SpaceX has secured the right to buy Anysphere's Cursor for $60 billion later this year, or pay $10 billion for the joint work both companies are building together. Cursor halted a $2B fundraise at a $50B valuation after the SpaceX offer; the deal is timed around SpaceX's planned IPO this summer, with Musk positioning the rocket company as an AI powerhouse. Andreessen Horowitz holds roughly 10% of Cursor, putting its stake at ~$6B at the deal price.
A memo from White House OSTP director Michael Kratsios accuses Chinese entities of systematically extracting capabilities from American AI models using tens of thousands of proxy accounts and jailbreaking techniques. The memo distinguishes routine model distillation from what it calls industrial-scale IP theft aimed at undermining U.S. R&D. The accusation escalates tensions ahead of a planned U.S.-China summit next month.
Meta will lay off approximately 8,000 employees starting May 20, with additional rounds planned for H2 2026. The cuts span Reality Labs, Facebook social, recruiting, sales, and global operations, while the company redirects $115–135B toward AI infrastructure. Teams are being reorganized into AI-focused "pods" under Chief AI Officer Alexandr Wang's Superintelligence Labs.
Jeff Bezos's physical-world AI lab, Project Prometheus, has closed a $10 billion funding round backed by JPMorgan and BlackRock, valuing the venture at $38 billion. The lab, co-led with Google veteran Vik Bajaj, focuses on AI models for engineering and manufacturing physical products. Bezos is reportedly seeking up to $100B for a holding company to acquire industrial businesses whose operational data would feed Prometheus's models.
Anthropic quietly removed Claude Code access from its $20/month Pro tier, triggering immediate backlash. The company called it a test on ~2% of new signups and reversed course within hours, restoring the checkbox on pricing pages. The episode exposed the underlying economics: Pro subscribers routinely consume far more in compute than their subscription covers, sometimes by 10x, forcing Anthropic to explore usage limits.
Mira Murati's Thinking Machines Lab signed a multibillion-dollar deal with Google Cloud for access to Nvidia GB300-powered infrastructure for model training and deployment. This is Murati's first cloud partnership since founding the lab in early 2025 with a $2B seed at a $12B valuation. The deal is non-exclusive, leaving the door open for multi-cloud arrangements.
AI data infrastructure company Vast Data closed a $1 billion Series F co-led by Drive Capital and Access Industries, with participation from Nvidia, Fidelity, and NEA. The round triples Vast Data's valuation from $9.1B in 2023 to $30B, reflecting surging demand for AI storage infrastructure. The company reports over $4B in cumulative bookings and $500M+ in committed annual recurring revenue.
A new PwC study of 1,217 senior executives across 25 sectors finds the top-performing 20% of companies generate 7.2x more AI-driven revenue and efficiency gains than the average competitor. The dividing factor isn't volume of AI deployed but whether companies use it for growth and business reinvention versus just productivity. The report warns the gap will widen as leaders learn faster and scale proven use cases.
Adobe unveiled CX Enterprise, an end-to-end agentic AI system combining AI agents, MCP endpoints, and governance layers for marketing and creative workflows. Built with NVIDIA Agent Toolkit and WPP, it features Adobe Brand Intelligence — a reasoning engine that captures evolving brand signals — and Engagement Intelligence for personalization at scale. The platform deepens Adobe's AI partnerships with AWS, Anthropic, Google Cloud, Microsoft, and OpenAI.
xAI's Grok chatbot has been effectively unusable since April 21, throwing "high demand" errors for over 48 hours despite xAI's status page claiming full operational status. Over 800 user reports have flooded in across the U.S., U.K., and Germany. The timing coincides with a feature rollout including custom templates and video extensions, suggesting the usage surge overwhelmed capacity.
