The Weekly Think: May 8-14, 2026
Anthropic went vertical, OpenAI hired itself a consulting firm, Google teased an Android-powered laptop, and Jensen Huang got a last-minute Air Force One ride to China.
AI news seeker, come on down! Last week, I called what these labs are turning into a sort of FrAInkenstein (note to self: gotta trademark that bad boy). This week kind of proved the point. Nobody shipped a flashy new frontier model. What they shipped instead was distribution: into law firms, small businesses, Microsoft Office, and Beijing. Oh my!
The pattern isn’t hard to recognize. The race has shifted to distribution: who can plant their flag inside the most workflows before anyone else does. And the labs are basically copying Palantir’s old playbook now (more on that in a sec).
Here’s what’s covered today:
Anthropic launched Claude for Legal AND Claude for Small Business in 48 hours
OpenAI started a $4B consulting firm and called it the Deployment Company
Google previewed its “Gemini Intelligence” and a new laptop category called Googlebook
Jensen Huang got a last-minute call from Trump and ended up in Beijing
The memory shortage went from “concerning” to “no affordable laptop for you!”
Anthropic went vertical: Legal on Tuesday, Small Business on Wednesday
The story: On May 12, Anthropic launched Claude for Legal: 20+ legal MCP connectors, 12 practice-area plugins, integrations with Westlaw, Thomson Reuters, Harvey, Everlaw, the works. Less than 24 hours later, on May 13, they shipped Claude for Small Business, a one-click install that wires Claude into QuickBooks, PayPal, HubSpot, Canva, DocuSign, Google Workspace, and Microsoft 365.
What happened:
Freshfields, one of the world’s biggest law firms, has already deployed Claude to thousands of users.
Legal became the #1 power-user job function inside Claude Cowork, with 3x the usage of any other vertical.
Daniela Amodei said small businesses “make up nearly half the American economy” and have never had enterprise-grade tools.
Anthropic also bundled a free AI fluency course (14 lectures, an hour of video) for the small business launch.
This is what going vertical looks like, friendos. A year ago, Anthropic was a chatbot. Now it’s an orchestration layer that sits between you and your billable hours, or between you and your unpaid invoices. The thing that should jump out at you, though, is the pacing. Two completely different verticals, two days apart, both shipped with real partner integrations already in place. Good gravy! Companies that take eighteen months to launch a single integration should be taking notes.
If you’re a small business owner reading this and you haven’t dug into Claude yet, this is the week to start. An AI course priced at free 99 is a great place to start.
OpenAI launched its own consulting firm (and immediately bought one)
The story: On May 11, OpenAI announced the OpenAI Deployment Company (also known as DeployCo). It’s a $4 billion subsidiary backed by 19 outside investors, with the very specific goal of, quite literally, putting OpenAI engineers inside Fortune 500 buildings. The same day, OpenAI announced it’s acquiring Tomoro, a London/Edinburgh-based AI consulting firm, to staff the whole ding darn thing on day one.
What happened:
Tomoro brings approximately 150 Forward Deployed Engineers from day one (Palantir invented this role, and it apparently prints money).
DeployCo launched with TPG as lead investor, plus Bain Capital, Brookfield, Goldman Sachs, SoftBank, and Warburg Pincus on the cap table.
Three of the largest consulting firms in the world (Bain, Capgemini, McKinsey) also wrote checks.
Tomoro’s existing client list reads like a fun trivia card: Tesco, Virgin Atlantic, Red Bull, Mattel, the NBA, Supercell.
Axios reportedly values the unit at $14 billion.
You catch what just happened? OpenAI just got into the consulting business. They’re sending their own engineers into big companies (think Tesco, Virgin Atlantic, the NBA) to build custom AI tools on-site. The money isn’t in having the smartest model anymore. It’s in the hands-on work of making AI actually useful. Anthropic has been doing this with one law firm at a time. OpenAI just hired 150 engineers to do it with hundreds of companies at once.
For software builders, this is the kind of move you should be taking notes on. The deployment problem is so big that one of the biggest AI labs in the world just spun up a 150-person team specifically to solve it for other people. If you can be the person who walks into a company and makes their AI actually work, you’re going to have more work than you can handle for the next few years.
Google previewed Gemini Intelligence, a new laptop, and basically told Microsoft “we’ll take it from here”
The story: On May 12, Google held its Android Show: I/O Edition, a warm-up event a week before the main Google I/O keynote on May 19. They previewed Gemini Intelligence (a suite of agentic features baked into Android), Gemini in Chrome with “auto browse” (the browser, browsing itself, which is very meta if you ask me), and Googlebook, a new laptop category built for Gemini from the ground up.
What happened:
Googlebooks will be made by Acer, ASUS, Dell, HP, and Lenovo, shipping this fall.
The new OS underneath them, called Aluminium OS, is essentially Google merging Android and ChromeOS into one stack.
A feature called Magic Pointer lets you wiggle your cursor at anything on screen, and Gemini suggests what to do with it (one writer compared it to Clippy “but potentially 1,000 times more annoying,” which, like, justice for Clippy bro✊🏽📎).
Gboard is getting Rambler dictation cleanup, which scrubs up the “uhh… so basically” mess in your voice notes.
Android 17 is also adding Pause Point, which interrupts you before you can open the doomscrolling app of your choice.
Microsoft tried this with Copilot+ PCs in 2024 and it didn’t exactly catch fire. Engadget had a great line on this: Microsoft “started stripping Copilot features out of Windows apps after users revolted.” So Google is walking into a category that the much bigger software giant already faceplanted in. Confidence is a heck of a placebo.
Two things you should be watching: first, whether Magic Pointer is genuinely useful or just genuinely annoying (try wiggling your finger at grocery store items with people around; see what happens). And second, whether Gemini in Chrome browsing-on-your-behalf is the moment agentic AI stops being a demo and starts being a habit. Speaking of which, I/O is next Tuesday. You better believe I’ll have thoughts.
Jensen Huang got a last-minute call from Trump and ended up on Air Force One
The story: On Monday, May 12, a list of CEOs traveling with Trump to meet Xi Jinping in Beijing went out to the press. Apple’s Tim Cook? Yes. Tesla’s Elon Musk? Yes. Qualcomm’s Cristiano Amon? Yes. Nvidia’s Jensen Huang? Notably… no. The CNBC headline was basically “oof.” Cue the actually-watching-his-own-funeral SpongeBob meme.
What happened:
After CNBC and others ran the story of Huang’s absence, Trump personally called him.
Huang flew to Alaska to board Air Force One mid-trip (which is a sentence I’d like to revisit when I’m old).
Trump posted that opening up China for U.S. businesses would be his “first request” to Xi.
Huang’s Nvidia made up the entirety of Anthropic’s SpaceX Colossus 1 lease last week (220,000 GPUs of it, anyway).
Hassam Nasir at Tom’s Hardware noted Nvidia’s most advanced chips have faced tighter U.S. export restrictions on China for four years running.
Imagine being so necessary to global AI infrastructure that the President of the United States personally rerouted you onto a presidential aircraft in Alaska (in a huge “my bad, dawg” situation). Most of us would feel like we just got picked for the kickball team. Jensen probably felt like that was just another Tuesday. There’s a real story here about how the most consequential (and probably polarizing) CEO in tech right now is the one making the picks and shovels for everybody else’s gold rush. It’s reality: without Nvidia, this whole AI party probably wouldn’t be so crazy.
The compute supply situation is going to keep shaping what models you can use, where you can run them, and what they cost. Speaking of compute…
The memory shortage is now everyone’s problem (yes, including yours)
The story: Two reports this week made the memory crunch impossible to ignore. Insurance-Edge published a deep dive on May 13 showing that DRAM contract prices surged ~90% in Q1 2026, with order lead times now running past 40 weeks. Cisco, also on May 13, posted a 15% stock pop on earnings, and announced 4,000 layoffs starting May 14 to refocus on AI demand. Memory and AI are eating everything else.
What happened:
Counterpoint Technology Market Research clocked memory prices up ~90% in Q1 alone.
IDC projects 2026 DRAM supply growth at just 16% year-over-year, well below historical norms.
Samsung’s memory chief Kim Jaejune warned shortages will persist through “at least 2027.”
Some hyperscalers have already locked in HBM supply through 2027.
Cisco’s revenue grew 12% on AI demand and they’re still cutting 4,000 jobs to chase it harder.
Here’s why this matters even if you never touch a data center (because, man, I’ve never even SEEN one). When the three companies that make 90%+ of the world’s memory (Samsung, SK hynix, Micron) decide to send their best wafers to Nvidia instead of Dell, the cost of every laptop, every phone, every PlayStation (gamers: “noooooo”), and every smart fridge (produce in the fresh drawer: “noooooo”) goes up. Lenovo, Dell, HP, Acer, and ASUS have all warned of 15-20% price hikes (and look, I love hiking but… oh, not that kind of hike…). Your next PC upgrade is being indirectly funded by Anthropic and OpenAI buying GPUs. (Funny how that works, no? Actually, it’s not funny.)
The flip side is the opportunity. If you’re a software builder or a small business owner, the memory crunch is creating a giant moat around anyone who can squeeze more value out of less compute. Models that run efficiently on local hardware just got a lot more interesting, and open-weights players did too. The companies betting big on running everything in the cloud are going to find out how expensive “the cloud” really is.
What ties it all together
Last week, I said the “AI lab” category was collapsing in real time. This week was the first week where you could actually see what’s replacing it.
You’ve got Anthropic building vertical-specific products (Legal, Small Business, Financial Services) the way a normal enterprise software company would. You’ve got OpenAI standing up a 150-engineer consulting arm to sit inside your office (gonna one heck of a stuffy office; hope there’s enough coffee). You’ve got Google merging two operating systems and shipping a laptop. And underneath all of it, you’ve got Jensen Huang on a plane to Beijing and a memory shortage that’s reshaping the price of every device you own. Whew.
The big tell of the week is what the labs are now selling. It’s integration. They’re embedding inside legal workflows, inside small business stacks, inside Microsoft Office, inside laptops, inside chip-supply diplomacy. The companies (and the people) who figure out how to ride that wave, by getting deployed inside workflows that actually matter, are the ones who win the next 12 months.
What I’m watching
Whether Google’s I/O keynote on May 19 lands Gemini 4 or settles for an incremental bump
How fast OpenAI’s DeployCo eats into Accenture/Deloitte’s AI services revenue (early signs not great for the consultancies; Accenture dropped 3% on the announcement)
Whether Anthropic adds a vertical-specific Claude every week now (Claude for Healthcare? Claude for Real Estate? Claude for Farming??)
Whether Trump’s China trip produces any actual chip-export movement
DRAM spot prices, because the whole industry might be about to find out it built on sand (and not rock, like a smart person)
Thanks so much for reading this edition of The Weekly Think.
See you next week!