Anthropic is weighing offers for a $50 billion funding round at a valuation of $850-900 billion, which would surpass OpenAI's $852 billion post-money valuation from earlier this year. The board decision is expected this month, with a possible IPO as early as October. Meanwhile, Anthropic's annualized revenue run rate has topped $30 billion — officially surpassing OpenAI's $25 billion ARR — after what CEO Dario Amodei called "crazy" 80x year-over-year growth driven by over 1,000 enterprise customers each spending more than $1 million annually on Claude.
The White House is preparing an executive order that would require frontier AI models to undergo government evaluation before public release, modeled on the FDA's drug-approval process. National Economic Council Director Kevin Hassett confirmed the administration is studying the approach, directly in response to Anthropic's Claude Mythos model, which autonomously discovered thousands of zero-day vulnerabilities across major operating systems and browsers. A working group of tech executives and government officials is being assembled, with one or more AI executive orders expected within two weeks.
Anthropic doubled Claude Code's five-hour rate limits for Pro, Max, Team, and Enterprise subscribers and removed peak-hour throttling for Pro and Max accounts. The expansion was made possible by a deal with SpaceX granting Anthropic access to xAI's Colossus 1 data center — over 300 megawatts of new capacity, equivalent to more than 220,000 NVIDIA GPUs coming online within the month. API rate limits also saw massive increases: up to 1,500% more input tokens and 900% more output tokens per minute at Tier 1.
Cloudflare is laying off roughly 20% of its global workforce — over 1,100 employees — even as the company posted a 34% year-over-year revenue increase in Q1. CEO Matthew Prince cited a 600% surge in internal AI usage over three months as the driver, calling the restructuring necessary to become an "AI-native" company. Departing employees receive full salary through year-end, but the market punished the move anyway: Cloudflare stock sank up to 24% in after-hours trading.
In a 98% vote, UK-based DeepMind workers backed a bid to form the world's first union at a frontier AI research lab. The move follows Google's deal allowing the U.S. Department of Defense to use its Gemini models inside classified military networks for "any lawful purpose." Workers are demanding an end to AI use by both the U.S. military and the Israeli Defense Forces, and organizers have floated potential "research strikes" — refusing to develop core AI products.
The European Council and Parliament reached a provisional agreement on May 7 to streamline the EU AI Act as part of the Omnibus VII simplification package. Key changes include pushing high-risk AI system deadlines to December 2027 and August 2028, extending SME exemptions to companies with up to 500 employees, and adding a new prohibition on AI-generated non-consensual sexual content and CSAM. The transparency deadline for AI-generated content tightens from six months to three.
Meta, Amazon, Microsoft, and Alphabet have collectively signaled roughly $725 billion in capital expenditures for 2026, almost entirely earmarked for data centers, custom chips, GPUs, and AI models — a 75%+ increase year-over-year. Separately, Nvidia plans to invest up to $2.1 billion in IREN as part of a data center agreement targeting up to 5 gigawatts of capacity. The infrastructure arms race continues to dwarf anything the tech industry has seen before.
The Connecticut House voted 131-17 to pass the Artificial Intelligence Responsibility and Transparency Act (SB 5), with the Senate passing it 32-4. The law requires disclosure when AI is used in hiring and employment decisions, mandates chatbot operators detect self-harm signals and disclose AI interactions, protects minors from addictive AI-driven social media algorithms, and creates whistleblower protections for employees at frontier model developers who report catastrophic risks. Governor Lamont has said he will sign it.
The Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences has formally ruled that AI-generated acting performances and AI-authored screenplays are ineligible for Oscar recognition starting with the 99th Academy Awards in March 2027. Producers must now sign an Affidavit of Human Origin during submission. AI tools remain eligible in VFX, sound, and editing categories — drawing a deliberate line between AI as tool and AI as creative author.
IBM's 2026 CEO Study found that 76% of surveyed organizations now have a Chief AI Officer, up from just 26% in 2025 — a threefold increase in a single year as companies race to restructure leadership teams for AI-first transformation. The study underscores how rapidly the C-suite is reorganizing around artificial intelligence, with AI strategy moving from IT departments to board-level governance.
