05/11/2026
OpenAI shipped GPT 5.5 and called it salvation. Anthropic, the polite kid nobody trends, quietly passed them in revenue.
Five things happened in AI this week. None of them landed the way the press releases promised.
Anthropic crossed thirty billion in annual revenue, tripled in four months, with a thousand customers now paying them seven figures. Sora, OpenAI's much hyped video generator, was unplugged on April 26th after burning a million dollars a day to earn two million across its entire life.
Tech laid off seventy eight thousand humans in Q1 with forty eight per cent explicitly blamed on AI, and then a Chinese court (yes, that China) said you cannot legally fire someone just because the robot can do their job. And Meta's two billion dollar acquisition of an AI startup hiding behind a Singapore flag of convenience was blocked by Beijing three weeks before Trump's state visit.
The pattern, if you squint: the loudest companies are not the highest earning. The most hyped products are not the most durable. And the legal ground under "we replaced them with AI" is shifting faster than the marketing teams can keep up.
For anyone advising clients: diversify your stack, build for portability, and please retire the phrase "free your team up." It is not landing the way it used to.
Full piece on Substack. Bring a beverage.