☕️ Anthropic strikes massive deal with SpaceX

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In today's Techpresso:

🚀 Anthropic strikes massive deal with SpaceX

🧑‍⚖️ Murati tells court she couldn't trust Sam Altman

👀 SpaceX IPO bans investor lawsuits

💻 Apple may drop $599 MacBook Neo

🛑 Google shuts down Project Mariner AI agent

🎙️ Spotify opens personal podcasts to AI agents

Plus: 🎁 10 other news you might like, 🧰 6 tools, and 📚 3 papers.

🚀 Anthropic strikes massive deal with SpaceX LINK

SpaceX, which recently took over xAI, has signed a deal giving Anthropic access to computing power at the Colossus data center, despite Elon Musk previously calling the Claude maker "Misanthropic," "evil," and an enemy of Western Civilization.

Anthropic said the agreement lets it double Claude Code's five-hour rate limits for Pro, Max, Team, and Enterprise plans, drop the peak-hours cutoff for Pro and Max subscribers, and raise API rate limits for Claude Opus.

Musk also announced that xAI will be dissolved and folded into "SpaceXAI," while Colossus 1 opens to Anthropic and SpaceX shifts focus to Colossus 2, which aims for 1 gigawatt of power but isn't running at full capacity yet.

🧑‍⚖️ Murati tells court she couldn't trust Sam Altman LINK

Former OpenAI CTO Mira Murati told a court in a video deposition during the Musk v. Altman trial that she did not trust CEO Sam Altman, saying he lied to her about safety standards for a new AI model.

Murati testified that Altman falsely claimed OpenAI's legal department had cleared a GPT model from going through the deployment safety board, but general counsel Jason Kwon contradicted that, so she sent the model through the board anyway.

Murati agreed Altman pitted executives against each other and undermined her, echoing cofounder Ilya Sutskever's 52-page memo, though she still criticized the board's firing of Altman, saying OpenAI risked falling apart before she left in 2024.

👀 SpaceX IPO bans investor lawsuits LINK

SpaceX's upcoming IPO will block shareholders from suing the company, according to a Reuters report on registration documents that show Elon Musk keeping what the news outlet calls "virtually unchecked executive authority" over the rocket maker.

The filing forces shareholders to "irrevocably and unconditionally" waive their right to a jury trial, bans class actions against the company and its directors, and requires mandatory arbitration under a September 2025 SEC policy statement.

Musk, who owns 42.5 percent of SpaceX equity and 83.8 percent of voting control, will keep over 50 percent of voting power through supervoting shares after the IPO, letting him elect or remove any board member.

💻 Apple may drop $599 MacBook Neo LINK

Apple is weighing whether to cut the $599 MacBook Neo with 256GB storage, a move that would push the laptop's starting price up by $100 without raising the cost of any single configuration, according to Tim Culpan.

The pricing squeeze follows Apple telling suppliers to double production to 10 million units after stronger-than-expected demand, which drained A18 Pro chip inventory and ran into limited 3nm capacity at TSMC due to AI orders.

The first Neo batch used lower-bin A18 Pro chips with one GPU core disabled, but a fresh run would yield more fully working chips at a higher per-unit cost, and Apple may instead add new colors to soften a price hike.

🛑 Google shuts down Project Mariner AI agent LINK

Google has discontinued Project Mariner, the experimental AI agent built to carry out tasks across the web, with its landing page confirming the May 4th, 2026 shutdown and noting the technology moved into other Google products.

Launched in December 2024 and later updated to handle up to 10 tasks at once, Project Mariner's features were folded into Gemini Agent, which can archive emails or book hotels, and into AI Mode for search.

Google recently showed a Chrome feature called "auto-browse" that handles multi-step tasks like researching flight costs, and the Mariner shutdown may clear space for new AI tools debuting at I/O starting May 19th.

🎙️ Spotify opens personal podcasts to AI agents LINK

Spotify is now letting people bring AI-generated personal podcasts into its app through a new beta CLI tool that works with coding agents like OpenAI's Codex, Anthropic's Claude Code, and OpenClaw.

The imported podcasts, which can cover things like class note summaries or calendar briefings, show up in the user's Spotify library for private listening and cannot be accessed by other Spotify users.

To set it up, users visit the tool's GitHub page, log in to Spotify through a browser, then prompt their agent to generate a podcast on a topic and save it, receiving a Spotify link back.

Other news you might like

• Anthropic's Claude Managed Agents can now "dream," sort ofLINK

• Morning Minute: Morgan Stanley Is Coming for CoinbaseLINK

• Qualcomm's latest chips may transform future low-cost phonesLINK

• Apple loses bid to pause Epic ruling at Supreme CourtLINK

• Google DeepMind partners with EVE Online for AI model testingLINK

• Snap says its $400M deal with Perplexity ‘amicably ended’LINK

• 3D-printed rocket fuel successfully tested, could enable lighter missiles and faster production ratesLINK

🧰 Trending tools

Claude Agents for Financial Services: an AI-powered framework that automates complex financial workflows, cutting manual processing time and improving decision accuracy across operations.LINK

GPT‑5.5 Instant: a fast AI model API that lets developers build and deploy scalable AI-powered applications using OpenAI's latest models.LINK

Lingo.dev v1: automates app localization with configurable translation APIs, glossaries, brand voice rules, and AI quality scoring across multiple locales.LINK

MESA: a Shopify automation tool that converts plain-English requests into workflows, eliminating repetitive tasks across orders, inventory, and customer support.LINK

reMarkable Paper Pure: a distraction-free digital notebook with a paper-like writing surface, built for focused note-taking and document work.LINK

DevPass by LLM Gateway: cuts your AI API costs by 3x while giving you access to 200+ models across Claude Code, Cline, and any OpenAI-compatible tool with minimal setup.LINK

📚 Trending papers & reports

ProgramBench reveals that no AI model could fully rebuild real software from scratch, with the best model passing 95% of tests on only 3% of tasks, and models consistently favoring simpler, single-file code over human-style designs.LINK

Large language models consistently fail at a basic counting task, revealing that their apparent language understanding is unreliable and breaks down even on simple, verifiable problems.LINK

Lossless Context Management beats Claude Code on every long-context benchmark tested, by using a structured memory system that automatically compresses and retrieves conversation history without losing any information.LINK

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