1. On the witness stand, Musk made OpenAI's IPO trial about saving humanity Elon Musk took the stand in a Northern California courtroom this week. He opened not with OpenAI, not with Sam Altman, not with the contracts at issue, but with South Africa.

2. Three Hacker News threads last week repriced what an AI coding subscription buys you Within the same week, three of the most-debated developer posts on Hacker News circled the same question from different angles: what exactly does an AI coding subscription buy.

3. Pentagon Pulls Google In, Brussels Pries It Open, Beijing Locks Meta Out Governments in three capitals reached the same US AI companies last week and pulled them in opposite directions.

In Brief

• Anthropic ships Claude connectors for Photoshop, Blender, and Ableton Anthropic launched connectors letting Claude operate inside Adobe Creative Cloud, Affinity, Blender, Ableton, and Autodesk apps. The release follows Claude Design earlier this month and pushes Claude into creative tool surfaces previously dominated by Adobe's own Firefly.

• GitHub shifts Copilot to usage-based pricing GitHub will charge Copilot subscribers based on actual inference consumption, citing costs it can no longer absorb from heavy users. The change ends flat-rate pricing for the most-used AI coding subscription and forces individual developers to track per-request spend.

• Mercor breach exposes 4TB of voice samples from 40,000 contractors Attackers exfiltrated 4TB of voice training samples covering roughly 40,000 AI contractors at Mercor. The dataset includes raw voice recordings used to train speech models, giving copycats material to clone voices at scale.

• Ming-Chi Kuo says OpenAI is building a phone with MediaTek and Qualcomm Analyst Ming-Chi Kuo reports OpenAI is partnering with MediaTek, Qualcomm, and Luxshare on a phone where AI agents replace traditional apps. The note adds hardware ambition beyond the previously rumored earbuds collaboration with Jony Ive.

• Red Hat ships Tank OS to sandbox OpenClaw agent fleets The OpenClaw maintainer at Red Hat released Tank OS, a container runtime for running AI agents with reliability and isolation guarantees. The release targets enterprises operating fleets of agents in production.

• Lovable releases vibe-coding app on iOS and Android Lovable shipped native iOS and Android apps that let developers generate web apps and websites from a phone. The mobile release moves natural-language coding off the desktop and into pocket workflows.

• Google tests conversational AI search inside YouTube Google began testing an AI Mode-style conversational search for YouTube that returns longform videos, Shorts, and text answers in one view. The experiment is live for a subset of YouTube users.

• Japan Airlines tests humanoid robots for luggage at Haneda Japan Airlines started a Haneda Airport trial using humanoid robots to sort luggage, load cargo, and clean cabins. The test responds to Japan's airport labor shortage and marks one of the first commercial humanoid deployments at a major hub.

• Amazon adds AI audio Q&A to product pages Amazon launched "Join the chat," an audio feature on product pages that answers shopper questions with AI-generated voice responses. The rollout extends Rufus-style answers from text to spoken output during browsing.

• Taylor Swift files trademarks targeting AI imitators Taylor Swift filed new trademark applications aimed at AI-generated copycats trading on her name and likeness. Trademark law has limited reach against generative output, making the filings a partial defense rather than a clean block.

• Neurable shops non-invasive BCI tech to consumer wearable makers Neurable is licensing its non-invasive neural-sensing technology to consumer wearable manufacturers. The CEO is targeting headphones and headsets as the first integration points for collecting brain signals from mainstream users.

• Rural communities organize against new data center construction Rural counties across the US are mobilizing zoning fights and lawsuits against data center projects driving AI capacity expansion. Opposition centers on water draw, grid load, and noise from facilities sited near small towns.

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