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Thursday, April 23, 2026

Good morning. Anthropic's secondary shares cross the trillion-dollar mark, the Senate declines for the fifth time to ask what we are doing in Iran, the James Webb telescope finds water ice where there ought to be ammonia, and the Michael Jackson biopic — starring, as the title role, his nephew — opens tomorrow. Here's what happened.

AI Tech News

Google splits its silicon in two, each half destined to do only half the work

Google arrived at its Cloud Next conference on Tuesday bearing gifts, chief among them a pair of new processors saddled with the slightly confusing names TPU 8t and TPU 8i — the former designed to train artificial intelligences, the latter designed to run them. For the first time, Google has divided its silicon in two, apparently on the theory that one chip doing everything was, rather like a butler expected to both iron the trousers and polish the silverware, a reasonable idea in principle but unsustainable in practice.

The 8t will reportedly cut model training from months to weeks; the 8i promises eighty percent more inference per dollar than its predecessor, which is impressive until one recalls that the predecessor arrived only rather recently. Both will ship later this year, which in the current AI-industrial complex means any minute now and also quite possibly already. Google, having rented enormous stacks of these machines to OpenAI, Meta, and Anthropic, finds itself in the agreeable position of selling shovels in a gold rush whose participants cannot, as yet, agree on what year it is.

Source: CNBC

Anthropic's secondary shares cross the trillion-dollar line; OpenAI looks on politely

On the private marketplaces where early backers sell their shares in companies that have not yet gone public, Anthropic's implied valuation ticked past one trillion dollars this week, eclipsing its rival OpenAI by a margin that is, by any historical measure, faintly ridiculous. A broker at Rainmaker Securities told reporters he had been offered shares at $960 billion a few weeks earlier and found the figure unthinkable, which makes the current figure unthinkable-squared — a concept the mathematically inclined may enjoy and the rest of us may simply nod at politely.

The proximate cause, we are told, is Claude Code, a coding assistant that has singlehandedly dragged Anthropic's annualized revenue from $9 billion at the end of 2025 to $30 billion by March — a trajectory usually associated with small countries discovering oil. That a secondary-market valuation reflects neither what the company could raise in a primary round nor what a future IPO would fetch is the sort of fine print investors customarily notice only after cashing the cheque.

Source: TradingKey

US Politics

The Senate declines, for the fifth time, to ask what it is doing in Iran

Presented on Wednesday with Senator Tammy Baldwin's war-powers resolution, which would have limited the President's ability to continue waging war on Iran, the Senate voted 51 to 46 against it — making this the fifth such rejection since March, and giving the phrase "just checking in" an entirely new dimension. Senator Rand Paul crossed the aisle in favor; Senator John Fetterman crossed the aisle against; everybody else stayed precisely where one would expect to find them, which was not, one suspects, the exercise Baldwin had in mind.

Under the War Powers Act, the administration has until May 1 to secure congressional authorization for a conflict that began on February 28, leaving roughly a week for the Senate to find a sixth occasion on which to not quite address the matter. The resolution has, with impressive consistency, failed to find fifty-one supporters on every attempt — a streak that suggests either considerable discipline or, perhaps, a certain disinclination to look under the hood.

Source: The Hill

The White House discovers, to some astonishment, that China has been copying its homework

In a memo circulated Thursday, Michael Kratsios, the director of the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy, accused China of "industrial-scale" theft of American AI intellectual property and promised a forthcoming crackdown, apparently having been informed of this arrangement only recently. That China has been copying American research, software, and occasionally entire databases for the better part of two decades is a fact so well-established it was nearly boring; the administration, however, seems to have arrived at it with the fresh enthusiasm of a man discovering Tuesday.

What the crackdown will actually consist of remains sketchy — previous crackdowns having involved chip-export controls, indictments of individual researchers, and strongly worded letters, with results ranging from modest inconvenience to none detectable. One imagines that somewhere in a Beijing ministry, a memo of its own is already being composed, expressing grave concern about something-or-other.

Source: U.S. News & World Report

Geopolitics

The Lebanon ceasefire holds, except for the building the journalists were in

Amal Khalil, a reporter for the Beirut daily Al-Akhbar who had covered southern Lebanon since the war with Hezbollah began in 2023, was killed Wednesday in an Israeli strike on the village of at-Tiri, despite a ten-day U.S.-brokered ceasefire meant to remain in effect until Sunday. An initial strike hit a car; a follow-up strike hit the building where Khalil and her photographer, Zeinab Faraj, had taken shelter; a further strike damaged the road by which ambulances would ordinarily have reached them. Faraj was eventually evacuated and underwent surgery.

Lebanon's prime minister has called the killing a "clear-cut war crime"; Al Jazeera reports that Khalil had previously received threats on WhatsApp from an Israeli phone number, warning her to stop reporting. A ceasefire that was brokered to halt killings, and has so far managed to not quite halt them, is the sort of thing diplomats call "a setback" and everybody else calls what it is.

Source: Al Jazeera

Iran discovers that running a toll road pays rather well, geopolitics notwithstanding

Iran's parliament, having spent the last seven weeks watching American warships turn back oil tankers bound for its ports, has begun levying tolls on vessels transiting the Strait of Hormuz — an arrangement that, by official estimates, may yield as much as twenty million dollars a day from oil tankers alone. This is, one pauses to note, the turnpike model applied to roughly a third of the world's seaborne crude, and it appears to be working rather better than anything else tried in the region since February.

U.S. Central Command, for its part, reports having forced thirty-one vessels to turn back since the blockade of Iranian ports began on April 13, while some 230 loaded oil tankers reportedly loiter in the Gulf awaiting clarity. Iran's parliament speaker has declared that reopening the Strait is impossible so long as the blockade stands; Washington has declared that the blockade will stand so long as the Strait remains shut; and the oil tankers, bobbing gently, have declared nothing at all, having no mouths.

Source: CNBC

Economy

ServiceNow beats estimates, loses a fifth of its value, and other modern paradoxes

ServiceNow reported first-quarter revenue of $3.77 billion on Wednesday evening, edging past the $3.74 billion consensus estimate — a feat that would once have earned it polite applause and instead earned it an eighteen-percent sell-off by Thursday morning. IBM, for its part, beat on both top and bottom lines, maintained its full-year guidance, and was rewarded with a nine-percent decline. Between them, the two firms dragged the software sector down roughly five percent, which is the sort of day one does not, as they say, tape into the scrapbook.

The cause, analysts will tell anyone willing to listen, is growing investor anxiety that AI assistants from firms like Anthropic are quietly eating the enterprise-software lunch. That Anthropic, two stories ago, crossed a one-trillion-dollar secondary valuation on the same day is presumably a coincidence, though not, one feels, an especially persuasive one.

Source: CNBC

Oil approaches a hundred dollars; markets, by and large, dislike the idea

West Texas Intermediate crude leapt nearly four percent on Thursday to cross $96.50 a barrel, while Brent broke above $105, after reports that American forces had intercepted three more Iranian oil tankers in Asian waters — a development that furnished investors with the unwelcome reminder that the Iran war is, in fact, still happening. The S&P 500 closed down 0.41 percent, the Nasdaq shed 0.89 percent, and the Dow surrendered 179.71 points, which is to say: a full-course meal of mild discouragement, politely served.

Asia took the news with mixed manners. Japan's Nikkei finished 0.75 percent lower; South Korea's Kospi, inexplicably, touched an all-time intraday high before settling up 0.90 percent, buoyed by first-quarter GDP growth that exceeded expectations for reasons economists have so far managed to describe only vaguely. The world, it turns out, can be several things at once — cheerful in Seoul, dour on Wall Street, and moderately alarmed in the Straits — all before lunch.

Source: CNBC

Science

JWST finds clouds where there ought to be ammonia; astronomers tidy their models

The James Webb Space Telescope, in the course of staring intently at a large and cold planet called Epsilon Indi Ab — roughly 7.6 Jupiter masses, rather less than 300 Kelvin, and considered by exoplanet standards something of a neighbour — has detected thick, patchy water-ice clouds where theoretical models had confidently predicted ammonia. It is the first such finding on a world so distant, and it means, as findings like these generally do, that a rather considerable number of papers written by rather considerable people now require what is diplomatically known as "revision."

The lead author, Elisabeth Matthews of the Max Planck Institute for Astronomy, suggests the ammonia is likely still there, merely concealed beneath the cloud deck — a hypothesis scientists may pursue for years, possibly decades, possibly until someone builds a better telescope and the whole question begins again. The universe, one is reminded, does not read briefing notes.

Source: ScienceDaily

A virus hidden inside a bacterium may explain colon cancer, which is rather too much plot

Researchers at the University of Southern Denmark announced on Wednesday that they had identified a virus nesting inside Fusobacterium nucleatum — a gut bacterium long linked to colorectal cancer — and that this virus, rather than the bacterium itself, may be the party quietly responsible for the tumours. It is an arrangement reminiscent of a Russian doll, except that the innermost doll is doing something alarming, and the outer dolls happen to be living inside us all.

The finding, if it survives further scrutiny, could redraw both the screening and the treatment of colorectal cancer by shifting attention from the bacterium (which most people carry harmlessly) to its viral passenger (which, it now seems, most people do not). That medicine should discover, in 2026, that a well-known disease may be caused by something hiding inside something else hiding inside ourselves is the sort of news one feels ought to be delivered with a drink in hand.

Source: ScienceDaily

Culture

The Peabodys go to a hockey romance, an alien hive-mind, and a hospital

The Peabody Awards announced their 2026 winners on Thursday, bestowing statues on, among others, Vince Gilligan's post-human hive-mind fable Pluribus; Canada's gay-hockey romance Heated Rivalry; the real-time medical procedural The Pitt; and Andor, a programme about the Rebel Alliance that somehow manages to take itself seriously. Thirty-four works were chosen from more than a thousand entries, in categories ranging from entertainment to interactive media — which is either admirably ecumenical or a sign that no one can any longer agree on what television is.

Heated Rivalry, in particular, was singled out for making "arguably the biggest cultural impact in television this year," which is a rather striking claim to level at a show adapted from a romance novel about two men who play hockey. The Peabody, as ever, rewards the programme one did not expect — a principle it has upheld with admirable consistency since roughly the Eisenhower administration.

Source: Variety

The Michael Jackson biopic arrives, starring, for better or worse, his nephew

"Michael," Antoine Fuqua's long-awaited biographical film about Michael Jackson, opens in cinemas on Friday, with the title role played by Jaafar Jackson — the late singer's nephew — in what can only be described as the most literal interpretation of "family resemblance" yet committed to film. Early reviews are the customary mixture of fascinated, scandalised, and occasionally both at once, depending on whether one's chief interest is music, history, or litigation.

That the Jackson estate both financed the picture and retained considerable creative input is a matter of public record; how this has shaped the film's handling of the more complicated passages of its subject's life is a question audiences will shortly have the opportunity to answer for themselves. The moonwalk, we are assured, is preserved faithfully.

Source: ABC News

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Google splits its chips in two, Anthropic crosses a trillion