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AI News Briefing — Tuesday, May 26, 2026 at 6:00 AM

🤖 AI News AM5/26/2026🕐 6:00 AM⏱ 7:16AudioMorning

Top stories, ranked by relevance.

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

Anthropic is expected to close its $30 billion mega-round as soon as this week, co-led by Sequoia, Dragoneer, Greenoaks, and Altimeter at a pre-money valuation exceeding $900 billion. If the deal lands at the upper end, Anthropic leapfrogs OpenAI's $852 billion March valuation to become the world's most valuable AI startup.

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#2Anthropic Projects $10.9B Q2 Revenue and First-Ever Operating Profit

Anthropic told investors it expects roughly $10.9 billion in second-quarter revenue — more than double Q1's $4.8 billion — and approximately $559 million in operating profit, its first ever. The primary growth driver is enterprise adoption of Claude Code; the company cautioned profitability may not hold for the full year due to planned compute spending.

#3OpenAI Confidentially Files S-1 for IPO, Targeting Q4 Listing

OpenAI filed its confidential S-1 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 filing reveals $13.1 billion in 2025 revenue against roughly $22 billion in total spending — a $9 billion net loss.

#4Pope Leo XIV Releases First Encyclical on AI, Co-Presented with Anthropic's Chris Olah

The Vatican released "Magnifica Humanitas" on May 25, a 42,300-word encyclical focused on protecting human dignity in the age of AI. Anthropic co-founder Christopher Olah was invited to speak at the presentation. Signed 135 years to the day after Leo XIII's Rerum Novarum on workers' rights, the document urges governments and corporations to slow deployment and ensure ethical oversight.

#5Andrej Karpathy Joins Anthropic to Lead New Pretraining Research

OpenAI co-founder and former Tesla Autopilot lead Andrej Karpathy announced he has joined Anthropic, working on pretraining under team lead Nick Joseph. He will also launch a new team focused on using Claude itself to accelerate pretraining research. A major talent coup for Anthropic in the AI lab arms race.

#6Trump Cancels AI Safety Executive Order After Musk and Zuckerberg Lobbying

The White House withdrew a planned AI executive order that would have established voluntary pre-release safety reviews for advanced models, after direct calls from Elon Musk, Mark Zuckerberg, and David Sacks. The "accelerationist" argument — that regulation would cede AI dominance to China — carried the day. Notably, OpenAI had supported the order.

#9Google Overhauls Search with AI Agents and Generative UI

Announced at I/O 2026, Google's biggest search redesign in 25 years features an intelligent search box powered by Gemini 3.5 Flash, background "Information Agents" that monitor the web 24/7 on your behalf, and dynamic generative UI that builds custom dashboards and visualizations per query. AI Mode has surpassed one billion monthly users.