Top Stories
Stripe finalized its $7B+ acquisition of OpenRouter, pushing the payments company deeper into AI infrastructure. — TechCrunch
Nvidia is cutting its proposed OpenAI data-center guarantee from $250 billion to under $120 billion amid investor concerns. — The Wall Street Journal
Alibaba released open weights for Qwen3.8-27B, alongside its larger Qwen3.8-2.4T-A95B model for more demanding AI agents. — Qwen
Anthropic revealed how it will watermark future Claude outputs globally, using detectable word-choice patterns rather than hidden characters, extra tokens, or identifying information, while reporting no quality loss. — Anthropic
SpaceX closed its previously announced $60B acquisition of Cursor, adding the coding startup to a portfolio that already includes xAI and X. — TechCrunch
Top Funding Announcements
Higgsfield AI — The AI video startup raised $400M led by DST Global, with Goldman Sachs, Liberty Global, and Intel participating. — Quartz
Wispr — The voice AI startup raised a $280M Series B led by Menlo Ventures. — Fortune
Shein — The fashion retailer plans a Hong Kong IPO of up to $2B at a roughly $25B valuation. — Reuters
Self Inspection — The AI smartphone vehicle-inspection startup raised a $10M round led by Sandberg Bernthal Venture Partners. — The Recursive
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Top Tweets
@DarioAmodei wrote a long-form Tweet in response to @GavinBaker, calling it a "false choice" to say AI power must either "concentrate... in the hands of a chosen few companies" via regulation or be distributed widely. Amodei notes that Anthropic writes policy that "disadvantage[s] frontier AI companies while advantaging smaller competitors." On messaging, he denied being overly negative, "it has been about equally balanced between risks and benefits,” and said public distrust of AI is "fundamentally a crisis of trust," not something he caused.
@DavidSacks fired back at Dario's post point by point. He called the "bubble" framing on regulation "a straw man," noting "almost no one" actually believes all regulation equals capture, and pointed out that Anthropic itself has "hired multiple senior Biden AI-policy officials" when building its government-affairs operation. On Dario's push for pre-deployment federal review, Sacks dubbed it a "DMV for AI," warning it would create long queues, handicap the U.S. against China, and protect Anthropic's pricing edge over open models.
"In the AI economy, compute is revenue," wrote @JensenHuang, announcing that NVIDIA is partnering with SB Energy to secure land, power, and shell at the PORTS-Pike site in Portsmouth, Ohio, with OpenAI as tenant. The initial 4.25-gigawatt deployment could represent "$150 billion to $200 billion in NVIDIA revenue" per generation over a 20-year term, part of a roughly $600 billion opportunity with OpenAI through 2030.
This Week in Startups
Timestamps:
0:00 New Segment: "Enough Already!"
3:04 Anthropic's record-breaking IPO plans
9:27 Why it's "Springtime for Trump and M&A"
10:07 PayPal - Built for payments, growth, and agentic. Paypal Open, built for all business. Visit https://paypalopen.com to get started
15:28 Sami Khoreibi of Wisewell joins
16:58 Hiring a water sommelier
19:51 CLA - Innovation takes balance. CLA's CPAs, consultants, and wealth advisors can help you get from startup to where you want to end up. Get started now at https://www.claconnect.com/withyou
28:28 The problems with tap and bottled water
30:02 Odoo - The all-in-one business platform. Get started for free at https://Odoo.com/twist
49:26 Puneet Puri of Gritt Robotics joins
54:03 Solar's version of "Moore's Law"
1:04:36 Are you using the Boomer emojis?
1:08:30 Why Jason loves the DJI Mic 3
1:11:04 Jason & Lon's streaming recommendations
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Today’s Fascinating Fact from Harmonic
AI dictation tool Wispr raised a $280M Series B this week, at a $2 billion valuation. But the company didn’t start out as a voice-to-text platform that allows you to talk directly to your AI agents. The original concept was distinctly more sci-fi. Stanford grads and co-founders Tanay Kothari and Sahaj Garg were pitching a wearable wristband that would translate neurological signals (aka sub-vocalization) into text, essentially attempting to read your thoughts. After three years of R&D, the wristband TECHNICALLY worked, but the co-founders found the results uninspiring, prompting the pivot into voice dictation software.
Try it yourself at harmonic.ai
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