AI This Week

SpaceX has obtained the rights to buy coding startup Cursor for $60 billion later this year — or pay $10 billion for the work the two companies are doing together. The company announced the deal in a post on X, declaring that "SpaceXAI and @cursor_ai are now working closely together to create the world's best coding and knowledge work AI." Elon Musk merged SpaceX with his AI startup xAI in February in a deal he valued at $1.25 trillion, and is now poised to take the combined company public in what will likely be a record IPO. SpaceX isn't acquiring Cursor immediately because of that imminent IPO, a major transaction would require updated filings and financial details, potentially delaying a listing targeting a $2 trillion valuation. Cursor was valued at just $2.5 billion in January of last year, climbed to $9 billion by last May, and was assigned a $29.3 billion post-money valuation when it closed on $2.3 billion in Series D funding in November. The company is no longer proceeding with a planned $2 billion funding round, as the capital was set to fund Cursor's computing needs, which are now being handled by xAI. Cursor CEO Michael Truell wrote on X that he's "Excited to partner with the SpaceX team to scale up Composer," referring to his company's AI model. Tuesday's announcement comes less than a week before a trial begins in Musk v. Altman, a high-profile case between the SpaceX founder and OpenAI CEO Sam Altman, whose company was an early investor in Cursor.

Apple announced that Tim Cook will become executive chairman of Apple's board of directors and John Ternus, senior vice president of Hardware Engineering, will become Apple's next chief executive officer effective on September 1, 2026. The transition was approved unanimously by the Board of Directors, following a long-term succession planning process. Under Cook's stewardship, Apple shares appreciated more than 1,700%, and Apple's market value now stands at more than $4 trillion, making it the third most valuable public company in the world. As executive chairman, Cook will assist with certain aspects of the company, including engaging with policymakers around the world. Ternus, who at 51 is nearly the same age Cook was when he became CEO, studied mechanical engineering at the University of Pennsylvania and joined Apple's product design team in 2001. For Ternus, perhaps the most critical aspect of his new job will be pushing the company deeper into artificial intelligence, where it has lagged many of its megacap peers. Apple shares dipped slightly — less than 1% — in after-hours trading following the news.

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Anthropic just drew a battle line in the design world. On Friday, Anthropic announced Claude Design, a new tool that lets users create polished visuals like slide decks, app prototypes, and marketing one-pagers using simple text prompts. The tool is powered by Claude Opus 4.7 and is rolling out as a research preview to Claude Pro, Max, Team, and Enterprise subscribers. Users can upload codebases and design files, allowing Claude to build a design system that automatically applies a team's colors, typography, and components — then refine results through conversation, inline comments, or direct edits. Wall Street responded instantly. Shares of Figma (NYSE: FIG) fell as much as 7.28% on the day, settling at $18.84 — well below the previous close of $20.32. Figma is widely considered the dominant player in UI and UX design for websites and apps, with an estimated 80% to 90% market share. The launch also triggered a roughly 1.5% drop in Adobe's share price. Earlier this week, Anthropic's chief product officer, Mike Krieger, had stepped down from Figma's board — a move that now looks unmistakably deliberate. Skeptics note that LLMs have been unreliable at generating visual elements — image generators can impress at first glance, but editing individual elements can quickly fall apart.

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Anthropic announced a new artificial intelligence model, Claude Opus 4.7, which the company said is an improvement over past models but is "less broadly capable" than its most recent offering, Claude Mythos Preview. The gap is stark. Claude Mythos Preview is Anthropic's most powerful AI model, excelling at identifying weaknesses and security flaws within software. Anthropic rolled out Mythos to a select group of companies as part of a new cybersecurity initiative called Project Glasswing earlier this month. Anthropic said the new model outperforms Claude Opus 4.6 across many use cases, including industry benchmarks for agentic coding, multidisciplinary reasoning, scaled tool use, and agentic computer use. Anthropic said it experimented with efforts to "differentially reduce" Claude Opus 4.7's cyber capabilities during training and encouraged security professionals interested in using the model for legitimate cybersecurity purposes to apply through a formal verification program. The launch of Project Glasswing has sparked high-profile meetings between members of the Trump administration, tech CEOs, and bank chief executives about the security risks of powerful AI models. Claude Opus 4.7 is available across all of Anthropic's Claude products, its API, and through cloud providers Microsoft, Google, and Amazon — at the same price as Claude Opus 4.6.

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Allbirds is abandoning shoes for artificial intelligence. The struggling footwear brand announced a $50 million deal to become an "AI compute infrastructure" company called NewBird AI. Shares surged more than 580% on the news. The pivot is dramatic. Allbirds once graced the feet of Barack Obama and Ben Affleck. Now it plans to offer on-demand graphics chips and cloud services built for AI workloads. The Allbirds brand itself goes to fashion conglomerate American Exchange Group for $39 million. Analysts aren't convinced. Branding consultant Wei Kan called the move a "liquidation" using the company's stock market shell. Retail analyst Hitha Herzog labeled it "clearly a meme stock," noting the AI mania driving excitement despite no proof of product or earnings.

The AI-powered cybersecurity race has reached a new level. OpenAI has announced GPT-5.4-Cyber, a modified version of its GPT-5.4 model built specifically for cybersecurity defense operations. Instead of restricting what its models can do, OpenAI is now prioritizing rigorous identity verification to determine who gets access to its most powerful cybersecurity capabilities. The model features lower refusal boundaries for legitimate cybersecurity tasks — what OpenAI calls being "cyber-permissive" — and includes binary reverse engineering capabilities, allowing analysts to hunt for malicious code in programs and apps. The model is being offered to participants in OpenAI's Trusted Access for Cyber program, launched in February. OpenAI plans to expand access to thousands of individuals and hundreds of security teams, provided they complete verification checks. Rival Anthropic's Mythos is considered so powerful it was shared with only a handful of the biggest software companies — including Microsoft, Apple, and Google — after the tool reportedly found decades-old vulnerabilities with ease. OpenAI says the GPT-5.4-Cyber release is also preparation for an even more capable AI model due later this year.

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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.