Good morning. The week is closing with the Pentagon broadening its classified AI vendor list while pointedly leaving Anthropic out, xAI putting up an aggressively cheap Grok 4.3, and Meta blaming AI spending for an 8,000-person layoff. The Musk trial also wrapped its first week, and a WIRED investigation found a $100M PAC tied to OpenAI and Palantir paying TikTok influencers to fearmonger about China.
The Pentagon’s vendor list keeps growing — minus Anthropic. New classified deals went out to OpenAI, Google, Microsoft, AWS, Nvidia, xAI, and startup Reflection, deploying their models on IL6/IL7 networks for “warfighter decision-making,” per TechCrunch. The Verge reports that Anthropic — previously inside the tent on a $200M deal — was shut out after refusing to loosen restrictions on autonomous weapons and domestic surveillance, then designated a supply-chain risk. Pentagon CTO Emil Michael called Anthropic’s “Mythos” security model a “national security moment,” which reads less like a security rationale than a negotiating position.
Grok 4.3 undercuts the frontier on price. xAI shipped Grok 4.3 at $1.25/$2.50 per million input/output tokens, well below Claude Opus 4.x or GPT-5.5. The HN consensus is that it’s fast and token-dense but trails the April frontier releases on coding and reasoning, with strengths in language nuance, voice mode, and search over X data. Several commenters openly wondered what Grok is for outside Twitter context; others noted the pricing looks like a deliberate market-share play rather than evidence of a smaller model.
Musk v. Altman, week one. MIT Technology Review’s recap of the first week pulls together the threads we’ve been following: Musk testifying he was “duped” into funding what became an $800B company, warning AI could kill us all, and admitting xAI distilled from OpenAI — a moment that reportedly drew gasps in the courtroom. OpenAI’s lawyer is framing the suit as competitive interference ahead of the IPO. Trial continues next week.
Meta cuts 8,000, blames AI costs. Zuckerberg told staff that AI infrastructure spending contributed to the layoffs, Forbes reports. The framing didn’t land well — commenters on r/artificial pointed out that nine-figure researcher packages and $70B+ in capex don’t square with 8,000 jobs being a budget pressure point. The more honest reading, as one reply put it: Meta is reorienting around an AI bet, and these roles aren’t part of the new shape. Separately, Meta acquired humanoid robotics startup ARI, folding the team into Superintelligence Labs.
A PAC backed by OpenAI and Palantir is paying influencers to fear China. WIRED reports that Build American AI, a dark-money group tied to a $100M super PAC, is paying lifestyle creators up to $5,000 per video to push pro-US AI messaging and frame Chinese AI as a threat. WIRED found out because they got pitched. Some approached influencers turned it down — one cited the combination of “uncritical AI promotion” and anti-China messaging from what they called an “unregulated industry.”
Hawley’s GUARD Act advances. The Senate Judiciary Committee unanimously moved Sen. Josh Hawley’s GUARD Act, which would mandate ID verification for AI chatbot users under a child-safety rationale. r/artificial commenters flagged the obvious: an identity-verification pipeline for every chatbot user is hard to dismantle once built, the bill’s actual text is sloppy, and the most predictable outcome is more people running local models.
PFlash claims 10x prefill speedup on a 3090. A new project called PFlash claims a 10x prefill speedup over llama.cpp at 128K context on a 27B model, using a small Qwen3-0.6B drafter with sparse attention to score and prioritize important tokens. The r/LocalLLaMA thread is interested but skeptical — multiple users called it a lossy compression approach in disguise and want quality benchmarks, a llama.cpp PR, and Vulkan/ROCm support before believing the number.
That’s the week. Trial resumes Monday, and we’ll see whether Anthropic’s exclusion from the Pentagon list survives its lawsuit or hardens into the new normal.