Morning Scan

It's May Day, and the AI industry is busy suing itself, training on each other's models, and fighting off goblins. TikTok Shop is eating into retail, Visa is settling real money on stablecoins, and Jerome Powell is making Trump's Fed succession plans considerably more complicated.

$4.9B — TikTok Shop's US sales in Q1 2026 alone, doubling year-over-year — a number that should be making every traditional retailer very uncomfortable. (Wall Street Journal)

Machines & Minds

Musk v. Altman: The 2017 Emails

Internal documents show Musk sought majority voting control of OpenAI, withheld promised funding, and tried to poach researchers — the trial is surfacing exactly the kind of origin story neither side wanted public. (Wired)

Musk Seemingly Admits xAI Trained on OpenAI's Models

In a legal battle about OpenAI's alleged misuse of IP, this is a notably ill-timed admission. (Wired)

OpenAI's GPT-5.5-Cyber Is for 'Critical Defenders' Only

A frontier cybersecurity model that won't be publicly released is either a thoughtful safeguard or an excellent way to make everyone wonder what it can actually do. (The Verge)

Where OpenAI's Goblin Problem Came From

GPT-5.1 and later models started spontaneously referencing goblins and gremlins, which required actual prompt engineering to fix — a strange but genuine window into how alignment drift surfaces in practice. (OpenAI)

"Surface patterns consistent with insider knowledge in prediction markets." — *Polymarket, via Bloomberg* — the company's new Chainalysis partnership in a nutshell, after a string of suspiciously well-timed bets drew scrutiny.

Connected World

Visa's Stablecoin Settlement Pilot Hits $7B Annualized Run Rate

Nine blockchain networks, real institutional volume — at some point this stops being a pilot and starts being infrastructure. (CoinDesk)

How Powell Just Complicated Trump's Fed Plans

By staying on as a governor after his chair term ends, Powell is engineering a procedural headache for anyone hoping to install a more pliant successor quickly. (New York Times)

Connected World

Iran's Internet Blackout Is Costing $80M Per Day — and Splitting Its Own Government

The economic damage is measurable; the deeper story is a military-civilian fracture forming in real time over who controls the kill switch. (Bloomberg)

SPRIND Opens €125M Competition for Europe's First Frontier AI Labs

The brief explicitly tells applicants not to try to replicate OpenAI — which is either pragmatic or a concession that the gap is too wide to close head-on. (The Next Web)

Anthropic's Claude Solved 30% of Bioinformatics Questions That Stumped Human Experts

A curated benchmark against actual domain experts is a harder test than most AI evals — 30% on genuinely unsolved questions is the kind of number researchers in the field will pay attention to. (Anthropic)

FDA Pilots AI for Real-Time Clinical Trial Data

A direct data feed into live trials could meaningfully compress approval timelines — one of the higher-stakes AI deployments in any government agency right now. (Nextgov)

Connected World

Japan Is Building Cardboard Suicide Drones

The Minister of Defense posed with one for the cameras, which is either a bold PR move or proof that the future of warfare is genuinely cheaper than you expected. (404 Media)