I think Anthropic and OpenAI have found product-market fit★ 76
Simon Willison's Weblog62 days agoCommentarySimon Willison says Claude Code/Cowork and OpenAI Codex have changed the economics of frontier AI. Personal subscriptions can still be bargains for heavy users, but enterprise plans are increasingly priced like API token usage. His core claim is that coding agents burn far more tokens, yet deliver enough value to high-paid knowledge workers that companies will pay materially more.
AI tried to bury this politician — now people have actually heard of him★ 72
The Verge AI62 days agoRegulationThe Verge frames New York’s 12th District Democratic primary as a proxy fight over AI regulation. OpenAI-linked backers and an Anthropic-backed PAC are spending on opposite sides of Alex Bores’ congressional run. The irony is that attacks meant to weaken Bores may have made him more visible, turning a local race into a national signal about AI political power.
OpenRouter more than doubles valuation to $1.3B in a year
TechCrunch AI62 days agoBusinessOpenRouter, an AI gateway startup founded in 2023, raised a $113 million Series B led by CapitalG. The round reportedly values the company at about $1.3 billion post-money, more than doubling from its estimated $547 million valuation after its June 2025 Series A. The company says it now offers access to over 400 models, has 8 million global users, and processes 100 trillion tokens per month.
Some ideas for what comes next, May 2026
Interconnects (Nathan L.)63 days agoCommentaryNathan Lambert argues that 2026 AI progress is becoming higher-stakes, with model capabilities, work patterns, economics, and real-world risks all escalating. He says open models still lack a true Claude Code and Opus 4.5-style agent moment, and Gemini has no clear competitor to Claude Code or Codex yet. The essay also tracks Mythos, American open-model momentum, frontier-lab competition, and mounting intervention from governments and other power structures.
Import AI 458: Reckoning with the future; and a singularity story★ 74
Import AI (Jack Clark)63 days agoCommentaryThis Import AI issue is a long essay and fiction piece about living through rapid AI progress. Clark uses personal experience and Anthropic’s internal use of Claude to show work shifting toward delegation, verification, observability, and agent management. He then offers speculative 2026-2028 predictions around biology, autonomous companies, robotics, recursive self-improvement, and a positive singularity story focused on healthcare.
Anthropic Co-founder Speaks at Vatican on Pope Leo XIV’s AI Encyclical
INSIDE 硬塞 AI63 days agoEthicsPope Leo XIV released Magnifica Humanitas, the Vatican’s first top-level document focused on AI. The encyclical centers on human dignity and calls on the AI industry to take ethics seriously and accept external oversight. Anthropic’s co-founder speaking at the Vatican highlights how AI governance is becoming a broader public, moral, and institutional issue beyond company self-regulation.
Uber president says AI spending is getting ‘harder to justify’
The Verge AI63 days agoBusinessUber reportedly exhausted its annual AI budget just four months into 2026. President and COO Andrew Macdonald said the company is not seeing a clear link between increased Claude Code token consumption and more meaningful output. The story highlights a broader enterprise shift from AI adoption enthusiasm toward stricter scrutiny of cost, productivity, and ROI.
Corey Quinn on Anthropic's Influence on the Pope's AI Ethics Encyclical
Simon Willison's Weblog63 days agoCommentaryCloud commentator Corey Quinn reacted to Anthropic co-founder Christopher Olah's influence on the Pope's new AI ethics encyclical, 'Magnifica Humanitas'. Quinn joked that getting the Pope to canonize a product's technical limitations as a spiritual treatise is the ultimate lobbying feat. The commentary highlights the surreal intersection of AI safety advocacy, corporate branding, and global religious authority.
Launch HN: Runtime (YC P26) – Sandboxed coding agents for every team
Hacker News (AI keywords)68 days agoNew ToolRuntime is a YC P26 launch focused on making coding agents usable across an organization, not only by engineers. It provides sandboxed environments with company context, integrations, secrets, policies, observability, and cost controls. The product page says it works with tools including Claude Code, Cursor, Codex, Copilot, Gemini CLI, Devin, and OpenCode, while fitting into Slack, Linear, GitHub, and related workflows.