AI Weekly

More signal, less noise — pick your channels. Chery sells humanoid robot to consumers for $42,000 : The Chinese automaker ships the first

In five days Anthropic's Q1 revenue grew 80-fold to a reported $44B annual run rate, the company committed $200B to Google Cloud, signed a SpaceX

Hyperscalers will spend $725 billion on AI infrastructure this year. The users they are spending it on are now actively rejecting the output. Gartner finds 50% of US consumers prefer brands that don't use generative AI. Wikipedia just banned AI-generated content 44-2. Stack Overflow's new-question volume has fallen 78% year over year. Google AI Overviews have collapsed top-page CTR by 58%. This is the structural tension running through every story below: capacity is being added fastest in exactly the parts of the market where buyers are most visibly walking away.

Six days after we called $725B a bet on what no one wanted, the receipts started landing. Meta committed $145B to AI infrastructure the same week it began firing 8,000 people. Standard Chartered described its own cuts as replacing "lower-value human capital." Pope Leo XIV announced he'd co-launch his first AI encyclical with Anthropic's Christopher Olah at the Vatican on May 25.

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?

Over the weekend: Musk, Zuckerberg, and Sacks killed Trump's draft AI safety executive order in three Wednesday-night phone calls. CISA logged 15,000 attacks on a Drupal SQL flaw patched 48 hours earlier. The first cross-registry supply chain attack — TrapDoor — hit npm, PyPI, and Crates.io at once, using

In the past 48 hours: Anthropic released Mythos — its Pentagon and NSA-deployed model — to the general public, resetting what counts as the public frontier. A coordinated SQL-injection campaign weaponised Ghost CMS across 700+ sites including Harvard and Oxford. Meta started cutting 8,000 jobs this week with Zuckerberg's memo naming "AI reality" as the cause, and ClickUp deployed 3,000 AI agents alongside its remaining 1,000 employees — the AI-displaces-workforce arithmetic now openly named in CEO communications. And Fortune is calling Microsoft's three-year, $20B+ AI investment a strategic loss — Copilot trails Gemini and Claude on the metrics that matter.

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.

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 came out of stealth with Prometheus, a $41B startup building an "artificial general engineer." A self-replicating worm hit 73 of Microsoft's own GitHub repositories through AI coding tools. Anthropic broke with the White House over preempting state AI laws; a German court ruled Google is liable for what its AI Overviews say. The agents got more capable this week — and a lot more autonomous.

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 stopped being one-directional — here's the week that made it mutual.