Samwise Tech/AI/Robotics Newsletter
Tuesday, April 28, 2026
Microsoft and OpenAI Scrap Exclusivity Clause, Opening OpenAI to Any Cloud Provider Through 2032
Microsoft and OpenAI on Monday announced a sweeping overhaul of their partnership, dismantling the exclusivity agreement that had bound the two companies since 2019. Under the new terms, valid through 2032, Microsoft receives a nonexclusive license to OpenAI IP — freeing OpenAI to serve customers via Amazon Web Services and Google Cloud. The restructuring was triggered by OpenAI’s $50 billion Amazon investment deal, which created a contractual conflict. Microsoft, which holds approximately 27% of OpenAI’s for-profit entity, will no longer pay revenue share to OpenAI, while OpenAI’s payments to Microsoft continue through 2030 under a cap.
Sources: TechCrunch
Google Commits Up to $40 Billion to Anthropic in AI’s Largest Single Investment
Google’s parent company Alphabet committed up to $40 billion in Anthropic on Thursday, the largest single investment in an AI company to date. Alphabet will immediately deploy $10 billion at a $350 billion valuation for Anthropic, with the remaining $30 billion contingent on the startup meeting undisclosed performance targets. The announcement follows Anthropic’s limited release of Mythos, its most powerful model yet, and a separate $5 billion commitment from Amazon, part of an agreement under which Anthropic is expected to spend up to $100 billion on compute capacity. Anthropic’s annualized revenue surpassed $30 billion by early April 2026.
Sources: TechCrunch
China Orders Meta to Unwind $2 Billion Manus Acquisition in AI Geopolitics Escalation
China’s National Development and Reform Commission ordered Meta to fully unwind its $2 billion acquisition of Manus, a Singapore-based AI agent startup, after a months-long regulatory probe. Manus was founded by Chinese engineers who relocated to Singapore before Meta announced the deal in December 2025. Beijing’s decision, citing national security concerns over Chinese AI talent and intellectual property flowing to an American company, marks one of the most significant cross-border tech interventions since U.S.–China tensions over semiconductor exports began. Meta faces the prospect of losing a key AI agent platform as competition in autonomous AI systems intensifies.
Sources: TechCrunch
DeepSeek V4 Arrives with Near-Frontier Intelligence at One-Sixth the Cost of Claude Opus 4.7
China’s DeepSeek launched preview versions of its V4 model family — including V4 Flash and V4 Pro — this week, 484 days after the V3 release. The 1.6-trillion-parameter mixture-of-experts model, released under a commercially permissive MIT License, delivers near-state-of-the-art performance across reasoning, knowledge, and agentic tasks while running at approximately one-sixth the API cost of Anthropic’s Claude Opus 4.7 and OpenAI’s GPT-5.5. On several benchmarks, V4 Pro matches or surpasses those frontier models. The launch intensifies pressure on American AI labs to compete on efficiency, not just capability, as open-weight models close the performance gap.
Sources: VentureBeat
OpenAI Reported to Be Developing AI-Agent Smartphone with MediaTek and Qualcomm
OpenAI is developing a smartphone in partnership with chip manufacturers MediaTek and Qualcomm, with Luxshare acting as co-design and manufacturing partner, according to industry analyst Ming-Chi Kuo. The device is designed around AI agents rather than traditional apps — marking a fundamental rethinking of the mobile operating system. OpenAI Chief Global Affairs Officer Chris Lehane confirmed the company is on track to announce its first hardware product in the second half of 2026, though earlier reports speculated the product could be AI-powered earbuds. The smartphone initiative would place OpenAI in direct competition with Apple, Google, and Samsung in the consumer device market.
Sources: TechCrunch
FTC: AI-Enabled Social Media Scams Cost Americans $2.1 Billion in 2025
Social media scams cost Americans $2.1 billion in 2025 — an eightfold increase and more than any other contact method used by fraudsters — according to a Federal Trade Commission report released Monday. The FTC analyzed complaint data across all 50 states, finding investment and impersonation schemes drove the most significant losses. Facebook and Instagram were the most commonly identified contact platforms. The sharp rise coincides with the widespread availability of generative AI tools that make it easier and cheaper to create convincing fake profiles, voices, and promotional content, raising questions about platform accountability for AI-assisted fraud at scale.
Sources: TechCrunch
Meta Reserves 1 Gigawatt of Space-Based Solar Power to Fuel AI Data Centers
Meta has signed a capacity reservation agreement with startup Overview Energy for up to 1 gigawatt of power transmitted from satellites to ground-based solar farms. Overview’s technology uses a wide infrared beam to power terrestrial solar infrastructure at night, sidestepping safety and regulatory hurdles associated with high-power laser or microwave transmission. The company has demonstrated ground transmission from aircraft and plans a low-Earth-orbit satellite test by January 2028. The deal highlights how AI data centers’ escalating power demands are forcing hyperscalers toward unconventional solutions, as global AI infrastructure spending is projected to exceed $650 billion in 2026 alone.
Sources: TechCrunch
Tech Pulse
Top Frontier Models (SWE-Bench Verified): Claude Opus 4.7 (87.6%) | GPT-5.3-Codex (85.0%) | Gemini 3.1 Pro (80.6%)
Top Open Source Models (SWE-Bench): MiniMax M2.5 (80.2%) | Kimi K2.5 (MMLU 92.0%) | DeepSeek V4 Pro (MIT, near-frontier)
Top Small Models (15–50B): Qwen 3.5 32B | Llama 4 Scout (17B active) | Mistral Small 4 (24B)
Top Edge Models (0–15B): Qwen 3 7B (HumanEval 76.0%) | Llama 3.3 8B (MMLU 73.0%) | Phi-4-mini (3.8B, strong reasoning)
AI Leaders: NVIDIA $5.26T | Alphabet $3.89T | Microsoft $3.83T
Robotics Leaders: Intuitive Surgical $156B | Figure AI $39B (private est.) | ABB Robotics div. $5.4B
Curated by JD · samwise.agency
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