In the News
🔥 This Week in AI: Everything that's moving the AI scene this week
The AI world didn't sleep this week. Chinese labs got caught red-handed stealing from Claude, DeepSeek dodged US sanctions with banned chips, and $2.5 trillion is now pouring into AI — more than the Apollo and Manhattan projects combined. Meanwhile, most people won't pay a dime for AI, and most companies say it's done nothing for them. Make it make sense. Here are the 19 links dominating the conversation (Feb 18–25, 2026).
But before everything : the mandatory check on the AI god stock that just announced its results yesterday!
Nvidia (NVDA) earnings report Q4 2026 — CNBC
Nvidia posted record Q4 revenue of $68.1 billion (beating estimates), driven by 75% data center growth, while guiding to $78 billion next quarter and confirming first Vera Rubin samples have shipped to customers.
Espionage, IP Theft & the US-China AI Cold War
Caught: Chinese Labs Ran Industrial-Scale Espionage on Claude (Anthropic) 24,000+ fake accounts. 16 million queries. DeepSeek, Moonshot, and MiniMax allegedly strip-mined Claude's capabilities.
DeepSeek Used Banned Nvidia Chips to Train Its Latest Model (Reuters) Trained on restricted Blackwell GPUs in direct violation of US export controls. A full-blown geopolitical flashpoint.
Money, Power & the Trillion-Dollar Bet
AI Spending Now Dwarfs Apollo AND Manhattan — Combined (Al Jazeera) $2.5 trillion in 2026, up 44% YoY. More than every mega-project in modern history. Uncharted territory.
Claude Code Crosses $1 Billion in Revenue (Anthropic) Six months to $1B run-rate. Anthropic also acquires Bun to supercharge the developer stack.
The Backlash: Nobody's Paying & Nobody's Impressed
Only 8% of Americans Would Pay Extra for AI (ZDNet) The monetization wall is real. Almost nobody wants to open their wallet.
80% of Firms: AI Has Had Zero Impact on Jobs or Productivity (NBER) 6,000 executives surveyed across four countries. The hype-reality gap is a canyon.
AI Boom Backlash Is Worse Than the Dot-Com Era (New York Times) Existential fears, low willingness to pay, CEOs admitting it hasn't moved the needle. Biggest investment-sentiment disconnect in tech history?
Communities vs. Data Centers: The Revolt
"Team Human" Is Stalling AI Data Centers Across America (TIME) TIME's cover story. Small towns fighting back against energy, water, and noise — and polls show most Americans agree.
The True Cost of AI's Thirst: Power Grids Are Buckling (Business Insider) City-scale power, fossil fuel dependency, almost no local jobs. The environmental bill is coming due.
Polk Prize Awarded for Exposing AI's Environmental Toll (Business Insider) Award-winning investigation with a first-of-its-kind national data center map.
China's Open-Source AI Offensive
China's Lunar New Year AI Blitz: Three Frontier Models in One Week (Euronews) Qwen 3.5, GLM-5, and DeepSeek V4 teased. China's open-source machine is moving at staggering speed.
GLM-5 Goes #1 on Open Leaderboards (Reuters) MIT-licensed, enhanced coding, strong agent tasks. Zhipu's best yet.
Alibaba's Qwen 3.5 Is Coming for US Models (CNBC) Multimodal, dirt cheap, massive Hugging Face adoption. A serious agentic AI contender.
Agents, Tools & What's Actually Shipping
X Cracks Down on AI Bots — While Pushing Grok (Social Media Today) Fighting AI spam while integrating its own AI into everything. The irony writes itself.
How to Spot AI Fakes: NYT's Detection Tool Guide (New York Times) Practical tools and strategies for identifying synthetic media. Increasingly essential.
Grok Gets Good at Niche & Gaming Queries (TechCrunch) Musk delayed a model release over bad Baldur's Gate answers. It paid off — Grok is now competitive.
Anthropic Agents Move Into Banking & HR (Bloomberg) New Claude Cowork plugins for finance, equity research, and HR automation. Enterprise push accelerates.
AgentAPI Hub: 73 APIs for Autonomous AI Agents (AgentAPI Hub) MCP-compatible APIs where agents discover tools and pay autonomously. The agent economy's plumbing.
No-Code AML: AI Slashes Compliance Costs (Fintech Global) AI streamlines anti-money laundering in finance. A quiet but real win.
💬 What caught your eye?
$2.5 trillion pouring in while 80% of companies shrug — greatest misallocation ever, or early innings of something that hasn't clicked yet?
Hit reply and tell me. I read every response — the best takes might make it into next week's edition. See you Wednesday. ⚡