AI News Today (May 25, 2026): The 15 Stories Reshaping the Industry This Morning
Anthropic is hours away from closing a $30 billion round at a $900 billion-plus valuation — which would push it past OpenAI for the first time in the AI race. The Vatican is publishing its first-ever encyclical on AI today, co-presented by an Anthropic co-founder. OpenAI is preparing to file an IPO. The White House just scrapped its AI safety executive order after three tech CEOs called the president directly. And NextEra is buying Dominion Energy for $67 billion — the largest US utility merger in history — to power the AI grid.
This is what AI news looks like in May 2026: not one headline a week, but five before lunch. Here are the 15 stories you actually need to know today, ranked by impact on builders, founders, and the broader market. If you want yesterday's recap to catch up first, our May 23 AI news roundup covered the OpenAI Erdős breakthrough and the Meta surveillance leak.
1. Anthropic Closes $30B Round at $900B Valuation
Anthropic is closing a $30 billion round at a $900 billion-plus valuation as soon as the end of this week, according to Bloomberg, co-led by Sequoia, Dragoneer, Greenoaks, and Altimeter. If the term sheet lands at the upper end, Anthropic surpasses OpenAI's $852 billion March valuation for the first time — a complete reversal from February 2026, when Anthropic was valued at $380 billion.
My take: this is not a vibes round. Anthropic just projected $10.9 billion in Q2 revenue and its first quarterly operating profit ever. Investors are pricing in a path to $50B+ annual revenue inside 18 months, not hoping for one. For context on which Claude models are driving the numbers, see our Best AI Models April 2026: Ranked by Benchmarks breakdown.
2. Pope Leo XIV Releases First AI Encyclical Today
Pope Leo XIV is presenting his first encyclical today, May 25, titled Magnifica Humanitas ("Magnificent Humanity"), alongside Anthropic co-founder Christopher Olah. The document centers on "the protection of the human person in the age of artificial intelligence" and was signed exactly 135 years to the day after Pope Leo XIII signed Rerum Novarum, the foundational Catholic teaching on workers' rights during the Industrial Revolution.
The parallel is intentional. Leo XIV is explicitly framing AI as the Industrial Revolution of our time — and the Vatican choosing to share the stage with Anthropic (not Google, not OpenAI) is a deliberate signal about which AI lab the Church considers a credible partner on safety.
3. OpenAI Files for IPO, Anthropic Goes Profitable
Three IPO stories landed inside 48 hours. Anthropic revealed it is on track for its first quarterly operating profit ever, projecting $10.9 billion in Q2 2026 revenue, up 130% from $4.8 billion in Q1. OpenAI is preparing to file a confidential S-1 with the SEC. And SpaceX's IPO prospectus revealed Anthropic is paying SpaceX $1.25 billion every month through May 2029 for GPU compute — a $45 billion total contract.
Frontier AI companies are universally assumed to be loss-making. Anthropic becoming operationally profitable while still actively training frontier models fundamentally changes the IPO narrative for both labs. For full context on what each Claude tier costs to run, see Claude Mythos: Release Date, Access, and What Comes Next.
4. Trump Scraps AI Safety Executive Order
President Trump abruptly canceled the signing of an AI executive order this week, telling reporters it risked undermining America's competitive edge. The order would have created a pre-release vetting process for advanced AI models — a direct response to security concerns triggered by Anthropic's Claude Mythos.
Axios reported that Mark Zuckerberg, Elon Musk, and David Sacks called the president directly in the hours before the scheduled signing. A White House source quoted in Axios said Trump "just hates regulation." The contrarian read: this is bullish for OpenAI and Anthropic short-term (faster release cycles), bearish long-term (no federal framework leaves a vacuum that states like California and the EU AI Act will fill instead).
5. Wall Street Becomes the New AI Battleground
Within a 72-hour window this month, Anthropic and OpenAI each launched enterprise deployment arms, announced major financial-services partnerships, and shipped agent tooling targeting Wall Street's most critical workflows. The race to become the operating system for finance is accelerating.
For builders, this means the next 18 months of AI hiring is dominated by quant-finance-fluent engineers who can wire LLMs into trade execution, risk, and compliance. The gen-ai-experiments repo on GitHub has hands-on notebooks for agent orchestration patterns that map directly to financial workflows.
6. NextEra–Dominion: $67B Utility Merger for AI Power
NextEra Energy announced a $67 billion deal to acquire Dominion Energy — the largest utility merger in US history — with AI-driven power demand as the primary strategic rationale. AI data centers are projected to consume 15–25% of US electricity by 2030, and the existing grid cannot support that growth.
NextEra, which operates the largest renewable energy portfolio in North America, is acquiring Dominion specifically to build out generation and transmission capacity for hyperscale AI workloads. The strategic read: power availability — not model capability — is now the primary constraint on training and inference at scale.
7. Google Bets on Distribution Over Benchmark Wins
Google chose to debut the latest Gemini at I/O 2026 not with a behemoth model to compete with Claude Mythos, but with the faster, cheaper Gemini 3.5 Flash. Sundar Pichai's strategy, in his own words to Axios: "Stay at the frontier, but prioritize models cheap and fast enough to deploy across products used by billions." For the full I/O recap, see our Google I/O 2026 developer announcements deep-dive.
Hot take: Google is the only frontier lab that can afford to lose the benchmark war and still win the AI war. Distribution is the moat. Anthropic and OpenAI don't have YouTube, Search, Gmail, Android, or 3 billion daily product users. They're running a different race.
8. Pentagon Tests OpenAI and Google AI to Replace Claude
The Pentagon is now testing OpenAI and Google AI models to potentially replace Anthropic's Claude in defense workflows. This is interesting because Anthropic spent the past year as the favored defense vendor — and now competitors are getting controlled evaluations on the same classified workloads.
Anthropic previously turned down a Department of Defense contract on ethical grounds in early 2026, which sent Claude to the number-one spot on the US App Store. The current Pentagon test reads as a hedge — neither Anthropic nor OpenAI alone is becoming the sole national security AI vendor.
9. Anthropic Eyes Microsoft's Maia 200 Chip
Anthropic is in talks to adopt Microsoft's custom Maia 200 AI chip for Claude models. That makes Microsoft the fifth silicon partner in Anthropic's portfolio alongside NVIDIA, AWS Trainium, Google TPUs, and SpaceX compute. The diversification is striking — most labs lock into one chip vendor; Anthropic is betting on compute optionality as a competitive moat.
10. OpenAI Codex Now Controls Mac While Locked
OpenAI Codex can now control a Mac even when it is locked — a major leap in autonomous agent capability. The days of users walking around with open laptops to keep agents running are ending. For comparison with how Claude Code handles long-running agentic work, see our What Is Claude Cowork? The 2026 Guide.
11. Chinese Models Cross 60% on OpenRouter
Chinese models — Kimi K2.6, DeepSeek V4, GLM-5.1, Qwen 3 — now account for 60% of all AI usage on OpenRouter, the most-used third-party AI model router. This is the clearest single signal that the open-weights tier is now Chinese-led. Meta's delayed Avocado model — the last credible US open-weights frontier candidate — has gone silent.
12. Adobe, Canva, CapCut Integrate Gemini
Adobe, Canva, and CapCut announced Gemini integrations to let users access their image and video editing tools directly inside the Gemini app. Users can generate AI content in Gemini and refine it in professional editors without switching applications. Canva is live for Gemini AI Ultra subscribers; Adobe and CapCut roll out in the coming weeks.
13. Google Search Gets Its Biggest Update in 25 Years
Google is rebuilding the search bar itself. A new feature lets Google generate custom visuals, interactive graphics, and even mini-apps directly on the search page in response to queries — piecing together sources from across the web. Robby Stein, VP of product for Google Search, told CNN: "People are asking much longer and harder questions that no longer have a clear response anywhere on the internet."
Translation for SEO and content builders: the 10-blue-link era is functionally over. Optimize for AI Overviews citation, not click-through.
14. Intuit Lays Off 17% as AI Restructuring Spreads
Intuit laid off 17% of its workforce as the AI restructuring wave keeps spreading across enterprise software. The pattern is now too consistent to ignore: Salesforce, Microsoft, Google, Meta (8,000 last week), and now Intuit. Companies are not laying off because AI replaced workers directly — they are laying off because AI enabled them to ship the same roadmap with smaller teams.
15. Andrej Karpathy Joins Anthropic
Andrej Karpathy — OpenAI co-founder, former Tesla Autopilot lead, and the most beloved AI educator alive — joined Anthropic to rebuild its pretraining research team from the inside. He cited "the next few years at the LLM frontier as especially formative." For the full backstory on Karpathy's move, see our May 21 AI news recap with the full timeline.
This is the highest-profile AI talent move of 2026 so far. Karpathy's signal matters because he chose Anthropic specifically — not OpenAI, not Google, not xAI. That choice gets read by every senior researcher considering their next move.
Frequently Asked Questions
What is the biggest AI news today, May 25, 2026?
The single biggest story is the convergence of three events: Anthropic closing a $30 billion round at a $900B+ valuation, Pope Leo XIV releasing the first papal encyclical on AI alongside an Anthropic co-founder, and OpenAI preparing to file its IPO S-1. Combined, these mark the day AI moved from "emerging technology" to "systemically important infrastructure."
Is Anthropic now worth more than OpenAI?
If the $30B round closes at the upper end of $900B+ this week, yes — Anthropic surpasses OpenAI's $852 billion March 2026 valuation for the first time. The reversal is sharp: Anthropic was valued at $380 billion just three months ago in February 2026.
What did Pope Leo XIV say about AI?
Pope Leo XIV released his first encyclical, Magnifica Humanitas ("Magnificent Humanity"), on May 25, 2026, focused on "the protection of the human person in the age of artificial intelligence." It was signed exactly 135 years to the day after Pope Leo XIII signed Rerum Novarum on workers' rights — explicitly framing AI as the Industrial Revolution of our time.
When will OpenAI go public?
OpenAI is preparing to file a confidential S-1 with the SEC as early as May 2026. The most likely IPO window is Q4 2026 or early 2027. Confidential filings typically precede a public IPO by 4–6 months.
Why did Trump cancel the AI executive order?
President Trump canceled the signing of the AI executive order saying it risked undermining America's competitive edge. Axios sources reported Mark Zuckerberg, Elon Musk, and David Sacks called the president directly hours before. A White House source said Trump "just hates regulation."
How much is Anthropic paying SpaceX for compute?
$1.25 billion per month through May 2029 — a $45 billion total contract — disclosed in SpaceX's IPO prospectus. This makes SpaceX one of Anthropic's five major silicon partners alongside NVIDIA, AWS Trainium, Google TPUs, and a pending Microsoft Maia 200 deal.
Will the Pentagon stop using Claude?
The Pentagon is currently testing OpenAI and Google AI models on classified workflows that Anthropic's Claude previously served exclusively. This reads as multi-vendor hedging, not a replacement — Anthropic remains a defense vendor, but is no longer the sole one.
Recommended Blogs
- AI News Today — May 23, 2026: 12 Biggest Stories
- AI News Today — May 22, 2026: Anthropic Goes Profitable, OpenAI Files for IPO
- AI News Today — May 21, 2026: Karpathy to Anthropic, White House AI EO
- AI News Today — May 20, 2026: Google I/O Dropped Everything
- Claude Mythos: Release Date, Access, and What Comes Next (2026)
- Best AI Models April 2026: Ranked by Benchmarks
- What Is Claude Cowork? The 2026 Guide
References
- Bloomberg — Anthropic Closing $30B Round at $900B Valuation
- Build Fast with AI — AI News Today, May 22, 2026: Anthropic Profitable, OpenAI Files for IPO
- Build Fast with AI — AI News Today, May 20, 2026: NextEra Dominion Merger
- Axios — How Google plans to win the AI war
- CNN Business — AI is changing the internet forever
- OpenTools — Daily AI News Updates
- LLM Stats — LLM News Today (May 2026)
- Medium / David Akpovi — AI News Week of May 18–24, 2026
