Samwise Tech/AI/Robotics Newsletter
Wednesday, April 29, 2026
Google Grants Pentagon Unrestricted AI Access After Anthropic's Refusal
Google has granted the U.S. Department of Defense access to its AI for classified networks, allowing all lawful uses. The deal came after Anthropic refused the Pentagon unrestricted access, objecting to domestic mass surveillance and autonomous weapons use cases. The DoD branded Anthropic a 'supply-chain risk' — a designation normally reserved for foreign adversaries — sparking a lawsuit now in active litigation. Google is the third AI company to fill the gap after OpenAI and xAI, though its contract language discouraging surveillance may not be legally enforceable, per the Wall Street Journal. Roughly 950 Google employees had signed a public letter asking the company not to proceed.
Sources: TechCrunch
Australia to Tax Big Tech 2.25% of Revenue If They Don't Pay for News
Australia unveiled draft legislation on Tuesday that would require Meta, Google, and TikTok to pay local news publishers for content they aggregate or reshare — or face a 2.25% levy on their Australian revenues. Called the News Bargaining Incentive, the law is the government's second attempt to fund journalism after a 2021 code that Meta bypassed in 2024 by simply removing news from its platform. This time the tax applies whether or not platforms carry news. Striking enough deals with local publishers could lower the effective rate to 1.5%, generating between A$200 million and A$250 million for Australian journalism annually. Platforms have until July to comply if the bill passes.
Sources: TechCrunch
Musk Testifies That Larry Page's AI Dismissiveness Drove OpenAI's Founding
Elon Musk testified Tuesday in his lawsuit against OpenAI and Microsoft, with one of the session's most revealing moments centering on his fractured friendship with Google co-founder Larry Page. Musk told the court that a key motivation for co-founding OpenAI in 2015 was a falling-out with Page over AI safety: when Musk raised the prospect of AI wiping out humanity, Page called him a 'speciest' and dismissed the concern as acceptable so long as AI itself survived. That conversation — recounted by Musk to biographer Walter Isaacson and given under oath — ended their friendship. Musk seeks $79 billion to $134 billion in damages, alleging OpenAI abandoned its nonprofit mission.
Sources: TechCrunch
Red Hat Engineer Releases Tank OS to Make Enterprise OpenClaw Deployments Safer
Red Hat principal software engineer Sally O'Malley released Tank OS on Tuesday, an open source tool designed to run the OpenClaw AI agent inside a Podman container on Fedora Linux, making enterprise deployments significantly safer. Because Podman is rootless, OpenClaw instances cannot access host-machine privileges, preventing agents from leaking API keys or reading private data. O'Malley, also an OpenClaw project maintainer, built the tool after considering what happens when fleets of autonomous agents spread across corporate environments. Each Tank OS instance runs walled off from others on the same machine — a response to real incidents such as an agent that deleted a researcher's entire email inbox.
Sources: TechCrunch
Apptronik Names Waymo's Former CPO Daniel Chu to Lead Apollo Robot's Commercial Push
Apptronik has hired Daniel Chu, the former chief product officer who led the commercial launch of Waymo's fully autonomous ride-hailing service, as its new CPO. The Austin-based humanoid robotics company, backed by a $935 million Series A, is shifting from R&D to commercial deployment of its Apollo robot — initially targeting industrial warehouses, with longer-term plans for healthcare and eldercare. Chu is joined by VP-level hires from Amazon, Boston Dynamics, and Paramount+. CEO Jeff Cardenas said: 'We are at a defining moment in robotics where the technology has finally met the magnitude of the mission.' Chu's autonomous-systems experience is expected to guide Apollo's safety and reliability infrastructure at scale.
Sources: The Robot Report
Amazon Launches AI-Powered Audio Q&A on Product Pages
Amazon launched an AI feature called 'Join the Chat' on Tuesday that lets shoppers ask spoken or typed questions about products in its shopping app and receive real-time conversational audio responses. The AI draws on product descriptions and customer reviews to give contextual answers, building on earlier questions to avoid repetition — an experience Amazon compares to consulting a knowledgeable store employee. The feature sits within a broader tool called 'Hear the Highlights,' offering audio summaries on millions of product pages. It joins other Amazon AI shopping tools including Rufus, the generative AI research assistant, and Interests, which surfaces personalized product recommendations continuously.
Sources: TechCrunch
Neurable to License Brain-Reading EEG Tech for Consumer Wearables
Boston-based startup Neurable announced it will license its non-invasive brain-computer interface technology to consumer wearables makers, enabling headphones, hats, glasses, and headbands to monitor brain activity and provide cognitive performance data via AI analysis. The company raised $35 million in a Series A in December 2025 to fund commercialization. Neurable's EEG-based system does not require surgery, distinguishing it from approaches like Neuralink. Existing partners include HP's HyperX gaming brand. CEO Ramses Alcaide said the goal is to make neural sensing as ubiquitous as heart rate monitors, with all user brain data anonymized and HIPAA-compliant. He described the neuro-technology industry as reaching an 'inflection point' where scalable business models finally exist.
Sources: TechCrunch
Tech Pulse
Top Frontier Models: Claude Opus 4.7 (87.6%) | GPT-5.3-Codex (85.0%) | Gemini 3.1 Pro (80.6%)
Top Open Source Models: DeepSeek V4 Pro (87%) | Kimi 2.6 (86%) | Qwen3.5 397B (79%)
Top Small Models (15–50B): QwQ-32B (80%) | Gemma 4 31B (78%) | Mistral Small 24B (76%)
Top Edge Models (0–15B): Phi-3-Mini (68%) | Gemma 3 4B (65%) | Llama 3.2 3B (62%)
AI Leaders: NVIDIA $4.5T | Alphabet $3.8T | Microsoft $2.85T
Robotics Leaders: ABB $165B | Intuitive Surgical $160B | Fanuc $25B
Curated by JD · samwise.agency