August 12, 2026

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Keep your feet on the ground. NASA has debunked a viral conspiracy theory that the Earth will lose gravity for seven seconds today. But just in case they’re wrong, we’re borrowing those leashed backpacks for all our friends.

—Sam Klebanov, Molly Liebergall, Matty Merritt, Neal Freyman, Abby Rubenstein

In today’s newsletter, we’ll get into:

Today’s total solar eclipse
Claude watermarking the content it generates
Michigan’s unusual new grading policy

Markets

Nasdaq

26,445.44

-0.60%

S&P

7,728.2

-0.32%

Dow

53,791.85

-0.34%

10-Year

4.684%

-1.0 bps

Bitcoin

$63,604.86

-0.48%

Alphabet

$343

-3.61%

Data is provided by

*Stock data as of market close, cryptocurrency data as of 6:00pm ET. Here's what these numbers mean.

Markets: Stocks fell yesterday as oil prices climbed due to doubts that a deal with Iran will materialize. Big Tech in particular had a bad day, with Alphabet, Amazon, and Apple all dipping. Today’s market focus is likely to be a little closer to home as a key inflation reading comes out this morning.

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COSTA DEL ECLIPSE DEL SOL

Solar eclipse is Europe’s star tourism magnet

A man looks up wearing solar eclipse glasses with a yellow orb behind him

Cesar Manso/Getty Images

Necks will be craned in Spain today but it has nothing to do with seeing the towers at the Sagrada Família. Mainland Europe is having its first total solar eclipse since 1999, followed by a meteor shower. The eclipse will be visible around sunset this evening in parts of Spain and Iceland.

The locales in the path of totality—where the moon blocks the sun entirely—are experiencing astronomical tourism spikes. These include the Spanish cities of Valencia, Bilbao, A Coruña, and Zaragoza, as well as Iceland’s capital, Reykjavík.

Icelandair and Delta both added Reykjavík flights from the US in advance of the eclipse, and hotel prices in the city today are 140% higher than a year ago. Meanwhile, Spain is expecting 460,000 visitors from overseas and an extra $395 million in spending from eclipse chasers.

Filling ‘empty Spain’

The eclipse’s path is through parts of Spain that are just a bit more populated than the moon, boosting tourism in places usually overlooked by paella pilgrims:

Hotel prices in the historic town of Soria soared sixfold from last week, according to El País.
The mountain village of Somosierra, with a population of 93 people, is expecting up to 2,000 visitors, as it is one of the closer places to Madrid in the path of totality.

It’s good for business, but…many visitors are heading to the driest parts of the country, threatening to exacerbate wildfire risk—and anti-tourism sentiment. Some local authorities are preparing by restricting parking, while others have closed rural footpaths and banned barbecuing.

This is just the beginning of Spain’s solar windfall. Spain’s tourism authorities are actively promoting two more eclipses that will be visible in the Iberian Peninsula in the next 500 days—one of them featuring a “ring of fire,” in which the sun forms a shining rim around the moon.

If you’re not in Spain or Iceland today…a partial eclipse will be visible in other parts of Europe and in 26 US states. Here’s how to see it from North America. Be sure to use protective equipment to avoid eye damage.—SK

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World

Tour de headlines

Row of buildings destroyed by an earthquake with piles of rubble and people standing on the roofs searching for survivors

Gabriel Aponte/Getty Images

🇨🇴 Search and rescue efforts continue after deadly Colombia earthquake. Rescue teams searched for survivors yesterday, with more than 3,000 people missing in the aftermath of a 7.4-magnitude earthquake in western Colombia that left at least 200 people dead. Colombians are also using social media to track down missing people. The country is declaring an economic emergency, which gives President Abelardo de la Espriella—whose term began Friday—the ability to more robustly address the disaster. The earthquake could create economic challenges, as coffee exports have largely been halted, Bloomberg reported yesterday.

🎬 Ellison threatens to move Paramount out of California amid antitrust fight. Paramount Skydance CEO David Ellison reportedly told the company’s leadership that he’s mulling moving Paramount out of California as soon as October—unless the state’s attorney general, Rob Bonta, agrees to settlement talks in the suit he’s leading to block its $110 billion purchase of Warner Bros. Discovery. Bonta dismissed the move as “another attempt to blackmail the state into letting an illegal deal through.” Although federal antitrust regulators have blessed the deal, it’s delayed because of the antitrust suit brought by California and 11 other states. A trial is scheduled for March.

📦 NYC’s Mamdani squares off with Amazon over delivery workers. New York Mayor Zohran Mamdani threw his support behind a City Council bill that would force big delivery companies like Amazon and FedEx to hire delivery workers rather than relying on subcontractors. The bill’s supporters, which include unions, say the current system allows companies to pay workers less. Its critics, including Amazon, say the bill’s passage would drive up prices for consumers and slow down deliveries. Meanwhile, President Trump said yesterday that the federal government was looking for ways to block a separate signature Mamdani policy, the pied-à-terre tax.—AR

CATCH ME IF YOU CAN

Claude content will soon get invisible AI watermarks

Samuel Boivin/Getty Images

Anthropic’s models are about to start telling on themselves. Yesterday, the company announced plans to watermark anything that Claude creates or edits, in compliance with European transparency regulations.

Everything the light touches. The policy will apply worldwide to all text and files that Claude models spit out, whether they’re AI-generated cover letters or AI-proofread lines of code. Loopholes exist: Heavy editing or file conversions may shed the watermark. Otherwise, the virtual scarlet letter will be invisible to the human eye but detectable by ~~Nicolas Cage squeezing lemon juice on it~~ machines. Anthropic said it will help users and other third parties detect the mark, with details to come in “forthcoming documentation.”

Timeline: Watermarking will come with any Claude model launching after Aug. 2, which is when the EU AI Act’s Transparency Code kicked in. It carries a four-month grace period for existing models, so Anthropic said it’s working to get its older Claudes up to par.

Other companies, including Google, Meta, Microsoft, and OpenAI, have also pledged to follow the EU’s new rules.

Zoom out: Anthropic’s move comes as backlash mounts against sneaky AI content. Allegations of computer-generated writing plague the book-publishing world. Meanwhile, AI music platform Suno recently said it would watermark its tracks, and Substack recently launched a tool for flagging AI writing that postures as human-made—something the newsletter company’s CEO referred to as “Claudefishing.”—ML

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GPA Saved

Michigan drops letter grades for freshmen

Niv Bavarsky

Good news for anyone planning to wing it on their Victorian lit final (there are multiple Brontë sisters btw): The University of Michigan won’t release official grades for its freshmen’s first semester. The university said that the pivot to a pass/no credit system for first semester classes is an effort to “curb the mental health crisis” among students.

The pilot program will start in the fall of 2027 and apply to the roughly 3,500 students that enter the College of Literature, Science, and Arts each year. Professors will still give students grades on assignments, and the school will internally track grades for scholarship and athletic requirements. But the letter grades won’t show up on students’ transcripts:

The administration said the program is aimed at helping students transition to college-level work and explore courses that are more difficult without the risk that a bad grade early on would tank their GPAs.
Critics outside the school argue the new approach creates entitlement and doesn’t do anything to improve mental health.

Whether you give it an A or a D, the idea isn’t new: Schools like the California Institute of Technology, Swarthmore College, and Wellesley College all have similar programs for first-semester grades. And MIT has been doing it since 1968.—MM

Reader Poll

Should college students get letter grades their first semester?

Yes, it’s part of going to school.
No, let them get used to new standards first.
It depends. Different schools have different policies and students can choose where to go.

Sam's stock of the week

Intel raised $20b for AI factories by selling new shares

Justin Sullivan/Getty Images

On Wednesdays, the Brew’s Sam Klebanov highlights a fascinating stock, commodity, or other asset that’s worth your attention.

Intel is doing the public company version of renewing its vows. The chipmaker raised $20 billion selling new stock in an oversubscribed offering this week, exceeding its initial goal of $15 billion, Bloomberg reported yesterday.

Why now? Intel is taking advantage of its stock soaring almost fivefold in the past year after a long period of struggling to compete with rival chipmakers Nvidia and AMD. The rally is thanks to explosive demand for its chips from AI hyperscalers and the US government taking a 10% stake in the company. It’s seeking to raise funds for costly chip factory upgrades and production expansion to serve the AI data center boom.

The company offered the extra shares for $95, at a 6.5% discount to Friday’s trading price.
Its stock dropped 4% after it first announced the share sale on Monday. But by yesterday, Intel reportedly had $100 billion worth of interest in the new shares, leading it to expand the offering.

It’s not the only one offering up equity for AI money. Google parent Alphabet is looking to raise up to $85 billion through equity sales and deals, while Oracle is seeking $20 billion, per Bloomberg.—SK

Worldly trivia

What country comes second in the alphabetical list of countries?

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Answer

Albania (Afghanistan is first)

Word of the Day

Today’s Word of the Day is: goose, meaning “to stimulate or boost.” Thanks to Alejandra Rivera Flaviá from Puerto Rico for the invigorating suggestion. Submit another Word of the Day here.

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Written by Abigail Rubenstein, Sam Klebanov, Molly Liebergall, Matty Merritt, and Neal Freyman

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☕️ Solar windfall