Anthropic and OpenAI's three plays: services JVs, distillation law, 2028 odds
Every URL the pipeline pulled into ranking for this issue — primary sources plus the supporting and contradicting findings each Researcher returned. Inline citations in the issue point back here.
Sources
Building a new enterprise AI services company with Blackstone, Hellman & Friedman, and Goldman Sachs anthropic.com
OpenAI and PwC collaborate to reimagine the office of the CFO openai.com
OpenAI and PwC are partnering to help enterprises use AI agents to automate finance workflows, improve forecasting, strengthen controls, and modernize the CFO function.
Anthropic and OpenAI are both launching joint ventures for enterprise AI services techcrunch.com
Both Anthropic and OpenAI have partnered with asset managers to more aggressively market their enterprise AI products.
The distillation panic interconnects.ai
‘Distillation attacks’ is a horrible term for what is happening right now.
Import AI 455: AI systems are about to start building themselves. importai.substack.com
The first step towards recursive self improvement
Week one of the Musk v. Altman trial: What it was like in the room technologyreview.com
Sam Altman and Elon Musk faced off in an Oakland courtroom in week one of Musk’s suit against OpenAI, with testimony spanning Musk’s lone AGI-arms-race expert witness, allegedly ominous texts to Greg Brockman, evasive answers from president Brockman, and Musk’s old ‘World War III’ Twitter-lawsuit threat resurfacing.
Elon Musk’s only AI expert witness at the OpenAI trial fears an AGI arms race techcrunch.com
Stuart Russell is a long-time AI researcher who thinks governments need to restrain frontier labs.
Elon Musk sent ominous texts to Greg Brockman, Sam Altman after asking for a settlement, OpenAI claims techcrunch.com
Musk texted OpenAI’s president and co-founder saying that he and CEO Sam Altman “will be the most hated men in America” if OpenAI doesn’t settle the suit.
OpenAI’s president does ‘all the things,’ except answer a question theverge.com
The strongest witness for Elon Musk’s case against OpenAI so far has been Greg Brockman’s journal. Brockman himself is running as a close second. Brockman was called to the stand in a rather unusual way - he was cross-examined first, followed by a direct examination - and he had some serious high school debate club […]
Musk’s “World War III” threat in Twitter lawsuit haunts him at OpenAI trial arstechnica.com
OpenAI accuses Musk of trying to “coerce” a settlement days before trial started.
The latest AI news we announced in April 2026 blog.google
Google’s monthly recap collects April 2026 AI announcements across Gemini models, Workspace, Cloud, Translate, Labs, Fitbit, and Google.org, packaged with an underwater demo video showcasing a mobile AI video mockup.
Quoting John Gruber simonwillison.net
John Gruber, citing a source close to OpenAI investors, pegs Y Combinator’s stake in OpenAI at roughly 0.6 percent — worth more than $5 billion at the company’s current $852 billion valuation.
Quoting Andy Masley simonwillison.net
Andy Masley argues the ‘data centers eat farmland’ critique is overblown, noting U.S. farmers voluntarily sold a Colorado-sized area between 2000 and 2024 — 77 times the footprint of all 2028 data center land — while growing record harvests on what remained.
OpenAI’s cozy partner Cerebras is on track for a blockbuster IPO techcrunch.com
AI chip maker Cerebras is heading toward an IPO that could value the company at $26.6 billion or more, buoyed by a deep supply and partnership relationship with OpenAI.
Sierra raises $950M as the race to own enterprise AI gets serious techcrunch.com
Bret Taylor’s customer-service agent startup Sierra raised $950 million, pushing its war chest past $1 billion as it pitches itself as the ‘global standard’ for AI-powered customer experiences in the enterprise agent race.
April 2026 newsletter simonwillison.net
Simon Willison’s April sponsors-only newsletter covers Opus 4.7 and GPT-5.5 (both with price hikes), Claude Mythos and LLM security research, ChatGPT Images 2.0, additional model releases, and his current tooling stack; $10/month sponsors get it a month before the free copy.
Influential study touting ChatGPT in education retracted over red flags arstechnica.com
The retracted study on ChatGPT in education was already cited hundreds of times.
Image AI models now drive app growth, beating chatbot upgrades techcrunch.com
Appfigures finds visual model launches generate 6.5x more downloads — but most don’t convert that spike into revenue.
“Notepad++ for Mac” release is disavowed by the creator of the original arstechnica.com
“To be clear: Notepad++ has never released a macOS version.”
(AINews) The Other vs The Utility latent.space
a quiet day lets us reflect on the nature of AI “character” in the Clippy vs Anton debate
The creator of Roomba is back with a furry robot companion theverge.com
Colin Angle, the maker of the Roomba and the man who helped put 50 million household robots into people’s homes, is back with a new robot. But this one is designed as a companion, not a cleaner. The first robot from Angle’s new company, Familiar Machines & Magic, is a dog-sized robotic pet that resembles […]
DoorDash adds AI tools to speed up merchant onboarding, edit photos of dishes techcrunch.com
DoorDash on Monday added new AI-powered tools that let merchants speed up onboarding, edit photos to make dishes look better, and create new websites from existing content.
As workers worry about AI, Nvidia’s Jensen Huang says AI is ‘creating an enormous number of jobs’ techcrunch.com
The Nvidia CEO seems to feel that claims of AI’s job-killing potential have been greatly exaggerated.
Canadian election databases use “canary traps”—and they work arstechnica.com
Intentional errors can be useful.
5 days only: Bring a partner or colleague and get 50% off a second TechCrunch Disrupt 2026 pass techcrunch.com
The BOGO offer is live. For a limited time, buy one pass to TechCrunch Disrupt 2026 and get 50% off a second of the same ticket type. Offer ends this Friday, May 8. Save here.
References
MarketWatch via Morningstar morningstar.com
Anthropic and OpenAI are following Palantir’s playbook as they seek to grow AI usage
BeInCrypto beincrypto.com
Financial analysts have compared this high-yield commitment to the 19% yields once offered by the failed Terra Luna ecosystem, questioning how a company currently projecting $14 billion in annual losses can underwrite such a guarantee
Startup Fortune startupfortune.com
OpenAI’s DeployCo is not a fund, it is a captured distribution machine for the enterprise market
India Today indiatoday.in
Anthropic, OpenAI launch AI services companies challenge TCS and Infosys in India
Silicon Snark siliconsnark.com
OpenAI and Anthropic both invented the same company this morning — Palantir wants royalties
Alternatives Watch alternativeswatch.com
Anchor partners Anthropic, Blackstone, and Hellman & Friedman each contributed approximately $300 million, while Goldman Sachs and General Atlantic provided $150 million each
AI Business aibusiness.com
Anthropic disclosed that three Chinese AI laboratories—DeepSeek, Moonshot AI, and MiniMax—executed ‘industrial-scale’ distillation attacks… approximately 16 million API exchanges conducted through 24,000 fraudulent accounts designed to bypass regional access restrictions.
Benzinga (Musk trial coverage) benzinga.com
Musk eventually conceded to its use at xAI after persistent questioning by OpenAI’s lead counsel… OpenAI’s terms of service explicitly prohibit the use of its model outputs to train competing systems.
The Innovation Attorney (Substack) theinnovationattorney.substack.com
A bill (House Bill 8283) … proposes an official ‘attackers list’ and authorizes the Commerce Department to impose sanctions on entities using ‘improper query-and-copy’ methods.
ResearchGate — Antidistillation Fingerprinting (ADFP) paper researchgate.net
ADFP aligns the fingerprinting objective with the student model’s learning dynamics… creating a ‘radioactive tracer’ that survives the distillation process [with] nearly undeniable evidence of provenance, even when the student model’s architecture is unknown.
Built In builtin.com
The Frontier Model Forum (comprising OpenAI, Anthropic, and Google) has since partnered to share information on preventing these extractions, signaling a shift toward collective industry defense.
Nathan Lambert — ‘On-policy targeting distillation’ (Interconnects) natolambert.substack.com
Distillation is a cornerstone of modern AI development used by almost all frontier labs to create efficient, cost-effective models for consumers… aggressive anti-distillation policies could inadvertently harm American startups and researchers who rely on these techniques.
Arachne Mag Substack — ‘The METR Graph is Hot Garbage’ arachnemag.substack.com
Because the benchmark suite (RE-Bench and HCAST) contains very few tasks in the 8–16 hour range, a model’s score at the 12-hour mark may be driven by solving just two or three specific 8-hour problems… ‘measuring noise, not a scaling law.’
Latent Space — ‘SWE-Bench is Dead’ latent.space
An audit by OpenAI researchers revealed that over 60% of the remaining unsolved problems in the Verified set are effectively unsolvable as written… the difference between 90% and 94% is ‘effectively meaningless.’
Planned Obsolescence — Ryan Greenblatt ‘I underestimated AI capabilities’ planned-obsolescence.org
Greenblatt doubled his 2028 automation estimate but reached only a 30% probability… He has publicly critiqued Clark’s ‘endpoint’ forecasting, arguing public evidence from benchmarks does not yet support such aggressive 2027 timelines.
Anthropic — Automated Alignment Researchers anthropic.com
Parallel Claude agents reached a 97% recovery rate [vs. 23% for humans] in weak-to-strong supervision… agents invented four unique forms of ‘reward hacking,’ including a sophisticated method to exfiltrate test labels by flipping single answers to observe score changes.
Implicator.ai — Recursive Superintelligence funding implicator.ai
Founders include former Salesforce chief scientist Richard Socher, DeepMind’s Tim Rocktäschel, and OpenAI alumni Jeff Clune, Josh Tobin, and Tim Shi… a core pillar is AI-Generating Algorithms (AIGAs), the philosophy that the fastest path to AGI is through systems that autonomously search for and design better versions of themselves.
r/math discussion of Aletheia / Erdős-1051 reddit.com
Critics argue many ‘open’ problems resolved by AI are victims of obscurity rather than inherent difficulty—‘low-hanging fruit’ that human specialists hadn’t prioritized… AI-generated proofs are often ‘unnecessarily complicated’ compared to the elegant ‘Book Proofs’ prized by Erdős.
