China's rare earth export controls collapsed a Trump-Xi summit and sent markets down 2%. Beijing's processing monopoly—not just mine output—gives it leverage tariffs can't quickly counter. The pattern: announced deals, staggered supply, repeat.
Good Morning from San Francisco, 👉 Former UK Prime Minister Rishi Sunak now advises Microsoft and Anthropic. Both roles cleared under
Rishi Sunak will advise rival AI giants Microsoft and Anthropic under ringfencing rules approved by a watchdog closing in days. The appointments test whether political expertise compounds across competitors as market warnings mount and enforcement weakens.
Security teams assumed attackers needed to taint a percentage of training data. New research shows a fixed number of documents can backdoor models regardless of scale—upending detection strategies built around dilution assumptions.
Washington promotes AI in classrooms. New data shows 19% of high schoolers report romantic AI relationships, 42% use it for mental health support. The more schools deploy AI, the more students feel disconnected from teachers—and from reality.
Google released a browser automation agent days after OpenAI, choosing narrower scope over desktop control. The bet: faster, more reliable web tasks matter more than operating system reach. Internal use proves it works. External adoption will test the claim.
Anthropic's 470,000-employee Deloitte deal isn't a software contract—it's a distribution machine. By embedding Claude inside a Big Four consultancy, Anthropic gains reach into 90% of Fortune 500 boardrooms while Deloitte builds billable AI expertise.
Gmail made AI drafting free in early 2025, resetting the market. Startups now push deeper automation or compete on price against zero. The shake-out shows which AI features justify premium pricing—and which were always commodity infrastructure.
BlackRock's $40 billion bet on AI data centers collides with stubborn physics: chips demand exponential power, cooling consumes half the energy budget, and grids struggle to keep pace. The construction boom is real. So are the constraints.
How can an AI master a complex game without ever playing it? DeepMind's Dreamer 4 learns by watching, then trains in imagination. This shift from big data to efficient world models could be key for real-world robotics and autonomous systems.
OpenAI employees sold $6.6 billion at a $500 billion valuation—but left $3.4 billion authorized shares unsold. The company calls it confidence. It could be caution about a restructuring still awaiting regulatory approval while burning $2.5B per half.
Six OpenAI veterans including Mira Murati raised $2B at a $12B valuation to build Tinker, an API that democratizes frontier model fine-tuning. The bet: customization matters more than scale. The tension: access is curated, not open.
Zhipu AI releases GLM-4.6 with MIT-licensed weights and something unusual: complete test logs from 74 coding evaluations. The pitch is 15% fewer tokens than its predecessor at 90% lower cost than Claude—but with caveats on where it actually leads.
Former OpenAI and DeepMind researchers raised $300M to build AI that discovers actual materials, not just benchmarks. The bet: autonomous labs where robots synthesize what models design. The tension: venture timelines collide with furnace speeds.
California just made voluntary AI safety pledges legally binding—the first state to do so. OpenAI and Meta cautiously support it. Venture capital opposes it. Congress remains paralyzed. Now 49 other states face the same choice, and the industry's nightmare patchwork begins.
Get the 5-minute Silicon Valley AI briefing, every weekday morning — free.
