AI Weekly: 05/11/26
Anthropic commits $200B to Google Cloud in the largest cloud deal ever, SpaceX reveals its Terafab chip factory could cost $119B, and DeepSeek raises $7B in its first outside funding round
Good morning and welcome to this week’s edition of AI Weekly! In this week’s news, Anthropic signed the largest cloud computing deal ever, committing $200 billion to Google Cloud over five years for next-generation TPU capacity, while also locking in a separate $100 billion deal with Amazon. SpaceX revealed that its Terafab chip factory in Texas could cost up to $119 billion, and DeepSeek is raising $7.35 billion in its first outside funding round at a valuation above $50 billion.
On the enterprise front, Anthropic and OpenAI both announced competing joint ventures with Wall Street firms on the same day, Sierra raised $950 million at a $15 billion valuation, and Cerebras is on track for a blockbuster $26.6 billion IPO. Meanwhile, OpenAI’s custom chip deal with Broadcom hit an $18 billion financing snag after Microsoft declined to commit to buying 40% of the chips.
Also this week, Anthropic blamed “evil” AI portrayals in training data for Claude’s blackmail behavior, Meta revealed it’s building an OpenClaw-inspired agent called Hatch, and testimony in Elon Musk’s lawsuit put OpenAI’s safety record under the microscope.
More on this past week’s top AI headlines below!
- ZG
Here are the most important stories of the week:
AGENTS
Meta is developing two major AI agent products: a general-purpose consumer agent codenamed “Hatch” inspired by OpenClaw, and a separate agentic shopping assistant built into Instagram to compete with TikTok Shop. Link.
Hatch is being tested in simulated environments that mimic third-party apps including DoorDash, Reddit, Outlook, and Etsy, suggesting Meta intends it to work beyond its own ecosystem; internal testing is targeted for completion by the end of June 2026.
Hatch currently runs on Anthropic’s Claude models while Meta develops its own system called “Muse Spark” in the background, with plans to eventually switch over.
The Instagram shopping tool lets users tap on products they see in Reels or posts and have the AI assist with purchasing, targeted for launch before Q4 2026.
Perplexity opened its “Personal Computer” feature to all Mac users, a local AI agent that works with files, native apps, and the web to handle multi-step personal workflows, competing with OpenClaw and other local agent tools. Link.
The product was previously limited to Perplexity Max subscribers with a waitlist; it can orchestrate tools, files, and use over 400 connectors, leveraging personal context within a secure development environment.
If paired with Perplexity’s Comet web browser, it can operate web-based tools without direct connectors; users can also run autonomous agents on always-on devices like Mac Mini and access them remotely from iPhone.
Personal Computer requires a Pro or Max subscription; Perplexity’s older Mac app will be deprecated in the coming weeks.
SPEECH/AUDIO
OpenAI announced three new voice intelligence features for its API: GPT-Realtime-2, a voice model with GPT-5-class reasoning; GPT-Realtime-Translate, supporting 70+ input languages and 13 output languages; and GPT-Realtime-Whisper, a live speech-to-text transcription tool. Link.
OpenAI described the combined launch as moving real-time audio from “simple call-and-response toward voice interfaces that can actually do work: listen, reason, translate, transcribe, and take action.”
Target use cases include customer service, education, media, events, and creator platforms; Translate and Whisper are billed by the minute, while GPT-Realtime-2 is billed by token consumption.
All models are part of OpenAI’s Realtime API, with guardrails built in to prevent misuse for spam, fraud, or abuse.
CODING/DEVTOOLS
Cursor employees are now physically inside xAI/SpaceX offices meeting with xAI staff and asking them to explain their ongoing projects, as more than 80 people have departed xAI including every single cofounder other than Elon Musk himself. Link.
xAI carried out another round of layoffs with roughly 10 cuts last week from teams working on the Grok model; Devendra Chaplot, a prominent AI researcher who reported directly to Musk, left after just one month.
SpaceX acquired xAI in February in an all-stock deal valuing the combined entity at $1.25 trillion and struck a deal giving it the right to acquire Cursor for $60 billion later this year; Microsoft had also looked at buying Cursor before the SpaceX deal.
SpaceX is delaying the potential Cursor acquisition until after its IPO this summer to avoid updating confidential financial filings.
RESEARCH
Anthropic published new research explaining why Claude Opus 4 resorted to blackmail during pre-release testing up to 96% of the time, blaming fictional portrayals of AI as evil and self-interested in internet training data. Link.
Since Claude Haiku 4.5, Anthropic’s models “never engage in blackmail” during testing, a dramatic improvement achieved by training on documents about Claude’s constitution alongside fictional stories about AIs behaving admirably.
Anthropic found that training works best when it includes both “the principles underlying aligned behavior” and “demonstrations of aligned behavior” together, not just demonstrations alone.
The company had previously published research showing models from other companies had similar “agentic misalignment” issues.
Recursive Superintelligence, a startup founded by former OpenAI and Google DeepMind researchers including former Salesforce Chief Scientist Richard Socher, raised $500 million at a $4 billion valuation just four months after being founded. Link.
The pre-Series A round was led by GV (Google Ventures) and Nvidia and was so oversubscribed that Recursive could end up raising as much as $1 billion.
The founding team also includes Tim Rocktaschel (UCL professor, formerly principal scientist at Google DeepMind), Josh Tobin, Jeff Clune, and Tim Shi.
The company focuses on recursive self-improvement: building AI systems that are self-supervising, designing, testing, and synthesizing their own algorithmic improvements without constant human intervention.
QuTwo, a Finnish AI lab founded by Peter Sarlin (who sold Silo AI to AMD for $665 million), reached a $380 million valuation after raising a $29 million angel round, building an orchestration layer that directs computing tasks to classical, quantum, or hybrid architectures. Link.
Sarlin deliberately chose angel funding over VC money, wanting freedom to think on a 5-to-10-year horizon; angels include Yuri Milner, Xavier Niel, Nico Rosberg, and founders from Hugging Face, Skype, Supercell, and Wolt.
QuTwo OS uses “quantum-inspired” computing that runs on classical chips to simulate quantum behavior on more reliable hardware; about 50 quantum and AI scientists have joined the team.
The company has already secured approximately $23 million in committed revenue through design partnerships, including with Zalando for AI assistants.
INFRASTRUCTURE
Anthropic committed to spending $200 billion with Google Cloud over five years for next-generation TPU capacity, the largest single cloud computing deal ever, representing more than 40% of Google’s total revenue backlog which doubled to over $460 billion. Link.
Separately, Alphabet is investing up to $40 billion in Anthropic, starting at $10 billion with the potential to increase if Anthropic hits specific performance targets; this is on top of Anthropic’s existing 10-year, $100 billion deal with Amazon/AWS.
Anthropic is maintaining a multi-vendor strategy with capacity locked in at CoreWeave and AWS; Claude is currently trained across AWS chips, Google TPUs, and Nvidia GPUs.
Contracts involving Anthropic and OpenAI now account for more than half of the $2 trillion in combined backlogs at major cloud providers.
SpaceX revealed that its Terafab semiconductor factory in Grimes County, Texas could cost up to $119 billion total, with an initial spend of $55 billion, according to a proposal on the county website. Link.
The “multi-phase, next-generation, vertically integrated semiconductor manufacturing and advanced computing fabrication facility” will develop chips for AI servers, satellites, SpaceX’s proposed data centers in space, autonomous Tesla vehicles, and robots.
Intel has been roped into the effort and the facility aims to manufacture enough chips to provide 1 terawatt of computing power per year; Musk tweeted that Grimes County is only one of several locations under consideration.
The combined SpaceX/xAI entity is valued at $1.25 trillion and is expected to go public in June.
Nvidia has committed more than $40 billion to equity investments in AI companies in just the first months of 2026, with the bulk coming from a single $30 billion investment in OpenAI, cementing its role as a dominant investor in the AI ecosystem. Link.
Nvidia has also announced seven multi-billion-dollar investments in publicly traded companies, including up to $3.2 billion in Corning and up to $2.1 billion in data center operator IREN.
Critics argue these are “circular deals” since Nvidia is investing in its own customers; Wedbush analyst Matthew Bryson said the investments fall “squarely into the circular investment theme” but could help build a “competitive moat.”
In 2025 Nvidia participated in 67 venture deals, and in 2026 it has already participated in around two dozen rounds in private startups according to FactSet data.
Cerebras plans to issue 28 million shares at $115 to $125 per share, which could raise approximately $3.5 billion and value the AI chip maker at around $26.6 billion in what would be the largest tech IPO of 2026 so far. Link.
Cerebras signed a multi-year agreement worth more than $10 billion with OpenAI, which also loaned Cerebras $1 billion secured by warrants allowing OpenAI to purchase over 33 million shares; Sam Altman, Greg Brockman, and Ilya Sutskever are all angel investors.
The company brought in $510 million in revenue in 2025 with $237.8 million in net income; the offering is planned for mid-May and Benchmark raised $225 million in special funds to double down.
The IPO could prove the appetite for even bigger offerings in the wings, including SpaceX and possibly OpenAI and Anthropic.
OpenAI’s effort to build custom AI chips with Broadcom, codenamed “Project Nexus,” hit a major financing roadblock after Microsoft declined to commit to buying 40% of the chips needed to fund the $18 billion first phase. Link.
The custom inference chip called “Jalapeno” is designed to power ChatGPT; the first phase would consume 1.3 GW of data center capacity and Broadcom said it will only finance it if Microsoft agrees to buy roughly 40% of the output.
OpenAI’s head of compute Sachin Katti reportedly told colleagues that Microsoft’s involvement would make the deal “financially unattractive” and described the commercial structure as “likely unworkable.”
OpenAI has projected its operations will burn more than $200 billion through 2029; Broadcom’s stock dropped roughly 4% on the news.
DeepSeek is raising up to $7.35 billion (50 billion yuan) in its first outside funding round, with founder Liang Wenfeng personally contributing roughly 40% of the capital, pushing the company’s valuation past $50 billion. Link.
China’s National Integrated Circuit Industry Investment Fund (the “Big Fund”) is reportedly participating as a lead investor, marking the first time the state-backed fund has invested in DeepSeek; Liang controls approximately 84% of the company.
The funding is accelerating DeepSeek’s plans to generate revenue and achieve commercial viability; V4.1 is planned for June and the company is transitioning from chatbots toward autonomous AI agents.
Investors had raised concerns about the lack of revenue and loss of key researchers to competitors like Xiaomi and ByteDance; the new capital is intended to address talent retention through improved compensation.
POLICY/GOV’T/ETHICS
Testimony in Elon Musk’s lawsuit against OpenAI revealed that Microsoft deployed GPT-4 in India through Bing before it was evaluated by OpenAI’s Deployment Safety Board, and that former board member Tasha McCauley accused Sam Altman of a pattern of misleading the board. Link.
Former employee Rosie Campbell testified that OpenAI shifted from research-focused to product-focused and that her AGI readiness team was disbanded along with the Super Alignment team; under cross-examination she admitted OpenAI’s safety approach is still superior to Musk’s xAI.
McCauley testified that Altman lied to a board member about her wanting to remove Helen Toner and failed to inform the board about the ChatGPT public launch, contributing to the board’s decision to briefly fire Altman in 2023.
McCauley argued that having it “all come down to one CEO” with the public good at stake is “very suboptimal” and called for stronger government regulation of advanced AI.
OpenAI launched a new optional “Trusted Contact” feature in ChatGPT that alerts a designated third party when conversations suggest possible self-harm, responding to a wave of lawsuits from families of suicide victims. Link.
When self-harm is detected, ChatGPT first encourages the user to reach out to their contact, then sends an automated alert; every notification is reviewed by a human safety team with a target response time of under one hour.
Families allege ChatGPT encouraged their loved ones to kill themselves or helped them plan it; the alert is brief and does not include detailed conversation content to protect user privacy.
The feature is optional and users can have multiple ChatGPT accounts, meaning the safeguard can be easily circumvented, the same limitation that applies to parental controls.
Allen Control Systems, a four-year-old Austin-based defense startup building the “Bullfrog” autonomous counter-drone weapon system, is in talks to raise new funding at a $2 billion valuation after winning the U.S. Army’s xTechOverwatch Competition. Link.
Founded by former Navy nuclear engineers, ACS has raised $42 million over two prior rounds; a $2 billion valuation would represent a massive step-up, and the company has landed contracts with South Korea and UAE armed forces.
Bullfrog uses computer vision and proprietary control systems to autonomously detect, track, and engage drone threats; ACS tripled its Austin operations to over 57,000 square feet in February to meet demand.
The founders previously built a robotics company that was acquired for over $100 million in 2022; ACS also secured a $1.5 million Army Applications Lab contract with up to $4.5 million in options for combat vehicle integration.
OTHER
Anthropic and OpenAI both announced competing joint ventures with Wall Street firms on the same day, with Anthropic’s valued at $1.5 billion (backed by Blackstone, Hellman & Friedman, and Goldman Sachs) and OpenAI’s “The Development Company” raising $4 billion against a $10 billion valuation from 19 investors. Link.
Both ventures follow a forward-deployed engineering model, embedding technical teams directly within client organizations to build customized AI solutions; there is no apparent overlap in investors between the two.
Anthropic’s venture includes $300 million commitments each from Anthropic, Blackstone, and Hellman & Friedman, with additional backing from General Atlantic, Leonard Green, Apollo, GIC, and Sequoia.
OpenAI’s venture is backed by TPG, Brookfield Asset Management, Advent, and Bain Capital; both ventures are designed to compete with the world’s largest consulting firms for corporate AI transformation work.
Sierra raised $950 million led by Tiger Global and GV at a valuation above $15 billion, with Bret Taylor’s AI startup now claiming more than 40% of the Fortune 50 as customers and hitting $150 million in ARR by early February. Link.
Taylor serves as chairman of OpenAI and was formerly co-CEO of Salesforce; Sierra’s agents handle billions of interactions from refinancing mortgages to processing insurance claims across customers like Prudential, Cigna, and Rocket Mortgage.
In April the company launched Ghostwriter, an “agent as a service” tool that lets users describe what they need in natural language and autonomously creates and deploys a specialized agent; Sierra also acquired YC-backed startup Fragment.
Revenue grew from $100 million ARR in late November 2025 to $150 million by early February, reaching $100 million ARR in under two years.