No shares for you!

Author

Alex Wilhelm
May 12, 2026 • Estimated Reading Time: 4 minutes

Top News

  • Everyone dreams of data centers in space: When Starcloud was just getting started, the TWiST500 startup was years ahead of the market. Today, the upstart technology company’s plan to put data centers in space is all but conventional wisdom. SpaceX wants space-based data centers. Google wants space-based data centers. Amazon, too. And now Google may tap SpaceX for launch capacity to put its chips in orbit, though it is working with other companies as well. Perhaps Brin and Page should found a Blue Origin competitor!

  • OpenAI announces ‘Daybreak:’ With Anthropic’s Mythos-grounded ‘Project Glasswing’ being held behind government glass, OpenAI is busy releasing new cybersecurity tools. To wit, the newly announced Daybreak, a fusion of OpenAI’s cybersecurity-focused AI models, its Codex agentic harness, and security partners. The goal? To “accelerate cyber defenders and continuously secure software,” which I reckon we can all get behind.

  • Repeat after me: FDE. News that OpenAI and Anthropic are partnering with PE firms to embed engineers in portcos to infuse them with AI is not being taken lightly by the AI labs’ rivals. Google Cloud CEO Thomas Kurian is also expanding the number of forward-deployed engineers (FDEs) his company commands to “scale customer AI transformation.” Soon, the only jobs left will be gig-based AI training, forward-deployed engineer, and firefighter.

TWiST 500

No shares for you!

That’s the message from TWiST500 behemoths Anthropic and OpenAI. Anthropic kicked off the news cycle by updating its diary with notes on who, and who cannot buy its shares (nearly everyone, that is):

Any sale or transfer of Anthropic stock, or any interest in Anthropic stock, that has not been approved by our Board of Directors is void and will not be recognized on our books and records. […] We do not permit special purpose vehicles (SPVs) to acquire Anthropic stock and any transfer of shares to an SPV are void under our transfer restrictions. […] Any third party claiming to sell Anthropic shares to the general public—whether through direct sales, "forward contracts," tokenized securities, or other mechanisms—is likely either engaged in fraud or offering an investment that may have no value due to our transfer restrictions.1

Not to be outdone, OpenAI followed suit with words of its own:

All OpenAI equity is subject to transfer restrictions. This means that OpenAI equity cannot be directly or indirectly transferred unless the seller first obtains OpenAI’s written consent. Any attempted transfer—which includes any pledge, encumbrance or other similar disposition—that does not follow this requirement is void.

That’s clear enough, and represents a nuclear bomb being dropped on the cottage industry of buying and selling shares in the two AI giants.

The problem will be cleared once both firms list. But until then, and as their values rise, expect more folks to try to make a buck off the success of the two foundation model shops. Be careful. You don’t want to invest in a complicated contract that winds up being worth less than the pixels it was written on.

Of course, if startups went public before reaching a $1 trillion valuation, that would help, too. — Alex

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This Week in Startups

E2287: Cerebras just jacked its IPO range to $150–$160 a share, OpenAI bought a consulting firm to seed its $4 billion private-equity joint venture, and a startup in Oakland is electrolyzing magnesium out of seawater for one-third the going price. Alex Wilhelm and Jason Calacanis go deep with AI21 co-CEO Ori Goshen on why model orchestration, not bigger LLMs, will decide who wins enterprise AI. The crew also covered the decline of OpenClaw, TikTok's new £3.99 ad-free tier, more entries in the live-show sidebar bounty, and had time for a little Off Duty before signing off.

E2286: Banks don’t want to hand over their data to AI labs. So David Moscatelli built a $250,000 box that runs AI on-prem. He already has 1,600 pre-orders. On today’s episode of TWiST, Jason and Alex sit down with the Go Abacus founder and Yanez's Jose Caldera to unpack how regulated industries are getting AI without the cloud, why Bittensor subnet 54 is incentivizing miners to attack identity systems, and why Cloudflare just laid off 20% of its workforce in the same week it raised guidance. The show closes with Jason explaining what it means to build an AI-first startup, and how workers can derisk their future employment!

E2285: Aleph's Michael Eisenberg argues we may be witnessing the end of a 60-year run for venture capital as a craft business. Maniv's Mike Granoff and Oxcart's Larry Covert push back, arguing it's merely splitting into two asset classes: "Consensus VC" and traditional VC. Either way, the implications for founders, LPs, and the next decade of innovation are enormous. Tune in for the IPO drought, "bullshit ARR" in the AI era, AI gross margins, the U.S.-China chip war, the Iran conflict's impact on defense tech, the death of NATO and the rise of allied supply chains, why Tel Aviv's stock exchange could become the next NASDAQ, and more.

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