Oracle Fired 30,000 People to Pay for AI. The Profit Was Already There.
On March 31, Oracle employees across five countries received 6am termination emails with no prior warning, cutting roughly 18% of the global workforce. The company had just posted a 95% profit surge. The money is going to AI data centres.
Read full story →Treasury and the Fed Called the Banks In. The Topic Was Anthropic's AI.
Scott Bessent and Jerome Powell convened an urgent meeting at Treasury with the CEOs of Citigroup, Morgan Stanley, Bank of America, Wells Fargo, and Goldman Sachs to discuss Anthropic's Mythos model. The dual purpose: warn the banks about the elevated threat environment it creates, and urge them to use it defensively. The meeting worked because Anthropic pre-briefed senior officials. That mechanism does not scale.
Read full story →New Zealand Builds Its AI Governance House Before Moving In
New Zealand's new Government Digital Delivery Agency opened this month with an AI framework already in place, a rare case of governance preceding deployment at scale. The agency consolidates NZ$13 billion in public sector tech spend, and uniquely embeds Maori digital sovereignty into its executive structure from day one.
Read full story →A Molotov Cocktail, a New Yorker Profile, and OpenAI's Turbulent Pre-IPO Week
A suspect threw a Molotov cocktail at Sam Altman's San Francisco home and later threatened to burn down OpenAI's offices. Altman connected the attack to a New Yorker profile by Ronan Farrow and Andrew Marantz, based on 100-plus interviews, that described him as possessing "a relentless will to power." The incident arrives in an already turbulent pre-IPO stretch: AG investigations, stalking victim lawsuit, Bloomberg IPO concern editorial.
Read full story →The Urgent Meeting Is the Last Mechanism That Works
The Treasury meeting worked because Anthropic chose to pre-brief US officials, creating a chain of advance notice and institutional preparation that functioned for this model. That chain requires relationships, trust, and time. The next major capability jump may come from a source with none of those. The governance mechanism that worked this week is not a system. It is a favour.
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