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…
The US government yanked Anthropic’s newest models days after launch, while state attorneys general opened formal process against OpenAI. That turns frontier capability into something investors have to discount: a model can be state-of-the-art on Monday and policy-frozen by Friday. The market still wants the upside, but the asset now has a kill-switch.
Visa just wired ChatGPT to shop and pay on your behalf — an AI agent can now buy at any Visa merchant without you clicking “buy.” It capped a week where the labs pushed autonomy and capital to new highs: Anthropic put Claude Fable 5, its most powerful public model, into everyone’s hands; Jeff Bezos…
