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United Launch Alliance (ULA) will launch another batch of Amazon's internet satellites to orbit early Thursday morning (July 2), and you can watch it live.

An Atlas V rocket carrying 29 Amazon Leo spacecraft is scheduled to lift off from Florida's Cape Canaveral Space Force Station on Thursday, during a 29-minute window that opens at 12:24 a.m. EDT (0424 GMT).

You can watch it live here at Space.com courtesy of ULA, or directly via the company . Coverage will begin at around midnight EDT (0400 GMT).

A United Launch Alliance Atlas V rocket lifts off from Florida’s Cape Canaveral Space Force Station on May 29, 2026 carrying 29 satellites for the Amazon Leo broadband constellation. (Image credit: United Launch Alliance) Amazon Leo is the company's broadband megaconstellation in low Earth orbit (hence the name), which will eventually consist of about 3,200 satellites. It will compete with SpaceX's Starlink network, which has nearly 11,000 satellites at present and is growing all the time.

About 370 Amazon Leo craft have reached orbit on a total of 14 missions to date, atop three different rockets — the Atlas V, SpaceX's Falcon 9 and Arianespace's Ariane 6 .

The Atlas V has been the most active of this trio, conducting 8 of the liftoffs for the megaconstellation, which was originally known as Project Kuiper. (The first of those Atlas V launches lofted two prototype satellites, not operational craft, which explains why Thursday's mission is called Amazon Leo 8 rather than Amazon Leo 9.)

The Atlas V flying on Amazon Leo 8 is the 551, the most powerful variant of the rocket. The numbers mean that it sports five solid rocket boosters, a 5-meter-wide (16.5 feet) payload fairing and a Centaur upper stage with a single engine.

The 29 Amazon Leo satellites going up on Thursday weigh a total of about 18 tons, tying the record for the heaviest load ever launched by an Atlas V. That mark was set on the Amazon Leo 5 mission in early April and has been equaled multiple times since.

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Bitcoin Magazine

AI’s Bitcoin Moment: Why the Open-Source Fight Looks Like Crypto Back in 2014

A new installment of Chain of Thought , the Brownstone Research newsletter written by Ben Lilly, argues that the battle over open-source artificial intelligence is following the same path Bitcoin walked a decade ago, and that investors who recognize the pattern stand to profit.

The note opens with testimony that Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei gave to Congress in July 2023. Amodei acknowledged that open source is “a good thing” in most scientific fields and that the risks of open models released so far were “relatively limited,” but he warned that the scaling of open-source models was heading “down a very dangerous path.”

Lilly reads the subtext plainly: if open models are dangerous, then the closed models sold by companies like Anthropic are the safe choice — and the policy that follows is to restrict the open and elevate the closed.

Bitcoin’s early skeptics mirror what AI is facing

That framing is one digital-asset investors know well.

He revisits Bitcoin’s early skeptics, from Rep. Jared Polis buying the first Bitcoin on Capitol Hill in 2014 to Sen. Joe Manchin’s call to ban a “dangerous currency,” through the 2023 accusations that regulators tried to cut crypto off from the banking system in what critics dubbed “Operation Choke Point 2.0.”

The industry survived, he notes, and Washington is now moving toward clearer rules through the passed GENIUS Act and the pending CLARITY Act.

Decentralized AI, which Lilly calls “DeAI,” is having that same fight now. He points to recent developments as evidence the walls are going up: a U.S. export ban on Anthropic’s latest release, which he says will push the company toward permissioned access that verifies a user’s identity before granting a model, and OpenAI’s decision to restrict its GPT-5.6 rollout to trusted partners.

He expects identity requirements to spread. “It’s for your protection, you see,” he writes. “It always is.”

The note leans on a national-security anecdote to explain the fear driving these moves. Lilly cites NSA chief Joshua Rudd, by way of Sen. Mark Warner, describing how Anthropic’s “Mythos” model broke into “almost all of our classified system, not in weeks, but in hours.”

Yet open source is closing the gap, according to the piece. Lilly says the recent GLM-5.2 scored on par with Anthropic’s Sonnet 4.6 from February, leaving open models roughly three to four months behind the frontier, and predicts an open rival to Mythos and GPT-5.6 by fall.

He argues the bigger unlock is decentralized training on peer-to-peer networks that mirror Bitcoin and Ethereum — swapping compute-for-network-security for compute-for-model-training. Distributed training, he notes, has grown from sub-1-billion parameters to 100 billion in two years.

He names three early projects — Dark Bloom, which enables low-cost private inference on idle Macs; c0mpute, a decentralized inference network; and Pluralis, which trains AI across distributed consumer GPUs — and expects more to launch tokens and reward users for contributing compute.

The note ends with the notion that governments will try to ban open models and they will fail. For him, investing in the space “will be like buying Bitcoin in 2014, back when it was still ‘dangerous.'”

This post AI’s Bitcoin Moment: Why the Open-Source Fight Looks Like Crypto Back in 2014 first appeared on Bitcoin Magazine and is written by Micah Zimmerman .

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VW may pull the plug on its partnership with Bosch despite significant investments.

A report says the project hasn’t reached internal expectations for new autonomous tech.

VW may lock in a new self-driving partnership before the end of September.

Most major manufacturers have spent upwards of a decade developing fully autonomous driving systems, promising they will fundamentally change the automotive industry. According to a new report, VW may have just shelved its major self-driving car project with Bosch.

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In 2022, VW’s software subsidiary CARIAD and Bosch partnered to develop a modular system for driver assistance and fully autonomous driving technologies. The plan was to use the jointly developed tech across all VW Group brands to better compete with rivals, including Tesla and Mercedes, as well as newer tech-focused firms from China.

Read: VW’s Software Firm And Bosch Working On Robot Tech To Park And Charge Your Car

Now , a report from the German newspaper Bild suggests that the project hasn ’t met internal expectations, and despite an investment of roughly €1.5 billion ($1.7 billion), VW is apparently pulling the plug.

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It’s claimed that VW still sees a significant gap between its self-driving systems and those offered by competitors. The car giant is well aware of just how important these technologies will be to its models, so while it may be walking away from the Bosch partnership, it isn’t giving up on autonomy.

Looking For A New Partner

VW

The same report indicates VW will purchase and develop the hardware and software needed for advanced self-driving systems with another partner, rather than developing the components itself, as it had been doing with Bosch . This should, in theory, allow VW to accelerate the development and roll-out of more advanced autonomous technologies, but it remains unclear if the group will be able to recoup any of the expenses it incurred from working with Bosch.

Bild claims that VW is already looking at options for other partners and could be ready to lock in a new agreement by the end of September. The German carmaker already has a partnership with Mobileye and is also working with Rivian on its new electric and software architecture, so they could be two options.

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VW

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Concern for the future of gaming prices is at an all-time high. While the biggest and most troubling increases have come to consoles, with the PlayStation 5 and Xbox Series X|S each seeing prices soar $100 or more, and Valve releasing the highly-anticipated Steam Machine at $1,049, there's a growing fear about how companies value the actual discs, or, increasingly, the digital downloads that accompany the entertainment devices. It began with Nintendo releasing Mario Kart World for the Nintendo Switch 2 at $80, knowing the high demand for the franchise, but more recently, Rockstar has been the focus. After months of speculation that the company could ask as much as $100 for the base edition, they announced that Grand Theft Auto VI would be $79.99 on launch , but physical copies won't come with a disc, and there will be an ultimate edition, featuring in-game shops, missions, and cosmetics, clocking in at that $99.99 price point.