Brook misses out on home ton as hosts slip from 322-5
The clock had just ticked past 7pm, there was still half an hour of play left on this soggy second day, and it looked for all money that Harry Brook would end a year-long wait for his 11th Test century with a first at his home ground of Headingley.
Brook had agonisingly missed out by one run against India here last summer. And this time, against a ragged Pakistan side that had handed him a life second ball amid another outing to forget, the box was practically begging to be ticked.
The USGS said the quake occurred at 1 p.m. local time and was centered 38 kilometers (24 miles) northwest of the city of Upahuacho, in the Parinacochas province of the Ayacucho region.
A general view of the damaged car in which 5-year-old Hind Rajab and members of her family died after Israeli forces fired on the vehicle in the Tel al-Hawa neighborhood of Gaza City, Gaza. —Dawoud Abo Alkas—Anadolu/Getty Images
The Israel Defense Forces (IDF) has acknowledged for the first time that its soldiers opened fire on a vehicle carrying 5-year-old Palestinian girl Hind Rajab and six of her relatives in Gaza, and said it would launch a criminal investigation into the incident.
The admission, issued Wednesday as part of the IDF’s review of roughly 150 “exceptional” incidents involving its troops during the war in Gaza, reverses the military’s previous denial that its forces were in the area when Rajab and her relatives from the Hamada family were killed in January 2024.
In findings published by its General Staff Fact-Finding and Assessment Mechanism (FFAM), an internal IDF body tasked with conducting factual reviews of exceptional operational incidents, the IDF said Israeli troops fired on the Hamada family’s vehicle as it approached them, killing five passengers.
Rajab and her 15-year-old cousin Layan Hamada initially survived. Twelve days later, their bodies were recovered from the vehicle by rescue workersreturning to the area, along with those of the five relatives who had been killed in the initial shooting.
The IDF said it was opening a criminal investigation after its review identified alleged failures in coordinating the movement of a Palestine Red Crescent Society (PRCS) ambulance that was sent to rescue the girls. The two paramedics inside the ambulance were also killed.
“In the hours shortly after the firing, following a telephone call to rescue authorities, in which the two girls participated and later Hind alone, the movement of a Palestine Red Crescent ambulance was coordinated for the purpose of evacuating the casualties,” the Israeli military said.
It continued: “According to the allegations raised, upon the ambulance’s arrival at the scene of the incident, a shell was fired toward it, resulting in the deaths of the two paramedics travelling in it. Several days later, the bodies of the seven members of the Hamada family, including the bodies of Hind and Layan, were recovered from the vehicle. In addition, the bodies of the two paramedics were recovered from the ambulance.”
In a statement on Thursday, Hind Rajab’s mother, Wesam Hamada, said, “I do not want a closed military investigation. I want an independent, transparent investigation and genuine accountability for everyone responsible.”
What happened to Hind Rajab
The Hamada family was traveling through Gaza City on Jan. 29, 2024, after Israeli evacuation orders prompted them to leave the city’s Tel al-Hawa neighborhood, when their vehicle came under fire.
The girls contacted rescue authorities for help. Recordings released by the PRCS in February 2024 captured Layan speaking with an emergency dispatcher before gunfire was heard and the call ended.
When the organization called back, Rajab answered and remained in contact with emergency personnel for hours as they tried to arrange her rescue. In the recording, Rajab tells a dispatcher that everyone else in the car is dead and that a tank is approaching. She repeatedly pleads for someone to come and rescue her, and as daylight fades, says she is afraid of the dark.
The recordings later became central to Kaouther Ben Hania’s The Voice of Hind Rajab, which uses Rajab’s real voice and was nominated for an Academy Award for Best International Feature Film 2026.
“IDF troops fired at a vehicle that was approaching them while travelling contrary to the advanced notice that had been published in an announcement by the IDF Spokesperson to residents of the area,” the Israeli military said in its findings Wednesday. “As a result of the fire, five of the vehicle’s passengers were killed, and two survived: Hind Rajab and her cousin Layan Hamada.”
In the hours after the shooting, the PRCS sought to send an ambulance to evacuate the girls and coordinated its movement to the scene. According to the IDF, allegations reviewed by the FFAM indicated that a shell was fired toward the ambulance after it arrived, killing the two paramedics inside.
“Following review of the findings and due to alleged failures in the coordination of the movement of the Palestine Red Crescent ambulance, it has been decided to initiate a criminal investigation of the incident by Military Police Criminal Investigation Division,” the IDF said Wednesday.
AWashington Post investigation previously found that the PRCS dispatched the ambulance after coordinating with Israeli authorities to secure a safe route. The ambulance came under fire after it reached the area, killing the two paramedics.
Days later, the bodies of all seven members of the Hamada family, including Rajab and Layan, were recovered from the vehicle, while the bodies of the two paramedics were found in the ambulance.
The deaths of Rajab and her relatives were among the most high-profile civilian casualties of the early months of the war in Gaza. Her fate became the subject of international concern as recordings of her calls with emergency personnel circulated around the world and prompted widespread calls for her rescue.
The IDF had previously denied involvement. In February 2024, it told The Times of Israel that “IDF troops were not present near the vehicle or within firing range of the described vehicle in which the girl was found.”
Before Rajab’s body was recovered, the IDF also told the Washington Post that it was “unfamiliar with the incident.” It gave a similar response to CNN, which had provided the military with coordinates supplied by the PRCS.
What else the IDF announced
The criminal investigation into the Rajab case was one of five decisions announced Wednesday involving incidents examined by the FFAM.
The IDF said a second criminal investigation would examine the deaths of 15 Palestinians, including medical personnel and a U.N. employee, during three shooting incidents in Tel al-Sultan, a neighborhood in Rafah, on March 23, 2025.
“They were killed in their uniforms. Driving their clearly marked vehicles. Wearing their gloves. On their way to save lives. This should never have happened,” said Jonathan Whittall, then head of the U.N. Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs in the occupied Palestinian territory, who helped coordinate the recovery mission. Whittall said that a U.N. vehicle, an ambulance, and a fire truck had been crushed and partially buried and that the bodies had been recovered from a mass grave.
Referring to the incident, the IDF said Wednesday that its soldiers had been conducting an ambush against suspected Hamas operatives when they opened fire on the vehicles. “It later became apparent that the vehicles struck in the first and second shooting incidents were a fire truck and ambulances, and that the vehicle struck in the third shooting incident was a Palestinian UN vehicle,” the military said. It said six of those killed were identified as members of Hamas.
The IDF also acknowledged that after the shooting, troops “decided to crush the vehicles and to cover the bodies with metal mesh.” The Military Prosecution, the legal body responsible for reviewing FFAM findings, concluded that “the firing conducted during the incident raises a reasonable suspicion of criminal misconduct,” prompting the second criminal investigation.
The Military Prosecution declined to launch criminal investigations into three other incidents reviewed by the FFAM: the Israeli strikes that killed seven World Central Kitchen employees in April 2024; an IDF strike on a Médecins Sans Frontières (MSF) building in Khan Yunis on Feb. 20, 2024, that killed two employees; and an incident in Gaza City on Nov. 18, 2023, in which two MSF employees were killed.
In the World Central Kitchen case, the IDF said its review found “serious failures” that led Israeli forces to mistakenly conclude that Hamas operatives were traveling in the aid group’s vehicles, but determined that commanders’ decisions did not raise a reasonable suspicion of criminal misconduct. Two officers had previously been removed from their positions and three others formally reprimanded over the strike.
The five cases are among roughly 150 incidents that the IDF says the FFAM has reviewed since the war in Gaza began after Hamas launched its Oct. 7, 2023, attack on southern Israel, killing roughly 1,200 people and taking about 250 hostages.
More than 73,000 Palestinians have been killed in Gaza since the start of the war, according to Gaza’s Health Ministry. In the absence of independent monitoring on the ground, the ministry is the primary source for casualty data relied upon by humanitarian groups, journalists, and international bodies. Its figures do not differentiate between civilians and combatants and cannot be independently verified by TIME. Data from the IDF suggests a Palestinian civilian death rate of 83%.
Israeli rights groups have long questioned the effectiveness of the military’s system for investigating alleged wrongdoing by its own forces.
An analysis by the Israeli human rights organization Yesh Din of complaints involving soldiers’ conduct in the West Bank between 2018 and 2022 found that just 0.4% of cases in which a Palestinian was killed and the fatality was brought to the military’s attention resulted in a prosecution—one prosecution for every 219 fatalities. B’Tselem, another prominent Israeli human rights organization, has cited Yesh Din’s 0.4% prosecution rate, saying it demonstrates the failure of Israel’s military and civilian legal systems to hold soldiers accountable for killing Palestinians.
Former Democratic Rep. Eric Swalwell had his electronic devices seized by the FBI over the weekend as part of a criminal probe into sexual misconduct allegations, two sources familiar with the matter told CBS News. CBS News justice reporter Jake Rosen has more.
The US Open will offer the biggest prize fund in Grand Slam history with a total of $108 million (£79.2m) on offer - marking a 20% increase on last year.
In a wide-ranging interview, Gov. Kathy Hochul stressed the values she shares with Mayor Zohran Mamdani and talked about President Trump, taxes and ICE.
Carlos Alcaraz has won his battle to be fit for the US Open.
The seven-time grand slam champion has not played on the ATP Tour since April due to an ongoing wrist issue, but enlisted the help of football transfer journalist Fabrizio Romano to announce his comeback.
President Donald Trump, who has made hundreds of millions of dollars in crypto, met at the White House with what he called a "who's who” of cryptocurrency leaders.
With the U.S. six months into the war with Iran, President Donald Trump announced that the U.S. will enact the "most crushing economic operation ever taken," calling it "an Economic D-Day."
North Korea launched a barrage of ballistic missiles toward the sea on Thursday, South Korea's military said, a day after the North shrugged off a U.S. decision to scale back military drills with South Korea in an apparent bid to resume diplomacy.
Royal experts Robert Jobson and Victoria Murphy weighed in on Prince Harry and Meghan's planned move back to the U.K. and what it could mean for the royal family.
The latest court filings in cases involving the Kennedy Center and the White House ballroom project detail the work being done at the two institutions.
Sheila Cavanaugh, a chaplain at Brigham and Women's Hospital in Boston, testified on Day 17 of Lindsay Clancy's murder trial. CBS News' Meg Oliver has more details.
Transportation Secretary Sean Duffy; Interior Secretary Doug Burgum; Washington, D.C., Mayor Muriel Bowser; and Monica Crowley, chief of protocol at the State Department, unveil the new Freedom 250 Grand Prix Indycar during a news conference on the National Mall in Washington, D.C., on March 9, 2026. —Matt McClain—Bloomberg/Getty Images
An IndyCar race consisting of 25 drivers will take place around the National Mall in the heart of Washington, D.C., on Saturday and Sunday.
IndyCar is the top level of single-seater auto racing in the U.S., best known for the “Indy 500,” an annual 500 mile race in Indianapolis.
"This will be like no other race ever. This will get the highest ever ratings of any such race," Trump said in July, when the top IndyCar drivers participating in the race visited the White House.
Trump himself is scheduled to take a ride around the 1.7 mile race track in his presidential limousine, known as “The Beast” before the competition begins, White House officials told multipleoutlets.
The event is being hosted by Freedom 250, the organization Trump established through an Executive Order in January to coordinate the Administration’s semiquincentennial events. The race follows other high profile events this summer in celebration of the milestone anniversary, including a UFC fight on the White House grounds, an athletics tournament dubbed the Patriot Games, and the world’s largest fireworks show.
Here’s what to know about the 250 Grand Prix .
When is the race?
Practice races will take place on Saturday, beginning at 9 a.m. local time and continuing throughout the day.
The real race will then begin at 1:10 p.m. on Sunday.
What is the route?
Drivers will race for 147 laps, covering a distance of roughly 250 miles.
The 1.66 mile, 7-turn track begins on 3rd Street near the Capitol building at the east end of the National Mall in Washington, D.C., before jutting down Pennsylvania Avenue, the course’s longest straight at 0.4 miles. It then makes turns on 9th Street, 7th Street, and Independence Avenue, passing sites including the Lincoln Reflecting Pool and the Smithsonian Museum before circling back onto 3rd street to finish off.
Who’s paying?
Penske Corp., the owner of IndyCar, is picking up most of the tab for the race, according to Bud Denker, Penske Corp. president and chair of the Freedom 250 Grand Prix.
An exact price tag for the event is unknown, but Denker said in July that the race is “much more” than IndyCar’s Detroit street race, which has a budget of $20 million.
A $90 million budget allocated by Congress for special events in Washington will cover security costs, according to Deputy Mayor for Public Safety and Justice Lindsey Appiah, who spoke at a public briefing in July.
The federal funding is a part of the Emergency Planning and Security Fund, which is designed to support presidential events, including those related to the U.S.’s 250th birthday.
How can you watch?
Organizers expect roughly 140,000 spectators to attend the race in person throughout the weekend.
Free tickets were given to 100,000 people through a lottery. The only other way to watch the event up close is to purchase an all-inclusive food and beverage weekend pass to the Champions Club, an exclusive viewing venue built for the race overlooking 7th Street and the National Mall, for nearly $5,500.
Venues for the race open to the public at 8 a.m. on both days.
For viewers watching the race remotely, FOX will be streaming the events.
You can also access FOX’s coverage through certain streaming platform bundles such as YouTube TV, Hulu +, Fubo, or Sling TV.
Flight disruptions
The Federal Aviation Administration last week said it expects to pause flights at Reagan National Airport for three hours for the race from 10:15 a.m. to 1:15 p.m. on Sunday.
“The FAA has been planning and coordinating with stakeholders to help ensure the safe and efficient movement of air traffic during Freedom 250 events,” the agency said in a statement. “As part of that effort, the agency will implement traffic management initiatives at Ronald Reagan Washington National Airport.”
Flights were also halted for several hours on July 4 due to Trump’s fireworks show.
Concerns for D.C. artifacts
Due to the vibrations caused by the race cars, some preservationists and museum representatives are worried for the safety of artifacts stored in the many museums along the race route.
Mary Okin, the assistant director of the Living New Deal, a non-profit dedicated to preserving the legacy of President Franklin Delano Roosevelt, wrote a letter last month to the U.S. General Services Administration (GSA) expressing her concern that the vibrations could damage the frescoes of the Wilbur J. Cohen Building, which the GSA manages.
“In the foreseeable event of a race vehicle losing control, or a crash that sends debris, such as tire marbles flying, or sparks a fire, what protective features will be in place ahead of the race to ensure that vibration, flying car parts, and other high speed or collision impacts do not damage this national treasure?” Okin additionally cautioned in her letter, referencing the Wilbur J. Cohen building.
The National Gallery of Art previously conducted a study to gauge the potential threat of the vibrations, but did not reveal its findings.
“In preparation for the Freedom 250 Grand Prix, the National Gallery conducted an extensive vibration study and based on the results we have implemented a set of measures to ensure the safety of our staff, visitors, collection, and facilities during the race,” gallery spokesman Chris Abanavas said in a statement to The Washington Post. “While we are not releasing the specifics, I can share that any such measures are only being taken out of a great abundance of caution.”
An arrest warrant was issued for Zymire Hughes, who authorities called a “punk,” saying they believe he may have fled Pennsylvania while having ties to California and Nevada.
Pentagon officials have discussed firing Max Lederer, the 19-year publisher of Stars and Stripes, before his scheduled retirement at the end of September, U.S. officials tell CBS News. CBS News senior national security correspondent Charlie D'Agata has the latest.
Government announce plan for ‘stepping stone’ qualification as 620,000 year 11 students face retaking maths or English after failure to achieve grade 4
The government’s plans to make young people continue studying maths and English if they fail GCSEs could be demotivating and ineffective, according to education experts and school leaders after retake pass rates slumped this year.
Only one in seven students in the age group retaking GCSE maths after a previous failure got a grade 4 or above this summer, while only one in six managed to pass English, meaning the majority will have to retake the exams next year if they remain in education or training.
The U.S. is conducting stealth operations to transport oil through the Strait of Hormuz, sources tell CBS News. The development was first reported by Axios. CBS News' Charlie D'Agata has more.
Federal agents also ‘seized electronic devices’ from former Democratic representative at San Francisco airport
Authorities are said to have searched the Washington DC home of disgraced former California Democratic representative Eric Swalwell on Sunday amid an ongoing law enforcement investigation into sexual assault allegations.
CNN reported that federal agents on Saturday also “seized electronic devices” from Swalwell at the San Francisco airport, citing unnamed sources familiar with the investigation. Multiple other outlets have confirmed the federal search; the Daily Mail was the first to report this law enforcement activity.
Researcher Nathan Cofnas previously claimed Black people would hold few high-profile positions in a meritocracy
Nathan Cofnas, the academic who made plagiarism allegations against Prof Jason Arday before his death, has been suspended by a university.
Arday, 41, resigned from his role at the University of Cambridge this month after coverage of Cofnas’s accusations of plagiarism. The allegations, which were not proven in any formal investigation, triggered questions about Arday’s achievements.
Объясню структуры данных через очередь в поликлинике, а потом покажу, где эта аналогия ломается: почему связный список с «вставкой за O(1)» в прикладном Go обычно проигрывает обычному массиву.
Спойлер: асимптотика здесь не ошибается. Ошибается вывод, который мы из неё делаем.
Статья для тех, кто асимптотику знает, но не проверял её замером.
Premier Christine Fréchette demanded more information from Prime Minister Mark Carney before deciding whether an emerging agreement adequately protects Quebec's dairy and forestry sectors.
Почему мы классифицируем движение руки, а не картинки со светофорами — и как встроить это в форму двумя строками
Картиночные капчи в 2026-м решаются моделями компьютерного зрения за миллисекунды, а каждый ваш клик по «выберите автобусы» бесплатно размечает чужой датасет. Плюс две свежие проблемы: Google в начале 2025 срезал бесплатный лимит reCAPTCHA с 1 000 000 до 10 000 проверок в месяц, а с апреля 2026 ужесточил модель ответственности за данные по GDPR. Из России reCAPTCHA к тому же нестабильна.
Общая проблема для сети — как доказать, что ты человек, не сдавая паспорт, лицо и номер телефона. Мы предлагаем: drop-in капчу, которую посетитель не кликает, а рисует. В описании — архитектура, ML-часть, приватность и код интеграции. Проект открытый. Буду рад аргументированным замечаниям.
Researcher Nathan Cofnas previously claimed Black people would hold few high-profile positions in a meritocracy
Nathan Cofnas, the academic who made plagiarism allegations against Prof Jason Arday before his death, has been suspended by a university.
Arday, 41, resigned from his role at the University of Cambridge this month after coverage of Cofnas’s accusations of plagiarism. The allegations, which were not proven in any formal investigation, triggered questions about Arday’s achievements.
The International Congress of Mathematicians met in Philadelphia last month, its first U.S. meeting since 1986. Minutes after accepting the Fields Medal, mathematics’s highest honor, Jacob Tsimerman told reporters he was leaving academia to work on AI safety. “I think the world is changing,” he said, adding that he did not expect the mathematical career to survive in its present form.
Two months earlier, he had been one of nine mathematicians asked to review whether an AI model had truly refuted an 80-year-old central pillar of modern geometry, known as the Erdős unit distance conjecture. Tsimerman and his peers determined that it had, and their commentary alongside the 18-page proof helped translate the machine's argument into mathematics a human could understand.
The breakthrough, and subsequent report, reflected how the bottleneck that holds us back from forging new discoveries in mathematics, and, increasingly, in every other field, is changing. For most of history, the scarce resource was discovery. With AI, discovery is nonstop, and human confirmation is now what is scarce.
To be clear, we are AI optimists. We believe AI tools will complement human ingenuity and expand what we can know and build, but our infrastructure for vetting and certifying discoveries was built for human throughput, and that is now the binding constraint. That is what holds innovation back. The answer to this problem is formalization: translating AI’s outputs into precise forms whose correctness can be checked automatically. Building the infrastructure to make verification routine is now a national-scale engineering problem.
Machines are outrunning us in more than math. The same is happening to the code that runs hospitals, banks, and power grids. In April, for example, Anthropic disclosed that its Mythos model could find unknown vulnerabilities in major operating systems and browsers, and restricted access to fifty organizations racing to patch them. Soon after, Microsoft engineers found 90 critical flaws in a widely used product; and in June, Sen. Mark Warner told a Senate hearing, citing the NSA director, that the tool "broke into almost all of our classified systems, not in weeks but in hours."
All of this arrives in a world that already runs on code we assume is correct. In July 2024, a single faulty software update, not a cybersecurity attack, grounded flights and disrupted hospitals worldwide. Nowadays, developers can “vibe code,” or use generative AI to write code with natural language prompts. This lets teams build quickly, but at the same time can produce vast quantities of code nobody fully understands.
The same AI systems accelerating discovery can also solve the resulting information overload — if we pair their generative power with the rigor of mathematics.
For decades, researchers in defense, intelligence, academia, and industry have built an alternative to blind trust: formal methods, systems for proving that software mathematically will do exactly what it was designed to do. Like the way a software compiler translates a program into instructions a computer can execute, formal verification takes code, a specification of what it should do, and a proof connecting the two, and accepts the program only if every logical step checks out. This makes it possible to automatically validate AI output, and more broadly rigorize software and other security guarantees. And generative AI tools have made this sort of formalization broadly accessible in a way it never was before.
Once proof checking is cheap, the next bottleneck becomes writing the right specification. Deciding precisely what a system should do and capturing the world around it remains a matter of human judgment. A flawless proof of the wrong specification is still an answer to the wrong question. Formal verification cannot stop phishing, prevent every failure in a complex human system, or certify an AI model's overall safety—but it can eliminate whole classes of errors in critical software. For systems where failure can mean harm to millions, this should be a crucial step in the adoption of AI-generated code.
The Leiden Declaration, endorsed in June by the International Mathematical Union, warns that AI threatens the verifiability of proof. We would put it the other way around: mathematics offers the infrastructure to make generative AI more trustworthy. For this reason, the United States should treat that mathematical rigor as a national mission. We need public infrastructure for verified software: open libraries of verified components and specifications, standards and benchmarks, better tools for checking updates, and training programs that connect mathematics, computer science, engineering, and national security—coordinated across agencies rather than confined to one program. And because formal methods rest on deep mathematical foundations, this requires sustained investment in mathematics research and education, not only in the applications built on top.
Companies operating critical infrastructure should not rely solely on reactive patching and bug bounties where failure could hurt the public. Instead, they should aim to build in auditing and formal guarantees from the start. The goal is not to formally verify every line of every program, but to identify the logic of critical systems, specify what that logic must and must not do, and achieve mathematical assurance in that logic.
Mathematics has weathered crises of trust before. Geometry, infinity, logic, and the nature of proof each threw the field into foundational doubt, and each time the response was more precise languages, stricter standards, and better verification. That rigor is what made mathematics scalable, and software now needs the same transformation. As AI writes more of the code the world runs on, blind trust is no longer good enough. The question is whether the United States will lead the shift to mathematical trust, or wait for the failures that force it.
North Korea fired a number of short-range ballistic missiles, Seoul's military said Thursday, after President Trump said he would meet again with North Korean dictator Kim Jong Un later this year. CBS News' Nancy Cordes reports.
USS George Washington will replace warship families say suffers from shortages, plumbing problems and low morale
The USS George Washington aircraft carrier has arrived in the Middle East, where it is expected to relieve the USS Abraham Lincoln from its record deployment amid concerns about poor living conditions and morale.
US Central Command announced on Thursday that the Washington arrived in the area on Wednesday, and posted an image of sailors working on the flight deck as the ship transited the Arabian Sea. No date has yet been announced for the Lincoln to return to the US.
Hi, this is Gergely with a bonus, free issue of the Pragmatic Engineer Newsletter. In every issue, I cover Big Tech and startups through the lens of senior engineers and engineering leaders. Today, we cover one out of four topics from last week’s The Pulse issue. Full subscribers received the article below seven days ago. If you’ve been forwarded this email, you can subscribe here.
Two months ago, I covered how Meta seemingly deliberately started destroying its once-standout engineering organization. The company did 10% layoffs at a time when revenue and profits hit an all-time high, and reassigned about 20-30% of software engineers to data labeling with basically no notice.
The result was that a good chunk of software engineers at Meta – even those not reassigned – were starting to interview elsewhere:
I said – and still maintain – that the layoffs were an unforced, self-inflicted error on Meta’s part. Coupled with forced reassignment, they struck disaster. And I’ve now gathered new details that confirm that Meta is bleeding top engineering and product management talent:
Some layoffs reversed, in the 11th hour
In the UK, mass layoffs require a notification to those potentially affected, before the cuts can happen. A few weeks after this notification, a good chunk of folks were “un-notified,” I confirmed. But those on notice had already started to look for jobs, obviously.
Retainer equity grants offered to IC6+ engineers resigning
Meta started to offer large retainer equity grants to those resigning and leaving for Google, Anthropic, and OpenAI: a practice not done before. Talking with long-time Meta engineers, Meta simply didn’t make counteroffers or negotiate when an engineer handed in their resignation. But this practice has been abandoned. Here’s a story of a senior, long-tenured engineer I confirmed to have happened:
This dev was force-reassigned to one of the AI data labeling teams
They thought “oh no, this is not what I want to do” and started to interview
Got a Google offer, but compensation was below their current one. Google basically lowballed them.
Decided to leave anyway. Told their new manager they were resigning.
New manager asked for some time, then presented a large, one-off, retainer equity grant, vesting over 3 years
The engineer went back to Google, telling the company, unfortunately, they are a key engineer and showed them the retainer amount Meta is paying for them to stay
Google upped their offer, out-bidding Meta’s retainer offer
The engineer who was desperate to leave – even for lower compensation! – was thrilled, and happily left for Google.
Retainer equity seems to be offered for most IC6 engineers who resigned in the last few weeks. I talked with seven such people, who were all IC6 (staff-level engineer) and IC7 (principal-level engineers), who shared more details. They are not aware of IC4 (mid-level engineer) or IC5 (senior-level engineers) getting such offers.
Retainer equity offered is $400K to $1M+, and vests over 3 years, for the folks who got these offers. The $1M+ offers were all for engineers with Anthropic or OpenAI offers, and I confirmed a $400K and a $600K grant for engineers with an offer for other, smaller AI startups.
A current Meta engineer who is interviewing asked me if these folks needed to present their offer letter to get a counteroffer. I asked two of these folks with counteroffers, and neither had to do so, but they both indicated they were handing in their resignation. Upon receiving this notification, their director, together with HR, offered a discretionary retainer equity, should they stay.
Anthropic and OpenAI on a hiring spree from Meta
Anthropic and OpenAI seem to be on a hiring spree, signing Meta engineers that Meta wants to retain now that it is too late! I have confirmed that three engineers who received an offer from Anthropic were also offered large, $1M+ equity grants (vesting over 4 years) as counter-offers to stay. Two out of the three rejected it and joined Anthropic, and the third one initially accepted the offer and then still left for Anthropic a month later, forfeiting this grant.
OpenAI is having similar success, and the two AI labs seem to be the main destination for now ex-Meta engineers to bounce to. It makes sense: these companies can match Meta’s total compensation, and although neither OpenAI nor Anthropic is publicly traded, both companies organize secondary equity sales, and their respective IPOs are likely to happen in 3-12 months’ time.
AI startups also successful in hiring infra experts from Meta
I had an in-depth discussion with another long-tenured AI infra engineer at Meta, who was considering whether to stay, or to go. This person wrote up their situation, and shared it with me, writing:
“With the current situation at Meta (layoffs, forced drafting to do AI work, general sense of disruption at work, low moarale, and almost zero productivity across teams, plus multiple reorgs) I started to look around, on the market, a few weeks before the 20 May layoffs. I figured I have a 50% chance of being let go.
I did not get laid off, but I got offers from startups, and one from a high-growth AI startup I like, and also an offer from Google.
Now, the pros to staying a Meta:Context, relationshipsScale that few others haveBig Tech perks, relatively “chill” WLB in terms of oncallHigh TC
The cons:Terrible morale, hard to “move” work through mostly unmotivated teams all around meRe-orgs continue, I have very low confidence in middle management (Directors, VPs) to navigate this churnFurther layoffs are likely: it’s clear that there’s more bloat, surely Zuck will do another round in 2027. And no one is safe during a layoffA ‘doom loop’ for anyone who stays: low morale → unmoitivated bith highly compensated engineers → a bloated organization that moves slow”
After a new reorg, this engineer got a supportive manager, who made it clear they would help them thrive inside of Meta. So the engineer rejected both the AI startup’s offer and that of Google, deciding to stay… but only for a month!
The AI startup’s founder spent more time with this engineer, increased the equity in the package significantly, and convinced this engineer that at the startup they matter as a person, while at Meta they would be doing soulless work, worrying about the next layoff, probably early 2027.
So this engineer also handed in their resignation. And it all started with the layoffs: the engineer assumed there was a 50% chance of being let go and wanted more career stability!
Those deciding to not resign: stay for the money?
There are engineers staying – at least until the end of the year, to wait for the stock refershers — which we’ll talk about in just a moment.
Another engineer I talked to decided to quit Meta with morale so low, and start his own thing. Management convinced him to stay until the end of the year, hinting at large equity refreshers being handed out around January, which could be in the $1M+ range for this specific engineer.
The 2022 stock price causing a TC decrease for many?
One reason there’s speculation about large equity refreshers being handed out at the end of the year is that Meta’s stock price was very low in 2022 and 2023, when equity refreshers and new hire grants were handed out. In both March 2022 and March 2023, the stock price was around $200 - which is about a third of this year’s stock price (which has been fluctuating between $520- 680, currently sitting at $540.) By March 2024, the stock price rose to $500, and then to $580 in March 2025.
Because of this, those who joined Meta in 2022 have seen their equity grants nearly triple, and the 2023 equity is worth nearly 3x as well. But for these lucky folks, total compensation is set to drop by the end of this year, and their equity refresher would need to be higher than in past years to avoid a compensation drop.
Inside of Meta, engineers who I talked to are split between expecting further attrition (those leaving whose total compensation drops steeply) and those who think that there will be more attrition unless there are higher-than-usual equity refreshers.
A “mercenary” culture at Meta?
I wonder if Meta made a massive mistake by treating engineers as “commodities” and turning their culture into a “mercenary” one. Between March and June, Meta treated engineers as replaceable commodities that could be thrown out or moved between teams, while stripping them of any autonomy. The reassignments to AI labeling were not explained, nor were managers or individuals asked about preferences: from above, someone said that Alice and Bob, starting on Monday, are no longer with the team, but are training up Meta AI. Never mind that these were the two most experienced engineers on the team, or that Bob was the team’s infra expert, and Alice the “fixer” engineer on the team.
And all this damage was done, for what? It was to allow Meta to restart its AI coding model development efforts, and release Meta Muse Spark: an AI model that is currently the 7th most capable AI model as per Artificial Intelligence Analysis, tied with Grok 4.5. Credit where it’s due: with this model, Meta is now well ahead of Google’s Gemini in capability.
With the damage done, there is little motivation for anyone to stay at Meta – unless they are on a visa, or if it’s about the money. You can have an OK engineering culture with a team who is mostly interested in making more money than what they would elsewhere: but this is more of a mercenary culture, and companies run by mercenaries are more easily out-executed by teams where people believe in the mission of the company.
If you work at a company that would love to hire from Meta: now is (still) your opening! So go for it.
And if you’re at Meta: you are so in-demand, outside of the company, at places where engineering is still treated as a profit center. As Ryan Nystrom, currently building AI at Notion, put it:
“Meta friends: the industry is exhilarating right now. Get out. Go build something. The handcuffs are an illusion.
I’m having the time of my life at Notion. Come, and have fun again.”
More on the “great engineering leader career break.” The industry is changing fast, and the VPE and CTO roles also need to adapt. And don’t forget that these are the roles from which you can drive change that reorganizes engineering in ways that work better.
We need to talk about migrations with AI. Asana needed to migrate off testing framework Enzyme, but it meant doing a massive rewrite of test cases. With AI, the project was completed in two weeks: without AI, this work would surely have been kicked down the road. Airbnb and Uber share similar stories, and AI seems like a superb fit for framework migrations.
Are AI startups making the Gartner Magic Quadrant irrelevant? Gartner ranked AWS, Microsoft and IBM above Anthropic, Cursor and OpenAI in their “AI code modernization tools” ranking. This is most likely because the first three pay large sums of money to Gartner, but AI labs and vendors refuse to pay this “Gartner tax.”
Industry Pulse. Another hours-long GitHub outage, GitHub alternatives are here and fighting for market share, Slack launches Slack Code, text generated by Claude to be watermarked, and Uber open sources SubmitQueue.
The president’s empty advice that children should receive separate jabs against measles, mumps and rubella will only lead to less take-up by parents
Nobody wants to hurt a child. The howl of pain, the tears, the look of betrayed shock all make it very hard to deliver a cherished small person to the needle-wielding nurse. But that’s part of being a responsible parent. It becomes a lot tougher if mum or dad is being fed mixed and erroneous messages about the benefits and harms of vaccination.
Parents have to make a lot of decisions about what’s right for their child, from the school they should go to and the food they should eat to the hours they should spend on the phone or watching TV. In the US, Donald Trump wants them to add another: do they choose to give their children separate jabs against measles, mumps and rubella, involving six visits to the clinic, or should they opt for the combined MMR vaccine, which does the job in two? For decades, the vast majority of families have been taking the advice of doctors, accepting their assurance that the MMR vaccine is safe and very effective. But what are they to think when a US president announces that the triple jab could be “quite lethal” and signs an executive order advising states to offer separate vaccines?
