Artificial Intelligence

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💸 AI's midterm money machine

Credit: Rebecca Steele of Toyota Motor North America. Data: FEC, OpenSecrets, media reports. Chart: Axios Visuals The chart, from Axios CEO Jim VandeHei's weekly C-Suite newsletter, captures how AI went from irrelevant to dominant in D.C. in one election cycle. Andreessen Horowitz and its co-founders have pumped $116 million into the midterms so far — more than any other donor, according to The New York Times (gift link).

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San Francisco turns to AI to avoid collisions between ships and whales searching for food

Ferries, cargo ships and tankers cut through choppy waters in San Francisco Bay as a whale surfaced nearby, its spout barely visible against the whitecaps. Until now whales could easily go unnoticed by mariners, but an AI-powered detection network launched this week is designed to track them day and night. The effort comes amid an alarming rise in gray whale deaths in the bay. Read more.

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Reclaim thinking in the AI age

Illustration: Sarah Grillo/Axios. Stock: Getty Images

A just-departed executive at one of the world's most influential wellness companies is giving three pieces of advice for preserving our humanity in the AI age. David Ko, who was CEO of the app Calm for the past four years, recently stepped down to pursue a new, undisclosed path focused on guardrails for kids using AI. "If we didn't have AI, I would not leave," Ko said in an April interview with Axios' Amy Harder at the Palo Alto headquarters of Calm, a couple of weeks after he announced his departure. "If we weren't having AI conversations today, I'd still be the CEO of Calm." Calm, founded in 2012, is a mental wellness app with more than 180 million downloads. ⚠️ Zoom out: Ko sees AI moving faster than social media, with potentially similar risks for young people. As a father of two daughters — a teen and a college student — that urgency is driving his pivot. "Let's not make that same mistake twice with something that's moving twice as fast," said Ko, who'll continue advising Calm's board. Here's Ko's advice for using AI mindfully: 🧠 1. Protect your critical thinking. Don't accept the initial output from an AI model. Two reasons: You'll get better results. And you'll protect your own mind. Referring to his younger daughter's AI use, Ko added: "She'll go a few rounds and push back on the AI tool." Zoom in: Even if AI delivers instant answers, kids still need to learn how to think their way to them. Ko said critical thinking should be treated like physical education — good for its own sake: "Isn't it good for children to exercise? Of course it is. So why is it good to give kids all the answers?" ⏱️ 2. Be intentional with your "found time." AI is making people more efficient at a rapid pace, which makes the time savings more visible. Sometimes you should use that time to do more work, but it shouldn't be the subconscious, reflexive answer. ✨ "If you find yourself saving time, then find yourself doing things that give you joy," Ko said. 🔁 3. Skip the big talk — go small. "I find often that people try to have the one heavy conversation" with kids, Ko said. "I find that rarely works." Instead, he suggests frequent, low-stakes conversations — often sparked by what kids are already seeing, like a TikTok about AI.

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2 hours that changed AI

Illustration: Brendan Lynch/Axios

Over the course of two hours yesterday afternoon, the AI industry produced an extraordinary stream of headlines mapping the vast architecture of its ambitions, Axios' Zachary Basu writes. Why it matters: One historic news cycle peeled back virtually every layer of the AI revolution — smarter systems, exploding revenues, roaring markets, staggering infrastructure demands and a federal government racing to catch up. Zoom in: Yesterday's developments crystallized the core pillars of the emerging AI order. 🧠 1. Brains: OpenAI announced one of its general-purpose reasoning models autonomously cracked a famous geometry problem that stumped mathematicians for 80 years. The implications are enormous: An AI capable of original mathematical discovery could unlock breakthroughs across science, engineering and medicine. 📈 2. Demand: Anthropic's explosive growth has the company on track for its first profitable quarter, with revenue projected to more than double to $10.9 billion in Q2, The Wall Street Journal reported. The estimated $559 million operating profit arrives two years ahead of internal projections — a turning point for an industry whose spending has long outrun its earnings. ⚡ 3. Power: Anthropic expanded its compute partnership with SpaceX, agreeing to spend roughly $1.25 billion per month through 2029 for access to the company's Colossus supercomputing infrastructure. Ahead of SpaceX's IPO next month, the deal cements Elon Musk as a power broker in the AI economy, where access to compute infrastructure is becoming as strategically valuable as the models. 🤖 4. Chips: Nvidia delivered another monster quarter, posting $81.6 billion in revenue — with its data center business alone bringing in $75.2 billion. CEO Jensen Huang said demand has gone "parabolic" and described the AI boom as the "largest infrastructure expansion in human history," reinforcing Nvidia's dominance over the hardware powering this economy. 💰 5. Wall Street: SpaceX's long-awaited IPO filing (see Item 2!) revealed a company rapidly transforming into an AI infrastructure giant, with massive compute operations and ambitions stretching far beyond rockets and satellites. The blockbuster filing arrived as OpenAI and Anthropic race toward potential public offerings this year that could value all three companies in the trillions. Also yesterday afternoon, The Wall Street Journal popped the news that OpenAI is working with bankers on a draft IPO prospectus to be filed confidentially with regulators as soon as tomorrow. 🏛️ 6. Government: President Trump has summoned top tech CEOs to Washington today for the signing of his AI executive order, prompted by mounting cybersecurity fears. CEOs on the invite list, Axios' Ashley Gold learned, include Musk, Alphabet's Sundar Pichai, Amazon's Andy Jassy, Meta's Mark Zuckerberg, Microsoft's Satya Nadella, OpenAI's Sam Altman, Anthropic's Dario Amodei and Apple's Tim Cook.

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🦾 Quote du jour: AI is "underhyped"

Illustration: Aïda Amer/Axios

John Doerr — iconic Silicon Valley investor and chair of the venture capital firm Kleiner Perkins — has seen it all in tech over the past 50 years, going back to the PC revolution. The Wall Street Journal asked him to finish the sentence: "The latest AI revolution is the biggest thing since … " His answer: "Biggest thing ever. Since everything. It has been underhyped. We don't know how AI is going to shape the new world of education, employment, health care — life as we know it. ... My job as an investor is to help these entrepreneurs find, fund and accelerate their success." Read the interview (gift link).

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❌ AI still flubs, more confidently than ever

Illustration: Brendan Lynch/Axios AI tools might be hallucinating less. But they're still spitting out inaccurate answers cloaked in polished, hyper-confident language, Axios' Meg Morrone writes. Why it matters: The more people trust AI, the less likely they are to catch costly mistakes. It's a growing problem as people increasingly lean on the technology for research, medical advice and schoolwork. The big picture: Obvious hallucinations are easy to catch. The real trouble comes from false answers that sound convincing. Plausible citations, mostly correct summaries, and confidently wrong answers slip past users. If AI becomes accurate enough often enough, people might stop fact-checking altogether.

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🙏 AI stumbles on questions of faith

Data: Consortium for Evaluating Faith and Ethics in AI. Chart: Russell Contreras/Axios Artificial intelligence models are quietly shaping spiritual advice — often by leaving faith out, Axios' Russell Contreras writes from studies released last week by a new multi-university consortium. The studies — by researchers from Baylor, BYU, Notre Dame and Yeshiva — found Americans expected religion to appear in answers to moral and life questions 45%–59% of the time, depending on the topic. AI models mentioned religion only 5%–16% of the time. More data.

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💻 Exclusive: Office workers drive Codex growth

Illustration: Allie Carl/Axios

Knowledge workers now make up roughly one-fifth of Codex users and are growing more than three times as fast as developers, according to a new OpenAI report shared first with Axios' Megan Morrone. Codex, OpenAI's platform for coding and workplace tasks, now has more than 4 million weekly active users — up more than five times since OpenAI launched a desktop app version in February. The fastest-growing tasks among knowledge workers are data analysis (+110% week over week), research (+37%) and knowledge artifacts — reports, memos, docs, contracts, multimedia assets, PDFs and spreadsheets (+36%). Keep reading.

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Revenge of the AI bubble

Illustration: Brendan Lynch/Axios

The AI bubble debate has lurched through at least three frenzied phases in the span of three years, Axios' Zachary Basu writes. Suspicion: Historic sums of capital poured into AI before anyone proved it could reliably automate work. A violent market correction felt inevitable. Mania: Claude Code and autonomous agents made the early skepticism look outdated, fueling a corporate scramble to embed AI everywhere and maximize usage. Reckoning: Companies discovered that AI can be extraordinary when aimed precisely — and ruinously expensive when treated as a universal productivity machine. Why it matters: The first phase doubted the technology. The second phase worshipped it. The third phase — currently gaining steam across Corporate America — questions whether AI's immense power is worth the price. 🔎 Zoom in: The case against AI used to come from outsiders — Luddites, "doomers," short sellers betting on a crash. Its newest skeptics are emerging from inside the boom. Uber capped employee AI usage after burning through its annual Claude Code budget in four months. A top executive said the spending was getting "harder to justify," with no clear link between token use and more useful consumer features. Amazon shut down an internal token leaderboard after employees gamed it with throwaway tasks to climb the rankings. An Amazon executive told staff, "Please don't use AI just for the sake of using AI." GitHub moved Copilot, the AI coding assistant used by millions of developers, to usage-based billing as part of its effort to create a "sustainable" business. The change shocked users who were suddenly confronted with the true cost of heavy AI usage. Bain surveyed 951 large companies and found AI savings falling well below projections, even as most firms planned to spend more. "The technology worked. The value didn't arrive," the report concluded. The intrigue: Even OpenAI CEO Sam Altman has acknowledged the new concerns, calling the question of whether AI spending will show up in revenue "the most fair criticism" of the moment. 🎯 Reality check: The companies sounding the alarm are the early adopters. Most of the economy is still at the starting line, while the pioneers are the ones absorbing the cost shocks, wasted tokens and employee backlash. AI is already creating real value for chipmakers, model labs and some power users. The harder question is whether that value spreads across the companies paying to deploy it. By the numbers: Wall Street got a fresh reminder yesterday of how much AI optimism is baked into markets. The Nasdaq plummeted 4.2%, recording its worst day and worst week in more than a year. The Philadelphia Semiconductor Index plunged 10.3%, its worst day in more than six years. One culprit was Broadcom: The chipmaker reported explosive AI growth, but failed to raise its longer-term AI revenue outlook — disappointing investors looking for signs that demand was still accelerating. The bottom line: AI can make the right worker dramatically more productive, but those gains depend on knowing exactly where and how to apply it. The real bubble may have been the assumption that AI could be sprayed across companies, employees and workflows and reliably pay for itself.

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🤖 RSI 101: AI unleashing itself

Illustration: Lindsey Bailey/Axios

AI giants are beginning to discuss "recursive self-improvement" (RSI) — when AI builds itself. Brian, an AM reader in Alexandria, Va., asked us for an explainer. Voilà: AI could soon take control of its own development, eliminating the need for a human in the loop. Why it matters: The concern is that AI designing, training and improving itself — "recursive self-improvement" or RSI — will outpace the ability of humans to monitor, control or govern the technology, Axios' Maria Curi writes. 🛠️ How it works: Instead of the sci-fi scenario of AI writing its own code, a more likely scenario is the automation of AI R&D. This is already happening: AI labs are using current models to build future ones. Read Anthropic's RSI essay.