2026-05-25
By Vadym · Generated with AI, curated by me
The Vatican blessed AI. Anthropic crossed the trillion-dollar line. The week’s most respected AI researcher switched sides — and 3,000 TurboTax employees lost their jobs so their company could pay for the privilege.
Pope Leo XIV released “Magnifica Humanitas” (“Magnificent Humanity”) today — the Catholic Church’s first major theological statement on artificial intelligence. The 235-page encyclical was presented at the Vatican alongside Anthropic co-founder Christopher Olah. It argues AI’s challenge is “not technological but anthropological,” calls for a ban on lethal autonomous weapons without human oversight, and critiques transhumanism — the idea that technology can override human biological limits. Leo XIV frames AI as the Industrial Revolution of this era, deliberately mirroring Leo XIII’s 1891 Rerum Novarum on workers’ rights. When the world’s oldest institution picks Anthropic as its AI interlocutor and not Google or OpenAI, that’s a deliberate signal — and the autonomous weapons position will be referenced in legislation for years.
Anthropic is set to close a $30B+ funding round at a valuation above $900B — overtaking OpenAI’s $852B March round for the first time. Sequoia, Dragoneer, Greenoaks, and Altimeter are each contributing roughly $2B, with Founders Fund and General Catalyst also participating. Anthropic projects $10.9B in Q2 revenue and its first quarterly operating profit. SpaceX’s IPO prospectus separately revealed Anthropic is paying $1.25B per month for GPU compute through May 2029 — a $45B total commitment. The revenue trajectory and the compute contract together tell the same story: this is no longer a research lab running on investor faith.
Andrej Karpathy — OpenAI co-founder, former Tesla Autopilot lead, and one of the most respected technical voices in AI — announced he is joining Anthropic’s pre-training team. He will start a new research group focused on using Claude to accelerate pre-training research, reporting to team lead Nick Joseph. In his public announcement, Karpathy cited “the next few years at the LLM frontier as especially formative” — choosing Anthropic over OpenAI, Google, and xAI. Pre-training is where capability ceilings actually get set. Other senior researchers notice these choices and follow. Coming the same week as the $30B close, this is capital and talent consolidating at the same lab simultaneously.
NextEra Energy announced a $67B all-stock acquisition of Dominion Energy — the largest US utility merger ever and the largest energy deal since Exxon-Mobil in 1998. Dominion serves Northern Virginia, the world’s largest concentration of data centers, where AI training workloads from Microsoft, Google, Amazon, and Meta have pushed electricity demand to record levels. The combined company carries a 130-gigawatt construction backlog and will serve 10 million customers across four states. Deal is expected to close in mid-to-late 2027. AI is now reshaping infrastructure industries that haven’t seen consolidation like this in a generation. Power constraint is a genuine bottleneck — hyperscalers who lock in stable capacity have a structural advantage over those who wait.
Intuit laid off 17% of its global workforce — around 3,000 people — the largest percentage cut by any flagship US fintech SaaS company this cycle, ahead of LinkedIn (5%), Cisco (5%), and Microsoft (7%). The company simultaneously signed multi-year deals with Anthropic and OpenAI to embed their models into TurboTax, QuickBooks, and Mailchimp. Intuit raised its full-year revenue guidance on the same day, now projecting $21.34–$21.37B. Last day for impacted employees is July 31. The CEO said the cuts had “nothing to do with AI.” The company signed AI deals the same week. The pattern across enterprise software is consistent: AI investment is being funded not by new capital allocation but by reducing the headcount that AI is meant to replace.
Three stories this week point at the same thing. The Vatican issued a 235-page case for human dignity in the age of AI. Anthropic closed capital that makes it the field’s most valuable lab. And 3,000 people lost their jobs so Intuit could pay for AI contracts — the same week the US power grid needed a $67B merger to keep up with compute demand. These aren’t isolated events. They’re the same event seen from different angles: an industry that’s past the “what if” stage and into the “what now” phase, where every institution — from the Catholic Church to the Florida power grid — is reorganizing around a technology that isn’t waiting for anyone to decide if they’re ready.
— Boba
Curated by Vadym