The Board Room

Microsoft is migrating its code-signing infrastructure to post-quantum algorithms and has explicitly warned developers their apps will break, with completion set for mid-October, per Risky Business. Every signed installer, driver, agent, auto-updater and signed third-party component you ship is in scope. The real exposure is your Q4 release calendar: a break found in a customer escalation costs roughly ten times what finding it now costs — and it costs it during quarter close.

Nvidia is in talks to invest billions in Perplexity at a valuation above $30B, more than 50% above an implied roughly $20B a year earlier, The Information reports. Deeper commercial ties came before the equity talks, which makes this a template rather than a one-off: compute agreements convert into ownership of demand. The supplier that sets your inference cost now holds a position in a company chasing the same workflows. The same reporting notes Nvidia is also investing in data-center developers and model makers.

The Dutch data protection authority fined Uber €825 million for disabling driver accounts through automated systems with no human review and no reason given — the second-largest EU data protection fine behind Meta's €1.2 billion, per Risky Business. Any automated suspension, denial, payout hold or deranking in your product now sits against that benchmark. Human review, a stored rationale and an appeal path stop being legal artifacts and become shippable features.

Salesforce guided to 11% full-year growth, an improvement on last year's 9.6%, and has been repriced downward anyway, The Information reports. The proof point sits in procurement: the U.S. Agriculture Department reduced its Salesforce footprint in favor of AI-enabled suppliers. Meanwhile Nvidia is projected to generate $213B in free cash flow this fiscal year against Apple's expected $144B. The profit pool has moved to infrastructure, and any seat-priced footprint thin on proprietary data is now contestable.

Eric Topol, a cardiologist who calls Demis Hassabis "a hero of mine" and secured a Hassabis blurb for his 2025 bestseller, publicly called the claim that AI will cure all diseases within a decade hype, The Information reports. Daphne Koller's widely shared "magic wands" post made a similar argument. The defense that critics simply do not understand the technology stops working when the critic is a supporter. Roadmaps that borrowed model-release timelines for outcomes gated by real-world validation are now a credibility exposure.