Five stories, one nerve: the distance between a claim and anyone's ability to check it. SpaceX takes a $4.16B contract to put America's airborne-threat tracking in orbit on its own Starshield platform. A Reuters investigation finds Tesla's "10x safer" math inflated by roughly three, and its robotaxi zones pre-mapped after all. OpenAI hands governments a life-sciences model it once warned could help build bioweapons. A new paper shows per-token AI billing is unauditable by design. And the FDA opens the door to swapping animal studies for computational models, just as fresh research shows where medical AI silently breaks.

• SpaceNews and Bloomberg via Techmeme — the $4.16B Space Force AMTI award to SpaceX.
• Reuters via Electrek — Tesla's inflated FSD safety math and pre-mapped robotaxi zones.
• Axios and The Decoder — OpenAI's Rosalind Biodefense program.
• arXiv — token-billing audits that hidden reasoning can inflate undetected.
• FDA draft guidance on swapping animal studies for computational models, alongside medical-AI papers on triage and retrieval.