Tech

An AI that finds security flaws faster than every human hacker on Earth combined. An AI that’s already found thousands of them — in your operating system, your browser, your bank’s software. That’s not a thought experiment. That’s Claude Mythos, and it’s forcing everyone from Fortune 500 CEOs to the Trump White House to completely rethink AI. Thousands of Zero-Days, One Model Claude Mythos Preview is Anthropic’s latest frontier model. It wasn’t built for cybersecurity — it’s general-purpose. But during internal testing, Anthropic discovered something startling: Mythos finds and exploits software vulnerabilities better than virtually any human alive. ...

Something deeply uncomfortable is unfolding at Meta right now, and it goes far beyond another round of Silicon Valley layoffs. The company is simultaneously tracking employee keystrokes to train AI models, forcing AI tool adoption into performance reviews, and preparing to cut 8,000 workers by May 20th. Employees are sharing nihilistic memes, building countdown websites to their own layoffs, and openly asking to be fired so they can collect severance. ...

The same Nvidia server rack costs $550,000 in the United States and nearly $1 million in China. That price gap tells you everything about where the AI industry stands in May 2026. Chinese tech companies are paying almost double for Nvidia’s B300 servers — when they can get them at all. The cause: a collision of exploding AI demand, tightening U.S. export controls, and a smuggling crackdown that just blew the doors off one of tech’s worst-kept secrets. ...

Something is breaking in America’s electrical system, and AI is holding the hammer. This week, North America’s grid reliability watchdog NERC prepared to issue only its third-ever Level 3 alert — the highest severity — because AI data centers are threatening power grid stability. Microsoft is reportedly reconsidering its ambitious 2030 clean energy pledge. And the operator of America’s largest electrical grid published a paper saying the entire energy market needs to be redesigned. ...

The company that sells every shovel in the AI gold rush just started renting shovels from someone else. And it’s paying $5.5 billion for the privilege. On May 7, Nvidia and IREN Limited announced a partnership combining a $3.4 billion cloud services contract with a $2.1 billion equity option — deploying up to 5 gigawatts of AI infrastructure using Nvidia’s DSX architecture. That’s enough power for 3.75 million homes, dedicated entirely to AI computation. ...

Remember when OpenAI was the scrappy nonprofit promising to build AI for the benefit of humanity? Humanity now comes with a $3-to-$5 cost-per-click price tag. On May 5, OpenAI opened its self-serve Ads Manager to all US advertisers. No more $50,000 minimums. No more hand-picked brand partners. Any business can now sign up, upload creative, set budgets, and start running CPC campaigns inside ChatGPT conversations. Three months from closed pilot to open platform. That’s not cautious experimentation — that’s a land grab. ...

Remember when the Trump administration called AI a “beautiful baby” that shouldn’t be restrained by “foolish rules”? That was July 2025. Ten months later, the same White House is drawing up plans to vet AI models before they reach the public. The policy whiplash is real. And it has a name: Mythos. One Model Changed the Entire Conversation Anthropic introduced Mythos Preview in April 2026 — then refused to release it publicly. The model demonstrated an unprecedented ability to discover high-severity security vulnerabilities across every major operating system and web browser, outperforming all but the most elite human hackers. ...

There’s a moment in every tech shift where an announcement lands and you think: oh, so that’s where this is all going. Amazon Web Services just launched Bedrock AgentCore Payments — infrastructure built with Coinbase and Stripe that lets AI agents autonomously spend money. Real money. USDC stablecoins. In real time. No human approval required. Your AI agent discovers a paid API, negotiates payment via the x402 protocol, executes a stablecoin transaction, and keeps working — all inside a single reasoning loop. No credit card form. No invoice. Bots paying bots, fractions of a cent at a time. ...

You use AI every day. It writes your emails, summarizes your documents, drafts your presentations. It’s faster and frankly better at first drafts than most of us. But here’s the question scientists are now asking with real urgency: what happens to the brain you’re no longer using? A wave of studies from Georgetown, MIT, UPenn, Carnegie Mellon, and Microsoft Research is converging on a troubling answer. Heavy AI users score worse on critical thinking tests. They’re less creative. They remember less. And most don’t even realize it’s happening. ...

Every major US AI lab is now under government pre-release review. Let that land for a second. Google DeepMind, Microsoft, and xAI just signed agreements to submit their unreleased AI models for security evaluation through NIST’s Center for AI Standards and Innovation (CAISI) — joining OpenAI and Anthropic, who were already on board. All five frontier labs. Government eyes on the code before it hits your screen. Six months ago, the Trump administration was actively dismantling AI safety guardrails. So what changed? ...