Good morning. Day two of Fortune Brainstorm Tech begins today in Aspen. It’s a packed and stacked program.
In the morning, we’ll hear from Asha Sharma of Xbox, Kimberly Powell of Nvidia, Geoffrey von Maltzahn of Lila Sciences, Sara Hooker of Adaptation, Rodrigo Liang of SambaNova, Marc Lore of Wonder, Justin Cyrus of Lunar Outpost, Mark Hoplamazian of Hyatt, Sridhar Ramaswamy of Snowflake, Dave Bozeman of C.H. Robinson, Peggy Johnson of Agility Robotics, Bill Briggs of Deloitte, Granville Valentine of Google, and Olympic snowboarder Shaun White…and that’s all before lunch!
The afternoon brings Glenn Fogel of Booking Holdings, Ryan Serhant of his eponymous firm, Cathy Hackl of Future Dynamics, Steve Case of Revolution, Warner Bailey of Assistants vs Agents, Georgie Holt of FlightStory, Robert F. Smith of Vista Equity Partners, Kaiwei Tang of Light, Andrew Yang of Noble Mobile, and Bridgit Mendler of Northwood. (Phew!)
It will be incredible. See the full agenda here and watch the livestream here.
More news below. —Andrew Nusca
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Anduril CEO: Economic warfare is the ‘new normal’ for military conflicts
Brian Schimpf, CEO of defense tech company Anduril, says that the nature of modern armed conflict has fundamentally shifted—and that the U.S. military’s supply chain is dangerously unprepared for it.
“The U.S. and Israel did something like 10 times as many strikes in the first month of the war as they did in the entire Gulf War,” Schimpf said at Fortune’s Brainstorm Tech conference in Aspen on Monday. “This is the new normal of what these conflicts are going to look like.”
Schimpf’s remarks opened on a pointed note: Back in March, when he was interviewed for a profile of Anduril in Fortune, he predicted that the Strait of Hormuz could still be blocked by the time the Brainstorm Tech conference rolled around. It was.
For Schimpf, that’s not an anomaly, it’s “the new normal.” Modern conflicts, he argued, are no longer primarily about destroying military assets; they’re about strangling economies. Data centers, oil refineries, and shipping lanes are the targets now, and low-cost drones have made striking them cheaper than ever.
For the U.S., he said, the new reality is a particularly tricky problem: It’s “essentially impossible to inflict economic pain on China without catastrophic economic pain on the U.S.”
Schimpf was especially candid about supply chain fragility. He noted that the U.S. fired through roughly 850 Tomahawk missiles in four weeks of conflict with Iran—burning through a stockpile that the Pentagon had been replenishing at a rate of about 90 per year.
His proposed solution is not just redesigning weapons to be more manufacturable—it’s moving upstream into raw materials. “We’re looking at how do we secure supply of germanium years out,” he said, pointing to China’s systematic acquisition of critical minerals, including rare earth magnets and copper film suppliers, as a strategic stranglehold the U.S. has been slow to counter. —Lily Mae Lazarus
Twitch CEO: Social media has become ‘antisocial’
Twitch chief executive Dan Clancy said that in an attention economy, livestreaming formats like his platform foster a sense of human connection and authenticity that consumers can’t get from social media channels.
The CEO of the Amazon-owned company spoke at the Fortune Brainstorm Tech conference in Aspen on Monday alongside Grant LaFontaine, chief executive of popular streaming marketplace Whatnot. Both executives emphasized that real-time connection is core to their business success. They also highlighted that the digital neighborhoods each has made contrast with highly addictive, quick-hit social media channels.
“Social media has become antisocial. Sitting and swiping doesn’t make you feel connected to other people,” Twitch’s Clancy said. “If you think of real-world communities—churches, running clubs—it all comes from shared experiences in real time.”
Twitch and Whatnot have both amassed audiences of millions who view content for hours on the platforms. Twitch has an estimated 35 million daily active users. Whatnot has said it attracts several million daily active users. Whatnot has risen fast in recent years and challenged e-commerce giants like eBay. It had $8 billion in sales last year, with the company succeeding in collectible categories like trading cards and sports cards, but also in fast-growing verticals like women’s fashion and sneakers. It ranks as one of the top shopping apps in Apple’s App Store.
Answering a question about Twitch and Whatnot themselves becoming addictive platforms, Whatnot CEO LaFontaine said his company has aimed for long-term customer relationships over short-term exploitation. He also said Whatnot allows its users to set limits, though he did not specify what those limits are.
And as for AI? Clancy said it will allow Twitch’s creators to “access their creativity” by providing tools that make content creation easier.
“AI is trying to take humans out of the equation, and live is one of the formats that keeps humans at the center,” he said. “You connect with people. You can understand them. You can see who they are.” —Sebastian Herrera
Anthropic’s Claude Code chief sometimes manages tens of thousands of AI agents at once
Boris Cherny, the creator and head of Anthropic’s Claude Code, hasn’t handwritten a line of code in eight months. But that doesn’t mean he’s stopped building software—it just means he now manages a massive fleet of AI agents to do much of the work.
“This morning I was managing maybe a few hundred,” he said during the opening session of the Fortune Brainstorm Tech conference in Aspen on Monday. “Some days it’s … thousands, or tens of thousands.” This is a big change from even just a year and a half ago, he explained, when developers were running one instance of Claude Code in one terminal window.
“Fast-forward to today, it looks very different,” he said. “You have a Claude Code, but it has subagents that are other Claudes.” The user is no longer prompting Claude, he added: “It’s actually another Claude that does the prompting.”
This massive speedup in coding will be as consequential as the printing press, he explained, which was developed by Johannes Gutenberg around 1440 and dramatically lowered the cost of producing books and expanded literacy.
Last week, Anthropic published a blog post titled “When AI Builds Itself,” outlining how it is increasingly using AI systems to help develop future AI models. Taken far enough, and with enough compute, the blog post said such an approach could lead to recursive self-improvement—an AI system capable of autonomously designing, building, and improving its own successors.
Cherny said that with Claude Code writing all the code for Anthropic—leading to an 8x increase in the amount of code written at the company since the beginning of the year—“I think this might be the first product that actually just takes off.” Claude Code is fully writing itself, he said, and is also doing its own security review.
“We’re starting to get to the point where it has ideas,” he said, adding: “It’s figuring out, ‘What should I build next?’” —Sharon Goldman
More tech
—Apple revamps Apple Intelligence and announces Siri AI, “a profoundly more capable and personal assistant.”
—OpenAI confidentially files for an IPO. “We have not decided on timing yet; it may be a while because there are things we want to do that are likely easier as a private company.”
—Microsoft disables dozens of repos on GitHub after hackers added credential-stealing malware to them.
—Meta takes legal action against NSO Group for defying a permanent injunction forcing it to avoid targeting WhatsApp users.
—Sam Bankman-Fried applies for a presidential pardon. The FTX co-founder was sentenced to 25 years in prison.
—Google lowers the price of Google AI Plus from $7.99 to $4.99 per month.
—Your career needs a ‘gym membership’ to keep up with continuous AI advancements.
