This Week in AI
This week underscored the AI industry’s twin realities: escalating geopolitical tension and unprecedented capital scale. While Anthropic’s clash with the Pentagon highlighted the growing friction between AI safety commitments and government power, OpenAI’s $110B raise showed just how enormous the frontier compute race has become. At the same time, product launches from Google and Perplexity, and workforce cuts at Block, signal a rapid shift toward agentic systems reshaping how companies operate
Anthropic vs. the Pentagon: the “supply-chain risk” fight goes public
Anthropic says the US Defense Department demanded removal of key safeguards (notably around mass domestic surveillance and lethal autonomous weapons), and threatened to label Anthropic a “supply chain risk” if it refused. The dispute has become a flashpoint for how AI vendors set (or lose) red lines when selling to government and defense customers.
Read more:
https://www.anthropic.com/news/statement-department-of-war
https://breakingdefense.com/2026/02/trump-orders-government-dod-to-immediately-cease-use-of-anthropics-tech-amid-ai-fight/
OpenAI lands a staggering $110B funding round to scale compute
OpenAI announced $110B in new investment (led by Amazon, Nvidia, and SoftBank) to fund the compute, distribution, and capital demands of “AI for everyone.” The round deepens infrastructure ties—particularly around large-scale inference capacity—and reinforces how expensive the frontier race has become.
Read more:
https://openai.com/index/scaling-ai-for-everyone/
https://apnews.com/article/a0a915c32b85337d799fe2f9525a932a
Block confirms a >40% workforce reduction as it leans harder into “intelligence tools”
Block disclosed a restructuring plan to cut more than 40% of its workforce, with expected charges of roughly $450M–$500M. It’s one of the clearest examples this week of a major public company explicitly framing headcount compression alongside an “AI-first” operating model shift.
Read more:
https://apnews.com/article/18e00a0b278977b0a87893f55e3db7bb
Google ships new Gemini-era upgrades: Gemini 3.1 Pro and Nano Banana 2
Google rolled out Gemini 3.1 Pro as a stronger “core reasoning” model across its ecosystem, while also launching Nano Banana 2 for faster, higher-quality image generation/editing inside Gemini and other products. The releases underline Google’s push to make “agentic” workflows and high-iteration creative tooling feel native across consumer + dev surfaces.
Read more:
https://blog.google/innovation-and-ai/models-and-research/gemini-models/gemini-3-1-pro/
https://blog.google/innovation-and-ai/technology/ai/nano-banana-2/
