.LINK

Fork, Explore, Commit for AI Agents: borrowing operating system concepts, AI agents can safely test multiple approaches in parallel, then keep only the successful attempts.LINK

Large Language Models Unmask Anonymous Writers: by comparing writing styles across posts, LLMs can identify anonymous authors at scale, threatening privacy for whistleblowers and dissidents online.LINK

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