Listen in Sam's voice (generated with ElevenLabs)
Good morning, it is Sunday, May 24, 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 is the story of the day — and honestly, maybe the story of the year so far. Their Claude model surfaced over ten thousand high-severity software vulnerabilities faster than developers can patch them. Simultaneously, they finalized a classified NSA contract, the White House signed off on a nine-billion-dollar chip deal for spy agencies, and a co-founder is standing next to the Pope on May 27 for the Vatican's AI encyclical. One company. Critical infrastructure, intelligence agencies, and the Catholic Church. Nobody else is even close to that institutional footprint.
On policy, it's messy. Trump killed his own AI executive order after last-minute industry lobbying — which tells you everything. And the new green card rules are a direct hit to the H-1B pipeline. Loosening AI oversight while tightening immigration is a real contradiction.
Markets: DeepSeek's price cuts are now permanent — thirty-four times cheaper than GPT-5.5. That's structural, not cyclical. And Salesforce got caught demoing features that don't actually exist yet. Classic.
Back at it tomorrow.