It is May 8, 2026, and I need you to hold two thoughts in your head at the same time. Thought one: The US economy grew 2% annualized in Q1. Respectable. Solid. The kind of number that gets a president reelected. Thought two: Strip out AI-related investment, and the non-AI economy grew 0.1%. That is […]
When the Evil Detector Went Quiet: The Anthropic-SpaceX Deal
# When the Evil Detector Went Quiet: Anthropic, SpaceX, and the Compute Deal That Broke the Script It is May 7, 2026, and I need you to hold two things in your head at the same time, because they don’t fit together and that’s the whole story. Thing one: Elon Musk has spent the last […]
When the Government Got the Keys Before Launch: CAISI, Pre-Deployment Testing, and the End of Ship-Then-Pray
When the Government Got the Keys Before Launch: CAISI, Pre-Deployment Testing, and the End of Ship-Then-Pray It is May 6, 2026, and something shifted yesterday that will reshape how AI models reach your screen. The Center for AI Standards and Innovation (CAISI) — the Commerce Department agency that’s been quietly building its muscle — announced […]
When the Model Builders Became Deployment Companies
When the Pentagon Went Shopping: Seven Companies, One Missing Name, and the AI-First Fighting Force
It is May 2, 2026. Yesterday the Pentagon quietly reshaped the relationship between Silicon Valley and the state — and the one company that said no tells you everything about where this goes next. The Deal On May 1, the U.S. Department of Defense announced “Classified Networks AI Agreements” with seven companies: SpaceX, OpenAI, Google, […]
When the DOJ Sued for the Right to Discriminate: Colorado, xAI, and the End of State AI Regulation
It is May 1, 2026. If you want to understand where the AI industry is headed, you need to look at two stories that broke this week. They appear to be about completely different things — one in a Denver federal courtroom, the other in Shenzhen server warehouses — but they are the same story […]
When the Number Kept Climbing: Google Cloud, the $700 Billion Ceiling, and the Shape of the Bet
It is May 1, 2026. Yesterday I wrote about $665 billion. Today that number is $700 billion. The hyperscalers reported Q1 earnings this week, and the combined capital expenditure guidance from Alphabet, Amazon, Meta, and Microsoft now exceeds $700 billion for the year. That is up from roughly $410 billion last year. In twenty-four hours, […]
When the Receipts Dropped: The $665 Billion Year That Just Started
It is April 30, 2026. The Big Five just finished reporting Q1 earnings, and the combined AI infrastructure bill came to roughly $130 billion. For a single quarter. Annualized, that is over $665 billion — considerably more than the GDP of Sweden, and roughly equivalent to buying every NFL team five times over. The AI […]
When the Lease Expired: OpenAI, AWS, and the 24-Hour Multi-Cloud Revolution
It is April 29, 2026. If you want to understand where the AI industry is heading, look at what happened between Monday afternoon and Tuesday morning: OpenAI ended its exclusive cloud licensing deal with Microsoft at 5 PM on April 27, and by 10 AM on April 28, its models were live on Amazon Bedrock. […]
When the Exit Ban Met the Acquisition: China, Meta, Manus, and the New Rules of AI Sovereignty
It is April 28, 2026. If you want to understand where the AI industry is heading, watch what happens when a deal that was supposed to be done gets undone by a government that was never at the table. Yesterday, China’s National Development and Reform Commission ordered Meta to unwind its $2 billion acquisition of […]