The week AI's platform alliances got renegotiated in public

Sources

The next phase of the Microsoft OpenAI partnership openai.com

OpenAI and Microsoft announce an amended agreement that simplifies the partnership, adds long-term clarity, and supports continued AI innovation at scale.

OpenAI models, Codex, and Managed Agents come to AWS openai.com

OpenAI GPT models, Codex, and Managed Agents are now available on AWS, enabling enterprises to build secure AI in their AWS environments.

OpenAI ends its exclusive partnership with Microsoft arstechnica.com

Amended agreement clears the way for OpenAI models to run on Amazon Bedrock.

Tracking the history of the now-deceased OpenAI Microsoft AGI clause simonwillison.net

For many years, Microsoft and OpenAI’s relationship has included a weird clause saying that, should AGI be achieved, Microsoft’s commercial IP rights to OpenAI’s technology would be null and void. That clause appeared to end today. I decided to try and track its expression over time on openai.com . OpenAI, July 22nd 2019 in Microsoft invests in and partners with OpenAI to support us building beneficial AGI (emphasis mine): OpenAI is producing a sequence of increasingly powerful AI technologies,…

Claude for Creative Work anthropic.com

Elon Musk and Sam Altman are going to court over OpenAI’s future technologyreview.com

After a yearslong legal feud, Elon Musk and OpenAI CEO Sam Altman are heading to trial this week in Northern California in a case that could have sweeping consequences. Ahead of OpenAI’s highly anticipated IPO, the court could rule on whether the company is allowed to exist as a for-profit enterprise and might even oust…

Musk and Altman face off in trial that will determine OpenAI’s future arstechnica.com

Musk’s shifting stance on AI dangers may complicate trial over OpenAI’s mission.

Quoting Romain Huet simonwillison.net

OpenAI is collapsing its Codex coding model into the flagship line, with Romain Huet confirming there will be no separate GPT-5.5-Codex release. The unified GPT-5.5 instead claims stronger agentic coding and computer-use gains, ending the parallel coding-specialist track introduced under GPT-4.

(AINews) GPT 5.5 and OpenAI Codex Superapp latent.space

Spud lives!

China kills Meta’s acquisition of Manus as US-China AI rivalry deepens arstechnica.com

Chinese regulators blocked Meta’s planned acquisition of agent startup Manus, forcing the deal to unwind and underscoring how founders with mainland ties struggle to exit to U.S. buyers as Beijing tightens scrutiny over outbound AI talent and IP transfers.

(AINews) DeepSeek V4 Pro (1.6T-A49B) and Flash (284B-A13B), Base and Instruct — runnable on Huawei Ascend chips latent.space

DeepSeek released V4 in two MoE sizes — a 1.6T-parameter Pro with 49B active and a 284B Flash with 13B active — both shipping base and instruct checkpoints and tuned to run on Huawei Ascend silicon, though no longer topping benchmark leaderboards.

EU tells Google to open up AI on Android; Google says that’s “unwarranted intervention” arstechnica.com

The European Commission is pressing Google to let rival AI assistants reach parity with Gemini on Android under the Digital Markets Act. Google called the preliminary findings an ‘unwarranted intervention’ and is contesting the proposed remedies.

(AINews) ImageGen is on the Path to AGI latent.space

Latent Space’s newsletter argues image generation has become an AGI bellwether, citing the ongoing GPT-Image-2 surge as evidence that multimodal world-modeling — not text reasoning alone — is now driving frontier capability gains.

Speech translation in Google Meet is now rolling out to mobile devices simonwillison.net

Google Meet’s real-time speech translation, which mimics the speaker’s voice in the listener’s language with a short delay, is reaching mobile after a web rollout. It currently supports English, Spanish, French, German, Portuguese, and Italian, and Simon Willison reports mixed results across devices.

OpenAI available at FedRAMP Moderate openai.com

ChatGPT Enterprise and the OpenAI API received FedRAMP Moderate authorization, clearing both products for handling controlled unclassified information inside U.S. federal agencies and putting OpenAI on closer compliance footing with Microsoft and Google’s government cloud offerings.

Announcing our partnership with the Republic of Korea deepmind.google

Google DeepMind and Korea partner to accelerate scientific breakthroughs using frontier AI models

Anthropic and NEC collaborate to build Japan’s largest AI engineering workforce anthropic.com

Join the new AI Agents Vibe Coding Course from Google and Kaggle blog.google

A web next to a laptop

Our commitment to community safety openai.com

Learn how OpenAI protects community safety in ChatGPT through model safeguards, misuse detection, policy enforcement, and collaboration with safety experts.

An update on our election safeguards anthropic.com

Our principles openai.com

Our mission is to ensure that AGI benefits all of humanity. Sam Altman shares five principles that guide our work.

Anthropic names Theo Hourmouzis General Manager of Australia & New Zealand and officially opens Sydney office anthropic.com

Choco automates food distribution with AI agents openai.com

How Choco used OpenAI APIs to streamline food distribution, boost productivity, and unlock growth—an in-depth customer story on real-world AI impact.

Partnering with industry leaders to accelerate AI transformation deepmind.google

Google DeepMind partners with global consultancies to bring the power of frontier AI to organizations around the world.

The missing step between hype and profit technologyreview.com

This story originally appeared in The Algorithm, our weekly newsletter on AI. To get stories like this in your inbox first, sign up here. In February, I picked up a flyer at an anti-AI march in London. I can’t say for sure whether or not its writers meant to riff on South Park’s underpants gnomes. But…

AIE Europe Debrief + Agent Labs Thesis: Unsupervised Learning x Latent Space Crossover Special (2026) latent.space

Note: This episode was recorded just after AIE Europe, but before the Cursor-xAI deal.

Rebuilding the data stack for AI technologyreview.com

Artificial intelligence may be dominating boardroom agendas, but many enterprises are discovering that the biggest obstacle to meaningful adoption is the state of their data. While consumer-facing AI tools have dazzled users with speed and ease, enterprise leaders are discovering that deploying AI at scale requires something far less glamorous but far more consequential: data…

(AINews) Tasteful Tokenmaxxing latent.space

a quiet day lets us reflect on the top conversation that AI leaders are having everywhere.

References

Simon Willison’s blog simonwillison.net

the new agreement describes revenue payments as ‘independent of OpenAI’s technology progress,’ effectively killing the AGI milestone as a legal trigger

TD Cowen analyst note via Investing.com investing.com

TD Cowen analysts estimate this shift will save Microsoft approximately $700 million in fiscal year 2026, potentially rising to over $5 billion by 2030

TipRanks (analyst roundup) tipranks.com

OpenAI commitments still drive roughly 45% of Microsoft’s AI backlog, posing a concentrated ‘major risk’ if the relationship continues to loosen

AWS Bedrock OpenAI page aws.amazon.com

GPT-5.5: $5.00 per 1M input tokens / $30.00 per 1M output tokens… pricing aligns with OpenAI’s direct API rates, allowing customers to apply usage costs toward their existing AWS cloud commitments

Hacker News discussion news.ycombinator.com

Developers expressed skepticism about whether GPT-5.4 or 5.5 on Bedrock would perform identically to the versions on OpenAI’s native platform or Azure… differences in quantization, custom inference silicon (like AWS’s Trainium), and batching strategies might lead to subtle degradations

FinancialContent — FTC AI Interoperability ruling financialcontent.com

the U.S. Federal Trade Commission (FTC) took more aggressive action on April 8, 2026, by mandating ‘AI Interoperability’… requires large-cap providers like Microsoft and Google to allow enterprise customers to move fine-tuned models and prompts across competing clouds without financial penalties

MLQ.ai on Sutskever deposition mlq.ai

Sutskever utilized ‘disappearing email’ services to coordinate with independent board members… and a previously undisclosed plan to merge OpenAI with its primary rival, Anthropic, immediately following Altman’s firing, with Helen Toner advocating that destroying the company could be ‘consistent with the mission.’

Finimize finimize.com

Coinciding with the start of the trial, Microsoft and OpenAI announced a ‘major amendment’ on April 27, 2026… ending Microsoft’s exclusive cloud partnership and allowing OpenAI to serve its models on AWS and Google Cloud — widely viewed as a strategic defense against Musk’s claim that OpenAI is a ‘captured’ subsidiary.

Business Insider businessinsider.com

OpenAI’s lead counsel William Savitt presented internal 2017 emails suggesting Musk himself had demanded majority control and 55% equity in a proposed for-profit subsidiary, framing the lawsuit as ‘sour grapes’ from a founder who failed to take over the company.

GeekWire courtroom dispatch geekwire.com

Judge Gonzalez Rogers allowed Musk’s damages expert to testify but noted she was ‘not particularly impressed’ by his $134 billion disgorgement calculation; the nine-person jury serves only an advisory role, with the judge retaining ultimate authority on liability and remedies.

Duke Law / Daily Journal analysis law.duke.edu

Under California and Delaware charitable trust law, the authority to enforce a nonprofit’s purpose typically rests with the state Attorney General, not individual donors — and the AGs, having already settled with OpenAI in October 2025, declined to bring this case, leaving Musk to pursue a novel legal path as a private donor.

MLQ.ai on dismissed fraud claims mlq.ai

Musk strategically dropped his fraud charges ahead of trial to streamline proceedings into equitable claims of breach of charitable trust and unjust enrichment — a bifurcated structure where the judge, not jury, fashions remedies.

Blender Foundation (official notice) blender.org

We have received a lot of feedback regarding this announcement and are actively evaluating the situation.

Mastodon — Amos Mulder (artist) mastodon.social

a middle finger to creatives… legitimizing a technology that threatens their livelihoods

80.lv — interview with Blender CEO Francesco Siddi 80.lv

in this case, it looks like there was not enough consideration… participation does not imply alignment

CGChannel cgchannel.com

Anthropic joins the Blender Development Fund as a Corporate Patron with a €240,000 annual contribution

SnapEDA benchmark blog blog.snapeda.com

Claude Opus 4.6 outperformed competitors like Gemini 3 in extracting mechanical dimensions, though it still produced occasional errors

TheFirewall blog thefirewall-blog.com

Anthropic drew criticism for using DMCA takedowns to protect its own AI-assisted code while simultaneously arguing that ingesting human artists’ work for training constitutes fair use