☕️ NASA might drop SpaceX from upcoming Moon landing mission

Hi there, this is your daily ☕️ Techpresso.

In today's Techpresso:

🚀 NASA might drop SpaceX from upcoming Moon landing mission

🤖 Amazon plans to replace 600,000 workers with robots

🎬 OpenAI cracks down on deepfakes after backlash in Hollywood

💻 Anthropic brings Claude Code to the web

👁️ AI eye implant helps blind people read again

✅ Amazon identifies the issue that broke much of the internet, says AWS is back to normal

🎁 + 16 other news you might like

🔮 + 4 handpicked research papers and tools

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• NASA may open its Human Landing System contract to competition due to concerns that SpaceX's Starship vehicle is behind schedule, creating a new race to return Americans to the moon.
• The agency’s acting administrator cited a “space race against China” as the motivation, saying that SpaceX's pushed timelines are a problem for getting to the lunar surface before other nations.
• Major technical hurdles for Starship include the need for in-orbit refueling and increasing its current lift performance from a lackluster 35 tons to the expected 100 to 150 tons.

• Amazon plans to significantly scale up its robotics to meet future demand, a move that could prevent the company from needing an estimated 600,000 new hires by the year 2033.
• Internal documents reportedly reveal a long-term goal to automate 75 percent of all company operations, which would save Amazon 30 cents for each item it packs and delivers.
• The report claims executives are being advised to avoid using terms like "automation" or "AI," suggesting they instead use phrases such as “advanced technology” or even the word "cobot."

• OpenAI has released new policies for its Sora generative video model after actors and unions protested that the tool was creating their likenesses in videos without consent, credit, or compensation.
• Actor Bryan Cranston prompted action from the SAG-AFTRA union after his AI-generated image appeared online, with the group calling the incident a “massive misappropriation” of a performer's identity.
• In response, the company promised to strengthen its guardrails around such abuse, stating that all artists now have the right to determine how and whether they can be simulated.

• Anthropic’s Claude Code assistant is now available through a web app for Pro and Max subscribers, who can create and manage several AI coding agents directly inside their browser.
• The launch moves the product beyond its command-line interface (CLI) origins, representing Anthropic’s effort to encourage developers to create autonomous coding assistants in a wider variety of places.
• Pro and Max plan users can now access the AI assistant by navigating to the main claude.ai website and clicking on a dedicated new “Code” tab to start their work.

• Patients with age-related macular degeneration received a tiny photovoltaic retinal implant that gets zoomed-in images from smart glasses using near infrared light to send electrical signals to the optic nerve.
• A clinical trial found 26 of 32 participants could read books and complete crossword puzzles after a year, although the restored vision is blurry and only appears in black and white.
• Science Corporation, a company from Neuralink co-founder Max Hodak, acquired the retinal implant technology from its developer Pixium Vision after the French medical device firm ran out of money.

• Amazon's widespread outage was caused by a problem with DNS resolution for its DynamoDB API endpoints, which specifically affected the data centers in the N. Virginia (us-east-1) Region.
• The disruption took down major apps like Coinbase, Fortnite, and Zoom, and even knocked out Amazon's own Ring surveillance products along with third-party cooling pods made by Eight Sleep.
• After several hours of downtime across the internet, the company confirmed that the underlying DNS issue was fully mitigated and that all AWS services had returned to normal operations.

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• Meta AI’s app downloads and daily users spiked after launch of ‘Vibes’ AI video feed LINK

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• It’s Official: Xbox Has a Full-Blown Identity Crisis LINK

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