Palmer Luckey’s gene-edited war dogs

PLUS: Meta gets hit with $25B fine

Good morning, tech enthusiasts. Texas-based startup Warhound came out of stealth with a premise that even Michael Bay might find excessive: gene-edited, cloned attack dogs in Anduril body armor.

Behind it are Ben Lamm, founder of de-extinction biotech company Colossal Biosciences, and Palmer Luckey, with the first puppies due in early 2027.

In today’s tech rundown:

  • Palmer Luckey’s $1.2B war dog startup

  • Meta loses $25B privacy trial

  • SpaceX goes shopping for 80K cell towers

  • Airbnb bans the checkout chore list

LATEST DEVELOPMENTS

WARHOUND

Image sources: Ideogram / The Rundown

The Rundown: Colossal Biosciences’ Ben Lamm and Anduril’s Palmer Luckey just launched Warhound, a startup that wants to genetically engineer war dogs for the U.S. military and law enforcement and suit them up in Anduril hardware.

The details:

  • Warhound plans to collect cells from elite military, police, and first-responder dogs, edit their genomes, and clone animals selected for high performance.

  • Early gene edits would target inherited conditions like hip dysplasia; later efforts could boost speed, agility, and smell, potentially using wolf genes.

  • Anduril is expected to develop protective equipment and software for the animals, including advanced body armor, goggles, and battlefield-awareness systems.

  • Warhound expects its first gene-edited puppies in early 2027, with future dogs intended for search-and-rescue to military and law-enforcement operations.

Why it matters: A de-extinction biotech and a defense-tech partner want to clone gene-edited war dogs in sensor-laden armor, in a B-movie pitch now worth $1.2B. If it works, the dogs get healthier and more capable, but it also pushes gene editing into a strange new arena where animal welfare and battlefield optimization blur together.

TOGETHER WITH ALGOLIA

👷‍♂️Building agentic AI

The Rundown: The next step in AI isn't better chat; its agents that can query databases, update systems, and make decisions. Does that mean more custom connectors? Not sure.

This guide helps developers and data leaders understand:

  • Challenges in building AI Agents

  • How MCP servers connect Agents with search

  • Best practices & real cases

META

Image source: Wikimedia Commons, Jeff Sainlar, Meta

The Rundown: A New Mexico judge ordered Meta to pay $25B after a jury found Facebook misled users about who could see their data from 2010 to 2021, in a case spun out of the Cambridge Analytica scandal.

The details:

  • Jurors found nearly 44M violations of state consumer-protection law. Judge Francis Mathew cut a potential $219.5B penalty to $25B.

  • Mathew found Zuckerberg knew users didn’t understand privacy and exploited it, citing his note that they “probably don’t understand their current privacy settings.”

  • The state sought $35B–$40B; Meta argued for no more than $3.4B. Under the state constitution, the money goes to education.

  • Meta’s chief legal officer said the ruling makes it “all but impossible to do business” in NM; the company lost a $375M child-safety verdict there in March.

Why it matters: The $25B penalty is 5x the FTC’s 2019 fine against Facebook — about $12K for every New Mexico resident, and the largest-ever fine against the tech giant. Other states settled child-safety and privacy claims for up to $18B in August; New Mexico went to trial alone and won $25B, pending Meta’s appeal.

SPACEX

Image source: Unsplash / Kabiur Rahman Riyad

The Rundown: SpaceX wants equipment on at least 80K U.S. cell sites — about half the country’s purpose-built towers — as it builds toward a fourth nationwide wireless carrier, reports Bloomberg.

The details:

  • 80K sites would amount to about half of the 158,500 purpose-built cell towers operating in the U.S. last year.

  • Crown Castle is in the mix: Bloomberg reports SpaceX is talking with the tower giant, which operates around 40K U.S. towers.

  • SpaceX is paying about $8B in cash for Grain Management’s 800 MHz licenses, which are designed for service from towers, not satellites.

  • AT&T, Verizon, and T-Mobile fell between 4.2% and 5% in extended trading, while Crown Castle jumped 9.46% after hours.

Why it matters: SpaceX already reaches phones from orbit. Now it’s pairing nationwide spectrum with tens of thousands of tower sites — the ground half of a real carrier, and potentially the first new nationwide challenger with the financial firepower to seriously pressure AT&T, Verizon, and T-Mobile since Sprint disappeared into T-Mobile in 2020.

AIRBNB

Image source: Unsplash

The Rundown: Airbnb is putting the brakes on the most hated part of the short-term-rental experience: paying a cleaning fee, then being told to strip the beds, wash the dishes, start the laundry, and haul out the trash yourself.

The details:

  • The rule covers reservations made on or after Nov. 20. Hosts can still ask guests to put dishes in the sink or dishwasher, gather used towels, and sort recycling.

  • Hosts now choose from 7 standard house rules. Every rule must appear in the listing at booking, and none can be added later by message, signs, or in person.

  • Repeat violators risk a notice on the listing, lower search visibility, canceled bookings, loss of Superhost or Guest Favorite status, or suspension.

  • Hosts argue Airbnb is pushing rentals closer to the hotel model and shifting more cleaning costs onto owners; a petition has drawn thousands of signatures.

Why it matters: This is Airbnb’s first written policy drawing a clear line between reasonable host requests and chores that go too far. It’s the latest step in a years-long cleanup of the Airbnb experience: more than 260K hosts cut or dropped cleaning fees in 2023, and since May 2025 the platform has shown total prices by default in search.

QUICK HITS

Oura sued Ultrahuman again for alleged smart-ring patent infringement, seeking damages and a U.S. sales ban on Ultrahuman’s redesigned Ring Pro.

EA is killing BioWare, one of gaming’s most beloved and influential studios, after 30+ years, canceling the next Mass Effect and cutting hundreds of jobs.

Meta struck an eight-year deal to keep Mark Zuckerberg in California, shielding his voting control as a proposed billionaire tax threatens an $11B+ hit.

Merck and Moderna said their personalized mRNA cancer vaccine plus Keytruda cut melanoma recurrence or death risk by 42% in Phase 3 trials.

Elon Musk reportedly invested $1B in Skydance, giving the newly combined media giant a major boost as it integrates Paramount and Warner Bros. Discovery assets.

eBay is laying off about 1,100 employees (nearly 9% of its workforce) as it looks to simplify operations and focus investment on key growth opportunities.

Chinese researchers built a one-gram wearable brain microscope that wirelessly captures cortex-wide neural activity in freely moving animals.

Rivian acquired UK startup Third Dimension to use its AI-generated 3D simulations to speed up development of advanced self-driving systems, including future robotaxis.

China’s CATL and BAIC are building a battery-swap network for 1M electric vehicles, where drivers trade a dead battery for a full one in 99 seconds.

Varda just sent a cancer-drug project into orbit on a SpaceX Falcon 9 to test whether microgravity can produce PROTAC crystals that are easier for the body to absorb.

That's it for today's tech rundown!

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Rowan, Zach, Shubham, Jennifer, and Nate — The Rundown’s editorial team

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