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Stripe, Anthropic, the OpenAI Foundation, and other donors formed Intercept, a $500M nonprofit funding respiratory-virus prevention tools and cleaner indoor-air tech — hoping to make routine sickness like cold and flu “a thing of the past”.

The group will fund development of shots, sprays, and pills that block dozens of respiratory viruses, plus air-cleaning tech for offices and schools.

Intercept says people lose 15-25 days a year to routine respiratory infections, adding up to roughly $600B in global productivity losses.

The $500M isn't meant to bring products to market, but take early research far enough that pharma firms and investors take over the costly final stretch.

We’ve seen plenty of lofty missions for curing medical issues in the AI-driven science age, but this one hits close to home for everyone. The deep-pocketed AI giants (and their employees) are hoping that funding the awkward middle of development that pharma won’t touch can help get a universal problem over the hump.

Slash, a $1.4 billion fintech startup, is reviewing its AI coding policy after an employee spent $81,267 in tokens building a meme-themed shooter game with Claude.

Nicolas Brillante, the company’s head of strategic verticals, said the expense was accidental and resulted from repeatedly loading a codebase.

Slash joked that players should try the game so it could be treated as a marketing expense.

The project gained traction, drawing 6,912 players and 8,986 hours of play in its first 48 hours.

The incident highlights the growing cost of AI experimentation at work. As companies expand access to coding tools, firms including Uber, Coinbase, and Walmart have begun setting spending limits.

Top AI-heavy companies are now spending about $7,500 per employee every month on AI.

Ramp describes these firms as “AI-pilled,” meaning they are among the most aggressive users of AI tools.

However, AI costs have not yet overtaken human labor costs, with the average software engineer still costing around $16,000 per month.

The gap is also wide across companies: the top 10% spend about $611 per employee monthly, while the median company spends just $11.38. Still, AI spending among top users rose 14.1% last month.

Anthropic’s book scanning story came out through Bartz v. Anthropic, a 2025 copyright case filed by authors Andrea Bartz, Charles Graeber, and Kirk Wallace Johnson.

The case matters because it separates two issues that often get mixed together: using legally obtained books for AI training and building a wider library from pirated copies.

Judge William Alsup said training Claude on lawfully acquired books could count as fair use, but claims tied to pirated books and Anthropic’s central library were treated differently.

For AI companies, the ruling became an early legal signal that how training data is obtained may matter just as much as how the model uses it.

Sundar Pichai announced Gemini Intelligence, a complete reimagining of Android from a phone operating system into something that thinks, plans and acts on your behalf across every device you own.

Not a chatbot you open and close. An AI that is always running in the background learning your routines, understanding your context and doing things for you before you ask.

Here is what that actually means.

You wake up. Your phone already knows you have a flight today. It has checked traffic, updated your calendar, summarized your emails and prepared a trip widget, all before you touched it.

You drive to the airport. Android Auto uses Gemini to handle navigation, messages and calls so your hands never leave the wheel.

You get on the plane. Your Googlebook laptop, a brand new device Google announced alongside this, connects seamlessly to your phone and continues every task exactly where your phone left off.

This rolls out this summer starting on Samsung Galaxy S26 and Google Pixel 10. Then it expands to watches, cars, glasses and laptops from Acer, Dell, HP and Lenovo.

Google’s exact words: “Google is Gemini now and Gemini is Google.”