Listen in Sam's voice (generated with ElevenLabs)
Good morning, it is Friday, May 15, 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 big story today was Cerebras. Priced at one eighty-five, opened at three-fifty, closed up sixty-eight percent. Largest US tech IPO since Uber. Sixty-seven billion dollar market cap. The market sent a clear signal: AI infrastructure is nowhere near cooling off. Anthropic reportedly closing a thirty billion dollar round at a nine hundred billion valuation backs that up. Even Cisco popped fifteen percent on AI order momentum. Capital is still flowing hard into this space.
On the geopolitical side, the US cleared Alibaba, Tencent, ByteDance and others to buy Nvidia H200s — Jensen Huang reportedly flew with Trump to make it happen. But Beijing is holding shipments. Diplomatic win on paper, chips not moving in reality.
And OpenAI is having a rough week. Apple partnership may end in litigation. Altman's on trial with real removal risk. And a security firm built a working macOS kernel exploit using Anthropic's AI in five days. That last one should not get lost in the noise.
See you tomorrow.