Mercor got hacked, NASA went back to the moon, and Anthropic just dropped $400 million on a nine-person biotech startup. There's a lot to talk about.
Maya, Anika, and Priya kick things off with the supply chain attacks that have been all over the news. A North Korean state actor called Team PCP compromised Trivy, an open source security scanner, which then cascaded into LiteLLM and Checkmarx, ultimately leading to 4TB of Mercor's data getting leaked, including biometric data and confidential training projects tied to OpenAI and Meta. They break down how the attack chain actually worked and how Mercor got their data back. They also debrief the future of cyber and why pinning your dependencies matters more than ever. They also look at who's building defenses in this space: Chainguard ($3.5B valuation), Socket (who detected the Axios attack in 6 minutes), and Cogent Security.
Then they get into Artemis II, NASA's first crewed mission beyond low Earth orbit in 53 years. The real question is why now, and the answer is mostly China, who landed on the far side of the moon in 2019 and says they'll reach the south pole by 2028. They break down the $100 billion the US has spent so far, the heat shield failure that NASA quietly buried for three years, and how SpaceX and Blue Origin ended up fighting over lunar contracts. They also get into the Artemis Accords, why $1.5 trillion in lunar resources has turned the moon into a geopolitical chess match.
Finally, the Get the Check segment covers Coefficient Bio, a nine-person team out of Genentech that got acquired by Anthropic for $400 million after just eight months. They get into how transformers apply to protein structure prediction, what AlphaFold unlocked, how the founders' "lab in the loop" paper cut drug discovery timelines by 70%, and what this signals about Anthropic building out a life sciences group. They also look at Chai Discovery (whose model gets 86% of designs to preclinical candidate selection) and Lila Sciences ($235M Series A), plus the Nvidia and Eli Lilly billion-dollar partnership.
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00:00 TBPN's rumored $125M acquisition by OpenAI
04:16 Supply chain attacks 101
10:42 How Mercor got hacked
20:33 Who's building cyber defense
23:03 Artemis II: back to the moon after 53 years
26:26 Why we are going to the moon (hint: China)
28:28 NASA's heat shield cover-up
31:34 $1.5T in lunar resources
33:40 Would we go to space
35:49 Coefficient Bio's $400M exit to Anthropic
36:50 How AI is changing drug discovery
41:46 Lab in the loop
44:34 Predicting a bio talent gold rush
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