Tuesday, June 2, 2026
Older Dispatches — Page 13
No. 18
Anthropic Builds a Think Tank While Fighting the Pentagon in Court
AI Policy··7 minMar 13
Two days after suing the Defense Department over its "supply chain risk" designation, Anthropic launched a new research institute led by co-founder Jack Clark. The timing is not accidental: the company is building its public-benefit argument into an institution precisely as the federal government tries to dismantle its credibility.
No. 17
Perplexity's Agent Strategy: Blocked at the Front Door, Building Through the Back
Industry··7 minMar 13
A federal judge blocked Perplexity's Comet agent from Amazon's site on March 10. Two days later, the company unveiled Personal Computer, a persistent AI agent running locally on a Mac mini. The two events are not coincidental - they define the strategic dilemma at the center of the agentic web.
No. 16
GTC 2026: NVIDIA Is No Longer Just a Chip Company
Industry··7 minMar 12
Jensen Huang's GTC 2026 keynote crystallizes an ambition that has been building for years: NVIDIA wants to own the entire AI infrastructure stack, from silicon to software to agents. Three headline announcements - the Rubin GPU architecture, a Groq-derived inference system, and the NemoClaw enterprise agent platform - make the case in full.
No. 15
Washington Plans to Put AI Chips Behind a Global Licensing Wall
AI Policy··6 minMar 12
The Trump administration is drafting rules that would require a U.S. government license for virtually every overseas sale of advanced AI chips, regardless of the buyer's location. The tiered framework - covering deployments from under 1,000 chips to installations of 200,000 or more - marks a fundamental break from the Biden era's ally-exemption model, and raises questions about whether chip access is becoming a trade lever as much as a security tool.
No. 14
Donald Knuth Says Claude Solved a Math Problem He Could Not
AI Research··7 minMar 11
Donald Knuth's latest paper, "Claude's Cycles," documents an open combinatorics problem solved by Anthropic's Claude Opus 4.6 before Knuth could crack it himself. The episode offers the most credentialed endorsement yet of AI's capacity for genuine mathematical reasoning.
No. 13
OpenAI Brings AI Security In-House With Promptfoo Acquisition
Industry··3 minMar 11
OpenAI is acquiring Promptfoo, an AI security startup whose tools are used by more than a quarter of Fortune 500 companies to test and red-team AI agents. The deal brings Promptfoo's team and technology inside OpenAI's Frontier platform for AI coworkers, signaling that enterprise AI security is becoming a first-party product feature rather than a third-party add-on.