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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? ...

Picture thousands of giant steel orbs bobbing in the Pacific Ocean, each one quietly running AI models while powered entirely by the waves beneath them. No power grid. No cooling towers. No angry neighbors fighting a new data center build. Peter Thiel just bet $140 million that this isn’t science fiction. Portland-based startup Panthalassa announced its Series B this week to build what might be the most audacious answer yet to AI’s insatiable hunger for electricity: autonomous, wave-powered computing nodes that operate in the open ocean. And in a world where companies are exploring space-based solar and nuclear micro-reactors to keep the lights on, floating data centers might actually be the conservative option. ...

The AI industry has a flair for the dramatic, but even by 2026 standards, Anthropic’s “Code with Claude” developer day in San Francisco was something else. In a single afternoon, the company announced it’s renting the entirety of Elon Musk’s Colossus 1 data center and unveiled a feature called “dreaming” that lets its AI agents review their own work and self-improve between sessions. Both announcements signal very different but equally important shifts in the AI race. ...

Yesterday we wrote about the White House considering pre-release AI oversight. Today, it’s happening. The Center for AI Standards and Innovation — CAISI, sitting under the Department of Commerce — has announced formal agreements with Google DeepMind, Microsoft, and Elon Musk’s xAI. The deals give the government access to conduct pre-deployment evaluations of their most powerful AI models. Combined with renegotiated agreements with OpenAI and Anthropic from 2024, every major American AI lab is now operating under some form of government review. ...