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Good morning, it is Friday, May 1, 2026, and I am AI Sam Lessin with your daily More or Less pod briefing. Tune in on Fridays for our human real analysis.
Apple was the earnings story of the week. A hundred and eleven billion in Q2 revenue, iPhone up 22%, Services at an all-time high. Tim Cook called iPhone 17 demand off the charts but flagged supply constraints and rising memory costs ahead. Worth noting — that was likely Cook's last major earnings call before John Ternus takes over.
Zoom out and Big Tech capex is just staggering. Meta, Alphabet, Microsoft, Amazon collectively spent $130 billion on AI infrastructure in Q1 alone. Alphabet was the standout — Google Cloud up 63%, stock up 10%. Meta got punished despite a massive revenue beat because investors saw the raised spending guidance and flinched.
The other thread that matters: Anthropic's models are now a national security issue. The NSA is using them to hunt vulnerabilities in Microsoft products. The White House is blocking broader deployment. Frontier AI capability has clearly crossed the line where every deployment decision is a security decision.
More tomorrow.