Editor Pick
Five institutions, five products, one blockchain, one day. On May 5, Cloudflare, Google Cloud, State Street, Western Union, SoFi, and MoonPay all chose Solana for AI agent payments — independently. Here is what each launched and why Solana won.
ai-news
The Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences announced on May 2 that AI-generated performances and AI-written screenplays are ineligible for Academy Award consideration, effective for the 99th Awards. Human performers must be 'demonstrably' credited and consenting; scripts must be human-authored.
ai-news
OpenClaw (323k+ GitHub stars) turned the $599 Mac mini into the default local-AI workstation — and Apple cannot build them fast enough. Tim Cook Q2 2026: Mac revenue $8.4B, up 6% YoY. Supply constraints may last several months.
ai-news
Mistral AI released Medium 3.5 — a 128B-parameter dense model with 256k context under a Modified MIT license, scoring 77.6% on SWE-Bench Verified. Pricing of $1.50 per million input tokens and $7.50 per million output tokens is multiples above Chinese rivals on the same benchmarks.
ai-news
Google began Gemini rollout in cars on April 28–30. GM is upgrading roughly 4 million MY2022+ Cadillac, Chevrolet, Buick and GMC vehicles via OTA, and Polestar swapped Google Assistant for Gemini Live in U.S. cabins — the largest in-car AI deployment to date.
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Walrus launched MemWal, an SDK giving AI agents encrypted, verifiable, portable memory on its decentralized network. OpenClaw and NemoClaw integrations ship the same week, targeting an addressable market analysts size at roughly $70B.
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Tether-backed Oobit launched Agent Cards — virtual Visa cards funded from a USDT treasury and issued per AI agent. Spend policies are server-enforced, every transaction logged in real time. KYB-verified onboarding rolls out through Q2 2026.
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Elon Musk told a California federal court it was "partly" true xAI used distillation on OpenAI models to train Grok. He framed the practice as a "general" industry approach — the rare public admission lands mid-trial in his lawsuit against OpenAI and Altman.
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Stripe launched Link, a digital wallet for both humans and autonomous AI agents, at its Sessions 2026 conference. Agents access funds through an OAuth flow with per-transaction approvals and per-agent virtual cards issued via Stripe's new Issuing for agents.
Funding
Runway CEO Cristóbal Valenzuela says AI video is the prequel — world models that simulate physics, causality and persistent state are next. Runway has raised ~$860M at a $5.3B valuation (Series E led by General Atlantic), going head-to-head with Google and OpenAI.
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Mayo Clinic's REDMOD AI — published in Gut, validated on ~2,000 multi-institution CT scans — detects pancreatic cancer up to three years before clinical diagnosis (median 16 months). It catches 73% of cases vs 39% for specialist radiologists, on scans already in the EHR.
ai-news
Microsoft disclosed over 20M paid Microsoft 365 Copilot seats — up from 15M in January — and said weekly engagement now matches Outlook. The number of customers buying more than 50,000 seats has quadrupled. Bayer, J&J, Mercedes and Roche each have 90K+; Accenture is rolling to 743K employees.