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In Today’s Issue:
🤑 OpenAI's leaked internal memo reveals a full-scale platform war against Anthropic
💵 Palantir CEO Alex Karp warns that AI will decimate humanities jobs
📈 China is quietly dominating the humanoid robot market
📉 Small-town America is revolting against AI infrastructure
✨ And more AI goodness…
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Dear Readers,
OpenAI just declared war on Anthropic, and we have the leaked memo to prove it. Their Chief Revenue Officer accuses Anthropic of inflating its run rate by $8 billion, reveals a new model codenamed "Spud," and lays out a full platform offensive designed to lock enterprises in for good. But that's only the beginning of today's issue.
While the two AI giants prepare for their IPO showdowns, the world around them is shifting fast: Palantir's Alex Karp is warning that AI will "destroy humanities jobs," armed attackers have targeted Sam Altman's home for the second time, and small towns across America are literally voting out their city councils over AI data center deals.
Meanwhile, China is quietly shipping more humanoid robots than the rest of the world combined, and global VC funding just hit a record $300 billion in a single quarter. The AI industry isn't just moving fast anymore, it's reshaping politics, labor markets, and entire communities in real time, and today's stories show you exactly how.
All the best,
🤖 AI Reshaping Jobs And Skills
Alex Karp warns that AI could “destroy humanities jobs”, arguing that generalized knowledge without specific skills will struggle in the market. He believes the future belongs to people with vocational training or unique cognitive traits like neurodivergence, while still insisting there will be “more than enough jobs” overall, just very different ones.
Not everyone agrees: firms like BlackRock and McKinsey still value liberal arts graduates for creativity, suggesting the real shift may be toward blending technical skills with human insight. However, the explanation of what equally well-paid jobs would be created to compensate for the lower pay remains inadequate. Unfortunately, jobs in arts and culture, for example, are comparatively less well-paid.
🚨 Arrests Follow Second Altman Incident
Two more suspects were arrested after a second gun-related incident near Sam Altman’s home in San Francisco, with police recovering three firearms and booking them for negligent discharge. Authorities say this attack appears unrelated to the earlier firebomb attempt, though tensions remain high to OpenAI and its increasingly visible role in AI policy and national security discussions. Honestly, this escalation highlights how high-profile tech leadership is drawing unexpected real-world risks.
🚨 Small Town Revolts Against AI
Residents of Festus, Missouri are pushing back hard after approving a $6 billion AI data center, leading to the removal of half the city council and a growing petition targeting remaining officials. A lawsuit claims illegal rezoning and lack of transparency, highlighting deeper frustrations with how these massive projects are being handled.
This isn’t isolated, across the U.S., communities are increasingly rejecting AI data centers over concerns like energy strain, secrecy, and local impact, with some protests even escalating into violence and extreme actions. Public resistance is becoming a major obstacle to AI infrastructure expansion. Fears about high energy prices are driving people to the streets.
Reinforcement Learning at Scale: Engineering the Next Generation of Intelligence
“AI will be indistinguishable from consciousness. Explore the idea that we'll eventually accept AI's sentience as it develops, making it a necessity in our lives.”
— Ray Kurzweil
OpenAI's Leaked Memo Changes Everything
The Takeaway
👉 OpenAI's CRO accuses Anthropic of inflating its run rate by $8 billion through gross revenue accounting on cloud partnerships, which would place Anthropic's actual revenue below OpenAI's reported $24-25 billion
👉 OpenAI is pivoting hard toward Amazon Web Services after admitting its Microsoft partnership has constrained enterprise growth, signaling a major shift in cloud distribution strategy
👉 The memo reveals OpenAI's full product offensive: a new model codenamed "Spud," an agent platform called "Frontier," and a deployment engine called "DeployCo," all aimed at making OpenAI impossible to replace
👉 With both companies preparing for IPOs this year, the accounting dispute over gross vs. net revenue recognition will become a central investor question, potentially reshaping valuations worth hundreds of billions
The gloves are off. OpenAI's Chief Revenue Officer Denise Dresser just dropped a four-page internal memo that reads less like corporate strategy and more like a declaration of war against Anthropic. The key accusations: Anthropic allegedly inflates its $30 billion run rate by roughly $8 billion through aggressive accounting, failed to secure enough compute infrastructure, and builds its entire narrative on "fear and restriction.”
Dresser, the former Slack CEO who recently absorbed COO Brad Lightcap's duties, also revealed that OpenAI's new Amazon Web Services partnership has generated "staggering" enterprise demand, while acknowledging that its own Microsoft relationship has limited growth.
The memo also introduces OpenAI's new model codenamed "Spud," an agent platform called "Frontier," and a deployment engine called "DeployCo," all designed to lock enterprises into OpenAI's ecosystem. With both companies eyeing IPOs later this year and Ramp data showing Anthropic rapidly closing the enterprise gap, this memo signals that the AI race is entering its most aggressive phase yet.
Why it matters: The rivalry between OpenAI and Anthropic is no longer just about who builds the smartest model. It's now a full-blown platform war that will shape how every enterprise deploys AI for years to come.
Sources:
🔗 https://www.theverge.com/ai-artificial-intelligence/911118/openai-memo-cro-ai-competition-anthropic
🔗 https://gizmodo.com/openai-exec-reveals-new-strategy-in-leaked-memo-attack-anthropic-2000745872
The IT strategy every team needs for 2026
2026 will redefine IT as a strategic driver of global growth. Automation, AI-driven support, unified platforms, and zero-trust security are becoming standard, especially for distributed teams. This toolkit helps IT and HR leaders assess readiness, define goals, and build a scalable, audit-ready IT strategy for the year ahead. Learn what’s changing and how to prepare.
Q1 2026 saw an unprecedented surge in global venture funding to nearly $300B, driven almost entirely by massive late-stage investments, signaling a sharp concentration of capital into a few dominant players
(OpenAI, Anthropic, xAI)
China vs. USA: The Robot Race
While Silicon Valley was perfecting pitch decks, China was shipping robots. The numbers are staggering: Chinese companies now control roughly 90% of all global humanoid robot sales, with Unitree and Agibot alone shipping over 10,000 units in 2025. The U.S.: Still largely in prototype mode. At CES 2026, 21 out of 38 humanoid robot companies were Chinese, and China has filed nearly five times more robotics patents than the U.S. over the past five years.
CES 2026
The secret sauce is a combination of state-backed industrial policy, a vertically integrated supply chain, and aggressive pricing: Unitree's G1 humanoid costs just $16,000, while Tesla's Optimus is projected at $20,000 to $30,000 and won't ship to customers before late 2027. But here's where it gets interesting: the U.S. still dominates the AI "brain" layer, the software, reasoning models, and compute infrastructure that will ultimately determine how useful these robots become. Tesla is converting its Fremont factory for Optimus production, and Figure AI just completed an 11 month pilot at BMW building over 30,000 vehicles. The race isn't over, it's just getting started.
(U.S. Figure 03 at BMW)
The humanoid robotics race mirrors the EV playbook, where China's early manufacturing dominance proved nearly impossible to overcome. Whoever wins this race won't just dominate a new industry; they'll reshape the future of global labor and manufacturing.
88% resolved. 22% loyal. Your stack has a problem.
Those numbers aren't a CX issue — they're a design issue. Gladly's 2026 Customer Expectations Report breaks down exactly where AI-powered service loses customers, and what the architecture of loyalty-driven CX actually looks like.