2026.30: The Copium Wars
The best Stratechery content from the week of July 20, 2026 including Chinese models and frontier futures, what happened to Hugging Face, and the NBA and its second apron bet.
In this week's Stratechery articles and updates, Kimi K3 is highlighted as a highly capable AI model, causing concern among Wall Street and the U.S. government about the United States' position in AI. Despite this, the advantage of frontier labs remains evident. In other news, the controversy surrounding OpenAI's cybersecurity issue on the Hugging Face platform has introduced several terms like "sandboxing" and "the paper clip problem."
This situation has raised questions about alignment fears around large language models (LLMs), with OpenAI possibly having made a mistake. Additionally, the NBA has implemented a new "second apron" salary threshold, effectively acting as a hard salary cap. This change has led to the loss of homegrown stars, limited room for improvement for other teams, and increased fan dissatisfaction.
The article explains the NBA's objectives behind this decision and its implications for the league amidst shrinking local TV money, slowing growth, and heavy reliance on national TV revenue.
Written by urgent.news from Stratechery's reporting — not their text. Machine-written — may contain errors; check the original before relying on it.
