Howdy wizards,
Here’s my pick of the 1% most important AI news from the last month, sans hype.
The big thing
Anthropic is winning compute, talent, revenue, and enterprise spend simultaneously. The breakdown:
Compute deals. Anthropic locked in some massive new compute commitments this last month. From Google, Akamai, CoreWeave, Broadcom, and more. Google's commitment of $200B, the biggest by far, is also paired with up to $40B in Anthropic equity. Akamai's stock hit its highest since 2000 on the news.
Revenue and first profit. Anthropic’s Q2 revenue is projected at $10.9B. That’s more than double Q1, and Anthropic's first ever operating profit. Dario Amodei told staff they could grow up to 80x this year.
Valuation. Anthropic is raising a new round at a $900B+ valuation, making it more valuable than OpenAI ($852B) for the first time.
Talent. Andrej Karpathy (ex-OpenAI/Tesla and one of the most renowned minds in AI) joined Anthropic to lead a new pre-training research group under Nick Joseph.
Enterprise customers. Two Big Four firms, KPMG and PwC, are rolling Claude out across their orgs (tens of thousands). KPMG is also embedding Claude in its client-facing platform.
Ramp's May AI Index confirms Anthropic just overtook OpenAI in paid business adoption for the first time.
Why it matters Anthropic is racing ahead, and everyone wants a piece of it. They’ve been strategic in focusing on the golden goose that is the Enterprise segment. Makes sense; at their current costs, there’d be no operating profit from consumers buying $20 Claude subscriptions.
IN PARTNERSHIP WITH GRANOLA
You know when you’re in a meeting and someone’s random bot joins the call?
With Granola, you get exactly zero meeting bots joining your call.
It uses your device’s own audio to transcribe and works with any meeting tool (Zoom, Google Meet, Microsoft Teams, etc). It even works for in-person conversations.
You stay focused and jot down notes like you normally would. Granola quietly transcribes and enhances the important bits in the background.
If you want to be extra thoughtful (or your company requires it), Granola can auto-send a quick consent email beforehand.
Try Granola on your next meeting and see how much easier it is to stay present.
NEWS NEWS NEWS ❦ NEWS NEWS NEWS
All the small things
Industry moves
OpenAI and Microsoft rewrote their partnership, killing the "AGI clause" and Azure exclusivity. OpenAI immediately put GPT-5.5 and Codex on Amazon Bedrock under a reported $38B AWS deal. Microsoft still keeps its ~27% stake and IP access through 2032. They’re still in the picture, but no longer in charge.
OpenAI and Anthropic each launched enterprise deployment companies on the same day to embed Forward Deployed Engineers inside Fortune 500 clients. OpenAI's DeployCo is backed by $4B from 19 firms. Anthropic's company is backed by $1.5B from a handful of companies. The labs are moving beyond just offering models, deploying the model is becoming more of a product (and of course essential for winning enterprise buyers).
OpenAI is preparing an IPO filing as early as September, now that a federal jury rejected Elon Musk's $130B lawsuit. The harder question hanging over the IPO is that OpenAI is currently missing its revenue targets, and there's skepticism on whether their income can cover the massive compute deals they've already signed.
New rounds of layoffs this month, framed as AI-first restructurings. Meta laid off ~8,000 (10% of workforce), Intuit cut 3,000 and Cloudflare cut 1,100. Standard Chartered will cut 7,000+ over four years. Cloudflare calls it "how a world-class company operates in an agentic AI era". Markets aren’t buying it, though: recent data shows 56% of S&P companies announcing AI-linked layoffs saw stock declines.
Cerebras went public May 14, with shares doubling on the first day — the biggest IPO of 2026 so far. Cerebras isn't a household name, but they make a radically different kind of AI chip: instead of stitching together many small chips like Nvidia does, they bake one giant chip roughly the size of a dinner plate. That design makes them very fast at running AI models (as opposed to training them). They're currently running Moonshot's Kimi K2.6 at the fastest speeds ever measured for any frontier model. The IPO is a signal the market is hungry for AI infrastructure players beyond just Nvidia.
Trump and Xi opened a Beijing summit with a US-China "AI safety protocol" focused on keeping the most powerful AI models out of the hands of nonstate actors. But there's no real enforcement mechanism, and the contradictions are obvious (e.g. Anthropic is refusing China access to its most powerful cyber model, Mythos, while the Pentagon openly uses the same model family).
NVIDIA crossed $5.5T market cap on another blowout quarter and shipped its first-ever CPUs (Vera) to Anthropic, OpenAI, SpaceXAI, and Oracle. NVIDIA is expanding beyond GPUs into CPUs, betting that AI agents (which need a lot of orchestration work, not just matrix math) will reshape which chips matter.
Highlights from Google I/O
Google shipped lots of things this week at I/O, all under the “agents 24/7” framing Sundar laid out on stage. Notable releases:
Gemini Omni Flash. Google's new video generation model — think Sora or Veo, but with conversational editing as the killer feature (ask it to swap a character, remove an object, or remix a clip just by talking). Takes any input (text, image, audio, or video) and outputs video. Free in the Gemini app, Google Flow, and YouTube Create.
Gemini 3.5 Flash is now the default Gemini model globally.
Gemini Spark — a 24/7 personal agent that works across your devices in the background.
Antigravity 2.0 — Google's multi-agent desktop for orchestrating long-running work across multiple agents and tools. I previously tested Antigravity 1.0.
AI Mode in Search gets agentic — AI Mode itself has been around, but Google layered real new things on top:
Information Agents (background monitoring that scans the web 24/7 and pings you when something changes — launching summer 2026),
Generative UI (Search now builds custom mini apps inline for your specific question — dashboards, trackers, interactive interfaces), and
Expanded agentic booking (Gemini can now call local businesses on your behalf to schedule things).
Workspace updates — Gmail, Docs, Sheets, and Drive get deeper Gemini integration. The standout: you can spin up "mini apps" from a sentence (e.g., "build me a project tracker for this client") and have them live inside your Workspace alongside everything else.
Native Android apps in Google AI Studio — Google's developer playground now builds native Android apps from prompts and lets you pull in Workspace data as live context.
Intelligent Eyewear (Android XR) — Google's smart glasses push, partnered with Samsung and Warby Parker. Gemini lives in your view: real-time captioning of conversations, translation, and context surfaced as you look at things.
Gemini for Science — research-focused stack pairing Co-Scientist (Google's multi-agent research system, just published in Nature) with AlphaEvolve. Pitched at scientific labs running real experiments.
❦
As you might have noticed — it’s been a whole month since I’ve shared the latest developments in AI with you. I personally like the approach of digesting the most important news in infrequent batches, rather than frantically trying to stay up to date on everything, every day (no one can). Hope you’re enjoying that approach too!
You are a delight.
Dario
What's your verdict on today's email?
Know which AI use cases are paying off — with Context Windows Pro
Most companies pick AI use cases by brainstorming internally. 90% of those initiatives fail.
I’ve created Context Windows just so you can pick the winners.
🟦 Subscribe to Pro to find high-performing use cases by industry, from 2,000+ companies. Visit contextwindows.ai or book a demo with me.
Disclosure: To cover the cost of my email software and the time I spend writing this newsletter, I sometimes work with sponsors and may earn a commission if you buy something through a link in here. If you choose to click, subscribe, or buy through any of them, THANK YOU – it will make it possible for me to continue to do this.