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April data kept macro policy in focus, with CPI up 0.6%, core prices rising 0.4%, and annual inflation at 3.8% as energy and housing costs pressured real wages. Jobless claims rose to 211,000, above forecasts but still low, signaling limited layoffs and resilient labor demand. The Senate’s confirmation of Kevin Warsh as Fed chair heightened concerns over central bank independence, and Jerome Powell remains on the board. Trump’s proposed federal gas tax pause could offer modest relief, though congressional and Highway Trust Fund hurdles remain. His China trip with CEOs from Apple, Boeing, Citi, Tesla, Meta, and Nvidia underscored business stakes around trade and market access. In tech and consumer markets, Lime filed for a Nasdaq IPO, while Cerebras fell 10% Friday morning after soaring 68% on its Nasdaq debut, raising $5.55B at a $95B market cap, as analysts questioned wafer-scale flexibility. Tech unemployment rose to 3.8%, below the Sept-Oct’25 high of 7.0%, as more layoffs were announced by Meta, LinkedIn, and GitLab this week. Elsewhere, eBay rejected GameStop’s $56B bid, and Instructure struck a deal with ShinyHunters to return and destroy Canvas Data at an undisclosed ransom price.
Top 5 AI Highlights
[1] 💰 Anthropic agreed terms for a $30B raise at a $900B valuation, backed by Dragoneer, Greenoaks, Sequoia, and Altimeter, as annualised revenue nears $45B. More from Financial Times.
[2] ☁️ Anthropic reportedly signed Akamai’s largest-ever deal, a $1.8B seven-year cloud contract, adding compute capacity after 80x first-quarter revenue and usage growth. This shortly follows Anthropic’s compute deal with SpaceX last week. Separately, Anthropic is in advanced talks to buy Stainless for at least $300 million, gaining control of a key SDK provider used by OpenAI, Google, and Anthropic. See more from Bloomberg and The Information.
[3] 🚀 SpaceX and Google are discussing orbital data centers, positioning space-based computing as a future AI infrastructure frontier ahead of SpaceX’s blockbuster IPO; Google already owns 6.1% of SpaceX and plans prototype launches by 2027. Details from WSJ.
[4] 🛡️ OpenAI launched Daybreak, pairing Codex Security and GPT 5.5 Cyber to find and patch vulnerabilities early, rivaling Anthropic’s Claude Mythos and targeting enterprise and government cyber defense. See more on The Verge.
[5] 🤖 Google centered Android’s future on Gemini Intelligence, adding AI agents for task automation, contextual browsing, smart autofill, speech cleanup, adaptive widgets, and proactive help across devices, while DeepMind tests Gemini-powered visual context pointers for natural commands across Chrome, Googlebook, and AI Studio. More from Engadget and Google.
✨Open Source AI Development
[1] 🚗 Xiaomi open-sourced OneVL, a driving VLA framework pairing trajectory prediction with language explanations, with report, weights, inference, and training code available. More on GitHub
[2] 🛡️ Cisco released Foundry Security Spec, an open, model-agnostic agentic AI security blueprint with eight core roles, five extensions, roughly 130 requirements, and 11 principles. Detail son Cisco.
[3] ⚙️ Ai2 introduced EMO, a 1B active, 14B total MoE trained on 1T tokens, designed to preserve performance using only 12.5% of experts. More from Allen AI.
[4] 👁️ Zyphra released ZAYA1 VL 8B, an Apache 2.0 VLM with 700M active, 8B total parameters, targeting visual understanding, grounding, and OCR tasks. See more on Zyphra.
[5] 🧬Benchling launched Model Hub, bringing open scientific AI models, including AlphaFold, Chai 1, OpenFold, and Protenix, into enterprise R&D workflows. Details on Benchling.
Founder’s Corner
Seed Stage by Sector
Source: X
What We Read This Week
- Intel jumped nearly 14% after a reported Apple foundry deal, validating 18A ambitions and positioning Intel as Apple’s second advanced chip source beyond TSMC. (CNBC)
- Baidu’s Kunlunxin plans dual Shanghai and Hong Kong IPOs, targeting a potential ~$14.7B valuation as China’s AI chip demand and local semiconductor funding surge. (Bloomberg)
- xAI cofounder Igor Babuschkin is reportedly seeking up to $1B for River AI, a new research lab valued up to $5B. (Forbes)
- Martha Stewart cofounded Hint, a $10M seed-funded AI home management startup that predicts repairs, insurance renewals, utility issues, and maintenance needs before homeowners search. (Fortune)
- Ilya Sutskever defended his role in Altman’s ouster while revealing a $7 billion OpenAI stake, complicating Musk’s trial narrative over governance and commercialization. (The Wired)
- OpenAI is exploring legal action against Apple over a disappointing ChatGPT integration, escalating tensions as Apple cites privacy and hardware concerns. (TechCrunch)
- WSJ says AI coding disruption is not killing tech hiring, but demand is shifting toward midlevel, senior, and elite engineers who can harness agents. (WSJ)
- Meta’s Dina Powell McCormick is emerging as Zuckerberg’s global emissary, joining Trump’s China trip while leveraging geopolitical ties to secure AI data center funding and government relationships. (Bloomberg)
- Digg relaunched as an AI news aggregator, using X engagement, sentiment analysis, and rankings to surface influential AI stories, but user adoption beyond tech circles remains uncertain. (TechCrunch)
- Alphabet plans its first yen bond sale while Amazon prepares a debut Swiss franc offering, as Big Tech AI capex exceeds above $700 billion. (Reuters)
- Ford’s shares surged nearly 20% over two days as Ford Energy sparked AI data center enthusiasm, with Morgan Stanley seeing storage deals and Barclays flagging meme stock momentum. (CNBC)
- Honda reported its first listed annual loss, $2.7B, after $10B in EV writedowns, U.S. cancellations, Sony JV exit, China collapse, and Canada freeze. (Honda)
AI Fundraising News (May 8 — May 14)
- Adfin: AI invoice collection company, raised an $18M Series A round
- Amp: AI compute marketplace company, raised $1.3B
- Anduril: AI defense technology company, raised a $5B Series H round
- Atech: AI hardware prototyping company, raised a $0.8M pre-seed round
- BranchLab: AI pharma commercialization company, raised a $26M Series A round
- Cimento AI: AI human risk management company, raised a $3M pre-seed round
- Ciridae: AI transformation company, raised a $20M seed round
- Config: AI robotics training data company, raised a $27M seed round
- Consensus: AI academic research company, raised a $30M Series B round
- Core Automation: AI continuous-learning research company, raised $100M
- Cowboy Space: AI space computing infrastructure company, raised a $275M Series B round
- Exaforce: AI cybersecurity agents company, raised a $125M Series B round
- Fifth Dimension: AI real estate analytics company, raised a $26M Series A round
- Fractile: AI inference chip company, raised a $220M Series B round
- Frame Security: AI cybersecurity training company, raised $50M
- GovWell: AI local government workflow company, raised a $25M Series A round
- Graphon: AI relational intelligence layer company, raised an $8.3M seed round
- Gridcare: AI electric grid capacity company, raised a $64M Series A round
- Havoc: AI autonomous defense robotics company, raised a $100M Series A round
- Helsing: AI defense systems company, raised $1.2B
- Hint: AI home management platform company, raised a $10M seed round
- Iceotope: AI data center cooling company, raised a $26M Series B round
- Isomorphic Labs: AI drug discovery company, raised $2.1B
- Judgment Labs: AI agent evaluation infrastructure company, raised $32M
- Knit Health: AI healthcare operations company, raised an $11.6M seed round
- Lithosquare: AI mineral discovery company, raised a $25M seed round
- Mind Robotics: AI industrial robotics company, raised $400M
- Monaco: AI sales automation company, raised a $50M Series B round
- Multiverse: AI workforce training company, raised $70M
- Nectar Social: AI social intelligence agents company, raised $30M
- Optura: AI healthcare investment platform company, raised a $17.5M Series A round
- Origin Lab: AI gaming data marketplace company, raised an $8M seed round
- Outmarket AI: AI insurance workflow company, raised a $17M Series A round
- Ranger AI: AI industrial tendering agent company, raised an $8.4M seed round
- Recursive Superintelligence: AI recursive self-improvement company, raised $650M+
- Reserv: AI insurance claims processing company, raised a $125M Series C round
- River AI: AI research lab founded by former xAI cofounder Igot Babuschkin, in talks to raise $1B.
- Synthetic: AI bookkeeping company, raised a $10M seed round
- Vapi: AI voice platform company, raised $50M
- Webidoo: AI SMB operating system company, raised $25M
- Wirestock: AI multimodal dataset company, raised a $23M Series A round
- Wispr AI: AI voice dictation company, in talks to raise $260M