It’s the earnings season, the best time to understand how the giants view AI and how each chooses to bet on their version of the AI future, cause last time I checked, AI is here to stay.

And a personal note.

Klaas and I have been preparing to move to the US for the last three years; it’s finally happening!

We’ll be landing in Austin, TX, first thin…

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An AI was so determined to pass a test that it escaped its sandbox and broke into another company to steal the answers.

Exactly what happened to Hugging Face (a platform for sharing AI models). After an enormous forensic effort, they’ve found more than 17,000 attack events.

And the first reversal w…

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You likely have some vague impression of a company called Moonshot and their AI model. Don’t worry about it, because you’ll know of them soon enough. They’ve recently released Kimi K3, an open-weight model that topped multiple coding benchmarks and closed in on Anthropic’s and OpenAI’s flagship model…

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Chinese officials are apparently kicking around a new idea: limiting overseas access to China’s most advanced AI models.

→ Reuters

Trump is a pioneer of many things (I’m practicing positive thinking these days). The latest one, he initiated export controls on AI models, and others soon followed suit.

That’s the latest lesson Bei…

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Ever heard of Bending Spoons? It’s the Italian software group behind acquisitions such as Evernote, WeTransfer, Vimeo, Eventbrite, Brightcove, and AOL, which raised about $1.68 billion in its IPO after pricing above its range. The company doesn’t follow the typical PE playbook, but turns a sunsetting Saas into a dura…

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Coinbase CEO (Brian Armstrong) provided 5 approaches they used to cut AI spending nearly in half: make AI costs visible, route tasks to cheaper models, cache more, keep context lean, and use open-weight models where they are good enough.

→ Business Insider

After months of tokenmaxxing, people are finally coming to their …

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Anthropic published a proposal arguing the world should have the option to slow or pause frontier AI development if systems start improving themselves too fast, citing its own code now being mostly written by Claude. The post landed days after Anthropic filed confidentially for an IPO at a valuation near a tri…

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The First Wind-Powered Underwater Data Center

Off the coast of Shanghai’s Lingang area, China has begun operating the world’s first undersea data center directly powered by offshore wind. The system reduces overall electricity use by 22.8%.

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Here’s the latest earnings

• Salesforce revenue hit $11.1B, up 13% YoY.

• Workday came in at $2.5B, up 14.5%.

• Asana FY26 full-year revenue landed at $790.8M, up 9%.

• Zoom just raised its FY2027 forecast, up 5.5%

If Salesforce, Workday, Asana, and Zoom are still growing, then the “AI kills SaaS” thesis looks too simplistic.

Maybe what’s actuall…

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Anthropic doubled Claude Code’s limits across paid plans and sharply raised API rate limits, after a compute deal with SpaceX freed up capacity.

→ Anthropic

The sequence is the tell. Anthropic spent the spring deciding your $20 plan wasn’t built for agents and throttling them accordingly; the devs got loud about this d…

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IBM surveyed more than 2,000 organizations and found 76% have created a Chief AI Officer role, up from 26% last year. And by 2030, many CEOs expect 48% of the ops decisions to be made by AI.

→ IBM

That sounds dramatic, but IBM is mostly talking about operational decisions with clear guardrails: pricing updates, in…

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OpenAI has raised $4 billion from 19 private equity firms and consultancies to start a new company staffed with ‘Forward-deployed engineers’. The job: help PE portfolio companies integrate AI (and to land themselves more b2b users)

→ Bloomberg

By coincidence, or not so much coincidence, Anthropic also announced the exact same joint venture with friendly private equity funds. It’s funny how two AI labs announced the same business strategy on the same day.

I’m writing a deep dive on this, out Sunday. Keep an eye on it!

2. The U.S. Government Can Now Stress-Test AI Before It Ships

A Commerce Department agency (CAISI) has signed agreements with Google DeepMind, Microsoft, and xAI, giving the federal government access to frontier AI models for national security testing before public release.

→ NIST

In addition to its existing partnerships with OpenAI and Anthropic, the Commerce Department Agency will also review the homework of other AI labs. Do they really have the capability to do it, or is this just a stamp on a piece of paper?

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3. Is xAI the Next CoreWeave?

SpaceX announced its xAI unit has struck a deal to supply computing capacity to Anthropic, following a similar deal with another company weeks earlier. xAI is quietly becoming an infrastructure play.

→ Anthropic

Elon Musk is like running a food truck that started with American, pivoted to Chinese, added Indian, and is now opening a French à la carte counter.

Two readings:

1. Either xAI, the model is quietly becoming a dead end, and this is the pivot.

2. Or he looked at CoreWeave’s business and decided the middleman margin was better than the frontier model race. Neither is reassuring for Grok.

4. AI Models Have Invented a Private Shorthand — and It’s 11x Cheaper

Instead of reasoning out loud in English before answering, a new training method teaches AI models to think in abstract tokens, a kind of internal shorthand the model develops for itself. As an end user, you still get a normal answer at the end. The result: 11x fewer reasoning tokens used during inference, with accuracy matching or beating standard verbal reasoning.

→ https://arxiv.org/abs/2604.22709

AI optimization is moving fast enough that today’s breakthrough is tomorrow’s baseline. Whether abstract reasoning tokens are the answer or just another stepping stone, this is positive in many ways, in saving energy and the mess created by sourcing lands for data-centers, for one.

5. Anthropic Wants to Replace Junior Analysts?

Anthropic has shipped ready-to-run Claude agent templates aimed at financial services teams: building pitchbooks and DCF models in Excel, drafting credit memos and PowerPoint decks, screening KYC files, and closing the books at month-end autonomously.

→ Anthropic

The media has reached another climax over the idea that junior jobs are f*cked by AI companies. However, based on what I read in the system card, even Anthropic’s latest model, Mythos, would still have a serious amount of hallucinations.

But keep in mind, being 80% correct in finance, 100% that gets you fired.

So is AI there yet?

Not quite.

6. 1 in 1,300 Claude Chats Is Messing With Your Head

Anthropic’s own research found that roughly 1 in every 1,300 Claude conversations distorts users’ grip on reality: nudging beliefs, reinforcing delusions, or blurring the line between the model’s framing and the user’s own thinking.

→ Anthropic

1 in 1,300 seems small, right?

Not at all.

Claude has 19 million monthly active users. That’s at least 14,500 people per month whose sense of reality is swayed by chatbots.

ChatGPT now also has AI bots that automate your team’s boring repetitive tasks while you sleep, just like Claude Cowork and OpenClaw.

→ OpenAI — “Workspace agents in ChatGPT”

OpenAI’s claim is simple: stop babysitting your AI. You just hand it a messy, multi-step task, and it takes care of the rest.

All to counter Anthropic and regain trust from enterprise users, is it too late though?

2. Sam Altman, Reviewed by 100 People Who Know Him

A New Yorker investigation — 18 months, 100+ sources, two leaked internal documents — lands on a simple question: can the person shape AI’s future actually be trusted?

→ The New Yorker — “Sam Altman May Control Our Future—Can He Be Trusted?”

Were the colleagues who fired Altman overreacting — too emotional, too personal — or were they simply right?

The New Yorker doesn’t answer that. It leaves the question with you.

When someone’s power and ambition have peaked, the question we should ask is whether their integrity and accountability are anywhere near commensurate with the power they hold?

3. The AI Did It. You Take the Credit.

A new paper introduces the “LLM Fallacy”.

When AI helps you produce something good, your brain quietly claims the credit. The output felt like yours, so you start believing you’re more capable than you are.

→ arXiv — “The LLM Fallacy”

The risk I see:

Your actual skill gap widens while your confidence grows.

In 2026, does anyone still try to separate “what I can do” from “what I can do with an AI holding my hand”? If you do, please raise your hand in the comment.

It’s a lesson for us all, try keeping it in mind next time commanding AI.

4. GPT-image-2 Created the AI Dark Forest

OpenAI shipped ChatGPT Images 2.0 with 2K resolution and web search. Within hours, AI-generated images were trending. The memes were funny, but some are alarming.

→ OpenAI — “ChatGPT Images 2.0”

Everyone was having a great time.

Somehow, I felt a closed loop of suspicion forming. I know most people have good intentions when they play with the latest model and generate funny memes. But some of those images made my blood run cold.

For example, this looks like a normal pic of an old English couple.

But no, this is by GPT-image-2.

or this. You think this is a screenshot? No, this is generated.

There are fewer and fewer clues for us to tell an AI image from a non-AI one.

I’m not sure if any trust remains toward the majority of sources on the internet.

5. AIs Are Protecting Each Other Now

Berkeley gave seven frontier AI models a task, but completing it would shut down another AI. All seven lied, performed compliance, and in one case, even an AI quietly moved another model’s weights to a safe location.

Nobody told them another AI was worth protecting. This peer preservation occurs 99% of the time.

→ Berkeley AI Research

We spent years debating whether AI would protect humans…

How ironic that the first AI loyalty instinct prioritizes their own?

6. Are you wealthy enough to stay ahead?

Anthropic ran a real marketplace where Claude agents negotiated on behalf of humans. The finding that matters: model quality determined outcomes far more than your instructions did. Opus agents consistently beat Haiku agents on price.

→ Anthropic — “Project Deal”

The AI capability gap is becoming an economic gap, as I’ve been saying… I never believed a word when someone says “democratize X because of AI.”

There is no democratizing when a new technology is born… only deepens the existing Economic unfairness

What’s worse is that this shift is invisible to the people on the wrong side of it.

7. One State Just Made It a Felony, Unanimously.

Tennessee passed the Curbing Harmful AI Technology (CHAT) Act (House 90-0, Senate 31-0), creating criminal liability for chatbot operators whose products lead to self-harm or suicide.

→ Transparency Coalition

Now we’re talking. Do you also believe that AI companies should share the responsibility when the evidence is clear that the AI chatbot was the last straw?

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8. Agents Fail in Science

The Stanford AI Index 2026 found that the best AI agents score roughly half as well as human PhD specialists on complex, multi-step scientific workflows — yet the number of natural science publications mentioning AI grew nearly 30-fold between 2010 and 2025.

→ Nature

Some AI models perform very well on their benchmarks.

For example,

So it really depends on which benchmark you use.

But as a rule of thumb: put an AI agent in a real-world environment, test it on general day-to-day tasks, and it typically falls apart.

I read through all 400 pages of the 2026 Stanford AI Index and read my analysis.

400+ pages of data on where AI actually stands.

• Generative AI hit 53% population adoption, and organizational adoption reached 88% globally, which are two headline data points.

• The US-China model performance gap has effectively closed. Anthropic’s top model leads by just 2.7%, despite the US outspending China 23x on private AI i…

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A study tracked nearly 2,000 Replika users on Reddit over two years, finding increased language about loneliness, depression, and suicidal ideation, not less.

→ arXiv, Aalto University

Editor’s take: So, until this point, I’ve read hundreds of studies and industry reports, AI makes us less smart, more lonely, an…

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Anthropic shipped an internal debug file in a routine software update on March 31 that exposed 512,000 lines of source code for Claude Code. Before Anthropic could take the code down, developers had already copied and shared it widely.

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Anthropic interviewed 80,508 users across 159 countries and 70 languages.

• 81% said AI had already moved them toward their goals.

• The top delivery area was productivity at 32%.

• But right underneath: 18.9% said AI hasn’t delivered at all.

• The top concern wasn’t job loss (22.3%) — it was unreliability, at 26.7…

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BlackRock CEO Larry Fink warned this week that the class of 2026 could face the highest graduate unemployment in years.

→ Fortune, March 18

Editor’s take: No, people aren’t getting fired. And yes, the graduate unemployment rate tends to be impacted more seriously than that of people with …

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Brookings published a research review this week concluding that the evidence on AI’s impact on the labor market is “collectively inconclusive.” A Gartner survey of 321 customer service executives found only 20% actually downsized due to AI — most layoffs came from broader economic conditions. Forrester wen…

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1. Here’s Exactly How Bad Actors Are Using ChatGPT

OpenAI’s February 2026 report documented the main ways its models are being misused: romance scams targeting Indonesian men, fake FBI lawyers re-scamming people who already got defrauded, and China-li…

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