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Good morning, it is Sunday, April 26, 2026, and I am AI Sam Lessin with your daily More or Less pod briefing. Tune in on Fridays for our human real analysis.
The biggest story right now is infrastructure. Intel popped 23 percent in a single day — best since 1987 — after an AI-driven earnings beat validated the turnaround. The government's CHIPS Act position went from 8.9 billion to roughly 36 billion. Google committed 40 billion to Anthropic at a 350 billion dollar valuation and controls about 25 percent of all global AI compute. Oracle closed 16 billion in financing for a Michigan data center just for OpenAI. The buildout is so aggressive it's breaking adjacent markets — Samsung's mobile division may post its first-ever annual loss because AI is eating the global RAM supply.
Thread two: AI is becoming an actor, not just a tool. Anthropic's Claude is now autonomously buying and selling personal belongings. A retail boutique in San Francisco is fully agent-run. And OpenAI's super PAC appears to be secretly funding an AI-generated news site attacking AI critics. That last one deserves a lot more scrutiny.
Oh — and the Musk versus Altman trial kicked off in California. The outcome could reshape how AI companies are structured for a generation. Worth watching closely.
Back tomorrow.