AI This Week
Novo Nordisk on Tuesday announced a partnership with OpenAI to deploy artificial intelligence across its business, spanning drug discovery, manufacturing, and commercial operations, as the Danish drugmaker looks to sharpen its competitive edge in the fast-growing obesity drug market. The financial terms were not disclosed. The partnership will enable Novo to better use AI to analyze complex datasets, identify promising new drugs, and reduce the time it takes for a medicine to move from the research stage to patient use. Pilot programmes will launch across research & development, manufacturing, and commercial operations, with full integration by the end of 2026. Novo Nordisk is seeking new ways to regain ground in the intensifying obesity-drug battle with Eli Lilly, which recently won U.S. approval for its weight-loss pill Foundayo. Shortly after taking over as CEO last year, Doustdar announced a restructuring that cut 9,000 jobs. Now, CEO Mike Doustdar emphasized that the initiative is aimed at augmenting human capabilities rather than reducing jobs. "The aim here is not to replace our scientists. It's about supercharging them," he said. The announcement pushed NVO shares up 2.8% shortly after the opening bell.
University of Pennsylvania researchers used AI to analyze more than 400,000 Reddit posts and identified patient-reported symptoms associated with GLP-1 drugs — the popular weight-loss and diabetes medications semaglutide and tirzepatide — that may not be fully captured in clinical trials or regulatory documents. The findings are shaking the world of pharmacology. The new study, published in Nature Health, covers more than half a decade of posts from nearly 70,000 Reddit users and highlights two main classes of symptoms that warrant further study: reproductive symptoms, including irregular menstrual cycles, and temperature-related complaints, such as chills and hot flashes. Fatigue ranked as the second most common complaint among Reddit users, despite reaching reporting thresholds in relatively few clinical trials. Clinical trials generally identify the most dangerous side effects of drugs, but they can fail to find what symptoms patients are most concerned about — and a large collection of social media posts may reflect those additional concerns. Researchers caution the findings are not conclusive. "We can't say that GLP-1s are actually causing these symptoms," the study's first author noted, adding that nearly 4% of Reddit users reported menstrual irregularities, "a signal worth investigating." Ultimately, the researchers believe this kind of rapid, AI-assisted social media analysis could become a useful tool to spot early warning signs around emerging drugs, with patient discussions on platforms like Reddit and TikTok offering some of the earliest clues to real-world experiences. The authors are hoping to expand their research beyond Reddit to uncover further unreported symptoms.
Waymo and Waze have announced a new pilot to give cities sharper tools to combat a common enemy of cyclists, pedestrians, and drivers: potholes. Using advanced onboard software, Waymo vehicles automatically track every pothole they encounter while driving through cities like San Francisco and San Jose. The pilot uses Waymo's perception and physical feedback systems to detect potholes, with the data made available to cities and state Departments of Transportation through the free Waze for Cities platform. The data will also be visible to Waze users, alerting them as they approach a pothole — and users will be able to verify Waymo-identified potholes, increasing accuracy. The pilot covers five initial markets: Austin, Atlanta, Los Angeles, Phoenix, and the San Francisco Bay Area, where Waymo has already identified about 500 potholes. Many cities currently rely on 311 reports and manual inspections to identify potholes, which can leave dangerous gaps. The idea reportedly came from city officials who shared feedback with Waymo over the years.
Meta is back in the AI race. The company released Muse Spark, marking its "first step" toward an "overhaul of its AI efforts" and the inaugural model from Meta Superintelligence Labs, created after CEO Mark Zuckerberg grew frustrated with Llama's lag behind OpenAI's ChatGPT and Anthropic's Claude. The model, code-named Avocado, was built over nine months by a team led by Alexandr Wang. According to benchmark tests Meta published, Muse Spark is competitive with leading AI models from OpenAI, Anthropic, and Google across many tasks and appears to put Meta back in the race after Llama 4 was widely panned as a dud. The model uses a fast mode for casual queries, several reasoning modes, and a "shopping mode" that combines large language models with data on user interests and behavior. Meta's AI-related capital expenditures in 2026 are projected between $115 billion and $135 billion, nearly twice last year's figure. The model raises privacy concerns, as users must log in with an existing Facebook or Instagram account to access it. Muse Spark is currently only available in the United States.
Anthropic's announcements typically trigger a selloff in software and cybersecurity stocks. But not this time. Anthropic is giving a group of Big Tech and cybersecurity firms access to a preview version of Claude Mythos — its unreleased and most advanced AI model — in an attempt to bolster cybersecurity defenses across some of the world's most critical systems. The initiative, called Project Glasswing, includes Amazon Web Services, Apple, Broadcom, Cisco, CrowdStrike, Google, JPMorganChase, Microsoft, and Nvidia. Shares of CrowdStrike and Palo Alto Networks, named partners in the project, surged sharply on the news: CRWD gaining 6.2% in its best single-day performance in over six months, while PANW gained nearly 5%. Earlier, CrowdStrike had dropped 7% and Palo Alto Networks had declined 6% when Mythos news first leaked. In just the past few weeks, Anthropic used Claude Mythos Preview to identify thousands of zero-day vulnerabilities — many of them critical — in every major operating system and every major web browser. Several vulnerabilities had existed undetected for years, the oldest being a 27-year-old bug in OpenBSD. Anthropic is allocating up to $100 million in usage credits for Mythos Preview and providing $4 million in direct donations to open-source security organizations.
AI-powered "vibe coding" tools have driven an 84% jump in new app submissions to Apple's App Store in a single quarter — the largest surge in a decade. The flood is straining Apple's review infrastructure, with approval times ballooning from 24 hours to as many as 30 days. The phenomenon of vibe coding was coined by Andrej Karpathy, a co-founder of OpenAI and former AI lead at Tesla — vibe coding is the practice of building software by describing what you want in plain language and letting a large language model write the code. Apple says it is not targeting vibe coding as a category but rather enforcing its guidelines, which prohibit apps from changing their behaviour after review — the very capability that defines vibe coding apps. Critics argue Apple's crackdown "puts it on the wrong side of history," contending the review-based model was conceived for a world that no longer exists.
It's about to become more expensive for Claude Code subscribers to use Anthropic's coding assistant with OpenClaw and other third-party tools. Effective April 4, subscribers can "no longer be able to use your Claude subscription limits for third-party harnesses including OpenClaw," according to a customer email shared on Hacker News. Instead, subscribers must now pay for extra usage through a pay-as-you-go option billed separately — and the policy applies to all third-party harnesses, with more to be rolled out soon. The policy change affects an estimated 135,000+ active OpenClaw instances. Anthropic's Head of Claude Code Boris Cherny said subscriptions "weren't built for the usage patterns of these third-party tools." OpenClaw's creator Peter Steinberger recently joined Anthropic rival OpenAI, with the open-source project continuing under ChatGPT's backer. Steinberger said he tried to "talk sense into Anthropic" but only delayed enforcement by a week, accusing the company of first copying popular features, then locking out open source. Anthropic is offering full refunds for subscribers who want to exit.
French lab Mistral AI has raised $830 million in debt to build a new data center near Paris that will be powered by Nvidia chips. The money fuels a massive infrastructure push. The data center will be powered by 13,800 Nvidia GB300 graphics processing units (GPUs), bringing its total capacity to 44 MW. It plans to complete building the data center in Bruyères-le-Châtel and make it operational in the second quarter of 2026. Mistral aims to have 200 MW of capacity across Europe by the end of 2027. The push is about sovereignty. "Scaling our infrastructure in Europe is critical to empower our customers and to ensure AI innovation and autonomy remain at the heart of Europe," CEO Arthur Mensch declared.
Anthropic accidentally exposed approximately 500,000 lines of source code across nearly 2,000 files when a file used internally for debugging was accidentally bundled into a routine update of Claude Code and pushed to the public registry. The npm package containing Claude Code v2.1.88 exposed the source map file, which contained the full and unobfuscated TypeScript source code. The leak potentially allows a competitor to reverse-engineer how Claude Code's agentic harness works and use that knowledge to improve their own products. The leak marks Anthropic's second major data blunder in under a week, following the discovery of descriptions of the company's upcoming AI model in a publicly accessible data cache. Anthropic confirmed this was a release packaging issue caused by human error, not a security breach.
OpenAI closed its record-breaking funding round at a post-money valuation of $852 billion, with $122 billion in committed capital, up from the previously announced $110 billion figure. SoftBank co-led the round alongside investors including Andreessen Horowitz and D.E. Shaw Ventures. ChatGPT now supports more than 900 million weekly active users, including more than 50 million subscribers. OpenAI extended participation to investors through bank channels for the first time and raised $3 billion from individual investors. CEO Sam Altman will face pressure to justify the massive valuation as the company gears up for a potential IPO. The startup has been retreating from hefty spending plans and shuttering features including its short-form video app Sora to rein in costs.