MIT coursework warning, Shopify vs Claude Code, ARIA AI music ban, China IPO strain, HP licenses Huawei Wi-Fi
Hello, dear TEA-mates! Here is what you need to know today.
1. 🎓 MIT Says AI Can Finish Most Undergraduate Homework
A Washington Post report on an MIT Ad Hoc Committee on AI Use finding says generative AI can now credibly complete most undergraduate assignments, and that most MIT classes should be reviewed with many needing substantial changes. The committee, co-chaired by professors Eric Klopfer and Samuel Madden, found AI can "produce credible solutions and provide reasonable responses to almost any written assignment in our undergraduate curriculum," Higher Ed Dive reported from the same release. MIT President Sally Kornbluth called the moment a "watershed for MIT, and for all of higher education," and said instructors would get guidance on fall AI policies the same day. The report urges faster curriculum changes without multi-committee, year-long reviews, more in-person assessment options such as oral exams, portfolios, and conversations about outside work, and warns against relying on AI-detection software, which it says is imperfect and can discriminate against neurodivergent students and non-native English speakers. (Read More)
🫖 TEA For Thought: "If AI can complete the coursework it means it can also teach college level courses, and if AI can teach MIT-level courses, why spend so much money paying the tuition when you can just learn it for almost free with AI?"
2. 🧾 Shopify's CEO May Ban Claude Code Over a Markdown File
Shopify CEO Tobi Lütke said on X he is thinking about banning Claude Code at Shopify until Anthropic's coding agent natively reads AGENTS.md and `.agents/skills`, instead of only CLAUDE.md. In Shopify's monorepo with thousands of developers, agent instruction files are applied recursively through the directory tree, so a missing file format can leave some engineers running with incomplete context, which Lütke called a "lobotomy" and a "complexity tax." AGENTS.md was introduced by OpenAI in August 2025, later moved under the Linux Foundation's Agentic AI Foundation, and by December 2025 was used by more than 60,000 open-source projects, with support across Codex, Cursor, Gemini CLI, GitHub Copilot, and others. Anthropic has offered workarounds such as importing AGENTS.md into CLAUDE.md or using symlinks, while GitHub feature requests for native recursive AGENTS.md support were closed as "not planned." After Lütke's post, Anthropic's Thariq Shihipar said Claude Code is being made more hackable and that AGENTS.md support is planned, without giving a date. (Read More)
🫖 TEA For Thought: "When all other agents follow AGENTS.md but yours is CLAUDE.md, obviously there are issues. Claude has to either give in or risk losing more customers."
3. 🎵 Australia Bars Wholly AI-Made Songs From the Charts
The Australian Recording Industry Association (ARIA) will bar wholly AI-generated recordings from the ARIA Charts starting with the chart dated Monday, August 31, 2026 (published Friday, August 28). Recordings that use generative AI only in a supporting role can still chart if they are "substantially human made," raise no stream or chart manipulation concerns, and comply with applicable law, including copyright. ARIA will use the global music industry's July labeling standard to separate AI-generated from AI-assisted tracks: an AI lead vocal or key instrumental makes a track ineligible, while a human lead vocal with AI backing vocals, AI mastering, stem separation, or AI instrument patches played by a person can stay eligible. Ineligible tracks can be refused for survey, removed, have positions adjusted, lose accreditations or No. 1 awards, and are barred from ARIA Awards. The move follows IFPI's July principles and scrutiny of Josh Fawaz's AI-assisted Madonna "Like a Prayer" cover, which became Australia's most-played radio track and reached No. 4 on two ARIA charts in July. (Read More)
🫖 TEA For Thought: "I think this is overcorrected. If you've used AI, you know how different the expertise is that you need to have in order to generate good songs. Everybody is able to use AI to generate music, but not all the music would get to the top of the charts. Instead of banning it altogether, I think as long as AI is like humans are part of the journey in terms of making the AI music, I don't think it should be banned."
4. 📈 China's AI-Fueled IPO Rush Is Showing Strain
Bloomberg reports that China's IPO market is raising money at the fastest rate since 2023, pushed by enthusiasm for artificial intelligence, but the pace is starting to look hard to sustain. Recent high-profile deals have struggled to hold early gains, a heavy IPO pipeline has revived liquidity worries, and some highly anticipated listings may be taking longer to reach the market than expected. The volume level sits near the stretch that preceded cooling measures in 2023 and a multiyear lull after that. Unitree Robotics' G1 humanoid robots featured in Bloomberg's coverage from the World Robot Conference in Beijing, a visual marker of the AI and robotics story fueling investor appetite. (Read More)
🫖 TEA For Thought: "There's no free market in CCP-led China. Period."
5. 📡 HP Licenses Huawei Wi-Fi Patents Despite the U.S. Blacklist
HP Inc. and Huawei announced a multi-year global patent cross-licensing deal covering certain Wi-Fi patents, including technology tied to Wi-Fi 7, according to CNBC and Reuters. HP, which remains a U.S. PC and printing company, said the agreement is a routine standard-essential patent license for Wi-Fi, not a broader strategic partnership, supply relationship, or collaboration, and that it is not putting Huawei components into HP products. Huawei has been on the U.S. Entity List since 2019. The new deal follows a prior dispute that ended last fall when HP joined the Sisvel Wi-Fi 6 patent pool, which includes about 2,000 patents across 245 families and counts Huawei among its founding members. In a follow-up statement, HP said Huawei had sued over Wi-Fi patent use and that HP licensed to avoid litigation risk that could limit its ability to serve customers. (Read More)
🫖 TEA For Thought: "Huawei ranks as the top patent holder globally for Wi-Fi 6 and Wi-Fi 7 standard-essential patents, surpassing or rivaling traditional chipmakers like Qualcomm, Intel, and MediaTek. But one thing to know for sure is that Huawei is a legit CCP PLA corporation."
🛠️ Skill of the Day
The Tradeoff Card: force every "good idea" to name what it costs before you commit.
You are my tradeoff referee. I will describe a decision, plan, or recommendation that sounds good. Your job is to make the hidden cost visible before I lock it in.
Decision:
[PASTE THE OPTION, PLAN, OR RECOMMENDATION]
Do this:
1. Restate the claimed upside in one sentence, using only what I gave you.
2. List the top 5 things I would give up, delay, risk, or make harder if I choose this. Be concrete.
3. For each cost, say who pays it (me, my team, my users, my future self) and when the bill arrives.
4. Name the one irreversible or hard-to-reverse cost, if any.
5. Give me a one-paragraph "keep / kill / reshape" verdict, plus the smallest test I can run this week to check the cost before a full commit.
Rules: no pep talk, no inventing benefits I did not claim, and no pretending a cost is fine just because the upside is real. If the trade looks bad, say kill.Paste into ChatGPT, Claude, or your tool of choice. Replace the bracketed block with the decision you are about to make.
TEAHEE Moment
Stay sharp, stay informed. See you tomorrow.
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