Hey friend. It's Thursday, December 11, 2025
The Compute Arms Race: Microsoft's massive investment in India signals a global land grab for AI infrastructure, extending the compute war beyond traditional data centers.
The Agentic Standard: Major AI players are collaborating to standardize agent development, attempting to impose order on a chaotic, rapidly evolving ecosystem.
The Geopolitical Chip Game: Reports of smuggled Blackwell GPUs highlight the futility of export controls and the relentless pursuit of advanced compute, regardless of sanctions.
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Must Know
Anthropic, Block, and OpenAI have formed the Agentic AI Foundation under the Linux Foundation to steward open, vendor-neutral standards for AI agents.
Backed by major tech companies, this initiative aims to accelerate the development and interoperability of AI agents by establishing common protocols and best practices. The goal is to prevent fragmentation and foster a robust, secure ecosystem.
The Alpha: This collaboration is a preemptive strike against a fragmented agentic future. By establishing vendor-neutral standards, these giants aim to control the foundational layer of agent development, much like Kubernetes standardized container orchestration. This move could accelerate enterprise adoption but also centralize power, making it harder for smaller players to innovate outside the established framework. The stakes are now clear: control the standards, control the future of agents.
Bloomberg reports DeepSeek allegedly trained a new AI model using banned Nvidia Blackwell GPUs, reportedly smuggled into China via intermediaries to circumvent US sanctions.
This incident highlights the intense global competition for advanced AI hardware and the challenges of enforcing export controls. The alleged use of Blackwell chips suggests a persistent demand for cutting-edge compute in China, despite geopolitical restrictions.
The Alpha: This is a direct challenge to the efficacy of US export controls, exposing the porous nature of global supply chains when demand is high enough. The alleged smuggling indicates that China's pursuit of frontier AI will bypass any barrier, ensuring a parallel, high-performance AI ecosystem. This creates a long-term strategic dilemma for Nvidia, balancing market access with compliance. The geopolitical friction will only intensify.
Quote of the Day
The primary motivation [for SpaceX IPO] is building space data centers.
🤖 The Agentic Enterprise
Anthropic and Accenture's multi-year partnership to scale Claude and Claude Code across enterprises, training 30,000 professionals, signals a push for AI adoption in regulated industries.
Anthropic and Accenture's multi-year partnership to scale Claude and Claude Code across enterprises, training 30,000 professionals, signals a push for AI adoption in regulated industries. [Link]
A study revealed Microsoft 365 Copilot is vulnerable to zero-click prompt injection via crafted email, exposing a new class of AI agent vulnerabilities that could lead to silent internal data leaks. [Link]
LangSmith Agent Builder entering public beta enables rapid prototyping and deployment of production-ready AI agents in under 5 minutes, accelerating developer adoption of agentic workflows. [Link]
Sierra Platform reported a massive surge in AI agent volume during Black Friday, handling 74% for clothing retailers and 43% for food delivery, demonstrating agent scalability in high-demand scenarios. [Link]
Adobe integrated Photoshop, Express, and Acrobat into ChatGPT, allowing users to edit visuals and manage documents with plain language commands, streamlining creative workflows. [Link]
🌏 The Compute & Geopolitics
China included domestic AI chips on its official procurement list for the first time, signaling a strategic push for technological self-sufficiency and reduced reliance on foreign suppliers. [Link]
China is holding emergency meetings with tech companies to discuss purchasing Nvidia's H200 chips, reflecting persistent demand for advanced AI hardware despite U.S. restrictions. [Link]
US export controls on AI chips to China have evolved into a "metered access and a cut" model, with the US government reportedly receiving a 25% revenue share for Nvidia H200 sales to approved customers. [Link]
Starcloud successfully trained the first LLM on an Nvidia H100 GPU in orbit, planning a 5GW orbital platform for AI data centers to achieve 10x lower energy costs and emissions. [Link]
Elon Musk confirmed SpaceX IPO reports, stating the primary motivation is building space data centers, projecting a $1.5 trillion valuation for the company next year. [Link]
🧠 Model Innovation & Capabilities
Mistral AI launched Devstral 2, a 123B open-source coding model that rivals larger models like DeepSeek V3.2 on SWE-bench with 5x less compute. [Link]
Nomos 1, a 30B open-source model, scored an impressive 87/120 on the Putnam mathematical competition, demonstrating significant advanced mathematical reasoning capabilities. [Link]
Macaron AI's Mind Lab achieved a new benchmark for trillion-parameter Reinforcement Learning at roughly 10% of normal GPU cost by fine-tuning small LoRA adapters based on real user experience. [Link]
NVIDIA's Alpamayo-R1, a vision-language-action model, uses "Chain of Causation" reasoning to cut off-road events by 35%, improving autonomous system safety. [Link]
Resemble AI launched DETECT-3B Omni, a 3-billion-parameter model for multimodal deepfake detection across voice, images, and video, offering production-grade defense. [Link]
🔬 Research Corner
CrossAgent (2512.09706) introduces a unified agentic model that masters heterogeneous action spaces and autonomously selects the most effective interface, enabling more adaptable and efficient AI agents in dynamic environments. [Link]
ARTEMIS (2512.09882), a multi-agent framework, placed second overall in a real-world penetration test against human cybersecurity professionals, discovering 9 valid vulnerabilities and outperforming 9 of 10 humans. [Link]
O-Mem (2511.13593) proposes a novel memory framework based on active user profiling that dynamically extracts and updates user characteristics, achieving 51.67% on LoCoMo and 62.99% on PERSONAMEM for personalized, long-horizon agents. [Link]
Have a tip or a story we should cover? Send it our way. Cheers, Teng Yan. See you tomorrow.