Morning Scan

AI is becoming a workplace infrastructure story, not just a capability story. Capital is still chasing chips, defense, and automation — and the geopolitics underneath keeps getting harder to ignore.

$59B — Samsung's planned share buyback, earmarked in part to fund a massive chip-worker bonus. (SamMobile)

Machines & Minds

Anthropic Debuts Claude Tag, a More Capable AI Teammate That Lives Within Slack

Claude can now be @-mentioned in Slack channels like a coworker, handling tasks directly in the thread — AI assistants are moving from chat windows into org charts. (SiliconANGLE)

The Trump White House Is Over Anthropic's Dario Amodei

Administration talks with Anthropic are reportedly continuing without the CEO involved, which is an unusual way to run a relationship with your most strategically important AI partner. (WIRED)

U.S. Presses Meta to Agree to A.I. Reviews (paywall)

Meta is the only major US AI developer without a voluntary review agreement, and the administration is now actively pressing — a dynamic that gets more complicated given the Amodei situation next door. (NYT)

Google Launches Ask Ad Manager, Its First AI Agent For Publishers

Publishers can now prompt their way through delivery troubleshooting and reporting inside Ad Manager — a workflow upgrade that also embeds Google deeper in the infrastructure layer of digital media. (Search Engine Journal)

Connected World

xLight Tells Investors It's in Talks to Raise $350M for EUV Laser Tech

Chip supply chain infrastructure is still pulling serious capital; EUV lasers are a narrow but decisive chokepoint in advanced semiconductor manufacturing. (The Information)

Zhipu Is Considering a Multibillion-Dollar Hong Kong Share Sale After a 2,000% Stock Surge (paywall)

China's AI darling wants to lock in gains while the window is open — and a 2,000% post-IPO run in five months gives them a very wide one. (Bloomberg)

Cerebras Reports Q1 Revenue Up 94% YoY to $193.4M — Then the Stock Drops 8%

Strong growth, shrinking losses, and a gross margin warning was enough to spook investors who apparently wanted all three to go the right direction simultaneously. (CNBC)

“Calling AI a bubble is an insult.” — Masayoshi Son, SoftBank, at his annual shareholders' meeting

Connected World

Qualcomm Is in Talks to Design Custom Chips for ByteDance

A Qualcomm-ByteDance chip deal would be one of the stranger outcomes of the US-China tech war — an American chipmaker helping the company Congress has repeatedly tried to ban. (Reuters)

Alibaba Sues the Pentagon to Get Off Its Chinese Military Companies List

Alibaba is taking the rare step of fighting the designation in court rather than lobbying around it — which suggests the listing is material enough to their business to be worth the PR friction. (The Next Web)

FCC Spectrum Auction Raises $3.5B+ to Fund Removal of Chinese Telecom Equipment

The US is now using spectrum sale proceeds to rip out Huawei and ZTE infrastructure — essentially making the telecoms market pay for its own national security retrofit. (Reuters)

Connected World

U.S. World Cup Cities Are on a Counterdrone Spending Spree (paywall)

FEMA handed out $250M for airborne threat mitigation around World Cup venues — and all that hardware sticks around after the final whistle, which is either reassuring or not, depending on your politics. (NYT)

SEGA Rereleases Sonic 1 + 2 Cartridges on Genesis to Celebrate the 35th Anniversary

Physical Genesis cartridges in 2026 — a completely unhinged product decision, and yet, somehow, the correct one. (Retro Dodo)