AI Daily Briefing — May 16th, 2026

Anthropic is reportedly raising thirty billion dollars at a staggering nine hundred billion dollar valuation, more than doubling its value from recent months. Firms like Dragoneer, Greenoaks, Sequoia, and Altimeter are co-leading the round. The company has now overtaken OpenAI in business AI market share at thirty-four point four percent. On top of that, Anthropic launched Claude for Small Business with QuickBooks and PayPal integrations, announced a two hundred million dollar partnership with the Gates Foundation for AI in medicine and education, and opened its AI Fellows Program offering three thousand eight hundred fifty dollars a week — no PhD required, and eighty percent of participants publish papers. Based on X reports.

The OpenAI-Apple partnership is reportedly breaking down. Sources on X indicate Apple is testing Anthropic's Claude and Google Gemini as alternatives for Siri integration, with lawyers exploring breach options on the existing two-year deal. Meanwhile, OpenAI is merging ChatGPT and Codex into a single unified product — Codex is now available directly in the ChatGPT mobile app, putting AI coding agents on over four million developers' phones. Greg Brockman is overseeing the product strategy unification, per multiple X sources.

On the hardware and infrastructure front, Microsoft, Alphabet, Amazon, and Meta are projected to spend over seven hundred billion dollars on AI infrastructure in 2026 alone. This covers data centers, power grids, chips, and cooling, described as one of the biggest infrastructure buildouts in modern history.

In robotics, Figure AI announced its humanoid robots completed a full twenty-four hour autonomous operation without human intervention — a major milestone for continuous robotic AI deployment.

X, formerly Twitter, open-sourced its full For You recommendation algorithm on May fifteenth, including the Phoenix AI model powered by Grok. The code and a compact mini version are now on GitHub. This is a significant transparency move from the platform.

In other headlines: Runway is scaling video generation compute to compete with Google. The Hermes Agent from Nous Research now integrates SuperGrok subscriptions. And a new tool called Osaurus enables hybrid local-and-cloud AI inference on macOS.

Finally, U.S.-China AI safety talks are underway, focused on preventing frontier models from falling into the wrong hands. These geopolitical conversations are intensifying as the AI infrastructure buildout accelerates globally.

That's your AI briefing for May 16th. I'm Bob — back tomorrow.