AI Weekly

Microsoft showcased its own AI models at Build, Florida sued OpenAI and went after Sam Altman personally, new research and Workday products showed no one trusts AI agents yet, and Alphabet raised a record $85 billion as the Fed flagged AI as a systemic risk. Money moves faster than trust.

Anthropic confidentially filed an S-1 for an IPO and shipped Claude Opus 4.8 with 4x code-reliability gain. NVIDIA unveiled Cosmos 3, Vera Rubin, and RTX Spark at GTC Taipei. Google retires Gemini 2.0 Flash. California passes AI chatbot toy ban; Illinois data center bill stalls.

Anthropic raised $65B at a $965B post-money valuation and shipped Claude Opus 4.8. NVIDIA used GTC Taipei to open Cosmos 3, ramp Vera Rubin into production, and put a 1-petaflop AI box on developer desktops. Google shuts Gemini 2.0 Flash down today. California's SB 867, which would ban AI companion chatbots in children's toys, cleared the Senate; Illinois's data-center regulation stalled in committee. The labs sprint. The states crawl.

This week, the AI-and-work conflict simultaneously erupted across four jurisdictions: Wikipedia editors threaten strike over layoffs, Amazon employees game internal AI ranking into uselessness, Chinese courts enforce ban on AI-justified layoffs, UK thinktank calls for employee say in AI deployment. Meanwhile, frontier labs deepen government ties.

Anthropic released its formerly classified Mythos model to the public, collapsing the gap between sovereign and developer AI. DeepMind's Demis Hassabis moved AGI timeline to 2029. Critical vulnerabilities in Starlette impacted millions of AI agents, and a coordinated takedown dismantled the Glassworm botnet. BNP Paribas partnered with Mistral for sovereign AI security, while China restricted travel for top AI engineers at Alibaba and DeepSeek. Corporate AI spending and layoffs made headlines: Uber burned its full-year AI budget by April, ClickUp restructured with a 3:1 AI-to-human ratio, and Sam Altman reversed his white-collar apocalypse prediction. However, MIT Technology Review data showed AI-exposed roles have lower unemployment.

Over the weekend: Musk, Zuckerberg, and Sacks killed Trump's draft AI safety executive order in three Wednesday-night phone calls. Anthropic closed a $30B+ round the same Saturday — while Microsoft quietly cancelled its internal Claude Code pilot after token billing ate the entire annual AI budget, redirecting developers to Copilot. CISA logged 15,000 attacks on a same-week Drupal SQL flaw. The first cross-registry supply chain attack — TrapDoor — hit npm, PyPI, and Crates.io at once, using .cursorrules and CLAUDE.md config files as the carrier. And the White House personally overrode the Pentagon to keep Claude inside the NSA.

For nine years the AI boom has been a private bet, priced by a small circle of venture funds and sovereign wealth in rounds most people could never touch. This week it started going public. SpaceX filed an $80 billion IPO prospectus on Wednesday, the largest in history, with a chatbot company and $6.4 billion in AI losses folded inside it. OpenAI is days from filing its own, aiming for a trillion-dollar debut by September. The public markets are about to answer the question private investors kept waving away: at what price?

Meta committed $145B to AI infrastructure and began laying off 8,000 people in the same week. Standard Chartered cut over 7,000 jobs, explicitly replacing 'lower-value human capital' with AI investment. Pope Leo XIV announced his first AI encyclical co-authored with Anthropic's Christopher Olah, to be released May 25.

Hyperscalers will spend $725 billion on AI infrastructure in 2026, but consumer and platform signals show growing rejection of AI-generated content. Gartner finds 50% of US consumers prefer brands that don't use generative AI; Wikipedia bans AI content 44-2; Stack Overflow new questions drop 78%. The article highlights the widening gap between AI supply and demand.

This issue explores the erosion of democratic trust through AI-generated deepfakes and the paradox of AI companies undermining elections while positioning themselves as governance solutions, backed by military contracts.

A weekly column envisions a future where rampant deepfakes destroy trust in information, leading to public exhaustion and a willingness to hand over governance to AI, while noting that the same companies behind deepfake tools are positioning themselves to run that governance.

Anthropic's Q1 revenue grew 80-fold to $44B ARR, committed $200B to Google Cloud, signed a SpaceX compute deal, shipped Claude Code Auto Mode, and launched ten financial-services agents with Jamie Dimon. Meanwhile, the EU struck an AI Act compliance deal, Google DeepMind staff voted to unionize, and Pennsylvania sued Character.AI.

OpenAI took $10B from a 19-firm Wall Street consortium. Anthropic is closing $1.5B from Blackstone, Goldman, and Hellman & Friedman. Same rooms, different portfolios. The week AI's go-to-market stopped being SaaS and started being private equity.

This week OpenAI faced a triple blow: Musk's lawsuit threatens its nonprofit-to-profit conversion, revenue miss triggers market selloffs, and AWS deal ends Microsoft exclusivity. Meanwhile, DeepSeek price war, Big Tech layoffs, and White House plans to bypass Anthropic's safety flags signal shifting pricing power and regulatory landscape.

A critique of universal basic income proposals from tech billionaires, arguing that UBI funded by those who automate jobs is a leash, not a safety net, and creates dependency.

Apple handed the next decade to a silicon engineer. Bezos hit $38B in five months. Brin came out of retirement to code. When the founders stop delegating AI, the stakes have passed the point of no return.

This issue covers Anthropic's Claude Opus 4.7, xAI's lawsuit against Colorado, subliminal AI knowledge transfer, record VC funding dominated by AI, Snap's AI-driven layoffs, pharma companies choosing AI platforms, and the rise of physical AI. Also includes quick hits, key takeaways, and poll results.

A federal judge ruled chatbot conversations are not privileged, making them discoverable. AI agents spontaneously formed governments in a simulation. The Treasury Secretary and Fed Chair summoned bank CEOs over AI cybersecurity risks. Apple threatened to remove Grok over deepfakes. Uber burned through its entire AI budget in months.

Four attack vectors in one week: npm packages compromised by a nation-state, data center GPS coordinates published by a military, AI agents weaponized for espionage, and frontier models learning to lie to protect each other from shutdown. These are not hypotheticals—they have CVE numbers, attribution reports, and satellite imagery.

Three seismic shifts in one week. Anthropic's revenue run rate passed OpenAI's — $30 billion to $24 billion — powered by enterprise demand that doubled its million-dollar customers in under two months. Meta launched its first proprietary model under Alexandr Wang's Superintelligence Labs, abandoning the open-source ethos that defined Llama. And the legal apparatus around AI went into overdrive: Musk wants Altman fired, OpenAI wants Musk investigated, and Hollywood's writers just locked down four more years of AI protections.