• Internal chats: in March, xAI offered employees $420 in exchange for completed tax filings as training data for Grok, but the bonuses haven't been paid out (Carmen Arroyo/Bloomberg)
• Amazon's Alexa+ now produces AI-generated "podcasts" on various topics in the US, featuring chats between two AI "co-hosts", using content from media outlets (Todd Spangler/Variety)
• Arkham: Iran's largest crypto exchange, Nobitex, processed $2.3B+ since 2023 via Tron and BNB Chain, including $23M+ since the Iran war started in February (Reuters)
• Iranian media: Iran launches "Hormuz Safe", a Bitcoin-backed insurance service for shipping companies transiting the Strait of Hormuz; ~1,500 ships are trapped (Golnar Motevalli/Bloomberg)
• The Vatican says Anthropic co-founder Christopher Olah will join Pope Leo on May 25 to launch the pope's first encyclical, setting out his views on the AI age (Flavia Rotondi/Bloomberg)
• Decart, which offers real-time generative video and GPU optimization tech, raised $300M at a ~$4B valuation, up from $3.1B after raising $153M in August 2025 (Robbie Whelan/Wall Street Journal)
• Strategy acquired 24,869 bitcoin for ~$2.01B at an $80,985 average price from May 11 to May 17, taking its holdings to 843,738 BTC, or 4%+ of the total supply (James Hunt/The Block)
• Sources: competition for Google's TPUs among its employees and researchers intensified as it prioritizes cloud customers and flagship AI products over research (Julia Love/Bloomberg)
• Dust, which helps enterprises design and deploy specialized AI agents that work alongside humans, raised a $40M Series B led by Abstract and Sequoia (Chris Metinko/Axios)
• Steve Bannon and 60+ Trump allies sign a Humans First-led letter urging Trump to mandate government testing and approval of powerful AI models before release (Ashley Gold/Axios)
• How gambling companies like FanDuel and DraftKings, as well as Meta and a16z's founders, are pouring millions into state-level election campaigns via super PACs (Emily Birnbaum/Bloomberg)
• Eric Schmidt faced loud boos during his University of Arizona commencement speech while discussing "rational" fears over the impact of AI and automation on jobs (Lauren Edmonds/Business Insider)
• Baidu reports Q1 revenue down 1.1% YoY to ~$4.7B, above ~$4.5B est., and net income down 55% YoY to ~$506.6M, above ~$462.5M est., amid a slow AI payoff (Tracy Qu/Wall Street Journal)
• A college senior at Stanford describes how AI has changed classes: cheating using AI "has become omnipresent" with students "fudging just about everything" (Theo Baker/New York Times)
• How Amazon, which took a measured tone on AI, went from an AI also-ran to a real contender, thanks to $200B in spending, a bet on custom chips, and savvy deals (Tim Higgins/Wall Street Journal)
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