Three humanoid companies moved toward the public markets in a single week. Agility filed to go public via SPAC at $2.5 billion, Unitree cleared its Shanghai IPO, and Tesla started turning the line that built its last Model S into an Optimus factory. Mistral shipped a robot brain that finds its way with one cheap…
Look past the data-center megadeals and the bubble headlines, because something quieter happened this week: AI actually delivered. A Nobel laureate joined the AI-for-science push, the open-model frontier got cheaper again, and the first hard evidence landed that an AI tutor can beat the classroom. These are the wins that did not make the noise.
This week the AI buildout stopped being about models and became about balance sheets. Anthropic committed $19 billion to a single data center, SK Hynix raised $28 billion, and SoftBank kept pouring in $87 billion, even as a leaked Treasury draft warned the whole thing rhymes with the dot-com crash. Governments moved too: Illinois made…
Sam Altman spent a year pitching the White House on taking a piece of OpenAI. The offer is now on the table, and it volunteers his rivals too. Add Fable 5’s return, paid for in oversight concessions, and a pattern is hard to miss: this was the quarter the government stopped watching frontier AI from…
Three years into the productivity promise, there’s finally enough hard evidence to answer the question plainly: does working with AI actually make you more productive? Yes — spectacularly, for some people on some tasks. And no, or worse, for others. The gains are real. They’re just not flowing where the marketing said they would. This…
The cutting edge, and the cutting edge already on the clock. On the frontier this week: OpenAI shipped its strongest model to ~20 vetted partners, DeepSeek open-sourced the tricks that make models fast, and a new paper squeezed more reasoning out of far less memory. The edge also left the screen: humanoid robots got their…
Anthropic accused Alibaba of running 25,000 fake accounts to pull nearly 29 million conversations out of Claude — then took the evidence to the White House. That was just the opening shot in a week the labs spent at war with everyone, including each other: poaching Google’s top Gemini minds, watching their own developer tools…
Ten days after Washington pulled Anthropic’s top models from foreign hands, the bill came due. This week Beijing blacklisted 56 American firms, Anthropic’s own filing admitted the trigger was a routine coding request rival models can run, and Microsoft’s CEO warned that letting “a few models eat everything” won’t survive politically. The export war just…
This is 100 Years From Now. Once a week we skip a century and try to picture what life actually looks like when the stuff we’re building now has had time to settle in. This week: the war that won’t have a country in it.
Four days after Washington cut foreign access to Anthropic’s top models, the fallout is clear — and it’s flowing to everyone but Anthropic. Cohere says it’s drowning in government inbounds, DeepSeek just closed a record $7.4B round, and China’s labs are slashing token prices up to 99%. The export control meant to protect America’s AI…
