I love a good collab. It’s always fun to seee too dissimilar entities come together to achieve something greater than they could have on their own. Some collabs go well — Metallica x Stranger Things is a fun example that helped get the kids into heavier music via Netflix’s chariot. Others are more, well, Metallica x Lou Reed, if you catch my drift.

Enter TWIST500 hyperwright Anthropic, which may team up with Microsoft to use the latter company’s Maia 200 chips to power AI inference. Yes, every hyperscaler wants to be a chip company, too, and that could raise problems for current chip leaders in time.

For now, talks between Microsoft and Anthropic are in their early stages and could come to nothing. That said, the deal could prove a coup for Microsoft. The Azure maker has made strong progress in diversifying its AI lab partnerships beyond its early OpenAI agreement; it has invested in Anthropic, for example. Redmond is also cracking its own foundation lab into shape, which means it will soon be a first-party chip manufacturer, a hyperscaler using third-party silicon, an enterprise sales channel for AI, the developer of foundation models, an investor in major AI labs, and a company able to take all AI models to market via its existing products.

That’s a lot. But I suppose that doing everything, all at once, is one way to derisk one’s company from losing the AI game.

Now, what do we know about the chips that Anthropic is looking at? The Maia 200 chip was introduced in January of this year, with Microsoft claiming it is an “inference accelerator engineered to dramatically improve the economics of AI token generation,” and featuring specs that set it up well against competing chips from Amazon and Google. Satya Nadella announced shortly after that the chips were “now online in Azure,” implying that the transition from announcement to implementation went smoothly.

As The Information points out, there were bumps on the road to reaching this point. But as Google raises money to build a neocloud using its in-house chips and Amazon makes ever-larger bets on its own silicon, it’s clear that Nvidia’s largest rivals may, in time, prove to be its largest customers.

But as we can see from the breadth of Microsoft’s AI portfolio today, competing with your friends is simply the way the game is played today. Anthropic, will you ever have enough compute? — Alex

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E2291: Why raise $200 million if you are already profitable? That’s the question Jason and Alex put to Mercury’s founder and CEO, Immad Akhund, after the entrepreneur raised another massive round for his upstart, technology-friendly bank. TWiST then welcomed Kled founder Avi Patel to discuss the startup he considers a clear ripoff of his own company. Jason gavels in verdicts on all parties involved, including Y Combinator and venture capital firm General Catalyst. The show closes with a news lightning round, including OpenAI’s decision to offer $2 million in token credits to hundreds of startups.

E2290: Multiple 2026 commencement addresses have been interrupted by a chorus of boos when the speakers raised the topic of AI innovation. Why are America’s students SO NEGATIVE about the prospect of working with AI tools, and is it too late to turn things around. Jason and Alex discuss the growing backlash to datacenters, AI apps, and technology more generally among mainstream Americans, why it’s happening, and whether it’s still fixable. PLUS thoughts on how OpenAI and Anthropic gained such massive dominance in terms of actual AI-related revenue, and the growing visibility of Flock Safety’s surveillance network.

E2289: Self-driving just stopped being a science problem and became an engineering challenge instead. That's the through-line of today’s double-header with the CEOs of two of the most important AV companies in the world — Wayve's Alex Kendall and Waabi's Raquel Urtasun. Between them: ~$2B raised in the last six months, Uber as a partner, Nissan and Volvo as OEMs, and a shared bet that end-to-end AI plus world models beats Waymo's city-by-city map-and-pray approach. If you want to understand the state of the self-driving industry beyond recent Waymo announcements, this is the episode for you.

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