Welcome back! Trump says the AI giants owe the public a "contribution" and won't say what that means. A developer found a loophole that cuts Claude bills by 70%. Anthropic signed a lease on 20 years of electricity, and China ordered its own companies to delete their AI companions before a new law hits. Two governments, one week, two very different grabs.
In today's Generative AI Newsletter:
Government: What does Washington actually want from the AI giants?
Claude: How did one developer cut Claude bills by 70%?
Anthropic: Why did Anthropic commit itself to the year 2046?
China: What made ByteDance and Alibaba delete their AI companions?
The government helped make AI powerful. Now it wants to get paid.
Trump said in the Oval Office yesterday that the AI companies "making tremendous amounts of money" will be making "a contribution to the people of our country."
He turned to Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent, said "you know what I'm talking about," and declined to spell out what the contribution is.
He didn't have to.
This is the same government that banned Anthropic's Fable 5 for three weeks last month and floated taking a 5% stake in OpenAI. It talks about AI money like it's owed a tithe.
Nobody knows the form yet. A public stake, a national fund, a fee, a hand on the dividend. Bessent knows, apparently, and isn't saying.
A year ago Washington wanted to regulate AI. Now it wants to own a piece. Once the Treasury holds shares in the companies it's meant to police, every rule it writes comes with a stake attached.
Anthropic charges a premium for Claude. A developer just found the loophole in its own price list.
The tool is called pxpipe, free and open-source. It sits between you and Claude Code and turns the bulky stuff, your old context, tool docs and long code, into PNG images before it goes out. Anthropic bills image tokens far cheaper than text, so the same session costs a fraction. One demo dropped from $42 to $6.
It's lossy, so exact things like passwords and hashes have to stay as text or they come back garbled, and it runs slower because the model reads pictures instead of words. It already has 2,600 stars on GitHub, so plenty of people think the tradeoff is worth it.
This works because Anthropic's own pricing has a gap between how it charges for words and pictures. The day enough people drive through it, Anthropic raises image prices and the door shuts.
Anthropic signed a lease yesterday that runs for 20 years.
It's taking about 401 megawatts at a data center campus in Hawesville, Kentucky from a company called TeraWulf, in a deal worth roughly $19 billion in revenue over the term.
The first chunk comes online in the second half of 2027, the rest by early 2028. TeraWulf's stock jumped 17% on the news.
TeraWulf used to mine bitcoin. Now it builds AI factories, and Anthropic just became its anchor tenant.
Twenty years is the part to sit with. Anthropic is paying for 2046's electricity today, a bet that people will still lean on Claude two decades out. Everyone watches the model race. The real money goes into concrete and power.
China told its own companies to delete their AI companions.
ByteDance and Alibaba are shutting the features that let people build and chat with custom AI personas, ahead of new rules that hit July 15.
ByteDance's Doubao, the most popular chatbot in China, kills its custom-persona feature that day. Alibaba's Qwen and Tencent's Yuanbao are doing the same.
The rules are blunt about why. Beijing is banning AI that stirs up extreme emotions in kids or builds the kind of dependence that pulls people away from real relationships. It also bars companies from training future models on those intimate chat logs.
Two governments looked at the same technology this week. Washington asked for a cut of the money. Beijing moved to control what the bots do to people's heads.
Extuitive predicts whether an ad will work before you spend a dollar running it. You connect your Shopify store, it reads your products and past ads, then tests new creative against a model of 150,000 simulated consumers to forecast click-through and return before launch.
Try this yourself:
Book a demo at extuitive.com, the only way in for now, there's no self-serve signup.
Connect a Shopify store so it can read your products, audience and past performance.
Feed it a new campaign idea and read the forecast against your own best and average ads.
Have it generate fresh creative and copy, then score those the same way before you pay to run them.
Who it's for: Shopify and ecommerce operators tired of burning budget to find out which ad works.
Meta says its next model caught up to OpenAI: AI chief Alexandr Wang told staff that Meta's still-training model, codenamed Watermelon, matches GPT-5.5, though it burns about 10x the compute of the last one and nobody outside Meta has tested it.
Grok 4.5 is knocking on the public's door: xAI's 1.5-trillion-parameter model is already in private beta at Tesla and SpaceX, reportedly matching Claude Opus, and new subscription flags this week point to a wider release soon.
Wall Street bets Nvidia stays on top: Nvidia is already the world's most valuable company at about $4.7 trillion, and prediction markets put its odds of finishing 2026 there near 60%.
Robinhood says its trading bots will soon match the pros: CEO Vlad Tenev told CNBC that AI agents will trade as capably as human professionals, weeks after Robinhood began letting agents buy and sell stocks for users.
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