Meta engineer says safety was an afterthought; GOP warns on Ohio data centers

Good morning.

Three stories today about a job someone insists belongs to somebody else.

Arturo Béjar told an Oakland jury that Meta's break reminders had to be switched on by the user, which he compared to turning on the air bag every time you get into the car.

Senate Republicans sent AI companies a private memo saying campaigns cannot fix the toxic brand of an entire segment of the economy. That repair is the industry's job.

And Claude Code built a rough cut in DaVinci Resolve in under six minutes, then left the bad seams and the misplaced silence markers to the editor.

Stay curious,

Marcus Schuler

Arturo Béjar told an Oakland jury that Mark Zuckerberg built a culture at Meta where growth and engagement outranked child safety.

Béjar was a Facebook engineering director from 2009 to 2015 and an independent Instagram well-being consultant from 2019 to 2021. He estimated he briefed or interacted with Zuckerberg at least 100 times. Performance reviews and pay for staff on user-facing products emphasized user numbers and time spent.

He called Instagram's Take a Break prompt "a feature that's designed to fail." Judge Yvonne Gonzalez Rogers has narrowed the case to Meta's own statements about addictiveness, not content posted by users.

Why This Matters:

• Platform designers now face a jury weighing whether a safety control counts at all when the user has to switch it on.
• The narrowed case puts company claims about addictiveness, rather than user content, at the center of the liability question.

Senate Republicans told AI companies that repairing how voters see data centers is the industry's job, not the party's.

The August 18 memo, "Ohio Data Center Risk," says Sherrod Brown has made the facilities his "de facto opponent" against Sen. Jon Husted, and that campaigns "can not fix the toxic brand of an entire segment of the economy." Public polling puts Brown ahead 53 to 45 and names inflation first, with no data-center figure at all.

WIRED reverse-engineers Flock Safety's new police AI and shows how it turns a license-plate network into a tool for finding people by movement patterns.

Reporters reconstructed OS Investigate from more than 450 files that Flock's login pages served to visitors as of August 19, 2026, exposing links among camera scans, police records, and commercial identity databases. Of the 69 prewritten prompts WIRED documented that day, 14 require no plate, name, or physical description before a search by place, time, and behavior.

• Nvidia shipped about 10,000 H200 processors each to ByteDance and Tencent, though Beijing has told both buyers to keep the hardware in Hong Kong.
• Anthropic booked $11.6 billion in second-quarter revenue against OpenAI's $6.7 billion, turning a small operating profit while OpenAI's operating loss widened to $12.3 billion.
• Marvell granted Google a warrant on 58.97 million shares worth $12.2 billion, vesting in 240 tranches, one for every $500 million Google spends on its custom chips.
• Nebius is seeking $4.5 billion in convertible debt for data centers and GPUs, after $5.66 billion of second-quarter infrastructure spending.
• Oracle Health added automated coding, dictation and chart review to its clinical AI agent, available now to U.S. health systems.
• Amazon dropped the $19.99 monthly Alexa+ requirement for eligible U.S. Fire TV owners, with no separate app and no Prime membership needed.

Catch silent scope changes before kickoff. Kickoff notes often carry promises that never entered the signed statement of work. This check finds those additions before they become unpaid work or a missed deadline.

Your raw input: the signed statement of work, the latest kickoff notes, and one sentence naming the project owner.

The prompt:

Why this works: the prompt forces a document comparison instead of a summary. Quotations make each finding auditable, and the labels preserve uncertainty rather than resolving it for you.

What to use: Claude handles long agreements and meeting notes well. ChatGPT is a good fallback for shorter documents.

deepsec turns coding agents loose on a whole codebase to hunt vulnerabilities, rather than reviewing a pull-request diff the way most scanners do. Vercel Labs open-sourced it under Apache 2.0, and it carried 7,754 stars on August 18.

It is for security engineers who want a measured baseline for agent-driven code review instead of a vendor claim.

The number to read before you install it is the project's own benchmark: the best model found 30.7 percent of known vulnerabilities, false positives ran 10 to 20 percent, and 20 of 25 runs scored under 20 percent recall. A defender needs most of what is there. Vercel published the ceiling anyway, which is the useful part.

Credit: Midjourney

Prompt: A macro photograph of a surreal red caterpillar on a green leaf, its glossy segments trailing behind an aluminum soda can top for a head, complete with a silver pull tab, crawling across a textured dark green leaf wet with small droplets of water

Oklo issued 23.1 million shares in the first half of 2026 at an average of $81.44, raising $1.85 billion net to build its first Aurora power reactor. The stock now trades near $41 against an October 2025 peak of $193.84. (Implicator, August 19, 2026)

Our take: There is a version of this where the number comes first. You price the plant, then ask the market to fund it. Oklo ran the order backwards. Chief Financial Officer Craig Bealmear explained that full guidance is unavailable because the company is "still narrowing in on what total cost for the project is going to be" with its contractor. An at-the-market program does not require that answer. It requires buyers.

The buyers turned up at $81.44 and are now sitting at $41. Aurora-INL is still an excavation site aiming at 2028, and the reactor that did reach criticality this month is a small isotope test unit, not a power plant. Meta is waiting on roughly sixteen more.

Marcus Schuler

San Francisco

Editor-in-Chief and founder of Implicator.ai. Former ARD correspondent and senior broadcast journalist with 10+ years covering tech. Writes daily briefings on policy and market developments. Based in San Francisco. E-mail: editor@implicator.ai