Amazon Leo aims to double its pace:
Amazon
‘s satellite broadband venture has 304 satellites up across 11 launches and plans to double that over the next year as it prepares to launch commercial service “in the coming months.” In an interview at Amazon Leo’s mission control in Redmond, VP

Chris Weber

talks about acceleration plans, FCC deadline pressures, and the Starlink gap. Read more.

• Elsewhere in Amazon’s orbit: Jeff Bezos has self-funded his space venture for 25-plus years, but
  Blue Origin
  is now reportedly weighing external investment for the first time to support an ambitious ramp-up in launch cadence. 

Closing arguments are under way this morning in the landmark lawsuit filed by Elon Musk against Sam Altman,
OpenAI
, and
Microsoft
in federal court in Oakland, with the jury set to weigh whether OpenAI breached its charitable trust and whether its leaders were unjustly enriched by the for-profit conversion. Yesterday, Microsoft CTO

Kevin Scott

took the stand and publicly explained the 2018 email that Musk’s lawyers have held up as evidence Microsoft knew OpenAI was abandoning its nonprofit mission. The court’s live audio stream is here.

Is Seattle on a Road to Nowhere? The city ranks nationally in population growth and tech layoffs — so are we growing or dying? GeekWire co-founder

John Cook

taps into a contradictory Talking Heads anthem for inspiration at a time when cracks seem to be forming beneath one of the country’s most successful innovation economies. Read more.

A new AI-powered law firm is targeting Seattle startups with the promise that it can automate the legal work traditionally handled by an army of associates.
Talairis Law Group
was founded by two former
Perkins Coie
lawyers who both served as general counsels for tech companies. Read more. 

Microsoft’s new AI system beat out rivals from Anthropic and OpenAI on a leading cybersecurity benchmark, not by building a better model but by having more than 100 AI agents work together across multiple models to find software vulnerabilities. Read more.

Vibe coding was promised as a frictionless ride toward web development, but it’s in need of an on-ramp, and seat belts, to address a usability problem and a safety challenge.

Oren Etzioni

is waiting for “the Windows moment,” when a powerful but arcane technology gets a user interface so good that the machinery underneath disappears. Read the opinion.

Hot Links:

• Microsoft-owned
  LinkedIn
  , along with its layoffs, is making larger operational changes: centralizing design and research, reducing management layers, and shifting its learning business to instructor‑led content to move faster with AI. (Business Insider)
• An agreement involving
  T-Mobile
  , Amazon Leo,
  SpaceX
  ‘s Starlink and other telecom and satellite companies aims to improve cell phone coverage in dead zones. (Bloomberg)
• Nectar Social
  , a social media marketing startup that launched in Seattle and relocated last year to Palo Alto, raised $30 million in new funding. (LinkedIn)

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