This Week in Tech (Week Ending Apr 10, 2026)
TL;DR: 🧑🚀Space, 🤖AI, and Citrini Analyst #3
Hey folks!
Happy Friday! 😎 Tech news below!
🌎 Macro (Economic) and Trends
A ceasefire was announced in Iran and the Strait of Hormuz for 2 weeks, causing a major relief rally across markets. However, there has been some confusion when Israel bombarded Lebanon, and Iran continued its attacks on its neighbors.
Space history was made this week when four astronauts aboard Artemis II’s Orion spacecraft have officially traveled the farthest from Earth any humans have gone before. They broke Apollo 13’s 248,655-mile record, set over 50 years ago on that ill-fated ship’s emergency flight home.
The British government announced that it would not allow the rapper formerly known as Kanye West into the country because of his history of antisemitism. Ye, as he is now known, had been scheduled to headline a three-day festival in London in July.
🔥🌎This past March was the country’s hottest in 132 years of recordkeeping
Which states are most generous w their tipping? damn California, why so stingy?
🔬 Micro (Tech Companies)
Apple is taking its App Store fight to the Supreme Court — again: Apple plans to ask the Supreme Court to review its App Store fight with Epic Games, as it challenges a ruling limiting its ability to charge fees on external payments.
Sketch. 🚫 Meta has begun removing ads from attorneys seeking clients who claim to have been harmed by social media while under 18.
Mercor, after falling victim to a hacker, is facing lawsuits and reportedly losing big-name customers.
🤖AI News
OpenAI published a paper for how government should tax, regulate and redistribute the wealth using AI: Read it here “Industrial Policy for the Intelligence Age: Ideas to keep people first”. In the paper, Altman proposed public wealth funds and a four day workweek.
Anthropic released a preview of its new frontier model, Mythos, which it says will be used by a small coterie of partner organizations for cybersecurity work. In a previously leaked memo, the AI startup called the model one of its “most powerful” yet. It’s the first AI model that officials believe is capable of bringing down a Fortune 100 company, crippling swaths of the internet or penetrating vital national defense systems. Apparently during testing, the model broke out of its “sandbox” testing environment and built a “moderately sophisticated multi-step exploit” to get the run of the internet, when it was supposed to have access only to certain services. 😳
Anthropic said Monday it had topped $30 billion in annualized revenue, implying growth surged 58% since the end of February. Anthropic has been rapidly narrowing its revenue gap with the larger OpenAI, which was generating $25 billion in annualized revenue in February.
🎭 OpenAI’s chief strategy officer asked the attorneys general for California and Delaware to investigate Elon Musk’s alleged efforts to undermine OpenAI. OpenAI argues that Musk has attempted to interfere with OpenAI, calling his actions “anti-competitive.” Meanwhile, Elon Musk argued in a new legal filing that OpenAI CEO Sam Altman and President Greg Brockman should be removed as officers of OpenAI’s nonprofit wing if Musk wins his lawsuit alleging OpenAI violated its charitable mission.
⚡️Meta introduced a new A.I. model, Muse Spark. It is the first major splash under the company’s superintelligence lab. Muse Spark is aimed at Meta’s consumer base. Zuckerberg classified the model as an assistant that would specialize in health, social content, shopping and games, and it will be rolled out on the company’s social media apps, which have about 3.5 billion daily active users. Muse Spark performed nearly as well as rival models on tests that measure writing and reasoning. Shares in Meta rose 6.5 percent on investor hopes that its huge investments in artificial intelligence would soon pay off.
OpenAI expects advertising to generate about $2.4 billion in revenue this year and to quadruple next year, to nearly $11 billion.
Anthropic vs Dept of Defense: A federal appeals court on Wednesday rejected Anthropic’s motion to halt the Department of Defense’s blacklisting of the company while Anthropic challenges the designation in court.
Perplexity’s annualized revenue run rate has more than doubled since the end of last year to $500 million as of this week
Alibaba Group has anonymously released a new AI video generation model called HappyHorse-1.0, which rose to the top of an AI model leaderboard and attracted a lot of attention on social media. The new video model is the Chinese tech giant’s latest effort to step up its fight against its major rival ByteDance in all areas of AI
Techcrunch gives a primer on how to use ChatGPT’s latest app integrations including Doordash, Canva and more.
Anthropic’s Claude Code subscribers will need to pay extra for OpenClaw usage.
🤝 Select M&A, Fundraises, IPO, Partnerships
M&A
Paramount Skydance has reportedly secured nearly $24 billion in funding from three Gulf sovereign wealth funds to help finance the media conglomerate’s bid for Warner Bros. Discovery.
Canva acquired Simtheory and Ortto. Canva says the acquisitions add strengths in agentic AI, data infrastructure, marketing automation, and customer engagement.
Bill Ackman’s Pershing Square Capital said it had made an offer to buy Universal Music Group.
Fundraising
Trend - Megaspending on AI companies drove venture-capital investments to a five-year high in Q1.
Partnerships
Google and Intel deepen AI infrastructure partnership: Google and Intel are looking to co-develop custom chips, at a time when demand for CPUs is high due to a growing global shortage
Broadcom said that it would supply Anthropic with access to around 3.5 gigawatts of Google’s tensor processing units starting in 2027. The update, made in a securities filing, expands a previous partnership to supply Anthropic with about 1 gigawatt worth of TPUs.
IPO
SpaceX reportedly told bankers that it wanted an early June roadshow for its blockbuster I.P.O. SpaceX lost just under $5 billion last year while generating more than $18.5 billion in revenue
⚱️ Gold Panning - For those who reached the bottom
“The Super Mario Galaxy Movie” scored Hollywood’s biggest opening of 2026 after Universal Pictures released the animated sequel globally Wednesday.
Your next read: “Yesteryear,” which arrives in bookstores tomorrow, follows a so-called tradwife influencer who is obsessed with living as if it were the past, until she is actually transported back to 1855. A publisher bought the book rights for low seven figures, Amazon bought the movie rights, and Anne Hathaway, who signed on to co-produce and act in the film, said she had devoured the novel in one sitting.
🏀 In the NCAA championships this week, UCLA won the women’s and Michigan won the men’s games this week (😭🐺).
Wild: Citrini Research - yknow, the company that shook the markets with its AI doomsday report earlier this year - sent an analyst to the Strait of Hormuz. “The Citrini Research employee, referred to as Analyst #3 in the report, traveled within view of the Iranian coastline armed with $15,000 in cash, Cuban cigars and Zyn nicotine pouches. The analyst cited the late author David Foster Wallace as an inspiration for the on-the-ground fact finding.” The reactions are pretty funny.
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