The Lyceum: Sunday Edition — Jun 13, 2026

This was the week the Iran war tried to end and couldn't quite manage it: negotiators agreed on the final text of a peace deal on June 12, the same week the U.S. conducted strikes in southern Iran and shot down Iranian drones over the Strait of Hormuz. A deal on paper, a war in practice. Running underneath the headline conflict is a quieter, stranger story — Washington asserting direct control over things it once left to markets and allies: the AI models companies can sell, the routers in your living room, the chips that leave the country, and the troops it lends to NATO.

• Gemini Omni & Gemini 3.5 Flash (Google): At I/O, Google rebuilt Search, Android, Workspace, and YouTube around Gemini and unveiled new agent features under Gemini Spark — reframing itself as an AI company that happens to run a search engine.
• Fable 5 (Anthropic): Launched June 9 as Anthropic's most capable broadly available model — then disabled three days later under a U.S. government export directive (more below).
• Venice EPYC (2nm) (AMD): The first high-performance computing processor to reach mass production on TSMC's 2nm node, targeted at cloud and AI workloads.
• Oral GLP-1 trial data (Eli Lilly): Fresh results strengthened the case for an oral obesity pill — a format shift from injectables that could broaden access dramatically.
• Starship V3 (SpaceX): The new iteration central to NASA's Artemis program is being treated as proof-of-concept for SpaceX's long-term design bet, even as engineers work through payload-deployment reliability issues.

If you've watched oil prices, your grocery bill, or your 401(k) lately, you've been watching the Iran conflict by proxy — and this week all of those proxies swung hard in both directions. (RETIREMENT DOOMSDAY!)

U.S. and Iranian negotiators, with Pakistani mediation, reached agreement on the final text of a draft peace deal on June 12, covering an end to active hostilities, sanctions relief, and maritime access through the Strait of Hormuz. Trump signaled he might sign in Europe within days. Markets surged. (Pakistan, US, Iran signal deal to end war close)

The problem: on June 11, the U.S. launched strikes in southern Iran — the most serious breakdown of the ceasefire to date — while U.S. officials still insisted the ceasefire held. The same day the text was finalized, the U.S. military shot down two Iranian drones targeting vessels in the Strait of Hormuz. A peace deal and an active shooting war are running on parallel tracks, and nobody in either capital seems fully in control of both. Iranian officials call the document preliminary and insist nuclear issues require separate talks. Israel is pressing the U.S. to block the unfreezing of Iranian assets, and Defense Minister Israel Katz said Israel will not withdraw from the territories it occupies in Lebanon.

Hormuz — the narrow waterway through which roughly a fifth of the world's oil passes — is the physical chokepoint. Every day it stays contested, oil stays elevated, and so does your energy bill. The signal to watch is brutally simple: whether Trump signs this weekend, and whether Iranian military units actually stand down or keep flying. (Amid regional conflict, the Strait of Hormuz remains critica)

The man who must ratify any peace deal in Tehran is a 56-year-old cleric who has never given a public speech, built his career in the Revolutionary Guards' intelligence apparatus, and inherited power because his father was killed on the first day of this war. (2026 Iranian supreme leader election - Wikipedia)

Mojtaba Khamenei, the second son of the late Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, has been selected as Iran's new supreme leader. Al Jazeera reports his ascension is a clear sign that hardline factions retain control — and could indicate the government has little appetite for a deal in the short term. Asharq Al-Awsat and an Atlantic Council profile describe him as more hardline than his father, with ties to the establishment's most ideologically extreme clerics. He has issued only written statements; many Iranians have never heard his voice. (Who is Mojtaba Khamenei, Iran's new supreme leader?)

The dynastic dimension cuts deep. A hereditary succession would create exactly the kind of dynasty the 1979 revolution was built to reject — which means Mojtaba's legitimacy is untested at the precise moment he must decide whether to bless a deal his negotiators just finalized. The question isn't whether he'll sign. It's whether he can survive politically if he does. His silence so far is itself the signal; watch for any public word on the framework. (Iran's new supreme leader Mojtaba Khamenei expected to ...)

Imagine the FDA calling a drugmaker at 5 p.m. on a Friday and ordering it to pull a medication from every pharmacy — not for a safety recall, but over a classified concern the company can't see the details of. That's roughly what happened to Anthropic. (Trump Abandons 'FDA for AI' Proposal | TechPolicy.Press)

Anthropic disabled access to its Fable 5 and Mythos 5 models to comply with a U.S. government export-control directive citing "national security authorities." The company says it received the order at 5:21 p.m. ET, instructing it to suspend access for any foreign national — inside or outside the U.S., including its own foreign-national employees — and shut the models for all customers to ensure compliance. Per Fortune, officials acted after learning of a technique to bypass Fable 5's safeguards and unlock the cybersecurity capabilities of Mythos, the model beneath it. Anthropic argued the jailbreak was narrow — and pointedly noted the same exploit likely works on rival models like OpenAI's GPT-5.5, which face no such controls.

The backstory makes the timing suspicious. Trump in February ordered federal agencies to stop using Anthropic's models after it refused the Pentagon's contract terms; the Pentagon declared it a "supply chain risk" in March, a designation Anthropic is fighting in court. This is the first time Washington has ordered a commercial AI model off the market mid-deployment — targeting a company already in litigation with the administration, weeks before its IPO. If access is restored within days, it was a negotiating move. If it stays dark, every frontier lab's lawyers are quietly rewriting their government-relations playbook. (Trump signs AI executive order asking companies to give gove)

Most people set up their router once and forget the box with the blinking lights exists. This week the U.S. government decided that box is a national security threat. (The NSA Just Warned Everyone to Reboot Their Routers)

The FCC added all consumer routers to its "Covered List," blocking the import and sale of new foreign-made devices after the White House determined they pose "unacceptable risks." The scale of the problem is real: China is estimated to control at least 60% of the U.S. home-router market, and the FCC cited three cyberattacks — Volt, Flax, and Salt Typhoon — tied to actors working on behalf of the Chinese government. The catch is that most routers are assembled abroad, often in Taiwan or China, and the ban applies even to U.S.-designed devices built overseas.

Your current router still works. But when it dies, replacement options just got more expensive and more limited — and the domestic manufacturing to fill the gap doesn't exist yet. This is the quiet cousin of the chip export controls: the same logic (Chinese hardware as potential backdoor) applied to the device in 130 million American homes. Watch for price increases and a scramble by U.S. brands to find compliant factories. (The NSA Just Warned Everyone to Reboot Their Routers)

The biggest business deal of the week had nothing to do with AI models or peace talks — it was about the electricity that powers both. NextEra Energy announced it will acquire Dominion Energy in a $66.8 billion all-stock transaction, the largest power-sector deal on record, creating the country's largest electric utility across territories spanning Florida to Virginia.

The timing isn't a coincidence. Virginia hosts more data center capacity than anywhere on Earth, and its grid is already straining. AI companies are building faster than utilities can wire new power plants, and the gap between electricity demand and supply has become the single biggest constraint on the AI buildout — bigger than chips, talent, or capital. NextEra has the world's largest renewable portfolio and the project-finance muscle to build at scale; Dominion has the territory. Together they're betting that whoever controls the grid in AI country controls the AI economy.

The deal still needs approval, and in an administration that's been aggressive on both permitting and antitrust, that's genuinely uncertain. Watch FERC — the federal regulator overseeing interstate electricity — for early signals on its posture.

Climate policy couldn't do it. Carbon taxes couldn't do it. It took $100-a-barrel oil and a Persian Gulf war to finally push European consumers into electric vehicles at scale.

Reuters reports EV demand is up roughly 50% in France and Germany since the Iran war began, with Renault CEO François Provost citing the conflict directly and saying the company may add production shifts in France and Slovenia to keep up. The mechanism is simple: when gasoline costs what it costs now, the math on an EV flips overnight, and monthly fuel savings alone close the deal for households who'd been on the fence.

Here's the irony worth sitting with: a war devastating for energy markets is simultaneously accelerating the escape from the fuel that makes those markets matter. Every European driver who switches is one fewer permanent customer for Iranian, Saudi, or Russian oil. The question is durability — if oil settles back toward $80 after the ceasefire, some demand evaporates. But if the war has permanently repriced Europeans' expectations about fuel volatility, it may have done more for EV adoption than a decade of subsidies. Watch whether the surge survives peace.

Europe heard two messages from Washington this week, neither soothing. Reuters reported on June 12 that the U.S. plans to significantly reduce the aircraft and warships it makes available for NATO operations after European Command said it would "rightsize" its contribution to the alliance's Force Model. European leaders were still reacting angrily to Trump's revived tariff threat tied to Greenland — pressure they've called unacceptable. (For the record, the original January standoff was defused at Davos after talks with NATO Secretary-General Mark Rutte; the ambition never went away.)

Different stories on paper, the same rhyme in practice: America may give Europe less hard military capacity, and may use economic threats even against friendly governments. The combined message is alliance management by uncertainty. That doesn't mean NATO is collapsing — it means Europe is being shoved, more bluntly than before, toward strategic adulthood. All of this lands while Russia's war on Ukraine grinds on and Middle East crises drain U.S. munitions and naval resources. Alliances are strongest when they're boring. This one is no longer boring. If Washington names exact reductions in ships and squadrons this week, Europe's debate shifts from "we should prepare" to "we are already late."

President Trump told reporters that U.S. support may have helped shift the situation in Ukraine, and Russian officials responded to the prospect of a diplomatic opening. The headline reflects a right-leaning focus on Trump's leverage in the conflict and the possibility of a deal, rather than battlefield developments alone.

Also in right-leaning news:

• Fox News also highlighted the sentencing of former South Korean President Yoon Suk Yeol to 30 years over North Korea drone flights.
• The New York Post reported that SpaceX is pricing a record-breaking $75 billion IPO at $135 a share.

Texas officials approved waivers allowing border wall construction work in and around Big Bend National Park, prompting criticism from conservation advocates and local residents. Opponents say the project would affect protected land and sensitive desert habitat.

Also in progressive news:

• The Guardian also reported that the U.S. Justice Department approved an $111 billion merger between Paramount and Warner Bros. Discovery.
• Vox highlighted a Supreme Court ruling that created a legal rule affecting Planned Parenthood.

The Supreme Court and Planned Parenthood. Two treatments. Same facts, genuinely different emphasis. Which perspective is which?

Version A

The Supreme Court's decision foreclosing Medicaid patients' ability to challenge South Carolina's exclusion of Planned Parenthood from the program deserves scrutiny not merely as an abortion dispute but as a structural question about who can hold government accountable. Medicaid's 'free choice of provider' provision was written precisely to protect low-income patients from politically motivated restrictions on their care. When the Court rules that beneficiaries lack standing to enforce that guarantee in federal court, it does not resolve a neutral procedural question — it removes the only practical enforcement mechanism available to people with the fewest resources. The patients who brought this case were not seeking abortion services; they sought routine gynecological and preventive care from a provider they trusted. Stripping them of judicial recourse while leaving the state's political decision intact concentrates power in the hands of officials who face no legal check on ideologically driven contracting. The ruling's consequences fall disproportionately on rural, low-income women for whom Planned Parenthood is often the sole accessible clinic — a distributional reality the majority opinion does not acknowledge.

Version B

The Supreme Court's decision to allow states to cut Medicaid funding to Planned Parenthood raises a question that conservatives have long considered foundational: who controls the allocation of public money? The Court held, in Medicaid's existing statutory framework, that individual patients cannot sue in federal court to override a state's determination of which providers qualify as 'qualified' under the program. This is not a novel invention of doctrine but a reading of congressional intent and the limits of implied private rights of action — a principle the Court has applied consistently across many contexts. States have legitimate authority to make judgments about which organizations receive taxpayer dollars, particularly when those organizations perform procedures a substantial portion of the public finds morally objectionable. The ruling does not prohibit Planned Parenthood from operating, nor does it strip anyone of a constitutional right. It restores a boundary: federal courts are not the appropriate venue for every policy disagreement. Fiscal federalism requires that states retain meaningful discretion over Medicaid contracting, or the program's cooperative structure becomes a legal fiction.

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A peace treaty signed between airstrikes. A supreme leader nobody has heard speak. The little plastic box in your hallway, reclassified overnight as a weapon of the state.

Somewhere in Washington, the same government that yanked two AI models off the shelves over a jailbreak it described verbally is also reassuring everyone that the ally it now ranks as a top-tier spy is a trusted partner in the war it's simultaneously fighting and ending — and the most honest thing in the entire story might be the Pentagon's filing cabinet.

Stay skeptical.

If you know someone still assuming their router is just a router, forward this — they'll want to read it before March.