The Weekly Think: May 3-7, 2026
Anthropic out-earned OpenAI, leased Musk's biggest data center, and got locked out of the federal contract. All in 24 hours. Fun stuff!
Good day, weary AI news traveler! A lot happened in 24 hours, and y’all, none of it was about new models (though a fresh new face in this space sure would be nice, no?).
Anthropic’s annual run rate hit $30 billion and passed OpenAI for the first time. They leased every GPU at SpaceX’s Colossus 1 facility. Then the Trump administration cut a federal AI testing deal with Microsoft, Google, and xAI, and didn't invite Anthropic to the table.
You know what this means? The good ol’ fashioned “AI lab” category is collapsing in real time. What’s replacing it is something… welp, altogether different: part defense contractor, part cloud provider, part financial services firm, part aerospace company. A sort of FrAInkenstein, if you will. I should trademark that.
Here’s what’s covered today:
Anthropic’s revenue blows past OpenAI
The Anthropic-SpaceX compute deal nobody saw coming
Anthropic gets locked out of the federal AI deal
A court just made AI ad platforms liable under securities law
Apple opens iOS 27 to third-party AI
Anthropic’s revenue blew past OpenAI
The story: Anthropic’s annualized revenue hit $30 billion this week. OpenAI is at $24 billion. Six months ago that ratio was, as Fresh Prince once said, “flipped, turned upside down”. Dario Amodei told a room of bankers they’d projected 10x growth and got 80x instead. Mr. Monopoly was not available for comment.
What happened:
Anthropic shipped 10 preconfigured Claude agents Tuesday for investment banks, asset managers, and insurers.
Claude Opus 4.7 dropped alongside them, tuned for financial work.
A $1.5B joint venture with Blackstone, Goldman, and Hellman & Friedman launched the day before to embed Claude into mid-market financial firms.
Jamie Dimon shared a stage with Amodei at the New York briefing.
This is what happens when “best at coding” turns into “best at coding workflows that big companies pay billions for.” Anthropic is winning enterprise. Enterprise is the only customer base where the unit economics actually work for a frontier lab. Wall Street can pay frontier-AI prices forever, and Anthropic just made themselves the operating layer for it.
The Anthropic-SpaceX deal nobody saw coming
The story: Anthropic announced a deal Wednesday to lease all of Colossus 1, Elon Musk’s 300+ MW facility in Memphis. Yeah man, the same Elon who spent the last year calling Anthropic “doomed to become misanthropic.” To quote one Michael Scott of The Office, “Well, well, well, how the turntables…”
What happened:
220,000+ Nvidia GPUs come online for Claude within the month.
Claude Code’s 5-hour usage caps are doubling across paid tiers.
Anthropic also “expressed interest” in working with SpaceX on multiple gigawatts of compute capacity in space (yes, in space).
Musk posted on X: “no one set off my evil detector.”
When the world’s most committed troll calls a truce with the company he’s been dragging for eighteen months, that’s quite the market signal, my dudes. The compute crunch is real enough that even Musk is choosing money over grudges.
Anthropic got locked out of the federal AI deal
The story: While Anthropic was signing with SpaceX and Goldman, the Trump administration cut a separate testing deal with Microsoft, Google, and xAI. Anthropic wasn’t invited to the party; they were basically treated like Cady in Mean Girls. The DoD’s classified-network deal last week with 10 AI providers? Same story.
What happened:
The exclusion ties to Claude Mythos, Anthropic’s restricted frontier model.
Mythos found thousands of zero-day vulnerabilities (including a 27-year-old bug in OpenBSD) during internal testing.
Federal policy has shifted from “release with guardrails” to “don’t release at all” for offensive-capable models.
Mythos access is currently limited to 12 partner orgs under Project Glasswing (AWS, Apple, Cisco, Google, JPMorgan, Microsoft, etc.).
The lab that’s leading on revenue (sweet!) and capability (nice!) is also the one most isolated from federal procurement (*record scratch*). That’s a strange position to be in. Two readings: either Anthropic’s safety posture is now strict enough that they’re harder to contract with, or the government doesn’t want the lab whose model just made it rewrite tech policy.
A court just made AI ad platforms liable for what their AI says
The story: *Cue the theme from Dragnet* A federal court in the Northern District of California ruled that when a platform’s AI exercises “ultimate authority” over assembled ad content, the platform itself can be considered a maker of fraudulent statements under Rule 10b-5 securities law. Dun-dun-dun-dun-dunnnnnnn.
What happened:
Meta, Alphabet, Snap, TikTok, and X all run generative AI in their ad pipelines.
Every one of them is now legally on the hook for what their AI puts in ads, and none of them have a plan for it.
Separately, U.S. lawyers are warning clients that AI chatbot conversations may be admissible in court.
None of those Claude or ChatGPT conversations have legal privilege.
AI agents are entering every layer of commerce, law, and corporate operations faster than the legal frameworks designed to govern them. The next 18 months are going to produce a parade of “wait, that’s legal?” moments. If you build software, you should be seeing dollar signs, like you’re an old timey cartoon. There’s a whole new market for tools that help companies stay legal as AI takes over their workflows.
If you’re an AI user? Be careful what you type. Your ChatGPT history isn’t private, and lawyers are already figuring out how to subpoena it.
Apple opened iOS 27 to third-party AI
The story: Apple announced that iOS 27 will let users pick which AI service powers their device-level features. It’s Apple saying “pick a card” at the OS level.
What happened:
Anthropic, OpenAI, Google, and likely a Chinese open-weights player are all in the running.
Apple has spent 18 months trying to ship their own AI strategy and produced approximately nothing usable.
This pairs with Salesforce’s headless announcement last week, which exposed their full SaaS platform to AI agents.
Two billion devices just became default-level real estate for whichever lab the user picks.
Apple basically gave up trying to build their own AI. Instead, they’re letting Anthropic, OpenAI, and Google compete on the iPhone, and Apple takes a cut from whoever the user picks. They’re not worried about winning. They’re “the house”, and in the parlance of poker, they always win.
What ties it all together
This week made one thing clear: what we used to call an “AI lab” doesn’t really exist anymore. A year ago, Anthropic and OpenAI were research companies that sold a chatbot. Now they’re leasing data centers, building compute in space, running Wall Street agents, and rewriting federal tech policy. But, they aren’t making julienne fries… yet.
At any rate, these aren’t AI labs anymore. They’re something else, and honestly, we don’t have a name for it yet. The category is being invented in real time, which means there’s never been a better time to break out the popcorn and see what transpires.
What I’m watching
Whether the federal exclusion of Anthropic becomes a bigger story
Whether any other lab delves into orbital compute
Which AI services Apple names for the iOS 27 launch list
Thanks so much for reading this edition of The Weekly Think.
See you next week!