🚨 Pentagon Chooses Musk's xAI

PLUS: Amazon's AGI Chief quits, Meta buys freedom from Nvidia

February 25, 2026

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Reading time: 5 minutes

🗞️In this edition

  • Anthropic Refused Pentagon. xAI Didn't.

  • Amazon's AGI Chief Just Quit

  • Meta Bets $100B Against Nvidia

  • In other AI news –

    • Stripe Just Hit $159B on AI Bets

    • Meta Just Banned the AI Everyone's Using

    • AI's Efficiency Era Just Ended

  • 4 must-try AI tools

Three companies made decisions this week that look completely unrelated. One about partnerships. One about leadership. One about spending.

But they're all solving for the same thing: what happens when the technology works, but everything around it becomes the problem. When the constraint isn't capability anymore.

What's happening:

Intelligence operations. Weapons development. Battlefield decisions. The most sensitive military work that exists. Until this week, only Anthropic's Claude had that access.

xAI agreed to one condition Anthropic wouldn't. "All lawful purposes" with zero restrictions. Mass surveillance, autonomous weapons, anything the Pentagon decides is legal. Anthropic drew lines. Musk erased them.

Why this is important:

Drop all safety restrictions or get eliminated. The threat is specific: brand them a "supply chain risk" and every defense contractor cuts ties. Anthropic built the best AI for classified work. Now strip the safeguards or lose everything.

The moment principles meet power. Competitors are lining up with zero restrictions. What happens when saying no means your own replacement?

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What's happening:

Rohit Prasad spent two years building Nova to compete with ChatGPT. Before that, 12 years making Alexa. Leaving end of year. Amazon says it's the right time. Reports say Nova can't touch GPT or Claude.

The executive hired to close Amazon's AI gap just quit trying. That tells you how the race is actually going.

Why this is important:

Amazon's replacing their AI researcher with someone who builds data centers.

Peter DeSantis ran AWS infrastructure for 27 years. Now leading AGI, custom chips, quantum computing—three areas where Amazon trails competitors. He's never led AI research. That's not an accident.

Amazon doesn't need better AI leadership. They need someone who won't say out loud how far behind they've fallen. Swapping the scientist for the infrastructure guy is the admission.

What's happening:

Six gigawatts of custom hardware starting second half 2026. AMD gets 160 million shares—10% of their company—vesting only when they deliver. Days earlier, Meta signed a similar deal with Nvidia.

Meta's building a world where no single chip supplier controls their AI future.

Why this is important:

This is about power, not cost savings.

When Nvidia controls 90% of AI chips, they eventually dictate terms to everyone building at scale. Meta just spent $100 billion to ensure they're never trapped negotiating from weakness. Every other AI company faces the same monopoly risk.

Comments from the editor:

AMD now has to prove monopolies can actually be broken.

They have the contract and Meta's $100 billion commitment. Now they deliver chips that match Nvidia's performance or confirm why 90% market share was justified all along.

If AMD executes, every AI company gets leverage against Nvidia. If they fail, the monopoly becomes permanent.

  • Stripe Just Hit $159B on AI Bets – Stripe's worth $159 billion now—up 70% in a year. The bet: AI agents will handle most transactions and stablecoins replace traditional rails.

  • Meta Just Banned the AI Everyone's Using â€“ Meta and major companies are restricting OpenClaw. Startups are embracing it anyway. The split shows who's willing to take the risk.

  • AI's Efficiency Era Just Ended – First wave automated tasks and cut costs. Second wave creates new revenue and builds products impossible before. The shift from saving money to making it.

👩🏼‍🚒Discover mind-blowing AI tools

  1. FindWise - An AI-powered search assistant that allows users to ask questions and get answers based on the content of a website

  2. Krizmi - An interactive learning platform that offers auto-generated flashcards and quizzes to help students retain and test their knowledge

  3. Zeliq - An all-in-one sales solution that helps businesses increase their sales and streamline their outreach efforts

  4. Ask Jules - A book discovery companion that helps users find their next book and answers book-related questions

This week showed the shift from building better AI to navigating what stops it from scaling.

Dead business models, revived hardware strategies, supply chains hitting walls. The winners aren't the ones with the smartest technology. They're the ones who saw the bottleneck before it formed and moved first.

Speed matters less when the road narrows.

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