[AI DAILY NEWS RUNDOWN] Musk’s Truce with Anthropic, Murati Turns on Altman, and Agentic Finance (May 07 2026)

• Claude financial service agents: Anthropic released ready-to-run agent templates for financial services tasks, including building pitch books, screening KYC files, reviewing valuations and closing books. Claude also now works across Microsoft Excel, PowerPoint, Word and soon Outlook through the Claude add-ins for Microsoft 365.

• OpenAI and PwC’s Native Finance Function: The ChatGPT maker and professional services firm announced a collaboration to build agents around the “core operating rhythms” of finance, including planning, forecasting, payments, treasury, taxes and accounting. The organizations noted that the partnership is already in progress, building a procurement agent inside OpenAI’s finance organization.

• Perplexity Computer for Financial Services: The self-described AI answer engine has extended the reach of its “general-purpose digital worker” to finance. Now, finance teams can bring licensed data from providers like Morningstar and Pitchbook into the agent to work with 35 dedicated workflows for tedious analyst work.

While the upside is obvious for AI firms, these tools also present real potential to democratize financial analysis, Terra Higginson, a principal research director at Info-Tech Research Group, told The Deep View. Until recently, AI has been “notoriously bad at financial analysis.” But with access to proper data, these tools have improved vastly, she said. Now, private investors could have access to tools that would have previously only been available to the top tier of investors and institutions.

“I still would not blindly use any model for financial analysis … but this is the first time the direction feels usable as a tool and not just a huge risk,” Higginson said.

However, risks still exist. Along with the obvious data security and regulatory risks, if everyone is using the same models, leveraging the same data, and coming to the same conclusions, “markets could become more crowded, more reactive, and potentially more volatile,” Higginson said. The real edge isn’t in trusting outputs outright, she said, but rather sharpening human judgment and knowing when not to trust the model.

“We always need to keep a human in the loop. I cannot emphasize this enough,” Higginson said. “Finance is highly regulated, high-stakes, and way too risky to let models operate alone.”

Murati tells court she couldn’t trust Sam Altman

• 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

• 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

• 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

• 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

• 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.

Anthropic, SpaceX(AI) partner in new compute deal

The Rundown: Anthropic just signed a deal with SpaceX to lease its Colossus 1, raising Claude usage and putting Musk and Anthropic on one team months after he said that Anthropic should be called “Misanthropic” and it “hates Western Civilization.”

The details:

• Anthropic will lease all of Colossus 1, a 300+ MW Memphis supercluster, with more than 220K Nvidia GPUs coming online within the month.

• Anthropic said Claude Code’s 5-hour usage caps are now doubling across paid tiers, with additional increases via API and no more peak-hour restrictions.

• Musk replied on X that SpaceX will rent compute to “AI companies that are taking the right steps to ensure it is good for humanity.”

• The Information also reported yesterday that Anthropic is committing to a $200B, 5 GW compute deal over the next five years with Google Cloud.

Why it matters: This is a fascinating partnership from several angles. One being Musk taking the ‘enemy of my enemy is my friend’ approach — helping patch OAI’s biggest rival’s glaring compute hole. Another is SpaceXAI (apparently the new name), moving to providing compute for rivals while still pushing to get Grok near the frontier.

Mira Murati speaks out in Musk vs. OpenAI trial

The Rundown: Ex-OpenAI CTO Mira Murati testified Wednesday via video deposition in Elon Musk’s lawsuit against OpenAI, accusing CEO Sam Altman of lying about a model’s safety review, undermining her authority, and pitting execs against one another.

The details:

• Murati said Altman told her OAI’s legal team cleared a model to skip safety review, which she later verified with counsel Jason Kwon was false.

• She also described Altman giving conflicting directions to different execs, making her role as CTO harder and creating chaos across OAI’s leadership.

• Murati briefly became interim CEO during Altman’s 2023 firing, but said the board process put OpenAI “at risk of falling apart.”

• Former OAI board member Helen Toner also testified, reportedly criticizing Murati as “afraid to stick her neck out” and scared of “blowback for her career”.

Why it matters: The 2023 board drama is the saga that will never conclude, and Murati’s testimony is a powerful voice to aid Musk’s argument that Altman and co. are untrustworthy. But whether that ultimately means anything related to Musk’s claims of Altman and Brockman “trying to steal a charity” in 2017 is up for the jury to decide.

DeepMind picks EVE Online game as next AI testbed

The Rundown: Google DeepMind picked up a minority stake in Fenris Creations, a game studio spinoff from CCP Games, which makes the popular EVE Online — with DeepMind set to use the 23-year-old space game as a sandbox for AI research.

The details:

• EVE Online has run for two decades on a single server where players form corporations, set market prices, and torch six-figure fleets in day-long battles.

• DeepMind’s investment will come with AI agent runs on an offline EVE clone, testing how models reason over long timelines, retain memory, and learn.

• Demis Hassabis cited Atari DQN, AlphaGo, AlphaStar, and SIMA as game-bred DeepMind wins, calling games “the perfect training ground” for AI algorithms.

• Fenris’ CEO pitched EVE as “one of the few environments” where intelligence can be tested “inside something that already behaves like a living world”.

Why it matters: DeepMind has been here before with Go, Atari, StarCraft, and SIMA, but EVE is not a match to win as much as a 23-year-old living, evolving society to understand. That makes the Fenris deal a natural next step in the shift from game-playing AI to agents that can operate inside less predictable real-life systems.

Giving agents the company card:

Amazon’s newly announced ‘Bedrock AgentCore payments’ preview allows AI agents to “instantly access and pay for what they use, such as web content, APIs, MCP servers, and other agents.” We’re this close to being able to charge agents per-read fees to access content, and shake up the online content market for the rest of time.

DeepL joins the layoff march:

Germany-based language AI company DeepL is cutting 250 roles, or about 25% of its staff. Why? DeepL’s CEO says rapid AI progress means that today’s companies need “smaller, more impactful teams with sharper focus and clearer ownership,” alongside “fewer layers, faster decisions and far less time spent on the back and forth that slows large teams down.” Sounds familiar! DeepL reckons that companies that refactor how they work too slowly will fall terminally behind.

Kraken buys Reap:

Add another stablecoin exit to the pile. This time, crypto exchange Kraken is snapping up Reap, a startup that offers stablecoin-enabled finance to corporate customers. Think global fiat payments using stablecoins, corporate cards for stablecoin-enabled companies, and agentic payments. Maybe Amazon should have bought Reap and not Kraken!

What Else Happened in AI on May 07th 2026?

Subquadratic debuted SubQ, a model the company claims has a 12M token context window and a 52x speed boost on long tasks at a fraction of the cost over rivals.

Anthropic launched dreaming, outcomes, and multi-agent orchestration for Managed Agents, letting agents study past sessions, grade work, and split complex jobs.

OpenAI teamed up with AMD, Intel, NVIDIA, Microsoft, and Broadcom to open-source MRC, a tool that keeps giant AI training runs going when hardware fails mid-session.

Chinese AI startup DeepSeek is reportedly nearing a new funding round that would value the company at as high as $45B.

Google announced a new partnership with TuneCore parent Believe to put its Flow Music and Lyria 3 Pro model in front of artists.