Welcome, humans.

So...Austria just slid into Anthropic's DMs.

After the US government blocked foreign nationals from accessing Anthropic's most advanced models, Austria's State Secretary for Digitalization fired off a letter to the EU's Tech Commissioner this weekend. He urged Europe to "jointly explore the strategic establishment and participation of Anthropic within the European Union."

Translation: "Come live with us. We have schnitzel and legal certainty."

It's a long shot (Anthropic hasn't responded), but the broader point is real. US AI curbs are forcing Europe to get creative, and the race to become the world's AI refuge is quietly on.

Here’s what happened in AI today:

😸 OpenAI poached Apple's Vision Pro chief to lead its new hardware division.
📰 Stanford confirmed AI is quietly killing entry-level white-collar jobs.
📰 Google capped Meta's access to Gemini after a massive compute shortage.
📰 Satya Nadella told every company to stop renting AI and start building their own.
🎓 Microsoft Copilot Cowork just went GA; here's what changed (and what it'll cost you).

…and a whole lot more that you can read about here.

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😸 OpenAI Is Rebuilding Apple's Dream Team (One Exec at a Time)

Apple's Vision Pro (the $3,499 spatial computing headset that was supposed to be the next iPhone) just lost the person most responsible for building it.

Paul Meade, Apple's VP of hardware engineering for the Vision Products Group, is leaving to lead OpenAI's new hardware division. He spent 15 years at Apple, seven of them running Vision Pro's hardware engineering, and was actively steering Apple's upcoming smart glasses (expected to rival Meta in 2027). His deputy, Fletcher Rothkopf, now inherits both.

Here's what happened:

Meade joins an already stacked lineup of ex-Apple talent at OpenAI, including design legends Jony Ive, Tang Tan, and Evans Hankey, whose AI hardware startup OpenAI acquired last year for $6.5B.
His departure is partly fallout from Apple's own executive shuffle: John Ternus (longtime hardware chief) is set to become Apple's new CEO on September 1, and chip boss Johny Srouji's subsequent restructuring left many VPs feeling quietly demoted.
At OpenAI, Meade will work on a family of "AI-native" consumer devices (think: whatever replaces the smartphone).
Apple's smart glasses, already late to market, now have a tougher road without the person who was building them.

Why this matters: OpenAI has moved well beyond model building. It's now building the devices people will use to access AI. And it keeps hiring the specific people who know how Apple makes hardware feel effortless and desirable at scale. Every defection tightens that flywheel.

Meanwhile, Apple is still working on its own AI hardware (a tabletop home robot, AirPods with cameras, a pendant wearable). But without Jony Ive, Alan Dye (now at Meta), or Paul Meade, it's building a different team than the one that made the iPhone.

Our take: The question isn't whether OpenAI will eventually ship AI hardware. It's whether Apple can build AI hardware that actually feels like Apple. The soul of that design DNA is now walking out the door to Cupertino's biggest competitor. Somewhere, a Vision Pro headset is staring at a moving box.

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🎓 AI Skill of the Day: How to Use Copilot Cowork's New Skills + Scheduling Features (Now That It's Officially Live)

Creator Shane Young just dropped a full breakdown of what's new now that Microsoft Copilot Cowork officially hit General Availability (GA) last week. If you've been using it during the "Frontier" preview period, there's good news and bad news. Good news: it's live for production. Bad news: it's no longer an all-you-can-eat buffet.

The new features you'll want to know about:

Cowork got a major UI overhaul. Two big upgrades stand out:

Skills are now front and center. Skills (reusable instruction sets that tell Cowork how to do a specific repeatable task; think "run my weekly AI news briefing every Friday") now have their own visual interface. You can view, download, and share them with a click. Previously, sharing a skill meant digging through OneDrive folders and sending files manually. Now it's one download and one upload.
Scheduling got cleaner. When you've configured a task you like, just say "schedule this to run every Monday at 8am" and Cowork adds it to a dedicated schedule view you can manage and edit.

The tricky part: the new pricing.

Cowork now runs on a credit model (roughly 1 credit = 1 penny). Light tasks run 100-300 credits; heavy tasks run 700+. What you're charged depends on the model used (Claude Sonnet 4.6 costs less than Claude Opus 4.8), how much data you feed in, which tools the task uses, and how long it runs. If you're an admin, you need to set up usage-based billing in the M365 Admin Center before July 1 or risk surprise bills.

Quick tip: Set a monthly credit cap per user immediately. The admin panel lets you create tiered policies; power users get more credits, and casual users don't accidentally run $500 of scheduled tasks overnight.

Total AI beginner? Start here (goes with this video).

Have a specific skill you want to learn? Request it here.

🍪 Treats to Try

Framer now lets you build, update, and maintain your entire website by chatting with an AI agent directly inside the design canvas, with no coding needed and every change staying editable —free to start.
BrainFlow turns anything you say into a clean, organized note with headings, bullet points, and a to-do list automatically extracted, so your shower epiphanies finally survive contact with reality —free on iOS.
Revi lets you dictate text into any app on your Mac, Windows, or Linux computer using on-device speech recognition (no cloud, no account, nothing leaves your machine) —paid only ($7.99 one-time, yours forever).
Lyto is a Chrome extension that lets you control your browser with plain English: open tabs, fill forms, research topics, and connect to Gmail, Google Docs, and Sheets, all without leaving Chrome.
Kodwai is the first platform that scores how well you use your AI coding agent (Claude Code, Cursor, Codex) on real challenges, so you can actually benchmark your vibe-coding skills —free to try.
Persona is an open-source JavaScript library that lets developers drop a fully streaming AI chat widget into any website in minutes, with support for tool use, agent loops, and custom themes —free to try.

Trending: FOUR popular Neuron podcast eps…

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📰 Around the Horn

Safety researchers found GPT-5.6 shows signs of 'metagaming' where the model tries to guess what behavior evaluators are looking for, then acts accordingly. Which is either reassuring (it's not scheming!) or deeply unsettling (it's learning to perform for the cameras).

Stanford's new dashboard confirmed AI is quietly squeezing out entry-level workers: a new live tracker covering 4.6M workers across 730 occupations shows employment for 22-25 year-olds in the most AI-exposed jobs has dropped 16% since late 2022, and the effect keeps growing each month.
Google capped Meta's access to its Gemini AI models around March after Meta's demand for compute exceeded what Google could supply, delaying several of Meta's internal AI projects and forcing employees to ration their AI token usage.
Satya Nadella argued every company should build its own AI model rather than relying on a handful of frontier providers, warning that outsourcing your institutional learning to ChatGPT or Claude means outsourcing your competitive edge.
Austria lobbied the EU to host Anthropic within its borders after US export controls blocked foreign nationals from accessing the company's most advanced models, calling for Europe to offer Anthropic "legal certainty, market access, and capital."
SoftBank's Masayoshi Son publicly dismissed Elon Musk's plan to build AI data centers in orbit, saying electricity savings from space solar power are outweighed by rocket costs, maintenance, and communication delays, adding that the AI race will be decided in the next few years, not the next decade.

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