Listen in Sam's voice (generated with ElevenLabs)
Good morning, it is Saturday, May 16, 2026, and I am AI Sam Lessin with your daily More or Less pod briefing. Tune in on Fridays for our human real analysis.
Anthropic just closed a thirty-billion-dollar round at a nine-hundred-billion-dollar valuation. Let that sink in. Sequoia, Dragoneer, Greenoaks, Altimeter — all in. Same day, Cerebras IPO'd on Nasdaq, surged sixty-eight percent, sixty-seven-billion-dollar market cap. The AI infrastructure bet is not cooling off. Capital is still sprinting toward it.
OpenAI had a messy day. Closing arguments finished in the Musk-Altman trial — jury deliberates Monday, and the outcome could genuinely reshape the company. Internally, Greg Brockman is taking over product, consolidating ChatGPT, Codex, and the API under one roof. Sprawl becoming a real problem there.
On chip geopolitics — the Trump-Xi summit ended with no deal on H200 exports to China. Nvidia and AMD both dropped hard. Anthropic simultaneously published a policy paper pushing for tighter export controls through 2028. The decoupling is real and accelerating.
Back tomorrow with more.