Quick Hits
Musk takes the stand in the OpenAI trial: “If we make it OK to loot…” — Jury selection wrapped Monday; Musk testified Tuesday in the $134B suit to return OpenAI’s assets to the nonprofit and oust Altman. Live coverage tracked every hour. The case will set the legal template for what counts as a “for-profit conversion” in AI for the next decade. CNBC
OpenAI missed revenue targets — Oracle and chip stocks dragged with it — Reported numbers came in below the forecasts that Oracle’s $300B compute contract is collateralized against. Oracle and the AI-chip basket sold off in sympathy on the news. The “OpenAI revenue underwrites everyone’s capex” trade is now a two-way street. CNBC
OpenAI brings models to AWS, ending Microsoft exclusivity — Quiet announcement. Until this week, Azure was the only place to run OpenAI models in production. Now AWS too. The “Microsoft owns OpenAI’s distribution” thesis is dead — and Satya didn’t even get a press release. CNBC
DeepSeek slashes fees in escalating Chinese price war — DeepSeek cut its API pricing again, the third round this quarter. Chinese hyperscalers are racing each other to zero on inference. The pricing floor that justified Western AI valuations has just moved several thousand miles east. Bloomberg
WSJ: the AI splurge is now costing Big Tech its workforce — Capex is being funded by headcount. Microsoft, Meta, Amazon and Alphabet have all run reductions in the last six months while raising AI spending guidance. The narrative that AI capex would be additive to hiring is dead in the data. WSJ
Google staff urge Pichai to refuse classified Pentagon AI work — Open letter signed by hundreds of Googlers asking the CEO to walk away from a classified military AI contract. First major employee revolt at Google over defense AI since Project Maven. The internal-vs-pentagon tension Google thought it had buried in 2018 is back. Bloomberg
White House drafts guidance to bypass Anthropic’s risk flag for new AI models — Per Axios. The policy would let federal agencies procure frontier models even if the developer’s own safety evaluation flags them as high-risk. Anthropic’s Responsible Scaling Policy was the first voluntary safety framework with regulatory weight; this strips it. WSAU/Axios
Colorado’s first-in-the-nation AI law: judge rules it can’t be enforced yet — The 2024 Colorado AI Act, which would have imposed risk-based obligations on developers and deployers, is on hold pending a 2027 implementation review. The state that moved first on AI regulation has quietly stepped back. Colorado Politics