Welcome back to the Technology newsletter 🤖
Apple turns 50 today and while Paul McCartney was playing "Hey Jude" at Apple Park last night, the company was also making headlines for a very different reason: cracking down on the AI-powered "vibe coding" tools that let regular people build apps without writing a line of code.
Meanwhile, OpenAI just closed the largest private funding round ever, and a once-beloved gaming platform is calling it quits.
Let's get into it 👇
💰 OpenAI closed a record-breaking $122 billion funding round on Monday, valuing the company at $852 billion. SoftBank, Amazon ($50B), and Nvidia ($30B each) co-led the round, and for the first time, OpenAI let individual investors participate, raising $3 billion from retail buyers alone. The company says it's now pulling in $2 billion a month in revenue. (CNBC)
🎂 Apple turned 50 today. The company marked the occasion with a special animated homepage showcasing its most iconic products in a sketch-art style, while last night Paul McCartney capped weeks of global anniversary events with a career-spanning concert at Apple Park, playing everything from "Blackbird" to "Band on the Run" under the building's rainbow arches. (Apple Insider)
🚢 Autonomous warship startup Saronic raised $1.75 billion in a Series D round that more than doubled its valuation to $9.25 billion. The Austin-based company, which builds AI-powered naval vessels for the U.S. military, plans to produce more than 20 ships a year by 2027 and is scouting locations for a new shipyard in Texas. Defense tech is officially a magnet for venture capital. (CNBC)
🎮 Rec Room, the social gaming platform that once had 150 million players and a $3.5 billion valuation, announced it's shutting down on June 1. The company said it never found a way to be sustainably profitable. Snap swooped in to acquire select assets and hire some of the team to work on its Spectacles AR glasses. (GeekWire)
🏞 Amazon bought 1,300 acres near the Columbia River in Boardman, Oregon, for what could become an "exascale" data center campus, an $8-to-$12 billion project with up to 20 buildings and 1 gigawatt of power demand. Amazon also recently paid $83 million for the site of a massive solar and battery storage project nearby to help power it. (GeekWire)
🤖 Microsoft upgraded its Copilot Researcher tool with two new multi-model AI features called "Critique" and "Council." Critique uses one AI model to generate research and a second to evaluate it. Council runs models from both OpenAI and Anthropic simultaneously and has a judge model compare the results. Microsoft says the system outperforms Perplexity's Deep Research by nearly 14%. (Computerworld)
On the same day Apple is celebrating 50 years of making technology accessible to regular people, it's also waging a quiet war against the tools trying to do the same thing for app development.
Last Sunday, Apple pulled the app "Anything" from the App Store -- the latest escalation in a weeks-long crackdown on so-called "vibe coding" platforms that let anyone build software using plain English prompts instead of writing code.
The term "vibe coding" describes a new wave of AI-powered tools -- apps like Anything, Replit, and Cursor -- that generate working code from natural language instructions. You describe what you want ("make me a workout tracker" or "build a recipe app"), and the AI writes the code and runs it.
No programming experience required. These tools have exploded in popularity over the past year as AI models have gotten dramatically better at writing functional software.
The problem, according to Apple, is what happens next: those apps run the generated code inside an embedded browser window within the app itself -- code that Apple's App Store review team never vetted.
Apple says this violates Guideline 2.5.2, which requires apps to be "self-contained" and prohibits them from downloading or executing code that changes their functionality.
The crackdown started in mid-March, when Apple quietly blocked updates for Replit and Vibecode without public explanation.
Replit's mobile app, which had been ranked first among free developer tools, has since fallen to third, a decline the company attributes partly to being frozen out of updates for months.
Now, with the outright removal of Anything, Apple is signaling that these aren't case-by-case judgment calls -- it's a policy.
Apple has suggested workarounds: Anything could resubmit if it opens generated apps in an external browser instead of an in-app web view. Vibecode was told it could get approved if it stopped generating software specifically for Apple devices.
But developers see these "fixes" as gutting the core experience that makes their products useful.
What makes the situation especially awkward is the timing.
Apple has been actively embracing AI-assisted coding in its own tools -- Xcode recently added integrations with OpenAI and Anthropic to help developers write code using AI.
The difference, in Apple's view, is that Xcode produces apps that still go through App Store review before reaching users.
But critics see a double standard: Apple is happy to let AI write code, as long as Apple gets to be the gatekeeper.
The deeper tension here isn't really about one App Store rule. It's about who gets to decide what software runs on the most valuable computing platform in the world -- and whether the coming wave of AI-generated apps will flow through Apple's tollbooth or route around it entirely.
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