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The biggest AI event of the month kicks off tomorrow at 10 AM PT at Shoreline Amphitheatre. Google is widely expected to unveil Gemini 4.0 (or 3.5), debut Android XR glasses, and preview "Omni," a Gemini-based AI video generation system. The keynote will also cover agentic coding tools and new Gemini-powered Android 17 features that let AI complete multistep tasks across apps.
Anthropic is reportedly negotiating a $30 billion funding round that would value the company at approximately $900 billion. The valuation is underpinned by Q1 2026 ARR exceeding $44 billion (up 80x year-over-year), over 1,000 customers spending $1M+ annually, and major enterprise contracts with PwC, Blackstone, and Goldman Sachs.
OpenAI co-founder Greg Brockman is now permanently leading all product efforts, merging ChatGPT, Codex, and the developer API into one unified product team. The move comes as OpenAI targets a late-2026 IPO at roughly $852 billion and faces competitive pressure from Anthropic's Claude Code and Google's Gemini, which has grown its AI web traffic share from 5.7% to 21.5% over the past year while ChatGPT declined from 86.7% to 64.5%.
OpenAI rolled out a personal finance experience in ChatGPT today for Pro users ($100/month) in the US. Users can connect bank accounts via Plaid (12,000+ institutions supported) to view balances, spending dashboards, and ask questions grounded in their actual financial data. ChatGPT cannot see full account numbers or make transactions. Plus and free tiers will get access later.
Amazon Bedrock AgentCore Payments is now in preview, enabling AI agents to make autonomous micropayments for APIs, MCP servers, web content, and other agents. Built with Coinbase (using the x402 stablecoin protocol) and Stripe (via Privy wallets), the system enforces per-session spending limits and requires explicit user authorization before agents can transact.
Canadian AI company Cohere is acquiring Germany's Aleph Alpha in a deal valuing the combined entity at approximately $20 billion, endorsed by both governments. The merged company will operate under the Cohere brand with dual Canada-Germany HQs, positioning as a "sovereign AI" alternative to US-China hyperscalers. German retailer Schwarz Group is committing $600M to Cohere's upcoming Series E.
David Silver, former lead of DeepMind's reinforcement learning team and co-creator of AlphaGo, raised Europe's largest-ever seed round for his startup Ineffable Intelligence. Co-led by Sequoia and Lightspeed with participation from NVIDIA and Google, the company aims to build a "superlearner" via reinforcement learning self-play — AI that discovers knowledge without relying on human data.
Mustafa Suleyman, CEO of Microsoft AI, predicted that AI will achieve "human-level performance on most, if not all professional tasks" within 12 to 18 months, specifically targeting accounting, legal, marketing, and project management. The bold claim is being widely debated, particularly after a recent METR study found AI tools actually made software developers 20% slower on real tasks.
Data center capacity costs across Europe's five largest markets (Frankfurt, London, Amsterdam, Paris, Dublin) are set to rise 12% in 2026. European electricity prices for AI-intensive industries run roughly double US rates — $89/MW in Germany and $112/MW in the UK vs. $28/MW in the US. OpenAI has paused its UK Stargate project citing energy costs, while France and the Nordics are emerging as winners thanks to nuclear and hydroelectric advantages.
Anthropic's controlled release of Claude Mythos Preview — its most capable model, sitting a full tier above Opus 4.7 — continues to expand under Project Glasswing. The initiative, which includes AWS, Apple, Google, Microsoft, and JPMorgan as partners, has already used Mythos to autonomously discover thousands of zero-day vulnerabilities across every major OS and browser, including a 17-year-old remote code execution flaw in FreeBSD.
