Top Stories
Jury Tosses All of Musk’s Claims Against OpenAI
A federal jury in Oakland delivered a unanimous verdict on Monday, rejecting every one of Elon Musk’s claims against OpenAI and CEO Sam Altman. The jury deliberated for less than two hours before concluding that all of Musk’s claims — centered on allegations that OpenAI violated an agreement to operate as a nonprofit — were barred by the statute of limitations.
The trial, which began April 27, had pulled back the curtain on the early days of OpenAI and the bitter falling-out between its co-founders. But the jury never reached the substance of those claims. District Court Judge Yvonne Gonzalez Rogers immediately adopted the advisory jury’s verdict.
Musk posted on X calling it a “calendar technicality” and confirmed he will appeal to the 9th Circuit. His legal team echoed that framing, arguing the core questions about OpenAI’s nonprofit obligations remain unanswered. OpenAI, meanwhile, is now valued at $852 billion after closing a record $122 billion funding round — making the stakes of any appeal enormous.
Pope Leo XIV Will Present AI Encyclical Alongside Anthropic Co-Founder
Pope Leo XIV will release his first encyclical on May 25 — and the subject is artificial intelligence. Titled Magnifica Humanitas, the document centers on “the protection of the human person in the age of artificial intelligence” and will be presented alongside Christopher Olah, co-founder of Anthropic.
The Pope signed the encyclical on May 15, exactly 135 years to the day after Pope Leo XIII signed Rerum Novarum, the landmark encyclical on workers’ rights during the Industrial Revolution. That is not a coincidence. The Vatican is drawing a direct line between the upheaval of industrialization and the current transformation driven by AI.
The Vatican also announced the creation of a new study group on AI that will work across its various departments to coordinate the Church’s engagement with the technology. The encyclical is expected to call for an ethics-first approach that prioritizes human dignity, with particular focus on AI in warfare, education, and healthcare. Having Anthropic’s co-founder at the launch signals the Vatican is not just issuing warnings from the sidelines — it is trying to engage directly with the people building these systems.
Source: National Catholic Reporter | Vatican News | Washington Post
Gemini 3.5 Flash Goes GA as Google I/O Wraps Up
Google’s I/O Day 2 delivered the developer-facing details behind Monday’s consumer announcements. The headline for builders: Gemini 3.5 Flash is now generally available, priced at $1.50 input / $9 output per million tokens with a 1 million token context window. Google is calling it “frontier-level intelligence at 4x the speed of comparable models.”
The developer keynote also detailed new additions to the Gemma open-source model family and expanded capabilities for Google’s Antigravity agent-development platform, which now has richer orchestration tools for building and deploying multi-step agents. Android 17’s Gemini-powered features got deeper technical walkthroughs, including how the on-device AI handles multistep tasks across apps, web browsing, form filling, and natural language widget creation.
For the broader competitive picture: Gemini 3.5 Flash at these prices puts significant pressure on OpenAI’s GPT-5.5 Instant (which became the ChatGPT default on May 5) and Anthropic’s Claude models. The 1M context window matched with frontier performance at sub-$10 output pricing is aggressive.
Source: Google Developers Blog
Quick Hits
- Anthropic’s “dreaming” for agents: Anthropic introduced a technique called “dreaming” that lets AI agents review their past sessions, extract patterns from failures and successes, and refine future behavior between runs. It works as scheduled memory pruning — the agent replays prior actions and curates plain-text notes for next time. Legal AI company Harvey reported a 6x increase in task completion rates after implementing it. VentureBeat
- OpenAI’s record fundraise: OpenAI closed a $122 billion funding round at an $852 billion post-money valuation — the largest private fundraise in history. CFO Sarah Friar confirmed the company will reserve a portion of IPO shares for retail investors, signaling a public listing could come in the second half of 2026.
- StanChart CEO on AI displacement: Standard Chartered CEO Bill Winters told a conference that AI will “replace lower-value human capital,” predicting significant workforce restructuring across banking. The comment drew immediate criticism from labor groups. Staffing Industry Analysts
- California privacy win: California’s AB 2561 unanimously passed the Assembly, prohibiting operating systems or applications from undoing a user’s privacy settings without explicit consent — a direct shot at dark patterns that reset preferences after updates.
Worth Watching
The Musk appeal will test nonprofit-to-profit conversions. The jury never ruled on whether OpenAI’s pivot from nonprofit to for-profit was legitimate — they stopped at the statute of limitations. If the 9th Circuit sends the case back, it could set precedent for how organizations with charitable missions can restructure. With OpenAI eyeing an IPO at close to a trillion-dollar valuation, the question of what it owes its founding mission is not going away.
The Vatican entering AI governance is bigger than it sounds. The Catholic Church has 1.4 billion members worldwide and significant influence in Latin America, Africa, and parts of Asia where AI regulation is still being shaped. An encyclical is not a blog post — it carries doctrinal weight. If Magnifica Humanitas takes strong positions on autonomous weapons, labor displacement, or data collection, it could shape policy conversations in dozens of countries where Silicon Valley’s “move fast” ethos has less cultural currency.