Signals

Anthropic stormed Wall Street with a $1.5 billion joint venture and ten ready-made financial agents, while the Pentagon signed AI deals with eight tech giants and pointedly left Anthropic off the list. The week crystallised a strange new reality: one company can simultaneously be the most wanted partner on Wall Street and the most unwanted in Washington.

OpenAI broke free from Microsoft's cloud and dropped GPT-5.5 in the same week, while Google and Amazon raced to write the biggest cheques Anthropic has ever seen. The walls between the AI giants are coming down — what's left is a fight over distribution.

Google bet the enterprise on agents while DeepSeek dropped a new open-source flagship on the same morning. Meanwhile, the capital flowing into frontier AI reached numbers that make last year's mega-rounds look modest.

AI cybersecurity became a philosophical arms race between OpenAI and Anthropic. Artemis II brought astronauts home from the moon.