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🧠 AI News PM

AI News Afternoon Briefing — Monday, May 25, 2026 at 3:00 PM

🧠 AI News PM5/25/2026🕐 3:00 PM⏱ 6:51AudioPM edition

Top stories, ranked by relevance.

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#1Anthropic Set to Close $30B Round at $900B+ Valuation, Surpassing OpenAI

Anthropic is expected to close its latest funding round as soon as this week, raising over $30 billion at a pre-money valuation above $900 billion — surpassing OpenAI's $852 billion March valuation to become the world's most valuable AI startup. Sequoia Capital, Dragoneer, Greenoaks, and Altimeter are co-leading the round, with Founders Fund and General Catalyst among returning investors. Anthropic's annualized revenue reportedly jumped from $14 billion in February to $30 billion in April, with the company projecting $10.9 billion in Q2 revenue and its first-ever quarterly operating profit.

🔗 Bloomberg
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#2Pope Leo XIV Releases First Encyclical on AI, Presented with Anthropic's Chris Olah

Pope Leo XIV today published Magnifica Humanitas, a 235-page encyclical on safeguarding human dignity in the age of artificial intelligence — the first papal document devoted to AI. In a break with tradition, the pope personally presented the text at the Vatican alongside Anthropic co-founder Chris Olah, arguing that AI built and governed by a small elite cannot serve the common good. The document was signed 135 years to the day after Leo XIII's Rerum Novarum on workers' rights.

🔗 Vatican News

#3Andrej Karpathy Joins Anthropic to Lead Pre-training Research

OpenAI co-founder and former Tesla Autopilot lead Andrej Karpathy announced he has joined Anthropic, where he will work under pre-training lead Nick Joseph and build a team focused on using Claude to accelerate pre-training research. The hire is a significant talent coup for Anthropic in the intensifying competition for elite AI researchers. Karpathy left his education startup Eureka Labs to return to frontier model work.

🔗 TechCrunch

#4OpenAI Files Confidential S-1 for IPO, Targeting $1T+ Valuation

OpenAI confidentially filed its S-1 IPO prospectus with the SEC on May 22, targeting a Q4 2026 public listing at a valuation between $852 billion and $1 trillion. Goldman Sachs and Morgan Stanley are leading the deal, with a public S-1 and roadshow expected by late summer. This marks a pivotal moment for a company that began as a nonprofit just over a decade ago.

🔗 Axios

#5Google Rolls Out Gemini 3.5 Flash and AI Agents in Search Globally

Following Google I/O 2026, Gemini 3.5 Flash is now the default model in AI Mode for Search worldwide, delivering four times the output speed of competing frontier models. Google is also placing persistent AI agents directly inside Search — capable of completing purchases, tracking objectives, and building personalized dashboards — marking a fundamental shift from query-and-result to agent-driven search.

🔗 Google Blog

#6Pentagon Testing OpenAI, Google, and xAI Models to Replace Anthropic Claude

The Department of Defense is actively evaluating models from OpenAI, Google, and xAI as it moves to phase out Anthropic's Claude from military workflows within six months. The split stems from Anthropic's refusal to remove safety guardrails that prevent mass surveillance and lethal autonomous weaponry use, after Defense Secretary Hegseth declared the company a supply-chain risk in March. Anthropic is challenging the designation in court.

🔗 Bloomberg
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#7Anthropic Inks $1.25B/Month Compute Deal with SpaceX

Anthropic is paying SpaceX $1.25 billion per month through May 2029 — nearly $45 billion total — for access to over 220,000 NVIDIA GPUs at the Colossus 1 data center in Memphis, with expansion to Colossus 2. The deal, revealed in SpaceX's S-1 filing, also includes the two companies exploring orbital AI compute capacity powered by solar panels and cooled by vacuum.

🔗 TechCrunch

#8Anthropic Acquires Stainless for $300M+, Winds Down Hosted SDK Tools

Anthropic acquired Stainless, the startup whose SDK-generation tools powered official APIs for OpenAI, Google, and Cloudflare, for over $300 million. The company will shut down all hosted Stainless products, effectively removing a key infrastructure tool from its competitors' hands. Existing customers retain full ownership and modification rights to SDKs already generated.

🔗 TechCrunch

#9Meta Cuts 8,000 Jobs, Redirects 7,000 to AI Teams

Meta began laying off approximately 8,000 employees — about 10% of its workforce — as part of a sweeping AI restructuring. Simultaneously, 7,000 workers are being redirected into newly created AI-focused teams including Applied AI Engineering and Agent Transformation Accelerator. Additional cuts are planned for H2 2026, while the company's projected capex of $125-145 billion is more than double its 2025 spending.

🔗 NPR

#10NextEra's $67B Dominion Acquisition Creates World's Largest Utility for AI Power

NextEra Energy announced an all-stock deal to acquire Dominion Energy for $66.8 billion, creating the world's largest regulated electric utility by market cap — driven explicitly by AI data center power demand. The combined company will serve roughly 10 million customer accounts and holds a 130-gigawatt construction backlog, exceeding their existing generation capacity.

🔗 Bloomberg
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Kilroy’s Daily Briefings · 5/25/2026