This week: the dependence problem running underneath the AI boom. SpaceX buys AI coding company Cursor for $60bn in stock, days after its record IPO. Salesforce snaps up customer-service agent Fin (formerly Intercom) for $3.6bn. ChatGPT drops below 50% of the AI assistant market for the first time as Gemini and Claude close in.

Two of Google's top AI researchers depart for rivals (Transformer co-inventor Noam Shazeer to OpenAI and Nobel laureate John Jumper to Anthropic), and Alphabet has its worst day in about a year.

Anthropic's Fable 5 and Mythos 5 are still offline ten days into a US export-control order. America's energy regulator, FERC, votes to fast-track AI data centres onto the grid while shielding household bills. A new "agentjacking" attack hijacks AI coding agents through fake error reports. And PwC's AI Jobs Barometer finds the most AI-exposed firms are growing wages and headcount, not cutting.

Plus a fast look at the model race: GPT-5.6, Gemini 3.5 Pro and China's open-weight GLM-5.2. If you find this useful, follow the show and leave a rating.

A week defined by one question: can you actually depend on these tools? Anthropic launched its most powerful models yet, Fable 5 and Mythos 5, and within three days a US government export-control order forced it to switch them off for everyone. Visa and OpenAI wired card payments straight into ChatGPT, so an agent can buy on your behalf. Google agreed to pay SpaceX about $920 million a month for computing power, the bubble question in a single deal. Microsoft's Copilot fell over four times in a month with no financially backed SLA, and then hit a critical security issue. Dario Amodei admitted AI will displace jobs and put 350 million dollars behind it. And a British MP took Grok to the High Court over deepfakes.

A big week for assistant strategy, pulling in two directions. Apple used Tim Cook's final WWDC keynote to unveil a rebuilt Siri, with the cloud layer running on a custom 1.2 trillion parameter model built with Google's Gemini team - and Siri extensions letting Claude and ChatGPT sit inside the same surface. Microsoft went the other way at Build 2026, pulling its AI stack in-house: seven MAI models, an always-on agent called Scout, and a native GitHub Copilot desktop app.

Then the money. The US government is reportedly discussing a direct equity stake in OpenAI, while Bernie Sanders floats a one-time stock tax on the big labs. SpaceX kicked off the largest IPO roadshow on record, now priced as much on AI compute demand as on rockets. And Meta launched its Business Agent across WhatsApp, Instagram and Messenger, betting small firms never leave the thread.

Plus the quick hits: ChatGPT's biggest memory update since launch, a new Lockdown Mode, Alibaba's Qwen 3.7 Max undercutting Western labs on price, and OpenAI's life-sciences model GPT-Rosalind.

It’s been a week of huge funding rounds, and the first clear signs that companies are getting stricter about AI costs.

Anthropic closed a $65bn round at a valuation near a trillion dollars and confirmed it has filed to go public, passing OpenAI as the most valuable private AI company. Cognition raised over $1bn on the back of an eye-catching figure: 89% of its code is now committed by Devin. And SoftBank pledged up to €75bn to build AI data centres in France, putting serious compute on European soil.

Then came the reality check. Microsoft is winding down most of its internal Claude Code licences, and Uber tore through its entire 2026 Claude Code budget in a matter of months, with its COO admitting he can't yet link the spend to better products. The land-grab phase of enterprise AI looks to be ending, and finance is now asking harder questions.

We also cover the EU AI Act handing companies 16 months of timeline relief, Anthropic's Mythos model surfacing 10,000 vulnerabilities while Sysdig documents the first AI-agent-driven intrusion caught in the wild, and DeepSeek's new pricing giving procurement teams a fresh benchmark for vendor talks.

Sponsored by Notify Technology.

This week on The AI Breakdown, we look at the moment AI starts to meet the public markets. OpenAI has reportedly moved toward a confidential IPO filing, Anthropic is showing signs of operating profit while leaning heavily on massive compute deals, and Google used I/O to remind everyone that distribution may matter as much as model quality.

We also cover Anthropic’s SpaceX compute dependence, Nvidia’s huge AI infrastructure numbers, Meta’s messy AI reorganisation, and Andrej Karpathy’s move to Anthropic as the frontier AI talent war heats up.

Cerebras went public at a $95 billion market cap, the biggest tech IPO since Snowflake and the first pure-play AI hardware listing of this cycle. The reference point for every NVIDIA challenger just got a lot more expensive.

Plus, Anthropic's reportedly closing a $30 billion raise at a $900 billion valuation, which puts it level with OpenAI and ends the smaller-alternative framing for good. Cisco posted record AI orders and announced 4,000 layoffs in the same week, which is starting to feel like the new normal.

Notion is pitching itself as an agent hub rather than a documents tool. And Microsoft's M-DASH multi-agent system beat Anthropic on a cybersecurity benchmark using more than 100 coordinated agents, which suggests the winning pattern isn't one giant model. It's a team of smaller ones doing specific jobs well.

We'll also touch on Anthropic going downmarket with Claude for Small Business, Boomi's on-prem agent runtime aimed at regulated buyers, and why Mustafa Suleyman's claim that AI will automate most professional work in 12 to 18 months lands awkwardly against Copilot's 3.3% paid seat share.

This week, the AI infrastructure wars went into overdrive. Anthropic and OpenAI both announced massive deployment vehicles - Anthropic's $1.5 billion joint venture with Blackstone, Goldman Sachs and Hellman & Friedman, and OpenAI's $4 billion Deployment Company plus the acquisition of UK consultancy Tomoro - signalling a direct shot at Accenture, Deloitte and the rest of the Big Consulting machine. The message? The bottleneck is no longer the model, it's getting it into production.

Then there's the deal nobody saw coming. Anthropic has leased the entire Colossus 1 data centre from Elon Musk's SpaceX - 300+ megawatts, 220,000 Nvidia GPUs - after Dario Amodei revealed Claude grew 80x in Q1 against an internal plan of 10x. Rate limits are easing, Opus token caps are jumping tenfold, and Musk has gone from calling Anthropic evil to becoming its biggest landlord.

Plus: Microsoft Agent 365 hits general availability with a serious control-plane play, AWS launches Bedrock AgentCore Payments so agents can transact in stablecoins, SAP drops €1 billion on tabular foundation model startup Prior Labs, Sierra raises $950 million at a $15 billion valuation, OpenAI opens GPT-5.5-Cyber to European defenders while Anthropic keeps Mythos walled off, Alibaba bakes Qwen into Taobao across 4 billion products, and Cloudflare cuts 1,100 jobs citing internal AI productivity gains - only for the market to punish the stock anyway.

This week on The AI Breakdown, the Pentagon has awarded classified AI contracts to eight companies, but Anthropic is notably missing from the list after being labelled a supply chain risk. Meanwhile, OpenAI has ended its Azure-only era, with GPT models now arriving on AWS Bedrock almost immediately after a reworked Microsoft agreement.

We also dig into Alphabet, Microsoft, Amazon and Meta signalling roughly $700 billion in AI infrastructure spend, why that may ease compute scarcity, and how custom silicon from Trainium to TPUs could reshape the economics of model hosting.

Beyond the top stories, you’ll hear why Mistral Workflows matters for European enterprise AI, what Ineffable Intelligence’s $1.1 billion seed round says about the market’s growing appetite for post-LLM bets, and the practical implications of the EU AI Act deadline, Claude Security, Meta’s 10 million weekly Business AI chats, xAI’s cheaper Grok 4.3 API, and Otter’s move into MCP-led enterprise search.