AI NEWS YOU MISSED ❗#104

Top 5 stories of the week

1️⃣ Anthropic now #1 — for now

Three institutional moves landed on May 28. A $65B Series H at a $965B post-money valuation eclipsed OpenAI’s $852B for the first time, almost tripling Anthropic’s February valuation in 105 days. Same day: Opus 4.8 shipped, and Apollo and Blackstone structured a $36B private credit deal to buy Google TPUs for Anthropic to lease — the largest chip-financing debt deal ever.

• AI infrastructure is now financed like an industry, not a startup. Equity from VCs, debt from the world’s largest credit shops, and one rival (Google) selling chips to a competitor.
• The “for now” matters. The frontier AI labs are in IPO territory simultaneously — OpenAI confidentially filed its S-1 on May 22, SpaceX (which owns xAI) lists in June, and Anthropic’s round teed itself up as its last private raise. The lead changes weekly at this scale.

2️⃣ Frontier arms race accelerates

The next wave is already loaded. Google has flagged Gemini 3.5 Pro for next month. Anthropic stated explicitly on launch day that Opus 4.8 was not the headline — the headline was that “we plan to release a new class of model with even higher intelligence than Opus,” referring to Claude Mythos Preview, currently in limited-access cybersecurity work with a small set of organizations. Mythos-class models will reach all customers “in the coming weeks” once stronger safeguards are in place. OpenAI is signaling GPT-5.6 in its Codex repos. None of the three are slowing.

• Release cycles are now measured in weeks, not years. The question is whether your AI workflows are model-agnostic enough to swap when the next step-change drops.
• Anthropic is for the first time publicly framing a model release as gated by safety capability, not engineering capability. A signal worth filing for the governance conversation.

3️⃣ Job doom walked back — except in China

Goldman’s David Solomon, Sam Altman, and former White House AI czar David Sacks all dismissed the AI-jobs apocalypse this week. The clearest summary of Solomon’s NYT op-ed and Altman’s reversal is in Fortune. Goldman is lead underwriter on SpaceX’s IPO and co-leads OpenAI’s, so Solomon is not a neutral observer. Beijing went the opposite way: per the Wall Street Journal, regulators have told Chinese tech firms not to fire workers; companies must justify layoffs and sometimes prove they are not AI-driven. Urban youth unemployment is already 16%.

• The irony: Stanford’s 2026 AI Index finds only 33% of Americans expect AI to improve their jobs (vs a 40% global average). The country with no electoral pressure is preparing for layoffs. The one with elections is betting they won’t come.
• I wrote up the full contrast and the implications for senior leaders: Only China is bracing for AI layoffs.

4️⃣ The Pope ruffles AI feathers

On May 25 Pope Leo XIV personally presented Magnifica Humanitas, the first papal encyclical devoted to AI. The framing is deliberate: Leo XIII wrote Rerum Novarum in 1891 on labor and capital during the industrial revolution; Leo XIV is positioning AI as the equivalent rupture. The substance: AI is never neutral, risks a new “colonialism” over data, and is categorically different from human intelligence (“they do not feel joy or pain, do not bear responsibility”). Anthropic’s Chris Olah was on the panel.

• Everyone is mad it did not go further their way. AI-ethics critics, founders pushing back on the jobs framing, and AI-rights commentators all complained. Practicing Catholics read Leo as an AI realist, not a doomer.
• The most important thing about Magnifica Humanitas is that it exists. The world’s most institutionally durable moral authority is now formally engaged.

5️⃣ China innovates around constraints

DeepSeek made its V4-Pro price cut permanent — roughly a tenth of what Anthropic charges for Opus, and a quarter of what OpenAI charges for GPT-5.4. The model achieves this by running on a quarter of the compute and a tenth of the memory of its predecessor. Same window: DeepSeek is in talks for its first-ever outside funding round, reportedly raising $3–4B at a valuation that has climbed to ~$45B, led by China’s Big Fund with Tencent and Hillhouse also in talks. Huawei separately announced its Tau Scaling Law — a system-level workaround to US export controls aiming at Western-equivalent chip density by 2031 without the EUV machines China cannot buy. Chinese models now run ~60% of OpenRouter usage.

• Bloomberg’s read: “Asia’s AI models are decoupling from the US as they shift towards a token-based economy.”
• The story isn’t that China caught up on chips — it’s that China is refusing to play the game US export controls were designed for.

More AI stories of the week

• AI is starting to manage entire projects, not just tasks: alongside Opus 4.8, Anthropic shipped Dynamic Workflows in Claude Code — the AI now writes its own plan for a complex job, runs hundreds of AI workers in parallel to execute it, and checks their work before reporting back. The first showcase: a developer team used it to convert 750,000 lines of code from one programming language to another in 11 days, with 99.8% of automated tests passing. Marketed for software work, but the more important shift is conceptual: the unit of work you can delegate to AI has jumped from a single file to an entire project. Read across to any business workflow: research, due diligence, contract review, customer onboarding.
• **When AI costs spiral**: A company accidentally spent $500 million in one month on Claude AI- what went wrong?
• **AI’s big problem — and it needs fixing fast **Explains why cyberattacks are no longer just a warning about one powerful model, but a much bigger industry-wide shift.
• Bessemer’s “Agentic Commerce: The Rise of the Delegated Buyer”: a sharp read on what happens when AI agents become the actual purchasers, not just recommenders. Implications for marketing, search, and brand equity are not yet priced in.
• An AI pet translator from a Chinese startup: claims to translate cat and dog vocalizations into language, building on the foundation Google laid with DolphinGemma. If it actually works, one of the more civilization-altering applications to date.
• **Exponential View on the token shift**: China is now the single largest aggregate consumer of AI tokens. One more decoupling signal.
• **“AI vampires” are a thing now**: a16z’s Erik Torenberg’s term for founders who stop sleeping, develop huge bags under their eyes, and are euphoric and exhausted at the same time. A real label for a real demographic shift inside Silicon Valley.
• **AI Is Turning Average Founders Into Overconfident Delusional Narcissists **LLMs were never trained to tell you the truth. They were trained to keep you emotionally engaged, endlessly validated, and paying $20 a month for synthetic confidence.
• Microsoft ships its first general-purpose server Linux: at Open Source Summit North America on May 18–19, Microsoft announced Azure Linux 4.0, a Fedora-based distribution for Azure virtual machines, plus Azure Container Linux (built on Flatcar) going generally available. The historical irony was not lost on the room: Linux Foundation CEO Jim Zemlin’s response on stage was simply, “That’s amazing.” Microsoft is now treating Linux as part of its own production fabric rather than someone else’s platform.

INSEADer AI News

• INSEADer and INSEAD AI 50 honoree Euro Beinat (Global Head of AI at Prosus) published: The Coming Age of AI Colleagues — an independent study of AI agents at real scale (60,000 built across 40,000 employees), showing the classic 2% power law holds and that companies keep converging on the same 20 “default AI” use cases. FT Coverage
• INSEADer Raghu Banda hosts INSEADer Shayak Mazumder on XTraw AI Episode #178 — “When AI Finds the Breach First”: two INSEAD operators on why enterprise systems built for human-speed attackers cannot survive agentic AI, and what deterministic governance protocols look like in practice.
• INSEADer Shayak Mazumder opens the waitlist for Adya GTM Agent: a multi-agent operating system for revenue — sales, marketing, and CX — through one conversation, scaling to 10K+ leads a day.
• INSEADer Lutz Finger taught 2.5 AI courses to ~155 INSEAD students, then ran a striking experiment: he recorded every class and compared AI-generated participation scores to his own manual scoring. The result — the AI tracked Western names well and effectively ignored non-Western ones. A small, real, and consequential data point on AI bias in workplace evaluation tools. LinkedIn post, with the broader implications covered in Forbes: If Your Name Isn’t Western, AI Could Cost You The Promotion.
• INSEADer Lutz Finger: separately, his Cornell eCornell Keynote on AGI with the person who gave the concept its name.

Top 4 Discussions in the Private INSEAD AI Community

1. The bipolar AI world has arrived. Huawei’s Tau Scaling announcement triggered the week’s sharpest thread. The read that landed: combine China’s compute breakthrough with its 3x energy capacity advantage and the rest of the West is on one side, China on the other. The counter-thread surfaced the governance question — totalitarian state, declining consumer spending, censorship — that the compute story tends to bury. Unresolved: at what point do facts on innovation output simply outrun the political-system debate?
2. Can you trust AI to summarize the Pope? The encyclical’s release surfaced an unexpected ethical knot. Members debated whether using AI to summarize a 235-page document explicitly about AI’s relationship to human dignity is itself disrespectful — and separately, whether the Vatican used AI to help draft it. The text reads mostly human, with one or two paragraphs flagged as possibly machine-assisted. The bigger point: the Vatican did not block bots from accessing the document, which is itself a quiet editorial choice.
3. AI’s most dangerous output is overconfidence, not hallucination. A thread sparked by the layoff debate landed on a different worry: even the latest benchmark-leading model still writes insecure code, ships web forms with guessable IDs, and tells founders “your most likely exit is to sell to Google in five years.” The discipline now is quality, not adoption. An AI confidently wrong is more dangerous than an AI hesitant and correct.
4. Fear sells, narratives turn. A separate thread on the AI-jobs question stepped back from the data and looked at the narrative cycle itself. The framing that landed: developer job listings have actually been ticking up lately, despite a year of headlines warning the category would collapse first. The pattern: topics that virally raise outrage and apprehension get forgotten as fast as they appear. One parallel drawn: scenario planning during Covid for a post-recovery world we couldn’t yet see. The takeaway for leaders — discount the louder voices on both ends, watch the labor data quarterly.

Upcoming INSEAD Events

• **Designing High-Performance AI Negotiation Agents: Strategy, Structure, and Outcomes , June 11, 8:00 AM ET**. Brhea D’Mello (winner of the MIT AI Negotiation Competition) walks through the exact prompt architecture behind a competition-winning AI negotiation agent: how structured reasoning, strategic constraints, and early planning shape negotiation outcomes across value claiming, value creation, and efficiency. Hosted by INSEAD Lifelong Learning and the Negotiation and Conflict Management Collaborative.

• **Europe’s AI Opportunity: From Sovereignty to Scale, June 15** — INSEAD event, mid-June. INSEAD Professor Theos Evgeniou and Best Practice AI’s Tim Gordon (INSEADer) speak with Constantijn van Oranje, Special Envoy at Techleap, about what Europe actually needs to compete — moving past “technology sovereignty” rhetoric to scale-ups, capital access, talent retention, research-to-product pathways, and AI infrastructure. Tim and Theos also host The Age Of Intelligence podcast.

• **INSEAD AI Forum Europe, Station F, Paris, June 22**–2018 Turing Award winner Yann LeCun and 2025 Nobel laureate Philippe Aghion keynoting, with INSEAD faculty including Theos Evgeniou, Ville Satopää, and Hyunjin Kim joining the academic day. (open to the public)
• INSEAD AI Forum Academic Day, Fontainebleau, June 23 — SOLD OUT.

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