The White House is pushing back on Anthropic’s bid to more than double private-sector access to its Mythos AI, citing compute constraints that could eat into the government’s own use — even as a national security memo quietly moves to defuse parts of the broader Pentagon standoff.

What’s going on:

• Anthropic wanted Mythos access expanded from roughly 50 companies to nearly 120. U.S. officials balked, warning the wider rollout could strain compute resources the government depends on for its own operations.
• A forthcoming White House AI memo is expected to push agencies toward multi-vendor AI adoption — and to address some of the underlying grievances that sparked Anthropic’s original feud with the Pentagon.
• Axios reported the action would give agencies a workaround on the supply chain risk designation — even with the legal fight still ongoing.
• GPT-5.5 has reached comparable cyber capabilities to Mythos, with former AI czar David Sacks predicting every frontier model will hit that bar within six months.

Summary: The White House’s posture toward Anthropic is shifting — but not cleanly. The administration clearly wants more of its own access to Mythos, which explains the sudden willingness to find middle ground. But with Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth calling Anthropic “run by an ideological lunatic” just this week, the internal signals are pulling in opposite directions. It’s less a détente and more a tug-of-war between factions that want to bury the hatchet and those still looking for a fight.

China has blocked Meta’s $2 billion acquisition of Manus, ordering both companies to unwind the deal — and turning a Singapore-based AI startup with Chinese roots into a pointed message for any founder thinking about moving talent or technology beyond Beijing’s reach.

What happened:

• Meta announced the deal in December. Chinese officials launched a probe in January examining export-control and foreign-investment regulations.
• The National Development and Reform Commission formally stepped in, declaring the deal off-limits to foreign investment and directing both parties to reverse it.
• By the time the order came down, the two organizations were already “deeply integrated” at Meta’s Singapore office — and Manus’s website had already been updated to read “now part of Meta.”
• The ruling lands just weeks before Trump’s scheduled May summit with Xi in Beijing. Manus executives are reportedly barred from leaving China while the investigation continues.

Why is this important: Beijing just classified AI talent as a national security asset — applying the same export-control logic to people and startups that Washington uses on chips. The move raises a question that neither side has answered: with the companies already operationally merged and Meta maintaining the deal “complied fully with applicable law,” what does an actual unwind even look like? And more pointedly — will Meta comply? For founders eyeing exits to Western acquirers, Beijing just made the off-ramp a lot narrower.

Chinese AI lab DeepSeek has unveiled preview builds of its long-awaited V4, a new family of open-source models boasting 1M-token context windows, Huawei chip support, and pricing that puts serious pressure on U.S. competitors.

What’s in it:

• Early third-party benchmarks rank V4 Pro near the top of the open-source field, and DeepSeek’s own evals put it in the same tier as GPT-5.4 and Gemini 3.1-Pro on reasoning tasks.
• It leads Vals AI’s Vibe Code Bench, though it lands in the fourth tier on AA’s Intelligence Index, alongside Meta’s Muse Spark.
• At $1.74/$3.48 per million input/output tokens, V4 Pro costs a fraction of GPT-5.5 ($5/$30) and Opus 4.7 ($5/$25) — a price gap that’s hard to ignore.
• Huawei confirmed its Ascend chips can run V4, offering the clearest proof yet of a functional AI infrastructure stack built entirely outside of Nvidia.

DeepSeek is back — and while markets aren’t in freefall this time, V4 reframes the AI competition around cost as much as raw capability. The Huawei angle may ultimately be the bigger story, though. A domestic Chinese chip stack demonstrating real-world viability suggests that U.S. export restrictions, long seen as a hard ceiling on China’s AI ambitions, may be a more porous barrier than assumed.

OpenAI has unveiled GPT-5.5, internally codenamed “Spud,” marking a significant step forward in its model lineup. The release is being framed as a new class of intelligence, with performance gains that place it at or near the top of industry benchmarks—reportedly edging past Anthropic in several key areas.

Key Highlights

• GPT-5.5 achieves top-tier results across reasoning, agent-based tasks, coding, and computer-use benchmarks, with some metrics approaching those seen in leading models like Claude Mythos.
• Despite the performance gains, the model maintains similar speed to GPT-5.4 while improving efficiency. OpenAI notes that both Codex and GPT-5.5 were used to help optimize its own GPU infrastructure.
• API pricing is set at $5 per million input tokens and $30 per million output tokens, with OpenAI positioning it as roughly half the cost of competing frontier coding models.
• The rollout includes availability across ChatGPT plans and within Codex, including specialized Thinking and Provariants, alongside continued emphasis on generous usage tiers.

Why It Matters

After a stretch where Anthropic held much of the momentum, the competitive landscape appears to be shifting again. OpenAI is moving quickly with high-impact releases, signaling a renewed push to lead at the frontier. At the same time, Anthropic has been facing user concerns around rate limits and output quality, making this a notable moment in the broader AI race.