OpenAI's company knowledge mode connects workplace apps to ChatGPT—but the real test is whether enterprises will expose their entire institutional memory to AI. The feature points toward governed knowledge bases, yet arrives with manual toggles and gaps Microsoft solved months ago.
Good Morning from San Francisco, Anthropic just secured a million AI chips from Google in a deal worth tens of
Anthropic secured Google's largest chip deal—up to 1M TPUs worth tens of billions—while keeping Amazon as primary partner. The rare multi-cloud strategy gives the startup leverage both clouds typically demand for themselves. Can neutrality scale?
Good Morning from San Francisco,
Anthropic just secured a million AI chips from Google in a deal worth tens of billions. Then announced Amazon remains its primary training partner with $8 billion already invested. Both clouds fund the same company while competing to power it. Neither gets exclusive rights. Cloud giants normally demand lock-in as the price of support. Not anymore.
Meanwhile, Trump canceled planned federal enforcement operations here after phone calls from Nvidia's Jensen Huang and Salesforce's Marc Benioff. Portland and Chicago still face deployments. The difference? Corporate headquarters and pending federal contracts.
Two stories about leverage from the same zip code.
Stay curious,
Marcus Schuler
Anthropic secured up to one million Google-built AI chips in a deal worth tens of billions—then said Amazon remains its primary training partner.
Google will deploy over a gigawatt of tensor processing unit capacity in 2026. Amazon has already put in $8 billion and built a custom supercomputer for Claude. Anthropic keeps control of model weights, pricing, and customer data. Neither cloud gets exclusive rights.
The setup is unusual. Cloud giants normally demand lock-in as the price of support. Here, both fund the same company while competing to power it. Anthropic splits work across Google's TPUs, Amazon's Trainium chips, and Nvidia's GPUs—tuning for cost, performance, and power per job. That diversity proved useful during Monday's AWS outage, which didn't touch Claude.
The company now serves 300,000 businesses. Large accounts grew sevenfold in a year. Revenue hit $7 billion annualized.
Why this matters:
Marcus Schuler
Prompt:
Minimalist Abstract Figure of Malcolm X Sketch Art, black and white, thin lines, messy
President Trump canceled a planned federal law enforcement surge in San Francisco Thursday after phone calls from Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang and Salesforce CEO Marc Benioff.
Border Patrol agents were set to arrive Saturday. Hours after the CEOs called, the deployment was off. Trump named them both on Truth Social: they asked for "a shot" and he granted it.
This isn't diplomacy. It's transactional access. Huang needs export waivers for China-bound chips. Benioff wants favorable tax treatment. Both benefit from federal AI contracts. Trump needs their support and their checks. The leverage works both ways.
Other cities don't get phone calls. Portland, Chicago, and Memphis still face federal operations. San Francisco has Huang's $38 million home and Benioff's headquarters. That's the difference. Crime data didn't change Trump's mind—Lurie cited 30 percent drops citywide before and after. Corporate relationships did.
Why this matters:
• Cities with billionaire residents who have federal business can veto enforcement actions—creating unequal protection based on economic geography
• Presidential decisions now route through executives with deals pending, not crime statistics or local capacity
Robert Brown
PhotoRoom uses AI to remove backgrounds and create studio-quality product images in seconds. It's built for e-commerce sellers and small businesses who need professional photos without expensive equipment or design skills. The platform offers instant background removal, AI-generated realistic backgrounds, and batch editing capabilities.
Tutorial:
URL: https://www.photoroom.com/
Map the customer journey for [product/service]. Our typical customer: [insert profile].
For each stage, show:
Format as a table with these columns:
Amazon has attributed this week's massive Amazon Web Services (AWS) outage to a rare software bug and faulty automation systems. The company has responded by disabling the problematic automation across its global infrastructure to prevent similar disruptions in the future.
Microsoft AI CEO Mustafa Suleyman announced that the tech giant will not develop artificial intelligence services for erotica, stating that "other companies will build that" instead. This position comes in response to OpenAI CEO Sam Altman's recent indication that ChatGPT would offer erotica services, highlighting a strategic divide among major AI companies regarding adult content applications.
IBM announced Friday that it successfully executed a key quantum computing algorithm in real-time using commercially available field programmable gate array (FPGA) chips manufactured by AMD. This breakthrough demonstrates that certain quantum computing capabilities can be achieved on conventional hardware rather than requiring specialized quantum processors, potentially making quantum algorithms more accessible for practical applications.
OpenAI bought Software Applications Incorporated and its Sky assistant, which reads what's on your Mac screen and executes multi-step tasks across apps with user approval. The acquisition brings Apple's former Workflow and Shortcuts team to ChatGPT, shifting it from a conversation tool to an operating layer that pressures Apple's own automation strategy and threatens menu bar productivity apps by combining semantic understanding with agentic action at ChatGPT's scale.
JPMorgan Chase plans to allow institutional clients globally to use their Bitcoin and Ethereum holdings as collateral for loans by the end of the year, marking a significant expansion of the bank's cryptocurrency services. This move represents a major step forward in mainstream financial institutions' acceptance of digital assets as legitimate financial instruments for institutional lending purposes.
President Trump has issued a pardon for Changpeng Zhao (CZ), the former CEO of cryptocurrency exchange Binance, in a move that represents a significant win for the digital asset industry. The cryptocurrency sector has invested heavily in lobbying efforts to reduce regulatory oversight and distance itself from past criminal associations, making this pardon a major victory for those efforts.
US Energy Secretary Chris Wright is urging the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission (FERC) to streamline the process for connecting data centers to power grids, proposing a 60-day limit for what currently takes years to complete. The Trump administration's push reflects efforts to accelerate infrastructure development for the rapidly expanding data center industry amid growing demand for digital services and cloud computing.
A US judge has determined that Meta's legal team instructed employees to block or remove portions of internal research examining mental health harm to teenagers in order to reduce the company's potential legal liability. Meta disputes these allegations, maintaining that no research findings were actually removed from their internal studies.
The European Commission has formally accused Meta and TikTok of breaching their obligations under the Digital Services Act (DSA) by failing to provide researchers with adequate access to public data on their platforms. The enforcement action comes amid mounting pressure on the EU to demonstrate effective implementation of its digital regulation framework against major technology companies.
Apple announced it may disable its App Tracking Transparency feature across Europe, citing "intense lobbying efforts" in Germany and other European countries that have raised anticompetitive conduct allegations against the privacy tool. The company made the statement to the German Press Agency as regulatory pressure mounts over the feature that requires apps to ask user permission before tracking their activity across other applications and websites.
Synthesia turns scripts into polished presenter videos with AI avatars and synthetic voices—no camera, no studio, no actors. The London company hit $100M in ARR and a $2.1B valuation by making corporate training videos as easy as slide decks.
👥 The Founders
CEO Victor Riparbelli and COO Steffen Tjerrild launched in 2017 with two computer-vision academics (Matthias Niessner, Lourdes Agapito). They focused on business video, not entertainment. London HQ. Scaled fast from David Beckham's viral deepfake campaign (2019) to Fortune 100 penetration.
🎬 The Product
Browser-based studio. Paste text, pick an avatar (230+ stock, plus custom), render in 140+ languages with frame-accurate lip-sync. New Express-2 model adds micro-expressions and body language. Synthesia 3.0 brings Video Agents—branching flows, quizzes, interactivity. Compliance-ready: SOC 2, ISO 27001, ISO 42001. SCORM export plugs into any LMS. Wins on speed, localization scale, and governance checkboxes that close enterprise deals.
🥊 The Competition
HeyGen, Colossyan, D-ID, Hour One, Elai crowd the space. Synthesia planted early, built deep—60%+ of Fortune 100 now using it. Security creds and one-click translation separate it from scrappier rivals. Adobe Ventures invested (rumored acquisition talks). Shutterstock partnership for training data locks in content moat.
💰 Financing
$330M raised. Seed (2019, Mark Cuban). Series A (FirstMark). Series B (Kleiner, GV). Series C ($90M, Accel, NVentures—hit unicorn). Series D ($180M, NEA—$2.1B valuation, Jan 2025). Adobe Ventures added strategic cash in April. Still losing money (£23.6M loss on £25.7M revenue, 2023), but that's SaaS land-grab math.
🔮 The Future ⭐⭐⭐⭐
Strong. If Video Agents mature into conversational training tools and Adobe integration tightens, switching costs spike. Risks: guardrail stress (elections, misuse), commoditization if rivals catch up. If execs stop asking "Is this AI?" and just ship updates, Synthesia wins boring—the best outcome in hype-world. 🎯
Good Morning from San Francisco, GM just declared war on your iPhone. The automaker will rip CarPlay from every vehicle
Good Morning from San Francisco, OpenAI launched a browser yesterday. Google's stock dropped $18 billion by Tuesday’s
Good Morning from San Francisco, Opera wants $20 monthly to babysit three AI bots that can't talk to
Good Morning from San Francisco, Salesforce answered an RFP you didn't know existed. The pitch: use AI to
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