Another night has passed, and the usual major Ukrainian drone attacks on Russian oil and facilities and tankers have occurred, this time impacting at least three Russian regions, authorities said Thursday. Strikes hit oil depots in the Stavropol and Tver regions, as well as an oil pumping station in the republic of Bashkortostan and a marine loading terminal in the Rostov region - along with other reported impacts, Amsterdam-based Moscow Times reports.
During this week's NATO summit, Ukraine's President Zelensky was touting his country's drone capabilities as among the best in the world, and that now, essentially no place is safe in Russia.
Telegram/Moscow Times: Fire at an oil depot in the central Tver region.This was perhaps on display Monday, when long-range drones apparently set a new distance record in striking a sprawling oil refinery in the city of Omsk in western Siberia
"Today, our long-range sanctions reached the oil refinery in Omsk – nearly 2,500 kilometers from Ukraine," Zelensky had announced in a nightly address soon after the attack.
"Upgraded Fire Point drones have put Siberia within reach of Ukrainian precision. This is a significant blow to Russia’s oil economy and an important achievement for the Armed Forces of Ukraine," Zelensky said.
The messaging from NATO leaders gathered in Ankara had clearly been one of support. For example, President Trump had commented, "It's an escalation but it’s also an escalation that can help lead to an end [of the war]."
Trump also said, "We have a lot of pressure on President Putin. I don’t think he likes what’s going on." He added: "But I talked to President Putin a lot. He wants to end the war."
Following these developments, the Kremlin is freshly warning Western strategists to 'stop and think' before leading the world to the brink of disaster by confronting nuclear-armed Russia.
Russian Foreign Ministry spokeswoman Maria Zakharova stated Thursday, "European elites are positioning themselves as leaders in the confrontation between the 'collective West' and our country," Zakharova said.
The Russians obviously knew Trump approved giving Ukraine targeting intel for deep strikes on Ru energy. Russia answered it this year by providing Iran targeting intel on US bases, radars & infrastructure. Iran defeated the US. Quite a brilliant tradeoff.https://t.co/X7vfRaExNO
— Mark Ames (@MarkAmesExiled) July 8, 2026"They likely don't realize that all this entails not only creating threats and problems for Russia, but also a significant depletion of resources and the creation of hotbeds of military tension within Europe itself," she added.
She also underscored how pursuing peace with Russia was glaringly absent NATO proceedings at the Turkey summit. "A constructive agenda remains a low priority for NATO," the Kremlin spokesperson continued.
"It's a shame that if NATO strategists had stopped and reflected, they might not have made such irresponsible decisions that could lead to disaster not only for the alliance, but for the entire world," she said.
According to more of her comments via English-language state publications:
The Russian spokeswoman also took aim at NATO's pledge to provide $80 billion in military aid to Ukraine in 2027, while ignoring mounting socio-economic problems across the continent. She accused the alliance of treating Ukrainians as "expendable material for their geopolitical ambitions.""In fact, the current European elites are positioning themselves for leadership positions in the confrontation with our country," she stated.
Some European officials actually voiced something similar, but they remain in a tiny minority:
Czech Prime Minister Andrej Babiš:
Everyone is talking about war, everyone is talking about rearmament, and yesterday I didn't hear the word "peace" even once. pic.twitter.com/KNfyVDzE6A
Prominent Russian writer and political philosopher Alexander Dugin has also commented, "The summit of NATO is a clear sign of all spectrum escalation. The growth of Russophobia and new phase of war against Iran."
Indeed both the Ukraine and Iran conflict theatres are growing hotter once again, and there's simultaneous escalation. Dugin has also warned that the "MoU is over. The new phase of the war begins. The escalation with Russia is going to grow."
Tyler Durden Thu, 07/09/2026 - 19:40Shortly after a leaked Meta memo revealed the company was planning on putting an AI chip into production in September as it looks to double computing capacity to 14Gigawatts, the company also unveiled a version of its most advanced artificial intelligence model, Muse Spark 1.1, that includes a new paid tier for developers, marking the first time Meta has charged businesses for access to its models and providing a new revenue stream. It’ll be "among the most affordable options" on the market, Zuckerberg said in a Bloomberg interview ahead of the release.
“Since this is not an open source model, this is I think the first time that we’re doing a real serious API,” Zuckerberg said, referring to the application programming interface used to access Meta’s AI. “And the pricing is going to be very aggressive and attractive” he added indicating that Meta hopes to capture market share by undercutting its competitors, offering the new model at 25% of the cost of top models from OpenAI and Anthropic.
The new model’s biggest improvement is in its agentic capabilities, the Meta CEO told Bloomberg, and according to benchmarks the model does indeed appear to be in line with the competition.
He hopes to piggyback on the latest craze in AI development this year, which a month ago saw Goldman forecast that agentic AI use will lead to a massive 120 quadrillion monthly tokens being used by 2030.
Agents are the big theme of AI this year, with the label applied to systems that can complete multistep tasks on behalf of a user. Zuckerberg described Muse Spark 1.1 as having “state-of-the-art or very close to it” agentic reasoning and tool use. The model is also greatly improved when it comes to coding and Meta employees are using it internally to build products and features for various apps, he added.
Meta will also introduce a new Meta Model API system, which will be used to collect fees from developers. Its API pricing is roughly 25% of the cost advertised by other top models from OpenAI and Anthropic, according to Bloomberg. Developers will be able to use Meta’s model for free, but only up to a point; they’ll be required to pay for access after reaching a certain token threshold, Zuckerberg said.
Which means that legacy frontier models will now have to worry about domestic cheap alternatives, especially after xAI also released an agentic and coding model yesterday which will have to grab market share, in addition to much cheaper Chinese models.
“The pricing from some of the other labs is very extreme and has very high margins,” Zuckerberg said, underscoring that his strategy is to get Meta’s technology in front of as many people as possible. “We think that there’s a real ability to be able to offer frontier or very high-level intelligence at a much more affordable cost.”
Zuckerberg, 42, is spending aggressively to keep pace with rivals like OpenAI and Alphabet in a race to achieve what he calls superintelligence, or AI that can perform tasks better than humans. Meta has committed hundreds of billions of dollars to building the infrastructure necessary to develop superintelligence, including data centers and expensive AI chips. The company announced a new $10 billion data center investment in Canada as well as a new image-generation model just this week.
Yet despite Meta’s massive investment spending, its models have not historically tested at the same level as those from Anthropic, OpenAI or Google. But Muse Spark 1.1 is more competitive, Zuckerberg said, and tested better than Google’s Gemini model in several categories related to agents, coding and multimodal capabilities.
“That is a pretty interesting milestone because I think this may be the first time, at least that I can remember, that Meta’s models are better than all of the Google models,” he said, although it remains to be seen if users/Wall Street agree.
Zuckerberg’s commitment to the AI race has led to a series of extreme shifts in strategy and resources over the past year. Following a disappointing model launch in the spring of 2025, Zuckerberg became personally involved in rebuilding Meta’s AI lab, which included hiring Scale AI’s Alexandr Wang to lead the new unit, and eventually, significant layoffs and several internal reorganizations.
Once fully committed to building open source AI models that are available for free to outside developers, Meta has also pivoted toward prioritizing closed models that it can charge for — like Muse Spark 1.1 — which required essentially rebuilding the technologies from scratch.
Zuckerberg said he’s pleased with how the lab is progressing, although it's not like he would openly admit the alternative.
“We’re generally doing better than we expected,” Zuckerberg said. He acknowledged that Meta is still trailing some of the larger AI labs, including Anthropic and OpenAI, but said that the company has another new model coming, codenamed Watermelon, that he believes can help Meta “push this maximum frontier of intelligence.” He declined to share details on Watermelon’s release timeline, saying that the focus is on quality.
Investing in a frontier model - or AI technology that moves the industry forward with new capabilities and features - is an expensive endeavor. But Zuckerberg believes it’s worth the investment from Meta given his mission: To build personal agents that everyone in the world can use.
Which begs the question, posed earlier By Vital Knoweldge, who pointed out that just over the past 24 hours wee have seen "new frontier models from Meta (Muse Spark 1.1), SpaceX (Grok 4.5), and OpenAI (GPT 5.6), and asked "Seems like differences are fairly marginal. Does the world really need all these?"
To Zuck the answer is, of course, yes: after all he has to justify the hundreds of billions he plans to sink into the commoditization of AI. Then again, Zuckerberg does not believe that the technology will ultimately become a commodity (narrator: it will) that is, that all of the various AI models will essentially do the same thing and be more or less indiscernible from one another. He pointed to Mythos, the latest model from Anthropic, which raised national security concerns in the US, as an example of how companies are already gatekeeping aspects of the technology instead of sharing it widely.
The truth is that Zuck really has no choice: Meta is projecting record capital expenditures for 2026, in addition to spending billions on AI talent to build out its Meta Superintelligence Labs, and has pledged hundreds of billions more to infrastructure projects. Should Zuck capitulate on building a frontier model the company will be relegated to the neocloud cloud, with excess capacity to spare (which is what sent the stock surging last week), and rerate appropriately after the initial move higher. Alternatively, it must keep spending in hopes to eventually show some return on the hundreds of billions in investment.
Critics have increasingly questioned whether the pivot has paid off. One among them is Apollo chief economist Torsten Slok who in a note overnight wrotes that consensus expects free cash flow for the hyperscalers to more than double over the coming years.
But what if the payoff takes longer than consensus assumes, Slok asks echoing a question that has plagued the AI industry since the summer of 2024? That question is particularly pressing given that token prices continue to decline and Chinese models are gaining ground, both in their share of the world's most-used models and in token usage, where they now lead their US counterparts among the top 20 models.
PIggybacking on what we said a few weeks ago (see "Answering The "Trillion Dollar Question": Are China's AI Models A Better Value Than US Models"), Slok says that if Chinese models keep gaining and token prices keep falling, the hyperscaler cash flows expected may prove too optimistic.
What are the consequences if the AI payoff comes slower than expected in the first chart?
Cash flows and earnings disappoint: the projected free cash flow surge slips later while committed capex and heavy depreciation hit on schedule, squeezing margins and marking down the forecast in the first chart.
A Mag 7 sell-off that takes the market with it: equity prices built on a fast payoff re-rate, and because the Magnificent 7 now account for so much of the indices, the pain can't stay contained, it spreads to chips, power, data centers and the S&P 500 as a whole.
Balance sheets stretch and credit risk rises: with internal cash unable to cover spending, hyperscalers lean further on debt, raising leverage and inviting possible ratings downgrades if profits lag.
All that is true, and is based on just growing Chinese competition. Now add various "new" domestic entrants such as xAI and Meta as aspirational frontier model leaders, which will inevitably spark an even more furious price war, and suddenly the return calculation for both stock and bond investors becomes much uglier.
Tyler Durden Thu, 07/09/2026 - 19:35Authored by Neetika Walter via Interesting Engineering,
Mach Industries has won a Defense Innovation Unit (DIU) contract to develop a long-range unmanned aircraft designed to launch from austere locations and ships without large flight decks.
Atlas drone Mach IndustriesThe aircraft, called Atlas, is being developed for the DIU's Runway Independent Maritime Expeditionary Strike (RIMES) program. Mach Industries will serve as the aircraft integrator, working with propulsion company Whisper Aero.
According to the solicitation, the Department of the Navy is seeking an unmanned aerial system capable of conducting long-range strikes while operating from expeditionary sites with minimal infrastructure or from ships that lack conventional runways.
Mach said Atlas is designed to meet those requirements with a hybrid-electric propulsion system, runway-independent operations, a 1,000-pound payload capacity, and a range of 1,400 nautical miles.
Built For Austere OperationsThe aircraft combines Mach Industries' platform development capabilities with Whisper Aero's JetFoil propulsion technology.
Unlike conventional fixed-wing aircraft that require runways, Atlas is being designed to operate from unimproved landing zones while retaining the control characteristics of a fixed-wing platform. The companies say the approach could give military units greater flexibility in contested environments where traditional airfields may be unavailable or vulnerable.
Excited to announce Atlas, our VTOL strike and logistics aircraft for the Navy. pic.twitter.com/fvbLWujnVN
— Mach Industries (@Mach_Industries) June 16, 2026The aircraft is also intended to support distributed operations, a growing focus for the U.S. military as it prepares for conflicts in which logistics networks could come under attack.
In recent testimony before the House Armed Services Committee, Under Secretary of Defense for Research and Engineering Emil Michael identified contested logistics as one of the Pentagon's critical technology priorities. The challenge centers on sustaining military operations when transportation routes, supply chains, and support infrastructure are disrupted.
Mach says Atlas addresses that challenge by reducing infrastructure requirements for launch and recovery while simplifying maintenance through a highly redundant propulsion architecture and a lower part count.
"Mach's speed to prototype and production, coupled with Whisper Aero's novel aerodynamics and propulsion makes Atlas a revolutionary air mobility platform," said Nathan Diller, President and Chief Strategy Officer at Mach Industries.
Quiet Propulsion AdvantageA key feature of the aircraft is Whisper Aero's JetFoil technology, which the company says improves efficiency while reducing acoustic signatures.
The system is designed to generate lift and thrust more efficiently than traditional approaches, helping extend range while allowing operations from confined locations. Lower noise levels could also make the aircraft more difficult to detect during missions.
"We developed JetFoil to propel the next generation of conventional, short, and vertical takeoff and landing aircraft silently and efficiently," said Mark Moore, CEO of Whisper Aero.
According to Moore, the technology allows Atlas to meet RIMES requirements while operating from smaller naval vessels. "With JetFoil, Atlas can effectively meet the needs of the RIMES mission to operate even from destroyer class vessels."
The award adds to Mach Industries' expanding defense portfolio. Founded in 2023, the company says it is currently flying five different platforms and has manufactured more than 250 aircraft. Over the past two months, it has also conducted flight operations in four countries under complex electromagnetic conditions.
If successful, Atlas could provide the Navy and joint force with a long-range strike platform capable of operating from locations where traditional aircraft cannot, while reducing dependence on large runways and established air bases.
Tyler Durden Thu, 07/09/2026 - 19:15