EU Eats Its Own - Europe Gives Up On Space - Is SpaceX Really Buying Cursor?

Upside is a weekly podcast that unpacks the real news behind the headlines affecting European venture startups and investing. Hosted by Mads and Dan from SuperSeed. 

This week: the EU admits it wrote a bad AI Act (shocking), Sergey Brin is wheeled out of retirement again, SpaceX buys a coding company because of course, and Wall Street invents a new way to short private credit. Dan and Mads untangle.

(02:00) DeepSeek V4 drops overnight — Chinese open-weights model benchmarking at Opus 4.6 level. The gap between Western frontier and Chinese open source is now 78 days. Trained entirely on Huawei chips, so the three-year US chip embargo has been going brilliantly. Anthropic will probably survive, but NVIDIA might want to glance at its share price.

(07:30) The EU quietly euthanises its own AI Act — Monday's trilogue is gutting the juicy bits and calling it "simplification." Translation: Brussels is admitting it was wrong without admitting it was wrong. Europe needs inference chips, public procurement as anchor demand, pension capital unlocked, a real 28th regime, and nuclear next to datacentres. Otherwise we're just tidying.

(11:00) Cyber week: three stories, one confused headline — France's ANTS loses 19M identity records (run by Atos, which is insolvent, what could possibly go wrong). The UK Biobank "breach" isn't a breach, it's a 2003 open-science policy finally meeting 2026 strategic competition. 

(18:40) Sergey Brin un-retires (third time lucky?) — Leaked DeepMind memo: every Gemini engineer must now use Google's own agents, because they'd been quietly reaching for Claude Code when they actually wanted to ship. Embarrassing. Meanwhile Google owns 14% of Anthropic and just sold them $10bn of TPUs. Panic stations over here, revenue party over there. Beautifully incestuous.

(24:20) SpaceX options Cursor at $60bn — or pays $10bn in compute to walk away. OpenAI has Codex, Anthropic has Claude Code, xAI had vibes. Now it has a distribution front door. Every frontier lab is becoming an application company. Europe's shot is here; Lovable, enterprise workflows, anything touching physical AI.

(28:45) Europe has ceded space to SpaceX — we just haven't admitted it — Starlink: 7,000 satellites. Eutelsat: 600. IRIS² won't be operational until ~2030. The architecture's right, the scale is pathetic, procurement is pork-barrel nonsense. Fix: scrap ESA geographical return, let a thousand flowers bloom at every input layer, anchor with state demand.

(33:30) Wall Street opens a short on private credit — JPM, Barclays, Morgan Stanley now making markets in CDS against Blackstone, Apollo, Ares. ~20% of BDC loans went to SaaS. AI is eating 25-35% of that. Blackstone took $3.8bn of redemptions in Q1 and posted its first monthly loss in three years. Not 2008, but a slow, jagged repricing of old-economy SaaS. 

(40:30) Predictions — Dan: the next trillion-dollar European company will be a defence prime, not software. Anthropic crosses $100bn ARR and never IPOs (Mads: sad, it should).

(41:20) Deals of the week — Mads: ATMOS Space Cargo (€25.7M Series A: Europe can finally bring things back from orbit without asking SpaceX, Russia, or China nicely). Dan: €1.07bn into 57 EDF defence projects, yikes grants, yes, but hopefully the bedrock rather than a grantrepreneur buffet.

(43:30) Week ahead — EU AI Act trilogue Tuesday, Ariane 6 launching American Kuiper satellites the same day (the irony writes itself), $14 trillion of hyperscaler earnings Wednesday, and a BoE decision that's drifted from "two cuts" to "possibly a hike." Cheers, Iran.