Week of May 10 – May 16, 2026

Sun 2026-05-10 → Sat 2026-05-16 · 120 stories

AI model & product releases

Thinking Machines Lab details interaction models, which can think and respond in real time, letting users and AI interact continuously for better collaboration Thinking Machines Lab · 2026-05-11
Amazon is replacing its Rufus AI shopping assistant with Alexa for Shopping, which is powered by Alexa+, on Amazon.com and its app, for all customers in the US Jennifer Pattison Tuohy / The Verge · 2026-05-13
Anthropic launches Claude for Small Business, featuring a host of automated services like bookkeeping functions, business insights, and tools for ad campaigns Lucas Ropek / TechCrunch · 2026-05-13
Sources: Google plans to announce a new Gemini model at its I/O conference next week; the model will land roughly in the class of GPT-5.5, but short of Mythos Alex Heath / Sources · 2026-05-13
OpenAI debuts personal finance tools for US ChatGPT Pro users, partnering with Plaid to give access to 12K+ financial institutions to analyze spending and more Ivan Mehta / TechCrunch · 2026-05-15
xAI launches Grok Build, an agent and CLI for coding, building apps, and automating workflows, in early beta, available first for SuperGrok Heavy subscribers Carmen Arroyo / Bloomberg · 2026-05-15

Capability thresholds

Google's TIG reports the first known example of hackers using AI to discover and weaponize a zero-day; TIG's chief analyst says “this is the tip of the iceberg” Dustin Volz / New York Times · 2026-05-11
Chinese state media: CAS Cold Atom Technology has built the 200-qubit Hanyuan-2, the world's first dual-core quantum computer, with a core for error correction Luke James / Tom's Hardware · 2026-05-11
Microsoft unveils MDASH, a security system that orchestrates 100+ AI agents to find vulnerabilities, and says it identified 16 previously unknown Windows flaws Gyana Swain / CSO · 2026-05-13
Adaption, co-founded by ex-Cohere VP of AI research Sara Hooker, unveils AutoScientist, which can automate the research loop behind model training and alignment Russell Brandom / TechCrunch · 2026-05-13
Claude Mythos Preview is the first AI model to complete both of AISI's cyber ranges, which measure AI models' cyberattack capabilities; GPT-5.5 solved only one AI Security Institute · 2026-05-13
Security research firm Calif says it used Mythos to help build a macOS kernel memory corruption exploit circumventing Apple's Memory Integrity Enforcement tech Robert McMillan / Wall Street Journal · 2026-05-14

Revenue & scale milestones

Sources: OpenAI let 600+ current and former employees sell their shares in a $6.6B secondary sale in October 2025; ~75 people cashed out the maximum cap of $30M Berber Jin / Wall Street Journal · 2026-05-11
Source: new revenue sharing terms cap OpenAI's payments to Microsoft at $38B; they previously could have totaled $135B through 2030 if long-term goals were met The Information · 2026-05-11
Sources: Anthropic is in talks to raise between $30B and $50B in a funding round that would value it at up to $950B Mike Isaac / New York Times · 2026-05-12
SoftBank reports Q4 net income up 3x to ~$11.6B, above ~$1.5B est., driven by a $25B+ gain in its OpenAI stake; its OpenAI investment will hit $64.6B by October David Keohane / Financial Times · 2026-05-13
Investor docs: Anthropic's revenue run rate is on track to hit $50B by the end of June; Ramp says more of its customers now use Anthropic than OpenAI, a first Kate Clark / Wall Street Journal · 2026-05-13
Cisco reports Q3 revenue up 12% YoY to $15.84B, above $15.56B est., raises its FY 2026 AI orders forecast, and is cutting fewer than 4,000 jobs; CSCO jumps 15%+ Jordan Novet / CNBC · 2026-05-13
Klarna reports Q1 revenue up 44% YoY to $1.01B, above est., GMV up 33% to $33.7B, active customers up 20% to 119M, and a $1M profit, up from a $99M loss YoY Connor Hart / Wall Street Journal · 2026-05-14
Figma reports Q1 revenue up 46% YoY to $333.4M, vs. $313.2M est., and forecasts Q2 revenue above estimates, citing AI monetization; FIG jumps 8%+ after hours Zaheer Kachwala / Reuters · 2026-05-14
Sources: Anthropic has agreed to the terms of a $30B fundraising at a $900B valuation, with Sequoia, Dragoneer, Greenoaks, and Altimeter co-leading the round George Hammond / Financial Times · 2026-05-14
Canadian legaltech company Clio says its ARR has reached $500M, citing demand for its AI tools; Clio had a $5B valuation after a $500M Series G in November 2025 Marina Temkin / TechCrunch · 2026-05-14
Foxconn reports Q1 revenue up 29% YoY to ~$67B and net profit up 19% YoY to ~$1.6B, meeting est., as it boosts AI server production, its largest revenue source Wall Street Journal · 2026-05-14
A profile of AI video generation startup Runway, which is training models directly on observational data, is now valued at $5.3B, and added $40M in ARR in Q2 Rebecca Bellan / TechCrunch · 2026-05-15
Kioxia reports record Q4 earnings of ~$3.8B, forecasts Q1 operating profit of ~$8.2B, and says it is planning a US listing; Kioxia shares are up 300% YTD Bloomberg · 2026-05-15

User behavior & adoption

A look at Janitor AI, a romantic fantasy roleplay chatbot site run by three men that claims 2.5M DAUs and 15M total users, with 70% to 80% identifying as women Anna Tong / Forbes · 2026-05-10
AppMagic: Grok downloads fell to ~8.3M in April, from a high of 20M+ in January; Recon Analytics: Grok's paid adoption in the US remains nearly flat YoY in Q2 Georgia Wells / Wall Street Journal · 2026-05-11
Princeton faculty votes to require proctoring in all in-person exams starting this summer, reversing an 1893 policy amid concerns about AI-fueled cheating Douglas Belkin / Wall Street Journal · 2026-05-12
Sources: Apollo Global, Morgan Stanley, and others are testing Grok internally as part of xAI's finance sector push, but financiers are rarely using it for work Carmen Arroyo / Bloomberg · 2026-05-13
OpenEvidence, an AI-powered medical search engine, says ~65% of US physicians, or ~650K doctors, and another 1.2M doctors internationally use its services Jared Perlo / NBC News · 2026-05-13
ZipRecruiter: IT and CS job postings are up 14.2% YoY in April; entry-level roles fell from 8.1% a year ago to 7.4%, while senior roles grew from 38.8% to 43.1% Katherine Bindley / Wall Street Journal · 2026-05-13
Professional services firm EY has withdrawn a study on loyalty rewards programs after researchers at GPTZero found apparent AI hallucinations and fake footnotes Stephen Foley / Financial Times · 2026-05-15
The UK's HMRC tax authority announces a 10-year, £175M deal to use London-based Quantexa's AI tech to help identify fraud incidents and fix tax return errors Zoe Kleinman / BBC · 2026-05-15

Platform & policy

The European Commission says it is in ongoing discussions with OpenAI and Anthropic to access their latest AI models; OpenAI is “proactively offering” access Inti Landauro / Reuters · 2026-05-11
Apple releases iOS 26.5, introducing end-to-end encryption for RCS messaging in beta with supported carriers; the setting is enabled by default Chance Miller / 9to5Mac · 2026-05-11
Many npm packages for Mistral, UiPath, and TanStack's web developer tools like react-router were compromised, likely in the Mini Shai-Hulud supply chain attack Socket · 2026-05-11
Meta offers to give rival AI chatbots free access to WhatsApp for a month while it discusses commitments with EU antitrust regulators to address their concerns Foo Yun Chee / Reuters · 2026-05-12
Apple files an EU submission criticizing draft DMA measures that would require Google to give competing AI services access to Android apps, citing privacy risks Foo Yun Chee / Reuters · 2026-05-13
Meta debuts Incognito Chat in WhatsApp and the Meta AI app, letting users talk to Meta AI without Meta being able to access the conversations Lily Hay Newman / Wired · 2026-05-13
Anthropic unveils Claude Agent SDK credits for paid plans, which users can allocate for programmatic usage of third-party agents like OpenClaw, starting June 15 Carl Franzen / VentureBeat · 2026-05-13
OpenAI says it would support a global AI governance body that is led by the US and includes China as a member, similar to the International Atomic Energy Agency Maggie Eastland / Bloomberg · 2026-05-13
Sources: climate watchdog SBTi drops proposed rules that would limit tech companies' claims that gas-fueled data centers are covered by clean energy investments Financial Times · 2026-05-14
Sources: Microsoft plans to remove most of its Claude Code licenses and push its developers toward GitHub Copilot CLI, after previously pushing Claude Code Tom Warren / The Verge · 2026-05-14
California Gov. Gavin Newsom proposes a new 7.25% tax on web-based software sales, targeting $1.1B in state and local tax revenue in the upcoming budget year Bloomberg · 2026-05-14
Ofcom says X has committed to implementing stronger protections for UK users, including reviewing illegal hate and terror content within 24 hours, after a probe Daniel Thomas / Financial Times · 2026-05-15
Replit says it has “worked things out with Apple”, which has approved a Replit update after four months, following a reported dispute over vibe coding apps Zac Hall / 9to5Mac · 2026-05-15
ArXiv, the repository of preprint academic research, says it will ban authors for a year if their papers have “incontrovertible evidence” of AI-generated work Samantha Cole / 404 Media · 2026-05-15
OpenAI's disavowal of a liability shield in Illinois SB 3444 bill and endorsement of a stronger SB 315 suggest it is open to meaningful AI safety legislation Transformer · 2026-05-15
YouTube expands its AI likeness detection program to users over the age of 18, after rolling it out to select creators, politicians, journalists, and others Mia Sato / The Verge · 2026-05-15

Infrastructure & compute

Microsoft and G42's $1B geothermal-powered data center in Kenya stalls after the government couldn't provide annual payment guarantees that Microsoft requested Bloomberg · 2026-05-10
SEC filing: Cerebras upsizes its IPO to 30M shares at $150-$160 each, up from 28M shares at $115-$125, aiming to raise up to $4.8B at an up to $34.4B valuation Carmen Reinicke / Bloomberg · 2026-05-11
Sources: Masayoshi Son has held talks with French President Emmanuel Macron about unveiling a multibillion-dollar AI data center project in the coming weeks Bloomberg · 2026-05-11
Cowboy Space, led by Robinhood co-founder Baiju Bhatt to build data centers in orbit, raised a $275M Series B led by Index Ventures at a $2B valuation Bruce Einhorn / Bloomberg · 2026-05-11
SoftBank partners with South Korea's Cosmos Lab and DeltaX to mass produce next-gen data center batteries in Japan at the scale of one GWh per year in FY 2027 Min-Jeong Lee / Bloomberg · 2026-05-11
CME Group and Silicon Data announce a futures market for computing capacity, with contracts based on daily GPU benchmarks for on-demand rental rates Tobias Burns / CNBC · 2026-05-12
Sources: Sam Altman recently discussed launching an AI compute company that is majority-owned by OpenAI, similar to Stargate's original data center initiative Alex Heath / Sources · 2026-05-12
Analysts: China's AI hardware suppliers face capacity constraints and component shortages, including of optical and electronic chips, that could throttle growth Bloomberg · 2026-05-13
UK chip startup Fractile raised a $220M Series B led by Factorial Funds, Accel and Founders Fund to make specialized logic and memory chips for inference Robbie Whelan / Wall Street Journal · 2026-05-13
Tencent says it plans to spend significantly more on AI infrastructure in H2 2026 as more China-designed AI chips become available “month by month” The Information · 2026-05-13
Cerebras prices its IPO at $185 per share, above the expected range of $150 to $160 per share, raising $5.55B and valuing it at $56.4B on a fully diluted basis Jordan Novet / CNBC · 2026-05-13
Blackstone Digital Infrastructure Trust raised $1.75B in its US IPO, selling 87.5M shares for $20 each, and plans to acquire data centers worth $250M to $1.5B Subrat Patnaik / Bloomberg · 2026-05-14
Ford stock jumped as much as 25% in two days after the launch of Ford Energy, a new subsidiary providing battery storage capacity to AI data centers Christian Davies / Financial Times · 2026-05-14
Cerebras shares closed up 68% at $311.07 in the company's Nasdaq debut after it raised $5.5B in the year's largest IPO, giving it a market value of $67B Bloomberg · 2026-05-14
Alphabet sold $3.6B of bonds in its debut yen-denominated bond sale, the largest by a non-Japanese company, as AI-driven capital spending accelerates Atsuko Fukase / Bloomberg · 2026-05-14
Power prices on the largest electric grid in the US, operated by PJM, jumped 76% YoY to an average of $136.53/MWh in Q1 due to rampant demand from data centers John Ainger / Bloomberg · 2026-05-15

Deals & funding

Sydney-based AI data center operator IREN agrees to acquire Mirantis, which offers Kubernetes management and cloud infrastructure software, for $625M in stock Shane Snider / Data Center Knowledge · 2026-05-10
Sources: Cerebras plans to raise its IPO price range from $115-$125 per share to $150-$160 per share, potentially raising ~$4.8B at the top of the new range Echo Wang / Reuters · 2026-05-10
Nvidia embraces the AI investor role in 2026, already making $40B+ in equity commitments so far, including $30B in OpenAI, $3.2B in Corning, and $2.1B in IREN CNBC · 2026-05-11
Sources: Kuaishou plans to spin off its Kling AI video unit for an IPO in 2027 and is seeking a $20B valuation in pre-IPO funding talks with potential investors The Information · 2026-05-11
OpenAI launches the OpenAI Deployment Company with a $4B+ investment to help organizations build and deploy AI systems, and acquires AI consulting firm Tomoro Reuters · 2026-05-11
Sources: German defense tech startup Helsing is set to raise $1.2B led by Dragoneer and Lightspeed at a valuation of about $18B, up from $14B in June 2025 Financial Times · 2026-05-11
Isomorphic Labs, an AI-powered drug discovery spinoff from Google DeepMind, raised $2.1B led by Thrive, after raising $600M in its first round in March 2025 Pritam Biswas / Reuters · 2026-05-12
Source: Anthropic is in advanced talks to acquire New York-based Stainless, which helps developers generate SDKs from APIs, for at least $300M The Information · 2026-05-12
Rivian CEO RJ Scaringe's Mind Robotics, which is building AI-powered robots for manufacturing tasks, raised $400M, a source says at a $3.4B valuation Sean McLain / Wall Street Journal · 2026-05-13
Sources: Microsoft is in discussions to acquire LLM developer Inception, and SpaceX also courted Inception; source: Inception is looking for a price of $1B+ Reuters · 2026-05-13
Anthropic and the Gates Foundation pledge $200M to use AI in health and education initiatives; the foundation signed a similar, $50M deal with OpenAI in January Jeffrey Dastin / Reuters · 2026-05-14
Sources: xAI co-founder Igor Babuschkin plans to raise up to $1B at an up to $5B valuation for a new AI research startup, with General Catalyst possibly leading Forbes · 2026-05-14
Sources: Nord Quantique, a quantum computing startup that is pursuing a hardware-level quantum error correction approach, raised $30M at a $1.4B valuation Sean Silcoff / Globe and Mail · 2026-05-15
Sources: OpenAI acquired Weights.gg, which offered AI tools to create clones of people's voices, earlier this year; PitchBook: Weights.gg had raised roughly $4M Mike Isaac / New York Times · 2026-05-15
Akamai acquires Israeli cybersecurity startup LayerX Security, which develops a browser-based platform to secure employee use of AI tools, for ~$205M in cash Meir Orbach / CTech · 2026-05-15

Regulation & legal

Corporate lawyers say AI-transcribed meeting notes may not have attorney-client privilege, making otherwise protected conversations discoverable in lawsuits Sarah Kessler / New York Times · 2026-05-10
The US House Oversight Committee launches a probe into potential conflicts in Sam Altman's personal investments; letter: several GOP AGs call for an SEC review Wall Street Journal · 2026-05-12
Musk v. Altman: Altman testified that in 2017 Musk demanded complete control of a proposed OpenAI for-profit arm, musing that he would pass it to his children Bloomberg · 2026-05-12
The UK CMA launches an antitrust investigation into Microsoft's business software dominance, focusing on its bundling of Windows, Word, Teams, and other apps Reuters · 2026-05-14
Musk v. Altman filing: Sam Altman holds $2B+ in stakes in companies that have done business with OpenAI, including a $1.7B stake in fusion startup Helion Energy Kenrick Cai / Reuters · 2026-05-14
The Senate Banking Committee advances the Clarity Act, which would make CFTC the primary regulator for most digital assets while SEC oversees digital securities Bloomberg · 2026-05-14
Musk v. Altman: in closing arguments, Musk's attorney doubled down on claims of Altman's untrustworthiness, while OpenAI's lawyer said Musk has no evidence Associated Press · 2026-05-14
Sources: the US FTC is investigating whether Arm is trying to illegally monopolize parts of the semiconductor market Josh Sisco / Bloomberg · 2026-05-15
Filings: YouTube and Snap reached agreements to settle a lawsuit headed to trial in June over claims addiction to social media has disrupted students' learning Bloomberg · 2026-05-15

Geopolitics & trade

NetBlocks: Iran's 70+ day internet blackout is “the longest recorded national internet shutdown in a connected society”, as businesses warn of layoffs, closures Golnar Motevalli / Bloomberg · 2026-05-10
Sources: Anthropic officials refused a Chinese think tank's request to change its stance and give Beijing access to Mythos at a meeting in Singapore in April New York Times · 2026-05-12
Nvidia says that Jensen Huang is joining President Trump on his China trip; source: the president asked Huang to join after seeing media coverage of his absence CNBC · 2026-05-12
Sources: the US has cleared ~10 Chinese companies, including Alibaba, Tencent, ByteDance, and JD.com, to buy Nvidia H200 chips, but no deliveries have been made Reuters · 2026-05-14

Hardware & devices

Sources: Intel has begun testing production of “low-end/legacy iPhone, iPad, and Mac processors”; Apple thinks TSMC's resources will continue tilting toward AI @mingchikuo · 2026-05-14
Meta rolls out new features for its Ray-Ban Display glasses, including neural handwriting support for all users, and opens up support for third-party apps Jay Peters / The Verge · 2026-05-15

Research & ideas

Agentic inference is set to be different than today's inference, and will change compute infrastructure because speed won't matter when humans aren't involved Ben Thompson / Stratechery · 2026-05-11
Brookings: clerical and administrative workers, 85%+ of whom are women, are among the most exposed to AI-driven displacement and least equipped to navigate it Taylor Telford / Financial Times · 2026-05-11
The 90-day vulnerability disclosure policy is dead, as LLMs compress bug finding and exploit development time, and critical issues must be patched immediately Himanshu Anand · 2026-05-11
In a policy paper, Anthropic urges the US and allies to enforce export controls, curb distillation attacks, and export US AI to hold the lead over China by 2028 Anthropic · 2026-05-14
How tech companies are using open source initiatives to achieve critical strategic goals and how such efforts are reshaping industries like AI, AVs, and more Bill Gurley / Bill's Substack · 2026-05-15

Voices & interviews

A profile of Anduril CEO Brian Schimpf, a Palantir alum and self-identified Democrat, as Anduril's defense tech shakes up the US military-industrial complex Allie Garfinkle / Fortune · 2026-05-10
Q&A with Scott Wu, CEO of Cognition, which hit a $445M revenue run rate in its first 18 months, on his math competition roots, the Devin coding agent, and more Jeremy Stern / Colossus · 2026-05-11
Q&A with Alexandr Wang on rebuilding Meta's AI stack, Muse Spark, personal superintelligence, Meta acquiring Assured Robot Intelligence, Sam Altman, and more Ashlee Vance / Core Memory · 2026-05-13
Q&A with Anthropic CFO Krishna Rao on the “cone of uncertainty” in AI, allocating compute, returns to frontier intelligence, platform vs. application, and more Invest Like The Best on YouTube · 2026-05-13
A profile of Amazon CEO Andy Jassy, who is killing projects, cutting staff, and pleasing Wall Street, while steering the company toward an AI-focused era Bloomberg · 2026-05-15

Industry narratives

An analysis of US DOL data: the IT sector's unemployment rate rose from 3.6% in March to 3.8% in April, as the sector shed 13,000 jobs amid AI uncertainty Belle Lin / Wall Street Journal · 2026-05-10
Musk v. Altman: Satya Nadella says Elon Musk never contacted him with concerns that Microsoft's investments in OpenAI violated any special terms or commitments CNBC · 2026-05-11
GitLab announces layoffs, saying they are “not an AI optimization or cost cutting exercise”, and plans to cut the number of countries it operates in Sarah Frier / Bloomberg · 2026-05-11
Sources: some Amazon employees are using in-house OpenClaw-like tool MeshClaw for unnecessary tasks to inflate AI token use after Amazon set weekly AI targets Financial Times · 2026-05-12
Analysis: a16z is the largest known donor in the current US midterm election cycle, spending $115.5M so far on pro-crypto, pro-AI, and Republican Super PACs New York Times · 2026-05-13
As Meta prepares to lay off ~10% of its staff on May 20, sources say morale is low, and it moved 1,000+ engineers to an AI unit to build generative AI models Wired · 2026-05-14
Sources: OpenAI is weighing legal action against Apple after expectations that ChatGPT's Siri integration would generate billions in revenue fell short Mark Gurman / Bloomberg · 2026-05-14
Sources: 50+ researchers and engineers have left xAI since the SpaceX acquisition via layoffs, firings, and voluntary departures; many have joined Meta and TML Theo Wayt / The Information · 2026-05-14
OpenAI memo: Greg Brockman says he will lead product strategy as part of a reorg, folding ChatGPT, Codex, and developer-facing API into one core product team Maxwell Zeff / Wired · 2026-05-15
Sources detail friction between Samsung's memory and logic chip businesses over higher bonuses for memory chip workers, leading many to leave or apply elsewhere Hyunjoo Jin / Reuters · 2026-05-15

Beyond AI

Filing: Wise plans to debut on the Nasdaq as WSE, and relist in London for its secondary listing; Wise reports year-to-March net revenue up 19% YoY to $2.5B Aisha S Gani / Bloomberg · 2026-05-11
Circle raised $222M via the presale of its native Arc token at a $3B valuation; a16z led with a $75M investment, with participation from BlackRock and others Tanaya Macheel / CNBC · 2026-05-11
AT&T, T-Mobile, and Verizon sign an “agreement in principle” to form a joint venture that aims to end wireless dead zones in the US, without giving many details Jess Weatherbed / The Verge · 2026-05-14
Sources: SpaceX aims to make its IPO prospectus public by next week, targeting a June 12 listing on Nasdaq, driven by a faster-than-expected SEC review Reuters · 2026-05-15
South Korea's Hana Bank agrees to acquire a 6.55% stake in Dunamu, which runs South Korea's largest crypto exchange Upbit, for $672.5M from Kakao Kwanwoo Jun / Wall Street Journal · 2026-05-16