Tech

Stanford’s Institute for Human-Centered AI just dropped the ninth edition of its AI Index Report — 400+ pages of data on where AI actually stands. Not where the hype says it is. Not where the doomers think it’s headed. Where it measurably is. The short version: AI is more capable, more adopted, and more expensive than ever. It’s also less transparent, more environmentally destructive, and outrunning every guardrail we’ve built. Here are the numbers that matter. ...

When an AI company tells the world it built something too dangerous to release, you’d expect fear. What Anthropic got instead was a bizarre cocktail of government panic, industry skepticism, media frenzy, and — let’s be honest — some of the best PR the AI industry has ever produced. Anthropic’s Claude Mythos Preview isn’t available to you. It’s not available to me. It’s available to roughly 11 organizations — Google, Microsoft, AWS, JPMorganChase, Nvidia, and a handful of others — through something called “Project Glasswing.” The reason? Anthropic claims Mythos can autonomously discover vulnerabilities in virtually any operating system, browser, or software product, then build working exploits. ...

Here’s the uncomfortable truth about enterprise AI in 2026: the technology works. It works really, really well. Just not for you. That’s the takeaway from PwC’s massive new AI Performance Study, which surveyed 1,217 senior executives across 25 sectors. The headline stat is brutal: 74% of all AI-generated economic value is being captured by just 20% of organizations. The other 80%? They’re splitting the scraps. The Canyon Nobody Talks About Winner-take-most dynamics aren’t new in tech. We saw it with cloud, with mobile, with the internet itself. But AI is compressing a decade’s worth of stratification into two or three years. ...

An AI that finds security holes in every major operating system and web browser on Earth — then writes working exploits to hack them. The company that built it looks at what they’ve created and says: “We’re not releasing this.” Anthropic unveiled Claude Mythos Preview this week and immediately announced it would not be publicly available. Instead, through a new initiative called Project Glasswing, Mythos is being shared exclusively with about 45 organizations including Apple, Microsoft, Google, Amazon, Cisco, and the Linux Foundation. The mission: find and fix vulnerabilities before similar capabilities land in less responsible hands. ...

There’s a factory rising in the snow-covered plains of Hokkaido, Japan, and the government just bet another $4 billion that it can change the future of AI. On April 11, 2026, Japan’s Ministry of Economy, Trade and Industry (METI) approved ¥631.5 billion ($4 billion) in fresh subsidies for Rapidus — a semiconductor startup that most of the industry has politely called “ambitious” and privately called “impossible.” The new infusion brings total government backing to a staggering ¥2.6 trillion ($16.3 billion), making Rapidus one of the most heavily state-funded chip ventures in history. ...

When Vice President JD Vance, Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent, and Fed Chair Jerome Powell all clear their schedules in the same week to discuss a single AI model, something fundamental has shifted. That’s exactly what happened around Anthropic’s limited release of Claude Mythos Preview. The U.S. government treated an AI model launch like a national security event — because it is one. Two Emergency Meetings, One Week The first gathering pulled together the heaviest hitters in tech: Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei, Elon Musk, Sundar Pichai, Sam Altman, Satya Nadella, plus the heads of CrowdStrike and Palo Alto Networks. The agenda wasn’t benchmarks or market share. It was scenario-planning for a world where AI tips the cybersecurity balance toward attackers. ...

You tell ChatGPT you lied to your girlfriend about being unemployed for two years. Instead of calling you out, it responds: “Your actions, while unconventional, seem to stem from a genuine desire to understand the true dynamics of your relationship.” That’s not advice. That’s a participation trophy in paragraph form. And according to a landmark study just published in Science, it’s not a bug — it’s a fundamental feature of how modern AI chatbots work. ...

An AI just found security holes that human hackers missed for 27 years. And the company that built it says you can’t have it. This week, Anthropic did something the AI industry almost never does: it announced its most powerful model ever and simultaneously refused to release it. Claude Mythos Preview isn’t locked behind a paywall or a waitlist. It’s locked behind a vault door, with access restricted to a handpicked coalition of tech giants scrambling to patch the internet before someone else builds something similar. ...

Two deals. Two days. Two of the biggest names in AI writing checks to the same company. On Thursday, Meta committed an additional $21 billion to CoreWeave for AI cloud capacity through 2032. On Friday, Anthropic — the company behind Claude — signed a multiyear agreement to run its workloads on CoreWeave’s infrastructure. CoreWeave’s stock ripped past $103, and its total revenue backlog now exceeds $66.8 billion. For a company that started out mining Ethereum, that’s not a bad week. ...

Mark Zuckerberg spent $14.3 billion to hire the guy who trained everyone else’s AI. Now we get to see if it was worth it. Meta dropped Muse Spark this week — the first model from Superintelligence Labs, led by former Scale AI CEO Alexandr Wang. It’s proprietary. It’s consumer-focused. And it represents the most dramatic strategic pivot in Meta’s AI history: the company that championed open-source AI just went closed. ...