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  Necks will be craned in Spain today but it has nothing to do with seeing the towers at the Sagrada Família. Mainland Europe is having its first total solar eclipse since 1999, followed by a meteor shower. The eclipse will be visible around sunset this evening in parts of Spain and Iceland. The locales in the path of totality—where the moon blocks the sun entirely—are experiencing astronomical tourism spikes. These include the Spanish cities of Valencia, Bilbao, A Coruña, and Zaragoza, as well as Iceland’s capital, Reykjavík. Icelandair and Delta both added Reykjavík flights from the US in advance of the eclipse, and hotel prices in the city today are 140% higher than a year ago. Meanwhile, Spain is expecting 460,000 visitors from overseas and an extra $395 million in spending from eclipse chasers. Filling ‘empty Spain’ The eclipse’s path is through parts of Spain that are just a bit more populated than the moon, boosting tourism in places usually overlooked by paella pilgrims: H...

When Greg Abel took over as Berkshire Hathaway CEO this year, he inherited two things: oracle-sized shoes to fill and a massive pile of cash. This past quarter, he took both in a new direction by going on a multibillion-dollar spending spree : At the end of Q1, Berkshire had $397 billion in cash on hand. By the end of Q2, that had shrunk to $365.5 billion, the company announced as it reported earnings on Saturday. Bye, bye, buy: During his last few years as CEO, Warren Buffett held onto cash like a broken vending machine. From October 2022 to December 2025, Berkshire was a net seller of stocks, and its cash pile more than tripled. But Abel uncorked the piggy bank last quarter, investing $10 billion in Alphabet and buying back about $4.5 billion worth of Berkshire shares—something the company traditionally only does when it believes it’s being undervalued. (Berkshire also dropped $6.8 billion on homebuilder Taylor Morrison last month, but that didn’t close until after the quarter ended...

  Despite his Chicago roots, the pope didn’t spend yesterday grilling by the lake. Pope Leo XIV issued his first encyclical yesterday, and spent most of the 83-page document offering a warning to Silicon Valley and policy makers about artificial intelligence. The encyclical—a pastoral letter outlining the church’s position on a topic—is titled “Maginifica Humanitas,” which translates to Magnificent Humanity. Leo cautioned that AI could be the “ new Tower of Babel ”: The document warned that AI power shouldn’t be concentrated among just a few private companies and that people’s jobs should be protected. Leo wrote that “the pursuit of greater profits cannot justify choices that systematically sacrifice jobs.” Leo also urged more independent oversight and AI regulation, saying “a more moral AI is not enough if that morality is determined by a few.” Without calling out any specific conflict, the pope criticized AI’s role in normalizing war and demanded developers build a chain of comm...

  The capability gap between the US’ AI models and China’s is now approximately equal to the distance between your desire for a long weekend and the impending July Fourth holiday. That’s the vibe after researchers announced over the weekend that China’s AI can, in some scenarios, match Anthropic’s powerful Mythos model , which the US government forced offline earlier this month. Zhipu AI, which matches Mythos on some tasks, is available to the public worldwide. Doing their level best. China hasn’t leveled up to Anthropic and OpenAI yet, but its rise highlights the social and financial perils of AI being governed differently around the world: Some industry watchers say that the US banning AI models while continuing to sell semiconductor chips to China enables it to create competitive models. US businesses are turning to Chinese models, like those from Zhipu and DeepSeek, to get powerful tools more cheaply. Even Microsoft is reportedly exploring how to offer Chinese models to consume...

Anthropic’s models are about to start telling on themselves. Yesterday, the company announced plans to watermark anything that Claude creates or edits, in compliance with European transparency regulations. Everything the light touches. The policy will apply worldwide to all text and files that Claude models spit out, whether they’re AI-generated cover letters or AI-proofread lines of code. Loopholes exist: Heavy editing or file conversions may shed the watermark. Otherwise, the virtual scarlet letter will be invisible to the human eye but detectable by Nicolas Cage squeezing lemon juice on it machines. Anthropic said it will help users and other third parties detect the mark, with details to come in “forthcoming documentation.” Timeline: Watermarking will come with any Claude model launching after Aug. 2, which is when the EU AI Act’s Transparency Code kicked in. It carries a four-month grace period for existing models, so Anthropic said it’s working to get its older Claudes up to ...

  It’s hard to imagine a home appliance more forgotten — yet more consequential — than the water heater. Most people only think of water heaters when their shower runs cold, but they represent about 18% of a household’s total energy budget and are one of the main causes of residential water damage. To Luke Winston-Almanzar, water heaters are in clear need of an upgrade. “The typical water heater is devoid of intelligence, it’s using a god-awful amount of energy, and my air fryer is smarter than it,” he told TechCrunch. “I was using more energy to heat my water than it takes to drive my electric car.” So Winston-Almanzar, who was previously chief business officer at 3D printing startup Formlabs , co-founded Reservoir along with Gabriel Parisi-Amon and Jake Felser to make a water heater that they would want to buy. Reservoir announced Wednesday that it has raised $8 million in a seed round led by Asymmetric Capital Partners with participation from Founder Collective and MCJ. The f...

  Where most energy storage companies look for big tracts of land near large connections to the grid, Base Power is betting that it can beat them all by putting batteries in people’s backyards instead. It appears to be paying off, with Base Power installing more than 500 megawatt-hours of storage over the past few years. The startup announced today that it has raised another $1 billion less than a year after its last billion-dollar round. The Series D values the company at a $13 billion post-money valuation. Base Power is installing about 100 batteries per day, according to The Wall Street Journal report, and it hopes to double that by the end of the year. That works out to about 8 megawatt-hours of storage installed per day. Base Power also rolled out a new version of its home battery today, called Base Core. The device is built at its Austin, Texas factory, and it can store 39.2 kilowatt-hours of electricity, significantly more than those of its competitors. Customers can choo...