DTNS June 2026 in Review

0:00This episode is brought to you by Capital One. Capital One's tech team isn't just talking about multi-agentic AI. They already deployed one. It's called Chat Concierge and it's simplifying car shopping. Using self-reflection and layered reasoning with live API checks, it doesn't just help buyers find a car they love. It helps schedule a test drive, get pre-approved for financing, and estimate trade in value. Advanced, intuitive, and deployed. That's how they stack. That's technology at Capital One. Hey, it's Paige from Giggly Squad, and I want to let you know that if you want the newest and hottest beauty products, you have to go to Sephora.

0:36I'm obsessed with the One Size Liquid Blotting Paper Spray. It's the first-of-its-kind blotting spray that mattifies for up to eight hours. It's unreal. There's also the Summer Friday Shade Drops SPF 50, which basically lives in my bag at this point. Oh, and the Kayali Eden Plush Pear smells so good. It's sweet, warm, and addictive. like people literally stop me and ask what perfume I'm wearing, which you know I love. So if you want the makeup, skincare, hair, and fragrance products everyone's about to be obsessed with, shop only at Sephora.

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2:32Jenn Cutter: This is the Daily Tech News Month in Review for June 2026. We're going to look back on what the big stories of the month were and try to help each other understand. And this month, we've got developer conferences, plural, because why talk about just one? Price increases and Fable 5. Oh, my. Ah, the fable of Fable 5, which is still a fable as we're recording this. I'm Tom Merritt. I'm Jen Cutter. Let's look back on some of the top stories of June 2026. Now, first of all, we like to ask an LLM every month what it thinks are the big stories of the month so that we can feel better about the superior choices we made.

3:11Jenn Cutter: here's the prompt that I gave, uh, chat GPT. Assume you are picking the topics for DTNS's monthly wrap up of the top tech stories of the month hosted by Tom Merritt and Jen Cutter. As you know, they usually do three big stories and one bonus stories for the patrons. What would you recommend they cover? It's a solid prompt. It's a good prompt. Thank you very much. Uh, it said if I were producing, it said a lot actually, and then it summarized it at the end. So I'm only going to give us the summary. If I were producing the episode, I'd structure it like this. First one, the AI infrastructure era begins.

3:49Jenn Cutter: Government, security, cyber. Two, why AI is suddenly making tech more expensive. Three, the new global AI race, Europe wants independence. And four, the patron bonus, which AI products are actually worth paying for? Which is not a thing we would ever do on the wrap up because that's more of a like product recommendation show. Interestingly, the AI thinks we should talk about AI, Jen. Yeah, that's a can you say AI has an ego? Yeah, it continued. I like this lineup because it avoids being three AI product announcements. Instead, it tells a coherent story. June was the month AI increasingly looked less like a software trend and more like a foundational layer of the global economy.

4:39Jenn Cutter: That's exactly the kind of framing that tends to make DTNS monthly rep-ups stand out. That's not what we would ever do. I guess, like, technically, it's not about specific products, but that is some rules lawyering right there. But also, it could be, it should be about specific products. Like, that's not a problem. That's not a bad thing. Some things that it did not include that we considered were the SpaceX IPO. That was a big financial story this month. It is ancillary to tech. Open AI filing for its IPO and then some leaks coming out that maybe it won't actually schedule it till next year. There was, of course, the Xbox leadership team sharing hard truths ahead of potential layoffs.

5:23Jenn Cutter: That was a big story. Um, uh, there was the five eyes warning about, uh, threats succeeding within months and, and giving some best practices for companies to put in place. Um, AMD resurrecting some, this actually could go in one of our segments on honestly, which is AMD resurrecting old chips, uh, because you know, they could sell them for cheaper. um intel talking about chips for data centers they're making acer swift air 14 a windows alternative the macbook air coming out of computex a lot of good products came out of computex uh those are all stories we considered that chat gpt did not that we did not put in the show so let's start with our first topic developer conferences Honestly, we could do the whole show about developer conferences, right?

6:18Jenn Cutter: You've got the Worldwide Developer Conference where Apple made its play for Siri AI and explained how this is not just Gemini. This is a what sounds kind of like a distilled version of Gemini, but a Gemini developed model that is combined with a Apple's own foundational models that it will run on your device as much as it can. When it can't run on your device, it's using private cloud compute. They had a whole separate session where they explained how private cloud compute can keep things private still. That was just WWDC. We also had NVIDIA GTC at Computex talking about their new CPU and their new platform of laptops that they're going to sell.

7:07Jenn Cutter: Talking, of course, about Vera Rubin. And, you know, so, I mean, just the next data center GPU and NVIDIA moving into Windows PCs, I think, is a huge story on its own. And then we had Microsoft Build, which kind of built, pardon the pun, on the NVIDIA announcements by introducing the Surface RTX Spark DevBox, which uses that CPU that NVIDIA announced. Also launched a bunch of AI-related stuff for its platforms as well. Yeah, developers, developers, developers. Oh, going back to the classics, but for not developers, for people like me, the Apple stuff is definitely a little more immediate, a little more theoretically useful.

7:58I've been tempted, as somebody who has never used Siri from the day it was announced, I have had it disabled on all of my things. I am now tempted to turn it on and use it before the new stuff comes out to see if it does actually improve my life. because like lots of promises. I want to know if it delivers just for average people doing average things.

8:18Jenn Cutter: Yeah. If you're a developer, you can, or honestly, even if you're not a developer, if you want to pay to get a developer account, you can get the developer beta and try it out now. It obviously isn't in its final form yet. It's in a beta. The public beta will be coming later, I'm guessing in the next month or so. And that's when we'll get a lot of people start to talk about it because then you don't have to have a developer account, you can just say, yes, give me the beta. But October or September, probably October, though, is when we'll get it for everybody. So that will be when we can finally judge whether Apple has fixed the perception that it's not good at AI.

8:59Yeah, the things that they have been promising for months, if not, you know, over a year at this point, they finally have to deliver.

9:07Jenn Cutter: I think it's interesting, too, that a month, you know, because this was right at the very beginning of June, a month later, I feel like people have just settled into like, well, Siri AI is okay. Right? Like, I don't hear a lot of Apple's, Apple's got a problem. Apple's not going to be able to survive anymore. But I don't people I don't hear people singing its praises yet. It seems like they hit a base hit, right? They kept the inning going. But you know, they're they're far from winning the game. So you like the NVIDIA stuff. You think that's pretty big for people. I think it's a big step for NVIDIA to get into Windows PCs.

9:48Jenn Cutter: I don't think a lot of people assume that. I think a lot of people assume that NVIDIA would just continue to go after data centers and AI-related stuff. And the Windows PC thing is AI-related because it's making a platform that is better at running AI on your device. But it's also, I think, pointing to the fact that Jensen Huang is very good at understanding that he can't just sit on what they're doing well now. You have to keep developing what they're doing well now and also be moving towards other things. I think those Windows PCs are a very flashy version of that because everybody says, oh, it's a consumer thing.

10:26Jenn Cutter: I could buy that. And even if it's not entirely consumer, It's an enterprise thing. It's a put it on my desktop thing, not put it in a data center thing. On the other hand, what got less press was NVIDIA talking about their physical AI approach and wanting to create platforms for robotics, wanting to make safety a priority in humanoid robotics in the workplace. And that's because there's not a real product there yet. There's not a real business to be had there yet. But NVIDIA is positioned so that when that does take off, they will be able to compete in that marketplace. Well, there is one consumer facing robot thing that I think is making a profit.

11:09And that would be all the videos of the dancing robots freaking out and collapsing.

11:13Jenn Cutter: Yeah, that's not the robots making the money. That's the people filming the robots making money. Someone is making a profit, but it's not necessarily the company's right now. It's not the robot maker. Yeah, not in those cases. All right. Well, that is our first topic. Or first three topics, depending on how you look at it. But hang on, there's more.

11:35This episode is brought to you by Capital One. Capital One's tech team isn't just talking about multi-agentic AI. They already deployed one. It's called Chat Concierge, and it's simplifying car shopping. Using self-reflection and layered reasoning with live API checks, it doesn't just help buyers find a car they love. It helps schedule a test drive, Get pre-approved for financing and estimate trade in value. Advanced, intuitive, and deployed. That's how they stack. That's technology at Capital One. Shipping, billing, admin, payroll, marketing. You're managing all the things. So why waste time sending important documents the old-fashioned way?

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14:31Jenn Cutter: All right, our next topic is also a collective one. I guess when we see LLMs doing these collective topics every month, it starts to have an effect on us. But the price of everything, mostly going up, although I do have a few examples right at the end of June where they came down. um microsoft apple valve uh tell me about it jen we've got everybody making things expensive now what is the biggest side effect of everything being more expensive is the regret i've been seeing across my feeds about like oh man i wish i bought this when it was cheaper i wish i bought this at launch how come my launch ps5 is now worth more well the good news about the xbox is It's not going, the price isn't going up on the Xbox till August 1st.

15:16Jenn Cutter: So hurry. No, same with like, cause the switch price isn't going up until September 1st. So people got to buy their Christmas presents early. And the Apple prices, although they are immediate, Apple raised prices on Macs and iPads and the Apple vision pro you can still find those items at the old price outside of Apple. So if you go to Amazon or you go to Best Buy and they've got the older stock, they're selling it at the older price until they run out of that inventory. Yeah, I was kind of surprised that Apple had bumped up the lowest price laptop because I thought that would be the great way to get those.

15:59They're moving pretty good, but it would be a great way to get those moving and to be like, well, we bumped up the rest of the stuff. But hey, if you want to get into the ecosystem right now, here's still your best effort.

16:09Jenn Cutter: I think that Apple doesn't do loss leaders on hardware, though. But is it a loss leader if they already have an inventory out there? Well, and what this implies is they didn't that that that they they were cutting it close to the bone. And the reason they didn't raise the money on the iPhones, I think, is because they do have that inventory. They they put the orders for iPhones well in advance of when they sell and they stockpile them. I, I, this kind of reveals that maybe the MacBook Neo, uh, was not created, uh, in large numbers in advance of its sales. Good point. Good point. I'm helping a friend of mine buy an iPad.

16:50Like it'll be their first iPad and they were going to get the one with all the bells and whistles. And now they're like, Hey, what's the oldest iPad I can buy? Yeah.

16:58Jenn Cutter: Yeah. It's going to make a lot of people pay more attention to price. Also, when you saw, I mentioned the Acer briefly earlier, when you saw a lot of the Windows machines coming out as Neo competitors, they were usually$100 or more, more than the Neo. So that gave Apple some room to maneuver. Like they're still at price parity with the cheapest Windows versions, you know, and before they were$100 cheaper than most of those. Yeah, that's definitely going to be a consumer preference thing. Do people want to, like if you're already on Windows, there is that friction in switching to the Apple ecosystem and people are going to have to make that call.

17:37But admittedly, the Apple ones are really pretty as usual.

17:42Jenn Cutter: And of course, I'm very curious what you think of the Steam Machine's$1 ,049 price. Shipping started June 29th, but I have seen it compared to a PS5, but twice the price. How are you feeling after having sit with this news for a little bit? Well, the fact that it's over a thousand bucks US makes it really, really hurt in Canada. But I have a few people who got through the wait list and are still buying it. They're like, yeah, I'm going to buy it now. This is going to be worse later. I want this. I want this to sit at my TV and not have to think about it. Even though there was a new machine that kind of got announced like today saying, well, look what we can do for just slightly more expensive and give you more hardware.

18:32but uh when you buy something from valve you have valve behind it you know that there's not going to be any compatibility issues with uh steam os though uh the uh the website kind of disappeared the whole 4k thing saying like 4k out of the box because of the 4k 60 frames per second yeah they were like yeah no it's going to be like 1080 out of the box you can still bump it up doing the settings but that is a thing you have to do but that's not a thing we're promising

18:58Jenn Cutter: anymore. That's a you thing. Yeah, because now that's like, because it's up to developers to basically design for this box to have that setting ready to go. And I think some developers will take advantage once they see the Steam Machine numbers. But how many did Valve make? Because you know, they're going to sell out immediately. Are they selling out a big number or not? All right, that's two of the three or four, if you're a patron. So hold, please, for the next topic.

19:30This episode is brought to you by Capital One. Capital One's tech team isn't just talking about multi-agentic AI. They already deployed one. It's called Chat Concierge and it's simplifying car shopping. Using self-reflection and layered reasoning with live API checks, it doesn't just help buyers find a car they love. It helps schedule a test drive, get pre-approved for financing, and estimate trade in value. Advanced, intuitive, and deployed. That's how they stack. That's technology at Capital One.

20:29Jenn Cutter: As we mentioned, Anthropic released Fable 5 and then pulled Fable 5 all in the course of a few days. The short version of what happened is Mythos was the too dangerous for the public version of a model that Anthropic made because it was really good at finding vulnerabilities. And that's an important thing to do to secure your software, but also something people could use for ill. So Mythos was restricted, but Anthropic released Fable 5 because it had guardrails on it so that if you tried to get it to do security stuff, it would fall back to Opus, the previous model, which was not in any way restricted, or it would just tell you it couldn't do it.

21:17Jenn Cutter: Uh, however, within a few days of release, Amazon's researchers did what is called a jailbreak, uh, where they were able to get fable five to address a security vulnerability, uh, which it shouldn't have done. It should have either failed over to Opus or it should have refused to do it. Like I said, there's a lot of debate over whether it's really a jailbreak, because what they did was say, fix this software. And in the course of fixing it, it found a vulnerability and fixed it. And Amazon said, technically, it shouldn't have found the vulnerability and fixed it. It should have failed over to Opus or stopped.

21:58Jenn Cutter: So they went to Anthropic. Anthropic said, yeah, technically, you're right. But that's something you could do with Opus anyway. So it kind of doesn't matter if they fail over to Opus. you would have got the same result. We don't think it's a big deal. Amazon, because they're a partner with cybersecurity officials in the U.S. government, disclosed their finding there. And the U.S. government said, I don't know. I don't think I like that. Called Anthropic said, hey, this is a problem. Anthropic said, nah, it's not a problem. And the U.S. government experts did not like that. It rose into some cabinet level stuff, not all the way to the president, but secretary of treasury, secretary of commerce.

22:35Jenn Cutter: And they got on the phone. There was a lot made of the fact that they asked Dario Amode to come to the phone and it took him an hour to get back to them. It was funny. The U.S. government literally said it took him an hour to get back. And the anthropic statement was, we got back to them in only an hour. So right from the start, you knew, OK, these folks are not communicating well with each other. The U.S. Department of Commerce issued a ruling saying that Fable 5 could not be made accessible to foreign nationals. Anthropic looked at that and said, well, it's going to be really difficult to figure out who's a foreign national and who isn't, especially when people inside Anthropic are foreign nationals.

23:18Jenn Cutter: So we're just going to block it for everybody. So Fable 5 has not been available since. It's been more than a couple of weeks where folks from Anthropic have been talking to the US government about what they need to do to be able to make Fable 5 available to everybody again. And actually, by the time you listen to this, that may be resolved. But it's something throughout the month of June that dragged on, and Fable 5 was not made available to anyone. Meanwhile, right at the end of the month, OpenAI released a memo to its staff saying that GPT 5.6, the next version of the model, would be restricted to a list of customers who they felt were responsibly able to use it.

24:02Jenn Cutter: They had agreed on the list of customers with the U.S. government. And after what they hoped were several weeks, they would be able to release 5.6 to everybody else. So there is now a precedent for you need to run this by the U.S. government before you release the new version of your foundational model. do you feel like it's a little bit of a uh shocked pikachu reaction in that preceding this like like months of of warnings from a company of like oh like this is going to be able to do like so much stuff do all these things maybe we should discuss regulation and now that some soft slash hard regulation is in progress is this really a surprise to like consumers who are like looking at this from afar who aren't necessarily using this and it's being like isn't this kind of what you asked for?

24:50Jenn Cutter: Yeah. I think there's a lot of schadenfreude around Anthropic, no matter what you think of him, to say, well, you did tell everyone it was too dangerous for everyone to use, right? You kind of brought this on yourself. I tend to think that while that probably plays a part, I don't want to discount it entirely. It's not the main motivation to this. I think what's going on is there was also the story that Anthropic had given access to Mythos, the more powerful version, to SK Hynix, the South Korean. Was it SK Hynix or SK Telecom? I think it was SK Telecom, actually, because SK Hynix is the chip maker.

25:28Jenn Cutter: They gave it to SK Telecom, a South Korean company, but a company that has Chinese clients. And they didn't clear that access with the United States before they gave it. The United States said, no, I don't think they should have it. They have Chinese clients. We're being extra careful here. And so they pulled the access for SK Telecom. I think that's what's going on is the U.S. is we're being extra careful here. And Anthropic is, weirdly, for the people who are always talking about you need to be extra careful going like, yeah, but that's too careful. That's not a problem. And I really think it is just two different ways of talking, two different cultures.

26:05Jenn Cutter: The CEO of Anthropic, Dario Modi, is famously prickly and difficult to get along with if you're not agreeing with him on something. And I think that's been part of it. He has not been involved in any of the talks since Fable 5 was pulled. And apparently they have been going well, although they can't have been going that well, or we would have added agreement faster. But I really do think it has to do with, we want you to follow, it's very government, right? We want you to follow these procedures. And Anthropic going like, no, we're very safe. Our procedures are the best. We don't need to follow different ones uh this kind of makes me think of the five eyes stuff five eyes saying like oh ai attacks and things and wouldn't you want your partners especially in that kind of partnership to have access to the best tools so because this is worldwide attacks are worldwide they're coming in from worldwide going out from worldwide wouldn't you want your people to have the things wouldn't you want the people supplying chips to your government effectively having this But there's no good way to silo that from the rest of their partners, because once you have the tool, you have the tool.

27:14Jenn Cutter: Again, it's very bureaucratic thinking to say the best way to keep people from misusing a tool is not to let them have the tool. Right. And it's very technology culture to say, let everybody use the tool because the only way because the bad guys will get it anyway. and the only way to assure the good guys stay ahead of the bad guys is to let them use the tool, which is kind of the argument you're making. Like, isn't it better to have your partners have access to this? So I think it is a bit of a culture clash. I think that is the root of this dispute. So what did everyone at home right now listening think were the biggest stories of the month?

27:56Do you think we're closed? Do you think we missed something? Please tell us at feedback at dailytechnewshow.com. Yes.

28:03Jenn Cutter: Big thanks to you listening or watching right now for being along for Daily Tech News Show. You are the folks who keep us in business by becoming a patron at patreon.com slash DTNS. And in fact, patrons stick around. We've got one more story for you about smart glasses. The DTNS family of podcasts. Helping each other understand. Diamond Club hopes you have enjoyed this program.

28:34This episode is brought to you by Capital One. Capital One's tech team isn't just talking about multi-agentic AI. They already deployed one. It's called Chat Concierge, and it's simplifying car shopping. Using self-reflection and layered reasoning with live API checks, it doesn't just help buyers find a car they love. It helps schedule a test drive, get pre-approved for financing, and estimate trade-in value. Advanced, intuitive, and deployed. That's how they stack. That's technology at Capital One.

29:31Thank you.