Welcome back! It takes a lot to get OpenAI and Anthropic on the same page and this risk did it. At the same time, Sam Altman was working the halls of Congress in person, Anthropic lined up Wall Street's biggest banks for its IPO and Meta showed off an AI agent that can close sales for a business.
In today's Generative AI Newsletter:
The DNA letter: Why would rival AI labs ask Congress to regulate them?
The 30-day rule: Who changed what policy makers initially planned for AI?
Anthropic's IPO: What does a $60 billion listing buy Claude users?
Meta's agent: Would you let an AI book appointments and close sales for your business?
The people running the biggest AI companies asked Washington to get involved because AI lowers the bar on building a biological weapon.
Who?
Demis Hassabis of Google DeepMind
Sam Altman of OpenAI
Dario Amodei of Anthropic
Mustafa Suleyman of Microsoft AI
They all signed a public letter pushing for new rules.
For decades the thing stopping a bad actor from making a dangerous pathogen was the know-how. Now everyone can access AI so we need to be a little bit concerned.
The ask: Companies that sell synthetic DNA and RNA should be required to screen both the customer and the order.
Why now: Back in 2017, Canadian researchers used about $100,000 of mail-order DNA to rebuild horsepox, a close cousin of smallpox. Synthesis has only gotten cheaper since.
Not so easy: Screening isn't airtight. Last year Microsoft researchers showed that AI protein-design tools could generate dangerous sequences that slipped right past the screening software companies already use.
The bill: A bipartisan Senate bill from Tom Cotton and Amy Klobuchar would force every gene-synthesis provider in the US to screen orders and customers.
These companies almost never ask Washington to regulate them. Signing this letter says they would rather help write a screening law now than answer for a bioweapon built with their tools later.
GenAI Works grew organically to 14M followers without any ads or paid reach. On Jun 11, founder Steve Nouri (Data analyst, AI expert and GTM advisor) is sharing the exact distribution playbook behind it.
This is for people who want to:
Show their AI products to millions, even if they’re starting from scratch
Ask questions and get tips from Fortune 500 go-to-market strategy advisor
Get a playbook to learn how to start
If you want to be on this live session, click here to save your seat.
The AI order Trump signed Tuesday was supposed to be three times tougher.
The original version gave the government up to 90 days with every major new model before release, and Trump was set to sign it at a ceremony on May 21.
The night before, Elon Musk, Mark Zuckerberg and investor David Sacks called him directly. The ceremony came off the calendar overnight. Now we know their efforts succeeded.
Their argument was China. A 90-day federal queue on every frontier release would slow American labs while Chinese rivals ship on their own schedule.
The version that survived asks labs to voluntarily hand their most powerful models to the government for national security testing up to 30 days before release.
Sam Altman spent yesterday on Capitol Hill to lock the friendly version in. OpenAI wants one national framework built on the state rules already out there.
The industry trimmed the rules before the signing and showed up smiling after. Altman meeting leaders from both parties says this is about making the friendly version stick no matter who runs Washington next. Whether voluntary stays voluntary is still the thing to watch.
The Claude maker is aiming to list as soon as October, and reports point to a raise of as much as $60 billion. That would make it the second-largest IPO ever, behind only SpaceX's $75 billion listing next week..
Anthropic has picked Morgan Stanley and Goldman Sachs to lead its IPO.
If those bank names mean nothing to you, Morgan Stanley led Facebook's IPO. Goldman led Twitter's. And they seem to be the ones leading the AI boom.
SpaceX: Goldman and Morgan Stanley are underwriting its June 12 listing, the record $75 billion raise.
Alphabet: Goldman, Morgan Stanley and JPMorgan are joint bookrunners on the $84 billion stock sale it announced this week.
So what does going public actually do for Claude?
Anthropic is on the hook to SpaceX for $1.25 billion a month and it spent months rationing Claude while it waited on capacity. Sixty billion dollars buys a lot of Nvidia chips, and chips decide how much Claude you get. So you get better models and hopefully, fewer restrictions.
Meta wants to talk to your customers instead of you. At its Conversations conference in London it showed off Meta Business Agent. It can take actions for you, like booking appointments and closing sales.
WhatsApp and Messenger already had business bots that handled basic FAQs. The difference now is that the new agent can do things. It plugs into Shopify and Zendesk, so it can check stock, process an order or update a support ticket without a human stepping in.
The reach: More than 1 million businesses already used the earlier chatbot versions. The new agent is rolling out to Instagram too and going global.
The cost: Free to start with paid tiers coming. Small businesses get it through WhatsApp Business Premium, bigger companies pay based on AI usage.
Meta's bet is distribution, the same edge that won it messaging with WhatsApp. It owns the apps billions of people already use to message companies, so nobody has to install anything new.
But don’t forget when hackers talked Meta's own support bot into changing account emails and locking people out of Instagram. Security will be a massive challenge here.
Appwrite is an open-source backend platform that bundles what every app needs into one toolkit, the login system, the database, file storage, serverless functions and real-time updates.
Instead of wiring up five separate services, you get them in one place, with a free plan and Pro at $25 a month.
The part worth trying is its MCP server, which lets you point an AI agent like Claude or Cursor at your backend and run it in plain English, no console clicking or custom scripts.
Try this yourself:
Make a free account at appwrite.io and spin up a project on the Free plan.
Add the Appwrite MCP server to Claude Desktop or Cursor using the guide at appwrite.io/docs/tooling/mcp.
Tell the agent what you want in plain words, like "create a products table with name, price and stock columns, all required."
Ask it to work with that data, like "export every product over $100 into a costly.csv file," and watch it run the database calls for you.
DeepSeek's first raise: China's DeepSeek is raising about $7.4 billion at a valuation as high as $59 billion, with Tencent and battery giant CATL among the backers.
Alphabet's $84 billion sale: Google's parent is selling $84 billion in stock to fund AI data centers, its first stock sale since 2005, with Berkshire Hathaway taking $10 billion.
Microsoft's agent gadgets: Microsoft unveiled Project Solara, an operating system for AI-agent devices like desk gadgets and badges, built on Android rather than Windows.
Google's water promise: Google pledged to replenish more water than it consumes by 2030 as pushback over data center water use grows.
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