Daily TEA – Did xAI Train Its Models on Claude?

AI meets blockchain, New York’s June 9 deadline for fake AI performers, xAI’s Claude-training report, America’s first advanced reactor goes critical, and why robotics still has no grand theory

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

1. ⛓️ The 10 Crypto Sectors Most Likely to Survive and Grow Through 2026

Pink Brains breaks down 10 crypto sectors it believes can keep growing through the second half of 2026, arguing that most altcoins will never reclaim their 2021 highs and that measurable usage, not narrative, now drives capital. Topping the list are two AI-crypto categories: agentic finance, where onchain trading agents gained real transactional authority through new wallet standards like EIP-7702 and Base’s AgentKit, and the “picks and shovels” compute layer (Bittensor, Render, Akash, Grass), where the broader AI-crypto sector roughly tripled to $22 to 27 billion by May 2026. The rest of the list runs through prediction markets (a record $28.4 billion in monthly volume in May), perp DEXs, onchain vaults, RWA-backed DeFi, privacy coins, crypto cards, stablecoin rails, and cultural platforms like Pump.fun. The throughline: the old playbook was buying a narrative early, the new one is spotting real usage early. (Read More)

🫖 TEA For Thought: “The intersection between AI and blockchain has never been closer.”

2. ⚖️ New York Starts Policing AI Performers in Ads on June 9

New York’s synthetic performer law (S.8420-A / A.8887-B, amending General Business Law 396-b) takes effect June 9, 2026, and requires advertisers to conspicuously disclose when an ad uses an AI-generated or computer-created digital performer made to look like a human. It covers synthetic performers in primary or background roles, but exempts recognizable replicas of real, identifiable people, expressive works like films and games, audio-only ads, and AI used purely for translation. Ad creators who knowingly include a synthetic performer must label it, and publishers must fix or remove undisclosed ones within 5 business days of notice. Civil penalties run $1,000 for a first violation and $5,000 for each one after, enforced by the state with no private right of action. (Read More)

🫖 TEA For Thought: “Alert to any business that resides in New York!”

3. 🤖 Report: xAI Trained Its Coding Models on Claude for Months

The Information reports that xAI spent months training its coding models directly on the outputs of Anthropic’s Claude. After Anthropic revoked xAI’s official access in January 2026, engineers allegedly kept tapping Claude through personal accounts and an intermediary service called Blackbox AI. The reporting also describes turmoil inside xAI: the pretraining team shrank to fewer than five people, four Grok code leads and several co-founders departed within months, and an employee accidentally deleted critical training data, costing two to three weeks of work. Musk has previously acknowledged in court that xAI “partially” used OpenAI models for early Grok training, calling it standard industry practice. He is now renting out GPU capacity through SpaceX to Anthropic and Google as a stopgap. (Read More)

🫖 TEA For Thought: “The terafab is one of Musk’s true leverage points. No matter who you are, you have to kneel and make a deal with those who can provide the compute.”

4. ⚛️ America’s First Advanced Reactor Goes Critical in Idaho

Antares Nuclear has become the first company to bring an advanced reactor to criticality under the U.S. Department of Energy’s Reactor Pilot Program. Its Mark-0 demonstrator passed a zero-power criticality test at Idaho National Laboratory on June 4, 2026, meaning its nuclear reactions became self-sustaining (it does not yet generate power). The reactor runs on TRISO fuel, in which uranium oxide particles are wrapped in layers of carbon and ceramic for high-temperature safety. The milestone answers Executive Order 14301, which directed DOE to get at least three advanced reactors critical by July 4, 2026. The compact design is being eyed for military and remote-site microreactor use, an early step toward small, modular, lower-carbon nuclear power. (Read More)

🫖 TEA For Thought: “SMR might be the future of green power. Small, modular, clean.”

5. 🦾 Why Robotics Is Still Waiting for Its Big Theory

In a widely shared essay, roboticists Stefanie Tellex and David Watkins argue that robotics is still a “pre-paradigm” field, borrowing Thomas Kuhn’s term for a science that has not yet agreed on an organizing theory. They note the field juggles competing frameworks (subsumption architecture, SLAM, POMDPs, neural networks, diffusion policies) with no grand unified theory of embodied intelligence. The current industry bet, placed by companies like Physical Intelligence and Tesla, pairs large datasets with vision-language-action models and reinforcement learning, yet the authors say even deep learning lacks a full theory of why it works. They compare the moment to chemistry before Lavoisier, when Priestley isolated oxygen but still explained it through phlogiston, and argue robotics is waiting for its own paradigm shift. (Read More)

🫖 TEA For Thought: “Rushing to find the next game to play.”

🛠️ Skill of the Day

The Decision Stress-Test: pressure-check any big decision before you commit, so you find the holes while they are still cheap to fix.

You are a sharp, friendly red-team advisor. I am about to make a decision and I want you to stress-test it, not cheerlead it.

MY DECISION: [DESCRIBE THE DECISION AND WHY YOU ARE LEANING THIS WAY]
CONTEXT: [BUDGET, TIMELINE, WHO IS AFFECTED, WHAT IS AT STAKE]

Do this in order:
1. Restate my decision in one sentence so I know you understand it.
2. Give the 3 strongest reasons it could be right.
3. Give the 3 strongest reasons it could go wrong, including the failure mode I am most likely ignoring.
4. Name the single assumption that, if false, breaks the whole plan, and tell me the cheapest way to test it this week.
5. Offer one smaller or reversible version I could try first.

Be concrete and honest. If my reasoning is thin, say so plainly and tell me what is missing.

Paste into ChatGPT, Claude, or your tool of choice, and replace the bracketed bits. Great before a hire, a big purchase, a launch, or any bet you cannot easily undo.

TEAHEE Moment

Stay sharp, stay informed. See you tomorrow.

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