The Trump administration might take an equity stake in OpenAI

President Donald Trump said on Friday that he’s spoken to AI companies about striking deals “where the American people can benefit from the success of AI.”

The token bill comes due: Inside the industry scramble to manage AI’s runaway costs

Across the industry, companies are starting to balk at the price of AI. Uber blew through its entire 2026 AI coding budget by April. Microsoft revoked its developers’ Claude Code licenses months after enabling them. A Priceline employee told TechCrunch that a routine Cursor contract renewal came back 4-5x more expensive.

Mira Murati steps back into the spotlight, carefully

Mira Murati isn’t a natural creature of the conference stage. As the CTO of OpenAI, she was present but rarely the public face of the company. As CEO of her own company, Thinking Machines Lab, she has been even harder to find. So when she sat down with Bloomberg in San Francisco on Thursday — her first major media appearance in roughly 18 months — it was worth paying attention, even if she was careful not to say too much.

Ahead of its IPO, Anthropic’s Daniela Amodei shrugs off doubts about AI’s returns

Private investors have been falling over themselves to get a piece of Anthropic, given the AI model maker is growing at a dizzying pace. Multiple investors told TechCrunch that the company’s $65 billion fundraise at a $965 billion valuation, announced last week, was greatly oversubscribed. Now, with that private demand still strong, Anthropic has revealed that it’s taking steps toward a public listing by filing confidentially for an IPO.

Apple approves Poke as the first AI agent on its Messages for Business platform

Poke, a startup that turns using AI agents into something as simple as sending a text message, has become the first AI agent approved to run on Apple’s Messages for Business platform. Previously, the platform was designed for businesses — airlines, retailers, hotel chains, and others — to communicate with their own customers through iMessage, offering a standardized interface that supports both automated chat and live agents. Until now, it hadn’t been open to standalone third-party AI agents.

Microsoft launches Scout, an OpenClaw-inspired personal assistant

In the first weeks of 2026, OpenClaw spread through the AI world like a sonic boom, introducing many of the industry’s most ambitious technologists to the joy and chaos of an unrestrained AI agent. The project’s momentum tailed off after OpenAI scooped up its founder, but the influence is still being felt — particularly at Microsoft.

OpenAI launches new Codex tools for white-collar work

OpenAI is getting serious about courting enterprise users. On Tuesday, the AI lab released a new set of capabilities for Codex, meant to expand the agentic tool’s uses in the workplace.

Nvidia chases $200B CPU market with AI agent PCs from Microsoft, Dell, and HP

Nvidia opened Taipei’s enormous Computex trade show on Sunday with a spark, literally. The chipmaker unveiled a new PC CPU called the RTX Spark, which it dubbed a “superchip,” and named a who’s who list of PC makers that will soon deliver AI PCs powered by it.

Anthropic files to go public

Anthropic, the AI lab behind Claude, has filed confidentially for an initial public offering, the company said in a blog post Monday.

I put Google’s 24/7 AI assistant Gemini Spark to work, and it’s actually pretty useful

Gemini Spark is Google’s new 24/7 agentic assistant, designed to help you help you “navigate your digital life,” which essentially means getting your online to-dos done, summarizing the things you don’t have time to read (like the entirety of your inbox), or organizing something that would have otherwise involved too much screen time-filled manual labor, like a personal expenses spreadsheet.