AI News PM — 5/26/2026

Top stories, ranked by relevance.

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#1Anthropic Set to Close $30B+ Round This Week, Valuation Tops $900B

Anthropic is expected to close its massive $30 billion-plus funding round as early as this week, at a pre-money valuation above $900 billion — which would make it the most valuable private AI startup in the world, surpassing OpenAI's $852 billion valuation from March. Sequoia, Dragoneer, Greenoaks, and Altimeter are co-leading, each putting in roughly $2 billion. The company's annualized revenue run rate is reportedly on pace to exceed $50 billion by the end of June.

🔗 Bloomberg

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#2OpenAI Files Confidential S-1 With SEC, Eyes Q4 IPO

OpenAI confidentially filed its S-1 IPO prospectus with the SEC on Friday, May 22, targeting a public listing between September and November 2026 at a valuation between $852 billion and $1 trillion. Goldman Sachs and Morgan Stanley are leading the deal. The filing comes despite OpenAI reportedly losing $1.22 for every dollar of revenue in Q1 2026.

🔗 Investing.com

#3Andrej Karpathy Joins Anthropic to Rebuild Pre-Training Research

OpenAI co-founder and former Tesla Autopilot lead Andrej Karpathy has joined Anthropic, starting this week under pre-training lead Nick Joseph. He will build a new team focused on using Claude itself to accelerate pre-training research — a signal that Anthropic believes AI-assisted research, not just raw compute, is the path to staying competitive. This is arguably the biggest talent move in AI this year.

🔗 TechCrunch

#4Google I/O 2026: Gemini 3.5 Flash, Omni World Model, and Spark Agent Debut

Google dropped three new Gemini models at I/O last week. Gemini 3.5 Flash is now generally available, outperforming Gemini 3.1 Pro on coding and agentic benchmarks at 4x the speed. Gemini Omni is a new "world model" that generates editable video grounded in real-world knowledge. Gemini Spark is a new agentic assistant that reasons across connected Google apps. AI Mode in Search has surpassed 1 billion monthly users.

🔗 Google Blog

#5OpenAI Codex Can Now Control Your Mac While Locked

OpenAI announced that Codex can now operate Mac applications even when the screen is locked, via an Apple authorization plug-in with temporal and behavioral safeguards. Users can start multi-hour tasks, walk away, and manage Codex from their phones — a major leap from AI assistant to autonomous background agent. Safety features include short-lived authorization, auto-relock on local input, and explicit app allow-listing.

🔗 MacRumors

#6Pope Leo XIV Devotes First Encyclical to AI

Pope Leo XIV released "Magnifica Humanitas" on May 25, the first papal encyclical centered entirely on artificial intelligence. The document applies Catholic social principles — subsidiarity, solidarity, the common good — to AI governance, and particularly condemns autonomous weapons systems. Published on the 135th anniversary of Rerum Novarum, it warns that the deepest danger of AI is not job loss but humanity beginning to see itself as "a problem to be corrected."

🔗 Vatican News

#7Micron Surges 14% as UBS Triples Price Target on AI Memory Demand

Micron Technology shares surged roughly 14% today after UBS analyst Timothy Arcuri tripled his price target from $535 to a Street-high $1,625, citing long-term AI supply agreements and HBM4 sold out through year-end. The stock crossed $800 for the first time, pushing Micron toward a $1 trillion market cap — a staggering turnaround for what was historically a cyclical memory chipmaker.

🔗 Yahoo Finance

#8NextEra-Dominion $67B Utility Mega-Merger Driven by AI Data Centers

NextEra Energy announced an all-stock deal to acquire Dominion Energy for nearly $67 billion — the largest utility merger in U.S. history. The strategic rationale is almost entirely about AI: Dominion powers Northern Virginia's data center corridor, the world's largest. NextEra shareholders will own 74.5% of the combined entity; the deal represents a 23% premium on Dominion's market cap.

🔗 Fortune

#9AMD Begins Production of 6th Gen EPYC "Venice" on TSMC 2nm

AMD announced it has started the production ramp of its 6th Gen EPYC processors, codenamed "Venice," on TSMC's 2nm process — the first high-performance computing product to reach this milestone. The chips are designed for next-gen AI infrastructure and agentic workloads. AMD also previewed "Verano," a follow-on optimized for performance-per-dollar-per-watt, with plans to bring 2nm production to TSMC's Arizona fab.

🔗 AMD Newsroom

#10NIST Secures Pre-Release AI Model Testing From Google, Microsoft, and xAI

The National Institute of Standards and Technology announced that Google, Microsoft, and xAI have agreed to share unreleased AI models with the government for security evaluation before public launch — joining OpenAI and Anthropic, which signed similar agreements in 2024. The move was reportedly catalyzed by cybersecurity concerns around Anthropic's Mythos reasoning model. The center has already completed over 40 AI model evaluations.

🔗 CNN