Grant Harvey

Check out our digest of AI Skills from the month of May, as well as bonus skills that we haven't featured in the daily newsletter yet.

Anthropic shipped Natural Language Autoencoders that translate Claude's hidden activations into readable English (and caught Claude Mythos Preview internally plotting to avoid detection on a training task); Google DeepMind detailed AlphaEvolve's real-world impact across genomics, quantum physics, and TPU design; the EU reached political agreement to simplify AI Act rules and ban nudification apps; the Trump administration set a China trip with Nvidia, Apple, and Exxon CEOs while the Pentagon's botched Alibaba/Baidu blacklist roiled US-China tech ties; Cloudflare cut 1,100 jobs (20%) in an AI-first pivot.

Anthropic threw its biggest developer day of the year and signed a SpaceX compute deal worth all of Colossus 1; DeepSeek lined up its first-ever fundraise at up to a $50B valuation; Apple paid $250M to settle the AI Siri it never shipped; Samsung joined the $1T club; plus 100+ more stories.

A Cape Breton fiddler sued Google for $1.5M after AI Overview falsely flagged him as a sex offender; OpenAI considered (then rejected) an Alphabet-style spinout for its robotics and hardware divisions; Nature retracted a flagship paper on ChatGPT in education; Microsoft's "Webwright" research framework set SOTA on long-horizon web agent tasks; and Anthropic shipped keyless authentication for the Claude API.

The White House started considering pre-release vetting of AI models; Anthropic and OpenAI both married private equity on the same day; Anthropic CCO Paul Smith launched a separate $1.5B mid-market spinout; DeepSeek's V4-Pro became the first Chinese model at frontier parity; Mayo Clinic's AI spotted pancreatic cancer up to three years before diagnosis.

At Sequoia AI Ascent 2026, Boris Cherny, Greg Brockman, and Andrej Karpathy each made a version of the same claim about software development. The interesting work is in their disagreements about what now becomes the bottleneck.

The Pentagon signed AI deployment deals with 8 vendors and left Anthropic out, Microsoft 365 E7 with Agent 365 went generally available, Meta bought a humanoid robotics startup, Mistral shipped Medium 3.5 with remote agents, Grok 4.3 added voice cloning, and a Mayo Clinic AI flagged pancreatic cancer 3 years before diagnosis.