Daily TEA – Claude Found What Two Years of Experts Missed

Anthropic’s Mythos weakens HAWK and speeds up an AES attack, X Money goes live, Meta’s China ad partner, where your company’s AI brain should live, Granola on your wrist

Jul 29, 2026

Hello, dear TEA-mates! Here is what you need to know today.

1. 🔐 Claude Found Real Math Flaws in Two Algorithms

Anthropic’s Frontier Red Team published two cryptanalysis results discovered with Claude Mythos Preview. The first improves the best known attack on HAWK, a third-round NIST post-quantum digital signature candidate that had survived two years and two rounds of expert human review. Working semi-autonomously with one researcher over roughly 60 hours, Mythos found a previously unexploited symmetry in HAWK’s lattice, dropping the expected cost of key recovery against HAWK-256 from 2^64 to 2^38 and effectively halving the scheme’s key strength. The second result, found almost entirely autonomously, speeds up a meet-in-the-middle attack on a 7-round variant of AES-128 by 200 to 800 times, using a technique Claude named the Möbius Bridge. Full 10-round AES is not broken, HAWK is not deployed, and no production software has to change. Each result cost roughly $100,000 in API spend. (Read More)

🫖 TEA For Thought: “This is probably another piece of fear-based marketing to show how great Mythos is. Imagine when everybody is capable of owning the open-source version of Mythos at home. The world definitely needs open-source models to help itself in terms of security.”

2. 💳 X Money Starts Its Limited US Rollout

X Money, the financial services platform built into X, has begun a limited US rollout to Premium and Premium+ subscribers over 18, following an invite-only beta. The service offers a deposit account, peer-to-peer payments, and a Visa debit card available digitally or as a physical metal card personalized with the user’s X handle, plus Apple Wallet integration. Advertised perks include up to 6.00% APY, 3% cashback bonuses, no foreign transaction fees, and early direct deposit, though the interest rate depends on factors like subscription tier and regular deposits, and a list of services is excluded from cashback. X Payments LLC is not an FDIC-insured bank, but deposits are held at Cross River Bank, an FDIC member, so balances are insured. The launch is part of Elon Musk’s stated pursuit of an “everything app.” (Read More)

🫖 TEA For Thought: “I just wonder when crypto will be added as part of the transaction infrastructure in this app.”

3. 🚨 Meta’s Chinese Ad Partner Is Behind Thousands of Nudify Ads

The Tech Transparency Project reports that GatherOne, one of roughly a dozen Chinese agencies authorized by Meta to place ads for Chinese clients, is named on thousands of Facebook and Instagram ads for “nudify” apps. Focusing on the EU, where the Digital Services Act requires advertisers to disclose who paid, TTP identified 210 Facebook pages naming GatherOne or Hongkong Gather Wisdom, running a collective 30,800 ads. Of those, 43 pages ran more than 7,600 ads for apps TTP verified can digitally undress women, and 179 pages (85%) ran ads Meta later removed for policy violations. One app, BAfter, drew at least six Google Play reviews flagging apparent child sexual abuse material while rated suitable for all ages. Meta’s China revenue rose from $13.69 billion in 2023 to $18.35 billion in 2024. (Read More)

🫖 TEA For Thought: “When you collaborate with the CCP, you are collaborating with evil. You are partnering with evil. The question is: why does the CCP want to ban Facebook? What are they afraid of? That is the one question everybody should ask.”

4. 🧠 Where Should Your Company’s AI Brain Live?

Charlie Graham argues that companies racing to become AI-first are choosing where their institutional memory will live by accident, before they understand how hard it will be to move. Once an AI system holds a company’s own definitions, edge cases, corrections, and self-improving workflows, it becomes the backbone that Siebel, SAP, Salesforce, and NetSuite became twenty years ago, except this version learns and rewrites its own playbook. He lays out four paths: the easy button of letting OpenAI or Anthropic host shared projects, memories, and agents; the incumbent play of bolting AI onto Salesforce, HubSpot, or Notion; a well-designed closed startup; or open source and managed open source, naming projects like OpenClaw, OpenWork, GBrain, Cognee, and Graphiti. His filter is a Win, Play, Lose framework: rent the parts where you only need to stay competitive, and own the parts where learning faster is how you win. (Read More)

🫖 TEA For Thought: “This is very, very, very important. We do not want to get locked in by any vendor. This is extremely important for the survival of many companies.”

5. ⌚ Granola Puts Its AI Notetaker on the Apple Watch

Granola has launched an Apple Watch app so users can record and transcribe meetings without taking out a phone. The app can be set as a watch face to start transcribing at any time, surfaces reminders about upcoming meetings, and works with the iOS app that launched last year. Co-founder Chris Pedregal told TechCrunch the watch app is meant for capturing in-person meetings, such as a walking one-on-one. When Granola tested it with employees who had Apple Watches, a large share of their mobile usage shifted from iOS to the Watch. The company said it considered building for Apple Watch easier than integrating with a separate hardware product, in a year that has seen a wave of AI notetaker pins and pendants. Granola hit unicorn status earlier this year with a $125 million Series C led by Index Ventures. (Read More)

🫖 TEA For Thought: “This app definitely comes in handy! They have definitely found a PMF!”

🛠️ Skill of the Day

The Fault Isolator: stop guessing at a stubborn problem and test your way to the actual cause.

You are my debugging partner. I have a problem I cannot figure out, and I keep guessing instead of testing.

Here is the situation:
- What I expected to happen: [DESCRIBE]
- What actually happens: [DESCRIBE]
- When it last worked correctly: [DESCRIBE, OR SAY "it never worked"]
- What changed since then: [LIST EVERYTHING YOU CAN THINK OF, EVEN IF IT SEEMS UNRELATED]

Do this in order:
1. Restate my problem in one sentence, and tell me what information you are missing.
2. List the possible causes, ranked from most to least likely.
3. For each cause, give me ONE cheap test that would rule it in or out, and tell me what each result would mean. Put the tests that eliminate the most possibilities first.
4. Then stop. Do not propose a fix yet.

I will run the tests and report back. Only after that, help me fix the actual cause.

Paste into ChatGPT, Claude, or your tool of choice. It works on broken code, a broken process, and a broken appliance.