The Adjacent Brief — May 1, 2026
Big Tech Q1 earnings landed with record capex numbers. Meta, Alphabet, Microsoft, and Amazon together spent $130B in the quarter, with full-year projections reaching $725B.
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The Adjacent Brief — April 30, 2026
SAP’s new API policy bars partners from routing its data into third-party AI systems, putting enterprise software integrators in a difficult position as AI becomes the default middleware layer. Parent coalitions in Salt Lake City and New York City secured rollbacks of school technology policies.
The Adjacent Brief — April 29, 2026
OpenAI is renegotiating its cloud dependency on Microsoft, routing workloads to Oracle and potentially Amazon as its infrastructure needs outgrow any single provider.
The Adjacent Brief — April 28, 2026
DeepSeek slashed V4-Pro API prices by 75% and cut cache costs to a tenth, undercutting OpenAI, Anthropic, and Google across the board.
The Adjacent Brief — April 27, 2026
China directed ByteDance, Moonshot AI, and other domestic tech companies to reject US capital without state approval, following Meta’s Manus acquisition. Perplexity added $150M in ARR in 30 days.
The Adjacent Brief — April 24, 2026
A poll of 4,000 US and UK workers finds that the highest-earning, most experienced employees are adopting AI tools far faster than everyone else — productivity gains are landing where leverage was already highest.
The Adjacent Brief — April 23, 2026
Meta is tracking employee keystrokes and mouse movements to train AI agents, drawing internal backlash — and separately, Zuckerberg is building an AI avatar to simulate his own decision-making.
The Adjacent Brief — April 22, 2026
Americans are using buy-now-pay-later loans for groceries and 401(k) hardship withdrawals are climbing back toward pandemic levels. The FTC settled a twelve-year-old facial-recognition case against Clarifai, and Gary Marcus warns against trusting chatbots for medical advice.
The Adjacent Brief — April 21, 2026
Three signals in one day point in the same direction: AI is generating real, measurable productivity gains at the tool layer — Intercom reportedly doubled engineering velocity with Claude Code — while the institutional layer is running behind, with Australia’s markets regulator flagging Anthropic’s
The Adjacent Brief — April 20, 2026
Three clusters of signals in one day point in the same direction: AI is crossing from digital tool into physical and operational system faster than institutions or public opinion can absorb it.
The Adjacent Brief — April 17, 2026
The institutions that built AI are now managing the wreckage — Anthropic degrading its own product, banks failing biometric checks at scale, deepfake nudes spreading through schools faster than any policy can follow.
The Adjacent Brief — April 16, 2026
Anthropic just crossed a $30B revenue run rate and is now building its own chips — the enterprise subscription model is proving out in real time, while OpenAI’s pivot to advertising reveals that consumer AI still hasn’t found a self-sustaining business.