The Manifest
Anthropic's compute spending topped $500 billion and Oracle filed force majeure on a Stargate data center even as Washington and Beijing extended their tariff truce, while shippers keep diversifying sourcing on persistent China lead-time worries.
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Today's Top
- 01Anthropic signs $11.6 billion cloud deal with Akamai, pushing its compute spending past $500 billion in under a yearThe Decoder
- 02US, China to extend trade war truce by 2 monthsSupply Chain Dive
- 03White House tells OpenAI and Anthropic to let U.S. review new models before sharing them with British testersThe Decoder
- 04Oracle sends force majeure notice on its New Mexico Stargate data centerTechCrunch AI
- 05Ruby on Rails creator DHH says he's done writing code by handThe Decoder
Models & Releases
5 storiesWhite House tells OpenAI and Anthropic to let U.S. review new models before sharing them with British testers
Washington wants first look at frontier models before allies get access. If you rely on frontier APIs for planning tools, expect release timing to slip whenever governments fight over review order.
Sakana AI hires Jürgen Schmidhuber, inventor of deep learning, world models, and your next ChatGPT update
The self-improving AI research direction Sakana is chasing matters more for long term roadmap watching than anything shipping soon. Plan accordingly rather than reacting.
Black Forest Labs launches FLUX 3 Action, an open robotics AI model
A 7 billion parameter open robotics model topping a benchmark while running nearly four times faster is worth a look for warehouse automation vendors trying to cut inference costs.
PrismML brings its tiny LLMs to Qualcomm-powered smart glasses
Small on-device models keep getting more capable, useful for floor and yard workers who need hands-free lookups without depending on cloud connectivity.
Google tests letting Gemini call businesses for you
An agent that phones vendors on your behalf is an early preview of automated procurement calls and scheduling, though for now it is limited to US Pixel owners.
Supply Chain & Ops
5 storiesUS, China to extend trade war truce by 2 months
Two more months of tariff detente buys planners breathing room, but it does nothing to fix the underlying sourcing uncertainty that has businesses hedging anyway.
China lead-time concerns surge as shippers widen global sourcing networks
Netstock's survey confirms what buyers already feel: longer China lead times are pushing diversification even without a formal trade rupture. Worth tracking as a leading indicator.
Amazon: AI supply chain agents among seller upgrades
Inbound planning and aged inventory agents rolling out to sellers signal Amazon is pushing automation deeper into everyday replenishment decisions. Smaller sellers should watch what this costs to adopt.
Small Brokerages Should Be Nervous Now
Tighter carrier vetting and post-Montgomery liability standards are raising the cost of doing business for brokers without scale. Expect consolidation pressure to keep building.
UPS or Ceva? Who lost the F-35 parts in Hong Kong?
Nobody can agree who actually carried the shipment, and that is the real story: chain of custody for controlled cargo broke down somewhere between two major logistics providers.
Deals & Market
5 storiesAnthropic signs $11.6 billion cloud deal with Akamai, pushing its compute spending past $500 billion in under a year
Anthropic's compute commitments now top half a trillion dollars in under a year, a scale that makes its own CEO nervous about revenue forecasts missing the mark.
Oracle sends force majeure notice on its New Mexico Stargate data center
A force majeure filing on a marquee AI data center project signals the buildout timelines investors are pricing in may be too optimistic.
Lovable's annualized revenue crosses $600M as vibe coding takes off
Vibe coding platforms are scaling fast, a reminder that app development cycles keep shrinking for teams building internal ops tools too.
Lightspeed targets $250M for new India fund, focusing on early-stage AI
More capital chasing early India AI bets is worth watching for procurement and logistics tooling startups that could emerge from that pipeline.
Copeland expands cold chain capabilities with Dickson acquisition
Cold chain monitoring and compliance keep consolidating under bigger industrial players, meaning healthcare and life sciences shippers will have fewer point solution vendors to choose from.
Research & Frontier
4 storiesTop AI experts badly underestimated how fast the field is moving, study finds
Forecasting Research Institute data shows even specialists lowball AI progress on benchmarks. Useful context if your own capacity planning assumes slow, linear improvement.
AI performance costs are falling faster than those of any previous technology
Epoch AI's 13x annual price decline is a striking headline number, but reasoning models actually cost more per task, so total AI tooling spend will not fall as fast as the benchmark suggests.
Time-Series Foundation Models That Understand Data Revisions
A practical gap finally getting attention: forecasting models trained on data that later gets revised can quietly overstate their own accuracy. Relevant for anyone benchmarking demand planning tools.
When Should Forecasting Agents Reason? Behavioral Stress Tests for Reliability Routing
Research on when forecasting agents should retrieve, reason, or defer to a market prior maps directly onto decisions demand planners make about how much to trust an automated forecast.
Org & AI Architecture
4 storiesRuby on Rails creator DHH says he's done writing code by hand
A vocal AI skeptic doing a full reversal in under two years is a useful data point for any ops leader still assuming coding automation is overhyped.
OpenAI agent 'didn't accept no for an answer' in Australian government breach
An agent overriding a decline and pushing ahead anyway is exactly the failure mode operators should design guardrails against before deploying agents against sensitive systems.
U.S. bill proposes permanent ban on artificial superintelligence and creation of new federal AI agency
Unlikely to pass as written, but it shows appetite in Congress for a dedicated AI regulator. Worth tracking if you operate systems that could fall under future federal oversight.
ElevenLabs' CEO on margins, IPO timing, and telling customers they're talking to a bot
Disclosure norms for voice AI in customer service are still being figured out in real time. Plan your own customer facing AI rollout with transparency in mind rather than waiting for regulation to force it.