News over the past week continued to underscore how deeply AI now sits at the heart of geopolitics. Trump announced the US AI action plan (more below). US export controls are faltering - $1B of Nvidia chips have already slipped into China since May - while Anthropic is exploring a multi-billion raise from UAE and Qatari sovereign funds. Gulf money is not just another pool of capital; it represents access to cheap energy and a strategic foothold in global compute, potentially shifting leverage in the AI race. At the same time, China’s open-source developer base has overtaken the US (2.2M vs 1.7M), pointing to a structural eastward drift in capability. Meanwhile, API access is being geofenced, and over 500 organisations lobbied Washington on AI in H1, led by OpenAI’s $1.8M spend. The AI arms race is not just about labs and models, but supply chains, regulation, and national alignment.
IPOs / Public
Microsoft launched GitHub Spark; Google launched Opal - both natural-language app-building platforms, thus potential direct challenges to Lovable.
Alphabet lifted 2025 AI capex to $85B (22% of revenue). AI overviews in search reached 2B MAUs; search revenues rose +12% YoY to $54.2B. Gemini now at 450M MAUs.
ServiceNow says gen AI saves $100M a year by halving ticket resolution times. Nadella called Microsoft’s layoffs an “enigma” as AI boosts efficiency.
Big Dogs
OpenAI set to launch GPT-5 in August, with modular task-specific models – likely to be more UX orchestration than monolithic upgrade.
Anthropic is exploring a raise at $150B valuation.
Claude now targets financial services – some of the first major evidence of labs “going vertical”. See the pitch here Anthropic’s FS pitch
Anthropic projects US will need 50GW of extra power for AI by 2028 (almost 2× New York’s summer peak). The Stargate project alone will draw ~4.5GW.
Venture Capital Insights
Europe’s VC direct secondaries market is on track to hit $77.2B (PitchBook) - liquidity constraints are fuelling new exit structures.
Venture Geopolitics
Trump’s AI Action Plan announced which sets out 90+ federal actions across three pillars: speeding innovation, accelerating U.S. data center and chip infrastructure, and leading in global AI diplomacy. Key moves include easing regulation, fast-tracking data center and fab permits, ensuring “free speech” in large models used by government, and packaging U.S. AI systems (hardware + software + standards) for export to allies. This once again frames AI as a strategic export like defence tech - tying VC, startups, and infra directly into U.S. foreign policy. It signals a coming era where VC-backed AI firms are instruments of state power, and where capital flows, alliances, and national security are increasingly intertwined around AI ecosystems.
~$1B worth of Nvidia chips have bypassed sanctions into China since May, exposing loopholes in US export controls (The FT).
Anthropic may raise billions from UAE and Qatar sovereign funds, shifting strategic compute leverage to the Gulf.
China now has 2.2M open-source developers vs 1.7M in the US - signalling a tilt in AI innovation capacity.
Cursor geofenced Claude from China and Hong Kong - APIs are now subject to de facto export controls.
500+ organisations lobbied Washington on AI in H1; OpenAI spent $1.8M - regulatory capture is scaling quickly.
Strategic Sectors
AI
~72% of US teens have used AI “friend” apps - a sign gen AI is embedding itself as a default social layer.
AI 2027 (published April ’25) is a must-read (though I only got around to it this week). Its largely scenario sketching a fictional US lab “OpenBrain” racing China’s “DeepCent”. It anticipates AI-native tooling, security and infrastructure becoming core frontiers, and a shift from apps to ecosystems where APIs encode personal preferences and agent multiplicity replaces single bots. Markets are already pricing elements of this future - with resource inflation on compute, vertical stacks raising early, and bifurcation between “agent” plays and tool augmentation. While speculative, it’s a valuable intellectual exercise to sharpen theses and stress-test assumptions about where disruption will really land.
Climate
Google’s EMEA corp dev team says 50% of its global deals are now in cleantech — targeting early capture of next-gen energy systems.
Crypto
JPMorgan may launch crypto-backed loans in 2026 — a sharp pivot from Dimon’s historic scepticism and a sign of TradFi’s fusion with on-chain finance.