An ex-Anthropic researcher’s doomsday warning comes at a very interesting time

An Anthropic researcher resigned this week, warning in a post on X that the company is “racing straight to self-improving superintelligence and gambling with our lives”. The company's own alignment lead even co-signed the message rather than walking it back. It's the kind of doomer warning the AI industry has flirted with before, but the timing, with Anthropic reportedly preparing for an IPO, makes it land differently. On this episode of TechCrunch's Equity podcast, hosts Kirsten Korosec, Anthony Ha, and Sean O'Kane dig into the latest AI safety warning and what it says about the industry's race toward increasingly capable models. Plus, Apple's first big event under new CEO John Ternus and more of the week's headlines. Listen to the full episode to hear more about: Why Apple leaned hard into AI at its hardware event, and how always-on features baked into the Watch and AirPods may matter more than the splashy new foldable iPhone How Stokes Space's $1 billion raise reflects a launch market that's suddenly wide open now that SpaceX is winding down its Falcon rockets Why investors poured $2 billion into coding startup Cognition at a $48 billion valuation, and what it says about how much room VCs think is left in AI coding What a $50 million seed round for floating nuclear reactors says about the scramble to power AI data centers Subscribe to Equity on YouTube, Apple Podcasts, Overcast, Spotify and all the casts. You also can follow Equity on X and Threads, at @EquityPod. Chapters: 00:00 Intro 3:28 Anthropic researcher's resignation warning 9:33 What's actually being done about AI risk? 15:56 Apple's AI-first hardware event 19:56 The case against a standalone AI wearable 21:53 Always-on listening: watch, AirPods, and privacy tradeoffs 26:43 The foldable iPhone's odds 27:16 Stoke Space raises $1B for a reusable rocket 31:17 Cognition raises $2B, betting on room for more AI coding players 34:13 BlueCore Energy's floating nuclear reactors 37:38 Outro Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:00Anthony Ha?

  This episode of Equity is brought to you by Schneider Electric. Schneider Electric, advancing energy tech.

• 0:05Kirsten Korosec?

  An Anthropic researcher publicly quit this week over concerns that AI companies racing to superintelligence are gambling with our lives. And one of Anthropic's own alignment leads had the numbers to back them up. Also this week, Apple unveiled its foldable iPhone and leaned hard into its always on listening AI features. Plus, we're keeping an eye on a couple of deals this week, including a rocket startup that raised $1 billion to take on SpaceX. So stick around.

• 0:42Kirsten Korosec?

  Hello and welcome back to Equity TechCrunch's flagship podcast about the business of startups. Today is Friday, September 11th. I'm Kirsten Korosec, Transportation Editor here at TechCrunch, and I'm joined by our Weekend Editor, Anthony Ha, and Senior Reporter Special Projects, Sean O'Kane. The band is back together. Welcome back, Anthony, from vacation. I hope it was a good one. And I know you've just been back a couple of days, but I have to ask, I know that Sean has absolutely seen this, but Anthony, have you watched the trailer to the new Elizabeth Holmes documentary, which seems to have captured everyone's attention? Everyone's talking about it right now.

• 1:23Anthony Ha?

  That is correct, yes. Well, I can't speak for Sean, but I've watched it and I found it excruciating, fascinating. I mean, it's this very weird, just one clip from the documentary, but it's hypnotic and unforgettable.

• 1:37Sean O'Kane?

  Take a million chances, and I don't think you could land on a better person to put out something more interesting at this point than Nathan Fielder, especially after there's been a book, a podcast, multiple TV and film projects all about Theranos. It's been told again and again, but this is something that I'm sure will stand on its own, to say the least.

• 2:00Anthony Ha?

  Yeah, I mean, it's interesting because, like you said, Sean, there's been so much about Theranos. It's also this fall that it feels like we're just going to get so much tech misbehavior content. There's going to be a Facebook movie, an OpenAI movie, a documentary about Elon Musk. And this feels like it broke through in a way that none of those, at least in the promo, have. And I think it's because of this just very weird combination of Nathan Fielder, who's such an unpredictable, unique filmmaker, and Elizabeth Holmes. And people are just like, what is this going to be? And I'm excited and terrified to find out.

• 2:35Kirsten Korosec?

  Some of my favorite other media outlets, one of them called the Autotopian, very car geeky, but they just already made hilarious memes based on it, all on the premise of, you know, in that trailer, it's like, he knows she's lying, she knows she's lying, he knows she knows she's lying. I mean, it's this weird cringe moment in which, you know, it's very memeable, and I predict that we will enjoy memes based on that one clip alone, let alone reminding our listeners, it's a three-hour-long documentary, apparently, packed full of surprises, which, to Sean's point, I'm not really sure how you pack any more surprises in a story that's been covered to death, but here we are.

• 3:18Kirsten Korosec?

  I want to jump right in, though, to something completely different, which is talking about AI and the doomer mentality that has been popping up in the last week, and specifically this Anthropic researcher.

• 3:33Sean O'Kane?

  Yeah, a researcher at Anthropic named Jacob Coxon sort of abruptly resigned and warned that he thinks that everything is, what they're developing there is going to end humanity if something isn't done. Something that we have heard many times before in different ways and different forms. And I think we should probably talk a little bit about why this might be different and why it isn't different. But it's just one of those things that blew up in a way that I don't, other than the Elizabeth Holmes documentary, I'm hard pressed to think of something that blew up so fast. This, I think, even transcends that by a mile, because in large part, not only did

• 4:16Sean O'Kane?

  this warning shot come out from this researcher, this young researcher who has also worked at OpenAI, but also was immediately shared on X by the alignment lead at Anthropic, who, in what might go down as one of the, I don't know about misplaced, but best misplaced exclamation marks ever, shared Coxon's post and thread and said, "We really do earnestly believe AI could kill all humans." Exclamation mark. Like, just what a weird vibe. I think that was just a ton of accelerant on an already fraught, you know, sort of post or series of posts.

• 4:57Sean O'Kane?

  And yeah, I think this coming after the hugging face hack from OpenAI's internal model and all of that, and plus, I think just the increased capabilities we've seen with the latest models released by Anthropic and now OpenAI with Astra. A few weeks ago, I think this was just perfectly timed to be a powder keg type of thing for this young researcher to say.

• 5:22Anthony Ha?

  Just to disagree with you on, or to riff on one point that you made, Sean, I do think that if you believe that AI could destroy all humanity, that does deserve an exclamation point. And I would argue that that is a perfectly well-used exclamation point. I think that, yeah, my issue with that tweet maybe was more the sort of like, oh, the we, which is also, you're like, who is the we here? How, to what extent can we talk about the AI community or AI research community as a monolith? And the greater than 10% chance where at that point, you're like, okay, now you're just, that's just a made up number. That's like, that doesn't mean anything, which I think is sometimes this habit in both in the tech industry and other places to just throw out these percentages that are just like made up.

• 6:04Anthony Ha?

  They're not based in anything or calculated based on anything. I think that the other, I will say, before I start rolling my eyes at some aspects of this, the one thing I will say about Coxon's statement and decision is that I do think there's this recurring theme on equity, but just also more broadly around AI is when someone like Sam Altman or Dario Amade is doing the sort of doomer narrative, there's always this element of like, well, then why are you doing what you're doing? Like, if you actually believed that, you would not continue doing this. And so this is actually somebody putting his professional trajectory where his mouth is.

• 6:46Anthony Ha?

  He's actually saying, I believe this is really, really, really bad, and I don't want to keep working on it. And so, at least props for having the courage to do that, if nothing else.

• 6:56Kirsten Korosec?

  Yeah, I would say for him, I put him in a separate camp than everyone else saying that and talking about the dangers. And I'm going to put my speculative hat on it because I want to ask both of you a question, which is, is it possible that every single time we see the increasing number of blog posts about yet another incident in which one of their, let's say, AI agents breaks through unintentionally, or they talk about how humanity is at risk? Is this a weird way of flexing to show how far advanced their company's AI model is? I mean, that sounds very cynical, but it does achieve that purpose, which is if these

• 7:38Kirsten Korosec?

  AI models weren't advanced and weren't capable and weren't breaking through, we wouldn't have to worry about these things, right? But here they are. And in a way, it's a very weird way to brag about the capabilities of the models that you've created within your own company.

• 7:55Anthony Ha?

  I definitely wondered about this, and again, it's something we have talked about a little bit. I don't think it's completely cynical in the sense that I don't think it's all just a kind of very conscious marketing ploy across the board. I think that when a lot of these people, whether the researchers, CEOs, talk about it, they do have real concern. But of course, yeah, it does align with their business interests in a lot of ways to say, wow, we've built the most deadly software that's ever been made. And I think that also there is, I mean, I don't want to get too psychoanalytic here, but others have pointed out that there is this sort of temptation on a personal level

• 8:39Anthony Ha?

  of, well, of course, you want to believe that the thing you're working on is the most important and most dangerous thing in the world.

• 8:46Sean O'Kane?

  Yeah, I think the thing that sticks out in my mind when I think about that question is there's certainly an element of that that makes it seem like, okay, we're doing this thing that's so capable, and that's good for us in some way, even if it looks bad in a lot of different lights. I think what's different about some of these most recent examples is like, it really gives you the feeling that these companies don't have a handle on this stuff in certain ways, especially with the OpenAI stuff. Like, we're keep seeing more and more reporting about other internal agents that have accessed different wikis on the web and are leaving messages for each other in a way that doesn't

• 9:27Sean O'Kane?

  seem like it's being handled in a competent way from OpenAI. I would imagine there would be just a bit more polish on the story being told if it was wholly about getting people to believe that, oh, my gosh, they've made something so incredibly capable. The other thing that I think is really fascinating about this, in particular, what Coxon was saying about Anthropic and the alignment leads backing them up immediately, is we're, what, a few weeks at most out from seeing Anthropic's S1 filing for its IPO and just a couple more weeks or month or two away from a potential IPO?

• 10:12Sean O'Kane?

  And like, the idea that you're going to come out and say these things in this You know, sort of clear language ahead of an IPO like I'm very interested in what that means for that process, you know, how much of this kind of stuff had they already written into the S one and the and the risk factors inside that document? Are there, you know, junior lawyers right now who are going through and having to rewrite that entire section of the S one filing to say, uh, you know, it's a officially anthropics position that there's a more than 10% chance that, you know, we could develop something that would eradicate all of humanity and that would be bad, you know, materially bad for our business.

• 10:56Kirsten Korosec?

  You're assuming that it's not in there already, though. Like, it is possible.

• 10:59Sean O'Kane?

  Is it in there already and being reverted? Or is this something that's like a true scramble? I'm sure there was some kind of, you know, there has to have been language in there. It's like one of the reasons I'm so eager to read this document in a way that I, you know, goes even further in some ways than the SpaceX one, uh, because I'm sure that there's probably stuff specific to these ideas, uh, that that will be interesting to see.

• 11:22Kirsten Korosec?

  Yeah, 100%. I mean, here's the thing, in a in traditional investment environment, one might believe that language like this would hurt, um, the valuation of a company because it's suddenly dangerous. But we don't live in normal times. And so, again, back to my point, it's a weird, it could end up being a weird beneficial flex for the company on the valuation side. And, you know, it's not the same as the whole rage baiting trend that we saw, you know, last year, but it's in that same, let's say, universe in which, um, the the strength capable ability, even, uh, elements of danger of something, um,

• 12:06Kirsten Korosec?

  equals a valuation, a high valuation. So I guess we'll see in a few weeks. I mean, the reporting right now is that this IPO is going to be coming sometimes towards the end of the month. My question for both of you, though, is, okay, putting that aside for a minute, what is being done about it? Um, and can we control this? We had recently the US executive director of a nonprofit called Control AI, Connor Leahy, he was on the show this week, sort of talking about this. So, I mean, what are you paying attention to in terms of how to control the dangerous aspects of AI? Or are we throwing up our hands and, you know, watching it all unfold?

• 12:48Anthony Ha?

  I myself do not necessarily have a great answer to this, but but I have been thinking about some aspects of this debate and maybe why I respond the way I do. I mean, first of all, in terms of just why I'm often rolling my eyes a little bit at the doomer arguments. Um, it is, I do, you know, to echo one of Sean's points, I do think that part of what this speaks to is the extent to which these, you know, major AI companies are feeling like they're not really in control of these models anymore. And I, you know, believe that that's definitely not, not great. That is something that we should all be be worried about. I do think that part of the reason I'm skeptical of the doomer narrative or resistant to the dooper narrative is I think that it can blind it. It because it reaches

• 13:29Anthony Ha?

  this sort of level of hysteria of, wow, we like this could destroy humanity in the next 10 years. It sort of can feel like it. It is a little bit of a distraction from the more immediate harms that AI can have, whether that's labor related, whether that's environment and climate related. And and, you know, ideally, I think we should be able to discuss all of these things and, you know, like have regulatory and other kinds of safeguards against all of these things. But because I think once you start using phrases like AGI and superintelligence, it seems like that just kind of sucks up all the oxygen in the room in a way that that I think is not very helpful. And then, you know, often, you know, as we again, we've discussed here, like, there's this discussion about sort of like, should we slow down? Should we sort of put brakes? Um, and I think, you know,

• 14:14Anthony Ha?

  I think that's probably a good idea. Um, but I feel like what that also obscures is then, okay, great, you slow down and then what? Like, what's the different direction we're going to take? That is maybe a necessary step, but like, that's just the first, you know, then what?

• 14:30Kirsten Korosec?

  Well, and then also, there's this whole other argument happening in the background that, well, we can't slow down, though, because China. And so that has also become, um, this, I guess, excuse, maybe, to continue to push forward.

• 14:48Sean O'Kane?

  Not only that, I mean, look at the way these companies are built at the moment. Like, they are just not built to slow down. They are built on the premise that the numbers are going to go up faster than anything you've ever seen before, in part because that has been true in some capacity about, you know, overall user base and and revenue growth and all that stuff. But, you know, questionable in some other capacities. And it's just, you know, when you look at the amount of investment that's coming in, the amount of investment, even as some of these newer models get more efficient and sort of blunt some of that cost, they're just not built in a way where you could slow down and they won't collapse. I just don't, I don't see it, you know, for as many bills are being proposed

• 15:30Sean O'Kane?

  and as much conversation has had about, okay, can we, um, put checks on this within our country? Can we do a diplomatic solution that crosses the US and China and and turns it into like a sort of almost like disarmament or sort of stalemate situation like we have with with nuclear weapons? Like, it's just so hard to see any of that happening unless the fundamental way that these companies are built at this moment changes. And I don't see that happening either.

• 15:58Anthony Ha?

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• 16:24Kirsten Korosec?

  You know, the interesting thing is that while this unfolded, and to your point, I mean, I think it did get actually more attention somehow than the Elizabeth Holmes documentary, which, you know, I guess makes kind of sense. But in the same few days, we also had this, here's the future, isn't it exciting? Apple event, which felt so, you know, quaint in a way, um, compared to a lot of the rhetoric that was happening around how AI was going to kill us. Um, but this was an important event, and certainly one I think we should talk about, which is, this is the the handover, the official handover that we've been talking about for weeks and weeks and weeks with John Ternus now as CEO,

• 17:04Kirsten Korosec?

  new foldable phone, and importantly, I think, AI components. And I'm wondering, you know, I know what stood out to me, but I'm wondering what really got your attention at this Apple event?

• 17:18Anthony Ha?

  There were a few different things that I think we we can cover, but certainly what they put front and center was the the AI element. And that was surprising, both surprising and not. I mean, you know, not surprising because, you know, there's just been all this reporting about like, Apple trying to kind of play catch up in AI and, you know, all these issues, trying to, you know, do an upgraded version of Siri and and kind of trying to reposition itself. But it did, there was this sort of cognitive dissonance and seeing all this sort of negative stuff around AI. And then, um, and then, you know, you just have this incredibly brightly colored marketing video from Apple of just being like, great, we're going to build AI. The iPhone is the AI device of the future. And sort of just kind of like, really trying to pitch that that feature. And I think in

• 18:03Anthony Ha?

  some ways, they are trying to kind of implicitly address some of these concerns, like within, you know, I don't know, like, two or three minutes of the of the beginning of the event, they they're already starting to talk about privacy and things like that. So it's not as if they're, you know, not acknowledging potential downsides, but it was a little bit of, there was, there was some whiplash.

• 18:24Sean O'Kane?

  Yeah, I thought it was interesting. I mean, we were talking about this just last week about like, how this felt like a pretty good first step for Ternus as far as like what we thought was lined up for him to introduce on the hardware side, being product guy, all that stuff. But I also thought it was interesting. And I think a lot of that was true, right? We could talk about some of the specifics if we want, but, um, I thought it was interesting that he started the whole thing by really stepping back in a way that, you know, I think echoed Apple's earlier messaging when it was really on the come up, you know, 25, 30 years ago, and becoming a force in kind of everyone's lives and and and almost to a certain extent, like, kind of the way that Jobs introduced the iPhone,

• 19:07Sean O'Kane?

  the original iPhone, where he was saying like, okay, you know, for this moment in time, with this access to this incredible technology, you know, if you were to build a device that would give you access to it, what would you want that device to be? It would have all of these characteristics, right? I mean, it was pretty clear where he was going with it. He was going to just, you know, oh, look, it would be the iPhone, like, sure. But I just thought it was an interesting thing, you know, instead of, he could have come right out and just tried to like, make a big splash immediately and show off the folding phone instead of saving it for the end of the event like they did. Um, you know, there were all these different ways he could have taken it. And I just thought that was an interesting strategy for an otherwise, you know, event that was typically It was very much the script that we've seen from them since the pandemic, right?

• 19:52Sean O'Kane?

  Like it was, you could have pulled Ternus out of this event and put Tim Cook into it. And it was the same flow, the same sort of stage direction. You know, not even on an actual stage, all recorded. And it was just, all of that felt very familiar, but I did think that that moment, that beat at the beginning was interesting. We had a little bit written about it on the site too. I know Sarah Perez called it out in the story and Tim Deschamps also did. I just thought that was, you know, it's a way for Apple to sort of position themselves while also not being a leader in the actual development of, you know, large language models or other frontier AI.

• 20:29Kirsten Korosec?

  Well, and it also, I think a little bit to Anthony's point earlier, sort of addresses some underlying concerns, which is like, what's the next device going to be? Is it, what's the next iPhone going to be for Apple? And, you know, they addressed it in a couple of ways. First of all, foldables, I think is an acknowledgement from them, even as cool as it is, and I'm sure it will sell well. It is not likely going to be the ubiquitous product, hardware product that we see everyone using with, let's say the iPhone or the iPod before, in part because not everyone wants something that large. And also it's just very expensive, but it does show and display their prowess for both hardware and software.

• 21:13Kirsten Korosec?

  To me though, what they really were addressing here is there's been these questions around what AI wearable they're going to have. And they answered it with, you know, maybe I'll be wrong and we can all talk about how I'm wrong a year from now. If they come up with some actual wearable, but I think what they really talk about is, hey, we've got a watch and you got a phone. And we're going to embed our AI in it. You don't need another AI wearable, like what OpenAI is reportedly working on. And you saw that with some of the AI features rolling out with the watch, which to me was far more interesting than the foldable. Especially because there's a couple of audio intelligence features that really allow you to

• 21:56Kirsten Korosec?

  record all the time from your watch and create these AI summaries that will be generated automatically. Which by the way, hilarious because, you know, Apple also at the same time talks a lot about privacy. And we now are having to get used to this moment where not only are you going to be potentially videoed everywhere, but recorded everywhere as well. But to me, they don't need a hardware like wearable. They have them already.

• 22:26Sean O'Kane?

  They do and they don't, like, I don't think, I'll go out and say it, like, I don't think this watch feature gets used all that much. And I also don't think it'll be very good. Not only because there's already sort of a backlash to it from people who, you know, think about the idea of their watch always listening to them. And, you know, there is, I think there is a palpable difference between your phone always being ready to answer if you ask for the digital assistant. And something that's actually like literally strapped to you. And I think, you know, we will see if Apple's able to get over that, that hump. I just don't, they certainly didn't demo it in a way that we could understand how good this thing, this feature is going to be able to listen to you

• 23:09Sean O'Kane?

  in any kind of not quiet environment, right? And so it's just one of those situations where, you know, I think this becomes a thing that Apple showed off and ultimately fades into the background. Where I do think it shows up is there's been a lot of reporting about what the company wants to do with the next generation of AirPods Pro, where they may even have cameras on them. It seems like they're going to even have cameras on them, not necessarily to take pictures or anything, but for visual intelligence and being able to understand what you're looking at and be able to ask questions about it. To me, the feature they're talking about on the watch here is pretty clearly like the first cut at what those AirPods Pro are going to be able to do when we see those probably next year.

• 23:51Sean O'Kane?

  That is a much different conversation than I think this one, which I ultimately think will be a limited thing that people forget about eventually.

• 23:59Anthony Ha?

  I mean, the other kind of reported product that it made me think of is, you know, the, the smart glasses that Apple is supposed to be working on. And, you know, there's been reporting from Bloomberg that, you know, that that's been pushed back a bit because Apple is trying to figure out like, given that, again, you know, I think Metas like Ray-Bans are both popular, but there's also like very, very significant backlash to them. There's sort of this nickname that they're pervert glasses. And so how can Apple do that in a way while still pitching itself as a privacy centric company? And I think, I mean, again, these products are not identical, but I'm very far from it. But this is in some ways a test case for can they say, hey, we've built these devices that are in many ways a surveillance risk,

• 24:42Anthony Ha?

  but we're going to build it in a privacy centric way. So it's okay. Are people going to be okay with that or are they going to reject it?

• 24:49Kirsten Korosec?

  Well, to Sarah's point, she was trying to normal, I mean, she, her headline was even like, Apple's trying to normalize the idea of this, which is it can be pri, you know, we have these privacy protections, but also all these devices you use may be capturing data to deliver some sort of value to you. Sean, your point about the AirPods or your watch, whether or not that feature gets used a lot, we'll see. And your phone, all of a sudden you have all of these other, you know, all these existing hardware devices that are essentially capturing all this data.

• 25:22Sean O'Kane?

  Yeah. I mean, they were also pretty explicit in, in sort of calling out other companies. They didn't name them, but other companies that are making devices that are always listening, many, there are many startups out there right now. And even software companies that, you know, are promising technology like this, uh, you know, through your browser or your phone or whatever. Sort of, you know, attacking them in some level of like collecting that data and using it nefariously and saying that Apple won't do that. And that it's going to keep it on device as much as possible. So there, you know, it's clear, I think, where they're going to try to draw that line. And it's just a matter of like, whether people will accept that. I will say really quickly on the fold or the iPhone Duo, as it's called, you know,

• 26:02Sean O'Kane?

  it does seem like an uphill battle because it's a form factor that hasn't been widely adopted here, but it is widely adopted in China. And I know that Apple is angling towards that, uh, you know, it seems like they, they will have a pretty good chance of it being a very successful device there. And the other thing I'll say is one, they have made it look very compelling in a way that I think most Android foldables don't look. Because when you open up an Android foldable, you have an Android tablet and Android tablets are pretty bad historically. Apple tablets are better in a lot of different ways. But the other thing is like, they're introducing this at a time when they're changing also how you pay for their devices.

• 26:41Sean O'Kane?

  By, you know, getting rid of the more traditional iPhone upgrade program and going to a lease model that goes across all of these devices in a way that, you know, just makes it far more palatable to get into a device that starts at $2,000. If you're only going to be paying, you know, $60 a month, quote unquote, only, only going to be paying like $60 a month or a little bit more, you know, for a year or two, to get access to that device. Uh, and, you know, I think it's the timing of all of those things puts them in a position to have this be more successful than any of the other foldables that we've seen.

• 27:16Anthony Ha?

  You know, to Apple's credit, I will say that I started watching this presentation and, you know, having had never had any interest in a foldable phone. Like every foldable phone I've seen has just immediately turned me off. And then at the end of the, you know, their, that segment, I was like, huh, yeah, maybe, maybe, maybe. And then, you know, you find out the price, like, no, absolutely not. But, you know, we'll see how it performs. In the meantime, we do have a few startup deals to talk about. The first is a rocket startup called Stoke Space, which raised $1 billion. Kirsten or Sean, do you want to kind of talk about the basics?

• 27:49Kirsten Korosec?

  I think that this company is really interesting. It seems to be very buzzy, you know, word on the street from, you know, our reporting staff here, Tim Frenhols, who, who's been covering Stoke Space, but also from others I've heard is that everyone wants to jump in on this and on this company. And I think that that really interesting thing, and Sean covers space a lot, so I'll let him talk more broad or more specifically about it. But it's a fully reusable rocket, but importantly, there's an important key difference between what it's trying to do and what SpaceX has achieved. But, you know, the company has raised 2.3 billion in total. This round was led by Point 72 Ventures, which is important because this is Steve Cohen's fund.

• 28:33Kirsten Korosec?

  And he's well known as, you know, a billionaire hedge fund guy. And I think he owns what baseball team, right? So, you know, he, yeah, the Mets. So he's well known and that's an interesting person to be leading this fund. But Sean, you know, what is it that specifically, you know, my understanding is that it's that the other stage of, that both stages of the rockets are reusable and that's where the real value is. And that's what really is driving investor interest.

• 29:03Sean O'Kane?

  Yeah. Well, I think it's twofold. One is that what you, what you just described, SpaceX typically is only recovering the booster stage of its Falcon 9. With Starship, they're looking to make both stages, the, the booster and the upper stage reusable, but they're, they're not quite there yet. And so, you know, going at that problem to lower the cost of access to space from the, from the jump with this is an interesting problem to try to solve. The other thing that I think is really interesting and makes it not terribly surprising to me that they were able to close such a big round is the landscape here for, you know, prospective launch companies is just totally different than it was a year ago.

• 29:42Sean O'Kane?

  Where, you know, a year ago, it was like, how are these companies, you know, some of which make even smaller rockets than, you know, how are they going to compete with SpaceX? SpaceX is the dominant launch provider on planet earth and has all the business and all the relationships and all the government contracts. And the answer at that point was like, okay, they're going down in size to launch smaller satellites perhaps. Or they're using like really radical different ideas, like slingshots to get access into space without using rockets at all. And now as SpaceX has all but come out and said that it's going to retire its Falcon 9 and Falcon Heavy in the relatively near future and focus completely on Starship. Elon Musk has said that pretty explicitly recently on X. That just totally changes everything.

• 30:27Sean O'Kane?

  I mean, like all of a sudden, these companies like to have a rocket that is, you know, relatively directly competitive with the Falcon 9. All of a sudden there's a ton of demand for that because all these, not only are there people who are trying to get stuff into space, you know, who exist right now, but there are all these other startups that had spent the last decade building prospective businesses on the idea that SpaceX was democratizing access to low earth orbit. And all of a sudden that rug just got pulled out from pretty much everybody. And not only that, Starship.

• 31:00Sean O'Kane?

  Is, you know, the original designs and, you know, sort of concept drawings of Starship and, and things that SpaceX said made it seem like there was going to be a more traditional payload on the upper stage of Starship. That's not the case anymore. Now Starship's upper stage is pretty much just built to launch Starlink satellites, you know? And so like, if you don't have a payload that can't slide out that little door that they built for those satellites, you're kind of out of luck. And so all of a sudden, there's just a ton of demand for companies like Stoke Space because there's just going to be a giant gap in that launch market, you know, for the foreseeable future.

• 31:34Anthony Ha?

  I also just wanted to quickly mention that I think their CEO is saying, you know, kind of repeatedly that they're going to have their first launch in early 2027. So for those of us who are not investors in Stoke Space will get, you know, to see how real a lot of these promises are going to turn out to be very soon.

• 31:50Kirsten Korosec?

  Yeah, I'm sure we'll be covering it. Sean, you made an interesting point that relates directly to the next deal I want to talk about, which is this idea of, you know, a seemingly much smaller startup breaking into, into a sector within an industry, in this case reusable rockets, that seems to be dominated by a large player. And this isn't space-related, but it is AI-related, which is Cognition. They're the startup developing the code assistant Devon. They raised $2 billion at a $48 billion valuation. But to me, what, which is, okay, let's let that sink in for a second. Okay. And then, you know, to me, this valuation

• 32:31Kirsten Korosec?

  seems to signal that VCs still see room for multiple major players in the market of AI coding, which, you know, again, goes to this idea of can a new, brand new startup, in this case, Cognition, relatively new, you know, break through when it seems like there is already, you know, major, dare I say, legacy, which seems weird to say in the AI coding world, but legacy players that, you know, seem untouchable. And it seems like the VC community actually believes that there is room for new players.

• 33:05Anthony Ha?

  Yeah, I think that it's not quite that they're brand new, which I think, you know, you did add some sort of nuance there, you know, even though I'm not a programmer myself, it's, it's a, it's a company I've heard of before and think of as sort of, you know, one of the leaders in the space while not also being kind of at the very top. And so on the one hand, it can seem kind of like a bet on like, yes, we think there's going to be, you know, a lot of winners in this, in this space, which I think is probably true. And it's also betting on the ones, the one space where AI has made the most headway and been the most transformative so far. So, you know, in some ways, it's probably like, if you're like, well, this is the area where we know this is going to be, and it already has been a big deal, we need to have our bet in that. Then I think it also makes

• 33:48Anthony Ha?

  sense that, you know, a bunch of investors would have piled on here.

• 33:51Sean O'Kane?

  You know, Silicon Valley people like to talk about how you should never bet against Elon. And, you know, I understand why the guy has made many different companies have very large valuations and has made many rich people along the way. But I think there's an element of this deal that speaks to another aspect of Elon that doesn't get talked about as much, which is that like, he tends to grab, I mean, we just talked about it, right? He tends to grab things and sometimes just hoard them, you know, for his own company's benefit. And that leaves space for other people to come in and make the product that's available in a way that, you know, Musk has changed that availability, right? Like, he has absorbed Cursor. The Cursor branding seems to be going away. It's not that they're

• 34:33Sean O'Kane?

  not selling those products anymore. They certainly are. But it just leaves room for a company like this to come in and take up some of that space in a way that I don't think we would have seen quite so strongly if Cursor was still independent.

• 34:46Kirsten Korosec?

  Yeah, that's a good point. And I'm curious to see, you know, as the Elon universe grows, if the M and A, you know, piece of it continues, and they erase these companies as they acquire them. I want to, we're almost out of time, but I do want to sneak in one more deal, just because I think it's so interesting, which is this nuclear startup called Blue Core Energy. They raised a modest $50 million seed round, which seems so delightfully small compared to some of these mega deals that we've been talking about today. But they're really interesting because they're working on small nuclear reactors on barges, which

• 35:27Kirsten Korosec?

  is, you know, an interesting twist to this. So, you know, I don't know if you, either of you have followed what's happening, but to me, there is a lot of investor interest in any kind of power-based startup because of the adjacent power needs in, with data centers and AI. So we're, you know, small nuclear reactors, the idea behind that have been around for actually quite a long time. But at least on my end, I keep on seeing a lot of deal activity and this seems to be reflective of that overall trend.

• 36:06Anthony Ha?

  I mean, when I saw this headline, I was like, yeah, this just makes sense for all the reasons that you just said. I do have one dumb question, though, which is why on barges? Where are the barges going to be?

• 36:17Sean O'Kane?

  In the water, Anthony.

• 36:19Anthony Ha?

  Just like in the ocean, like, like in, you know, just like in rivers across the United States, like anywhere, like why, what, why?

• 36:25Kirsten Korosec?

  Yeah, just floating around, you know? They will not be apparently on a fixed locations. And I guess the idea is that then they can be transported or more portable to go to where they are needed. Obviously, there's certainly a lot of questions around, like how portable, safety, anywhere in the world. I mean, there's a lot of questions there about that. But, but yeah, the basic premise is that, that the power comes to you.

• 36:55Sean O'Kane?

  Data center needs power, spins wheel, we'll use nuclear, spins wheel, and we'll put them on the barge. Sure.

• 37:01Anthony Ha?

  Yeah. I mean, one of the reasons I was curious about it was because obviously sort of the backdrop of this is that there's a lot of opposition to, to data centers right now. I think that's also increased the interest in nuclear, but I don't think like that means people are immediately just like, yay, great, like build a nuclear power plant in my backyard. That's totally fine. And I'm curious, like, what the reactions to be, will be like, if in some ways, like, well, this is like a moving barge will make it less, people less freak out? Or does it just mean more people will freak out? Because it's like, well, this nuclear power plant will be in your backyard for like a couple of days, but don't worry about it. It's totally fine. So I guess we'll see.

• 37:33Kirsten Korosec?

  I don't think it's going to be just a couple of days. And to be clear, like, this is a company that just came out of stealth. So it's very early days. They came out of stealth in July. They had two barges in the water already, and they are going through the Nuclear Regulatory Commission, the Coast Guard, Department of Transportation, all of this to get their design certified. And they are right now in the port of Long Beach. So my, my, my educated guess here is that they're going to be here for a while. And, you know, many years down the road, we'll be back on Equity to talk about them finally getting approval and launching.

• 38:11Anthony Ha?

  Well, we have covered a lot this week, so we better wrap up. Of course, Equity will be back next week. And then in the meantime, you can follow us on X and threads at EquityPod.

• 38:23Rebecca Bellan?

  Equity is hosted by TechCrunch senior reporters and produced by Teresa Locan Solo with editing by Cal. Subscribe on YouTube or wherever you get your podcasts and find out what's next at techcrunch.com/events. Thanks so much for listening and we'll talk to you next time.