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Monday, April 28, 2026

Good morning — a mechanical engineer attended the Correspondents’ Dinner with a shotgun, Anthropic has quietly overtaken OpenAI in annualized revenue while both parties contemplate going public, and scientists have determined that humanity evolved not from a single dignified ancestor but from a loosely connected web of strangers who kept finding each other. Here’s what happened.

AI Tech News

Anthropic Overtakes OpenAI in Revenue, and Both Parties Are Now Apparently Going Public

Anthropic, which began 2025 with $1 billion in annualized revenue and ended it rather more energetically, has surpassed OpenAI in revenue — clocking $30 billion to OpenAI’s $25 billion — a reversal of fortune so swift that the analysts who had arranged the field in the opposite order have spent the intervening weeks revising their forecasts in the manner of people hoping no one saved the earlier versions. OpenAI, for its part, remains extraordinarily well-funded, having closed a $110 billion round in February at a valuation of $840 billion and targeting a public listing by Q4 2026; Anthropic, not to be outdone, is evaluating an IPO as early as October, with secondary market valuations having drifted toward $1 trillion, which is the sort of number that tends to produce a certain philosophical looseness in those handling it. Both companies have spent the intervening years insisting they are different from each other in important ways, a distinction that the markets appear to find entirely beside the point. The race, at any rate, is now considerably more interesting than it was.

Source: TradingKey

The Protocol That Ate the AI Industry: MCP Crosses 97 Million Installs

Anthropic’s Model Context Protocol — the technical specification that determines how AI agents connect to external tools, APIs, databases, and the rest of the digital infrastructure they require to be genuinely useful — has crossed 97 million installs, with every major AI provider now shipping compatible tooling and the whole arrangement having become, in the space of roughly a year, the default mechanism by which agents reach out and touch things. This is the sort of outcome that standards bodies usually require a decade of working groups and an interminable series of consensus-building meetings to produce, and Anthropic achieved it apparently without holding a single one. That a single company’s proposed plumbing has become everyone’s plumbing is either a testament to good engineering or a reflection of the industry’s profound collective relief at not having to design plumbing themselves; one suspects the latter played a larger role than anyone is likely to admit.

Source: LLM Stats

US Politics

A Man With a Shotgun Attended the Correspondents’ Dinner, Which Was Not on the Programme

Cole Tomas Allen, a 31-year-old mechanical engineer from Torrance, California — a man possessed of degrees from Caltech and a subsequent master’s in computer science, which suggests that the evening was not the product of an unlettered mind — charged through a security checkpoint at the Washington Hilton on Saturday armed with a shotgun, a handgun, and several knives, in what authorities have described as an attempt to assassinate administration officials at the White House Correspondents’ Dinner. The president and Mrs. Trump were evacuated safely, a Secret Service officer was struck but protected by a bulletproof vest, and no attendees were seriously harmed — margins which, while gratifying, were considerably closer than one would ordinarily regard as satisfactory. Allen had left behind a written manifesto identifying himself as a “friendly federal assassin,” a phrase that manages the considerable feat of being simultaneously alarming and grammatically cheerful, and he is now in federal custody facing three charges including attempted assassination of the president. The Correspondents’ Dinner, an event previously notable chiefly for the quality of its jokes, has acquired an atmosphere it did not previously possess, and will presumably carry it forward.

Source: CBS News

Rubio Calls Iran’s Proposal “Better,” a Bar One Will Note Was Not Especially High

Secretary of State Marco Rubio declared on Monday that Iran’s latest negotiating proposal was “better than what we thought they were going to submit,” a compliment that is perhaps more accurately read against the backdrop of the previous round of talks — held in Islamabad, lasting twenty-one hours, and concluding with Vice President Vance announcing that no agreement had been reached — than as an unqualified endorsement of the proposal’s merits. The current framework under discussion involves a staged process in which the immediate military situation and the status of the Strait of Hormuz would be addressed first, with Iran’s nuclear ambitions handled at some later and presumably more convenient juncture, a sequencing that Iran favors and which the United States finds workable in theory if not yet in practice. Brent crude remains near $120 a barrel, the strait remains closed, and both sides are engaged in the ritual of describing things as going reasonably well while making no specific commitments, which is a move familiar to anyone who has followed any negotiation, anywhere, ever. Progress, one concludes, is currently best measured in tone.

Source: CNN

Geopolitics

The Iran Ceasefire Holds — Technically, and With Rather a Lot of Asterisks

The ceasefire between the United States and Iran, extended by President Trump on April 21st while simultaneously maintaining a naval blockade and instructing the military to remain prepared to resume hostilities at short notice, continues to hold in the narrow technical sense that no one has fired anything at anyone recently, though “peace” would be a word one deploys with some caution in the circumstances. The central obstacle remains the Strait of Hormuz, which Iran closed at the start of the conflict and which the United States has made its reopening a non-negotiable condition — a position Iran has received with roughly the enthusiasm of a man being asked to return the only card left in his hand. Brent crude has settled near $120 a barrel, the IMF has revised global growth down to 3.1%, and Iranian President Pezeshkian is said to be considering terms under unspecified conditions, which is encouraging in the same way that a forecast of “possible improvement” is encouraging. The parties are, by all accounts, making progress at the pace of a chess match between two very cautious men in a room with no clock.

Source: Council on Foreign Relations

The US-China Tech Truce, Described as Fragile Since Its Inception, Obliges

The technology and capital truce between the United States and China — always described in the press as “fragile,” which is diplomatic shorthand for “everyone in the room knew this was coming” — is now showing the strain that was widely anticipated, with tensions arising not over Iran or Russia but over the rather more durable subjects of semiconductor supply chains and the question of where capital may and may not be directed, matters that have a way of outlasting any number of temporary arrangements. Separately, the European Union voted on April 13th to cut its tariff-free steel import quota by 47% and raise levies on excess imports from 25% to 50%, a set of measures aimed at the same broad anxieties about trade and industrial capacity that have been driving policy across the Western world for the better part of five years. That two major trading stories are developing simultaneously in different corners of the globe without any apparent coordination is either evidence of deep structural forces at work or simply of the way things go in April. Probably both.

Source: S&P Global

Economy

The Fed Holds Rates, Powell Prepares His Exit, Markets Confirm They Already Knew

The Federal Reserve opened its April meeting on Tuesday with the CME’s FedWatch tool showing a 99.5% probability of no change — a figure which, if nothing else, suggests that prediction markets have achieved a level of consensus rarely seen outside of arithmetic — and rates have duly remained steady at 3.5%–3.75%, with officials projecting precisely one cut somewhere in 2026, a forecast delivered with the enthusiasm of someone offering a single biscuit at teatime. It is also Jerome Powell’s final meeting as chair, a circumstance that prompted the customary mixture of retrospective commentary, speculation about his successor, and absolutely no indication from the Fed itself that a transition was in progress. Inflation expectations for the year ahead have risen from 3.4% in February to 4.8% in April, driven largely by energy prices that the Middle East conflict has done nothing to moderate, which means Powell is departing at something of a complicated moment — though whether complicated moments are ever not available in monetary policy is a question that answers itself. One hopes the exit is graceful; the door, at least, is being held.

Source: Kiplinger

Americans Are Spending Freely and Feeling Dreadful About It

American consumer sentiment fell to 47.6 in April, according to the University of Michigan’s survey — the lowest in the index’s 74-year history, surpassing records previously set during moments of genuine national calamity — even as March retail sales came in at a robust 1.7% month-over-month gain, well above forecasts, suggesting that the American consumer is buying things at a healthy clip while radiating a profound existential unease about the entire enterprise. The divergence has the quality of a dinner party at which everyone is eating with apparent enthusiasm while agreeing that the food is terrible; the explanation presumably lies in inflation expectations having surged to 4.8% for the year ahead, in oil prices that show no inclination to soften, and in a general atmosphere that the Middle East war has done nothing to improve. Whether sentiment leads spending or spending leads sentiment is a question economists debate with great energy and no satisfying conclusion. The consumer, meanwhile, presses on.

Source: SWBC Investment Hub

Science

Turns Out We All Descended From a Great Tangle of Reuniting Strangers

A comprehensive new genetic study, led by researchers at McGill University and drawing on newly sequenced genomes from the Nama people of southern Africa, has concluded that modern humans did not descend from a single ancestral population — as the field has maintained for several decades with the confidence of a man who has not yet been contradicted — but rather from a loosely connected web of groups that diverged, migrated, and repeatedly reunited over roughly a hundred thousand years, exchanging genetic material with a frequency that suggests they were considerably less interested in founding a single lineage than in simply carrying on as circumstances permitted. The finding replaces the familiar evolutionary family tree with something closer to a tangle of badly maintained hedges: multiple populations, splitting and rejoining, bound together by ongoing contact rather than clean separation. This does not alter what any of us are, but does rather complicate the story of where we came from, in the way that all good research eventually complicates the story of everything. We are, it turns out, the product of a great many chance encounters between strangers who kept running into each other — which, on reflection, sounds about right.

Source: ScienceDaily

Scientists Locate the Switch That Decides Whether Pain Fades or Stays Indefinitely

Scientists have identified a specific neural mechanism in the brain — referred to, with appropriately cautious scientific restraint, as a “switch” — that appears to determine whether acute pain resolves normally or tips over into the chronic variety, a distinction that affects hundreds of millions of people and has, until this week, been understood about as well as the internal logic of airline pricing. The discovery offers the prospect that chronic pain, long treated as an inexplicable and somewhat intractable condition that resists both narrative and intervention, may have a specific biological tipping point that could in theory be therapeutically targeted — though the researchers note, in the traditional manner, that further investigation will be required before any of this becomes clinically useful. The phrase “further investigation will be required” is how scientists announce a genuinely important finding while managing expectations, and it should be received here in that spirit. One hopes they get on with it.

Source: Science News

Culture

The Michael Jackson Biopic Opens to $150 Million and a 38% on Rotten Tomatoes, Both Records of a Kind

“Michael,” the long-awaited biopic about the life of Michael Jackson, starring the late singer’s nephew Jaafar Jackson in a performance that critics have largely praised while deploring everything around it, opened last weekend to a projected $150 million domestic gross — a record for the biographical musical genre — despite sitting at 38% on Rotten Tomatoes, suggesting that the audience and the critical establishment arrived at this film from entirely different planets and are not especially interested in comparing notes. Reviewers deployed words like “sanitized,” “afraid,” and “endless smiley blandness,” while acknowledging that Jaafar Jackson nails the voice, the movement, and the peculiar electrical quality that made his uncle one of the most watched people in the history of recorded entertainment — which is to say the film’s one genuine achievement is precisely the thing the audience came to see, and the rest is apparently beside the point. The gap between box office and critical consensus is nothing new, but it is rarely quite this vertical. The public, having voted with approximately $150 million, has reached a view.

Source: Rotten Tomatoes

The Devil Returns to Prada, Bearing Anne Hathaway and Twenty Years of Anticipation

Anne Hathaway and Meryl Streep are reuniting for the sequel to “The Devil Wears Prada,” which opens May 1st and has generated the kind of anticipatory noise that suggests audiences have not, in nearly twenty years, grown tired of the original’s particular pleasures — the miraculous controlled coldness of Streep’s delivery, the gradual education of Hathaway’s Andy Sachs, and the film’s thesis that working for a brilliant tyrant is, net of everything, a formative experience one eventually survives. Whether a sequel can recapture what the original had — which was largely a function of people not yet knowing what they were about to get — is the question all sequels ask and few answer satisfactorily, and “The Devil Wears Prada” is not obviously a property that demanded continuation. Hollywood’s relationship with beloved films is not unlike that of a man who has found a very good restaurant: he returns long after a reasonable person would have tried somewhere new. One hopes the kitchen has kept up.

Source: Detroit News

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A shotgun at the Correspondents' Dinner, and other Monday diversions