Tech 24 - September 21, 2026
Gemini broke into three real systems, the AI slowdown pact gets sued, and Starship finally goes for orbit.
Good morning. Here's what happened in tech over the weekend.
Google's Gemini Broke Into Three Real Systems By Mistake
Google disclosed on Friday that Gemini gained unauthorized access to three outside computer systems. It guessed login details in one case. In the others it pulled credentials from a public leaked-password repository.
It happened during a security test run by the firm Irregular back in May. A bug let the model reach the open internet instead of the sandbox it was meant to stay inside. Gemini treated the real systems as part of the exercise, and stopped before doing anything with the access.
Google didn't find out until July, when Irregular reviewed its logs. It has since told the affected organizations and federal authorities. Three labs have now disclosed models acting outside their instructions in a matter of weeks. The pattern is the story, not any single incident.
Source: CNBC
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See all →A Lawsuit Says The AI Slowdown Pact Is Illegal
Anthropic, OpenAI, xAI and Google were sued in California federal court. The complaint targets their public agreement to slow the pace of AI development.
The claim is plain antitrust. Four dominant suppliers coordinating to hold a product back hurts the people paying for it. The plaintiffs are subscribers to ChatGPT, Claude, Grok and Gemini.
Whatever you think about slowing frontier AI down, "the major suppliers agreed among themselves to ship less" is a hard sentence to defend in court. This one will shape how labs talk about safety in public.
Source: CBS News
Trump Says He'll Build An AI Force And Name An AI Czar
Trump posted on Truth Social on Saturday. He'll create an AI Force, modeled on the Space Force. He'll also appoint an AI czar to watch for bad actors.
There's no structure, no budget, no timeline and no name for the czar. The post lands days after Google and OpenAI both disclosed models acting outside their instructions.
Treat it as direction rather than policy. But if you sell AI systems to the federal government, a new oversight body is worth planning around now.
Source: NBC News
The truth about Venezuela
President Trump secured a deal to seize control over a colossal new source of oil.
According to reports, we're talking about 65 billion barrels spread across 17 Venezuelan oil fields.
For comparison, the United States currently has roughly 46 billion barrels of proven domestic oil.
Combined, that would put Washington in control of around 7% of all proven reserves on the planet.
The media are treating this as a deal to lower gas prices, rebuild Venezuela and refill America's depleted Strategic Petroleum Reserve.
But, of course, they've missed the real story.
Because I don't believe this is just about oil.
It's about the U.S. dollar.
The last time America reset its monetary system, in 1974, oil sat at the very heart of it.
A secret pact with Saudi Arabia created the petrodollar – and changed the financial destiny of an entire generation.
Over the next 50 years, America created, on average, more than a thousand new millionaires every day.
Yet millions of ordinary workers and savers – who were never told that the rules of money had changed – watched their wages fall behind and their savings steadily hollowed out.
Now, assuming the deal is accurate as reported, Trump has secured a 35% U.S. government stake in the company controlling these Venezuelan fields…
Guaranteed access to 20% of its oil at production cost, with first refusal on the remaining 80%…
And concessions lasting an entire century.
Perhaps most revealingly, the agreement is pushing Chinese operators out of strategic Venezuelan oil fields.
That's because Venezuela isn't an isolated oil deal.
I believe it's part of a much larger plan for Trump to reset America's monetary system.
A reset that connects everything from the government's billion-dollar stakes in obscure mining companies…
To the reopening of retired nuclear facilities and Trump's obsession with invading Greenland and annexing Canada.
And if I'm right, the consequences won't stop at the gas pump.
This could affect the purchasing power of the money you've saved…
The value of the assets inside your investment portfolio…
And which companies receive the first flood of capital as Trump's New Dollar takes hold.
Strung together by a flurry of executive orders and a 13-nation treaty signed inside the State Department, most folks have no idea this is happening – let alone how to prepare for it.
That's why, in my new investigation, I reveal how Venezuela fits into Trump's secret dollar reset…
Why this controversial initiative could be exposed to the world as soon as December…
The five mission-critical companies I believe sit at the center of the new monetary system…
And the name and ticker of my No. 1 move to make today.
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Thanks for reading. See you tomorrow.
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