AI Weekly Issue #515: China’s AI is redrawing the AI race

Two stories this week, connected by one word: open. A Chinese open-weight model helped touch off the worst week for chip stocks since April, as investors finally asked what $725 billion in AI capex is buying. Days later, when an autonomous agent breached Hugging Face, its own defenders were locked out by US frontier-model guardrails…

AI Weekly Issue #514: Applied AI Is Here: What’s Working, What Got Pulled Back, and Why Now

Today we’re publishing the AI Use-Case Library: 159 real, named AI deployments across 21 industries, with the tools, vendors, and reported outcomes on 77 of them. Six were halted or reversed, and those might be the most useful entries in the file. It’s free, no signup, and built to search before you spend a budget…

AI Weekly Issue #513: Treasury analysts called AI a systemic risk. Treasury disowned it.

Regulators picked a word for AI this week, and the word is systemic. Career Treasury analysts concluded the boom is now too entrenched to unwind quietly: a downturn would ripple through stocks, private credit, data-center debt and utilities. The ECB gave every significant European bank until October 31 to prove it can take an AI-powered…

AI Weekly Issue #512: Robotics Is Moving Fast: IPOs, New Models, and Smarter Robots

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…

AI Weekly Issue #511: AlphaFold’s Nobel Winner Just Joined Anthropic. And 6 More AI Wins.

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.

AI Weekly Issue #511: Anthropic Bet $19B on Compute. Treasury Quietly Said ‘Bubble.’

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…

AI Weekly Issue #510: Altman Offered Washington 5% of OpenAI. And 5% of Everybody Else.

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…

AI Weekly Issue #509: AI Productivity: it works best for the people losing their jobs

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…

AI Weekly Issue #507: Anthropic Says Alibaba Stole 29 Million Conversations With Claude

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…