Google signed an amendment to its existing Department of Defense contract Monday allowing the Pentagon to use its AI for classified workloads under "any lawful government purpose" terms, The Information reported, hours after more than 600 Google and DeepMind employees urged chief executive Sundar Pichai to reject the agreement. The terms run more permissive than OpenAI's February Pentagon deal: where OpenAI retained "full discretion over our safety stack," Google's contract requires the company to assist in adjusting AI safety settings and filters at the government's request. The agreement includes language stating the AI "is not intended for, and should not be used for, domestic mass surveillance or autonomous weapons (including target selection) without appropriate human oversight," but adds that the deal "does not confer any right to control or veto lawful Government operational decision-making." Charlie Bullock, senior research fellow at the Institute for Law and AI, told The Information that the "is not intended for" framing is "not legally binding in any way." Google joins xAI and OpenAI in classified Pentagon AI deployments, leaving Anthropic as the only frontier lab outside DoD classified workloads after its February supply chain risk designation, which the company is currently challenging in federal court.
Read at The Information ↗
Anthropic's implied pre-IPO valuation crossed $1 trillion in on-chain private market trading on the Jupiter decentralized platform, the Economic Times reported. The pre-IPO instruments are backed by special purpose vehicle exposure to Anthropic shares, giving secondary buyers a live valuation read ahead of any public listing. Reported revenue rose from roughly $9 billion at the end of 2025 to over $30 billion by March, with Alphabet preparing an additional investment of up to $40 billion and Amazon committed to $25 billion plus a long-term cloud agreement. Anthropic's secondary trading at trillion-dollar levels arrives as Sen. Josh Hawley (R-Mo.) presses Republicans on AI industry lobbying.
Read at Economic Times ↗
British startup Ineffable Intelligence raised $1.1 billion in seed funding at a $5.1 billion valuation, SiliconANGLE reported. Lightspeed Venture Partners and Sequoia Capital led the round, joined by Nvidia, Google, the UK Sovereign AI Fund, DST Global and Index Ventures. Founder David Silver, formerly of Google DeepMind and lead developer of AlphaGo, plans to build what the company calls a "superlearner" using reinforcement learning techniques without conventional pre-training. UK Sovereign AI Fund participation puts a foreign government investor on the cap table of a U.S.-led frontier AI seed round, a structure CFIUS staff are tracking as outbound and inbound AI investment frameworks remain under interagency review.
Read at SiliconANGLE ↗
OpenAI fell short of its own user-acquisition and sales goals in recent months, raising concerns among company leaders about whether it can sustain its massive data-center spending, the Wall Street Journal reports. CFO Sarah Friar has told colleagues she is worried OpenAI may not be able to pay for future compute contracts if revenue growth lags, while the board has more closely scrutinized CEO Sam Altman's dealmaking spree, putting Friar at odds with Altman who has favored a more aggressive IPO timeline. OpenAI missed its goal of one billion weekly active ChatGPT users by year-end 2025, missed its annual ChatGPT revenue target as Google's Gemini gained share, and missed multiple monthly revenue targets earlier this year after losing ground to Anthropic in coding and enterprise. The company carries roughly $600 billion in future compute commitments against a recent $122 billion funding round it expects to burn through within three years assuming ambitious revenue targets are met. A material gap between revenue plans and compute commitments at the largest U.S. frontier lab is a data point for SEC and Treasury staff watching pre-IPO disclosures and the systemic exposure of cloud and chip suppliers.
Read at WSJ ↗
OpenAI missed its own user-acquisition and sales goals in recent months, fueling internal concern that the company may struggle to support its AI infrastructure spending, the Wall Street Journal reported, per Bloomberg. The miss arrives as OpenAI is restructuring its Microsoft partnership, preparing for a public offering, and committing tens of billions of dollars to compute capacity. Microsoft's revenue share from OpenAI continues at the same percentage but is now capped through 2030 under the revised partnership. A material gap between revenue plans and compute commitments at the largest U.S. frontier lab is a data point for SEC and Treasury staff watching pre-IPO disclosures and the systemic exposure of cloud and chip suppliers.
Read at Bloomberg ↗
Grassroots opposition to AI development has emerged across states from Indiana to Idaho, framing the conflict around Big Tech profits versus local costs in data centers, jobs and energy, the New York Times reported Monday. Rural communities are mobilizing against AI infrastructure siting, putting them at odds with the Trump administration's pro-AI infrastructure stance, the Financial Times separately reported. The opposition is intensifying in the same Idaho region where the Department of Energy opened its DOME microreactor test bed at Idaho National Laboratory earlier this month.
Read at NYT ↗ • Read at FT ↗