On April 4th, 2023, around two in the morning, a man was found stabbed multiple times on a sidewalk in downtown San Francisco. Hey, who did this to you? What happened next turned the story into a political firestorm. Reports have identified the victim as Bob Lee, the founder of Cash App. From Bloomberg Podcasts, this is Foundry, the killing of Bob Lee, beginning April 16. Welcome to the TechBrew Ride Home for Wednesday, May 13, 2026. I'm Brian McCullough. Today, Google unveiled Google Book, merging Chrome OS and Android into a unified laptop OS. WhatsApp launched incognito chat for private AI conversations. Anthropics revenue run rate is on track to hit $50 billion by the end of June. And Anduril raised $5 billion at a $61 billion valuation. Here's what you missed today in the world of tech. Turn your market hunches into market trades with Liquid. Liquid lets you go long or short on commodities, stocks, or private markets right from your phone with up to 100x leverage. That means a $10 position can give you up to $1,000 in market exposure, and you don't have to work around market hours or weekends. With Liquid, you get one platform for every market open 24-7. More than $3 billion has already been traded on Liquid, check them out at liquid.trade slash techbrew and sign up with referral code techbrew for a $25 deposit match. Terms apply. Google yesterday unveiled Google Books, a new laptop lineup featuring a unified OS merging Chrome OS and Android with devices from Dell, HP, and others coming this fall under that branding. Google says Chromebooks will get support through their, quote, existing date commitment and, quote, many models are eligible to transition to the Google Book experience, quoting ZDNet. The new product category is a step up from the Chromebook in terms of performance and features, merging Chrome OS and Android into a single operating system. This new unified OS is a risk for Google that could potentially pay off big. Chromebooks already had integrations with Android smartphones, but Google says the new operating system will bridge the gap bringing MacBook-like features to Google Book. Details are sparse, however, as we're expecting more information to be unveiled at I.O., Google's developer conference, on May 19th. Google Book enters the laptop market at a crucial moment. When Apple's $599 MacBook Neo dropped earlier this year, it completely altered consumer expectations for budget laptops, forcing both PC makers and Chromebook makers to re-evaluate their offerings. Google's strategy seems thus. Release a higher-quality laptop powered by a unified operating system across Android smartphones, and play ball with competitive features powered by its new overarching AI engine, Gemini Intelligence. Notice a naming trend here. One of the biggest selling points for the Neo was how well it integrated with the iPhone. It forced users to justify why they were using a Windows PC at all when they could unlock features like messaging, FaceTime, and phone mirroring, all on a laptop that was potentially cheaper than a PC. Google Books are almost certainly a response to that. One of the focal points of the new OS is the Cast My Apps feature, which lets you seamlessly use apps on your phone directly from your Google Book. No downloading required. Ultimately, the idea here is to bring native support for Android apps to the laptop experience on Google Book, including the new overarching AI engine, Google Intelligence. It will roll out features in waves, starting with the latest Samsung Galaxy and Google Pixel phones this summer. Other features like Create My Widget use AI to create widgets for Google Book based on prompts made in natural language. For example, the demo showed the user creating a widget for a family vacation, which Gemini Intelligence made as a scrollable itinerary that sat on the user's desktop. There's also some smoothing of Android to iOS features. For one, Google says its new Quick Share feature, which lets you share photos, videos, and files to different devices, will be compatible with AirDrop. This will be available on Pixel phones to start, with support for Samsung, Oppo, OnePlus, Vivo, Xiaomi, and Honor devices later this year. Google was clear, though, Chromebooks are not going anywhere. Chromebooks are not dead, Alexander Kutcher, senior director of tablets and laptops at Google said in a virtual press briefing. If Google Books are an all new product, the existing market of Chromebooks will remain unchanged for now. Kutcher said Google is committed to supporting software updates for Chromebooks until at the very least 2034 and readily admitted that the company was in no position to just get rid of the millions of Chromebook devices that are already deployed in schools businesses and the hands of consumers worldwide. Although specific products and associated specs have not yet been announced, Google confirmed new premium devices from Acer, Asus, HP, Dell, and Lenovo. Physically, there's also not a lot to go off yet, but one thing Google showed off is the new Glow Bar, a rainbow-hued LED bar on the back of every Chromebook, as a unified design language. The new Google Books won't be here until the fall, but we can expect laptop manufacturers to start announcing products as early as this summer, end quote. Google also unveiled Gemini Intelligence, bundling existing and new Gemini features, including task automation across apps, and letting users vibe code Android widgets, as I just mentioned. Well, actually, I mentioned that on the laptop, but I guess you can do this on your phone, too, quoting The Verge. Task automation is apparently one of those best of Gemini features. It's also on some recent Pixel and Galaxy phones as well, and it enables Gemini to use certain apps on your behalf. It's been limited to a handful of rideshare and food delivery apps until now, but that's changing soon, says Google, when task automation will open up to a wider range of apps. It will also add multi-modality. Previously, Gemini could only use voice or text prompts to inform its actions. Now you can throw a screen grab or a photo into the mix, which kind of seems like something you should have been able to do from the start. You'll be able to give Gemini a screenshot of a grocery list in your notes app, and it will add those items to your cart. You know, provided you have an Android phone that supports Gemini Intelligence. Another feature under the Gemini Intelligence umbrella that's all new is Create my widget. Google's blog post calls it a first step towards generative UI, and it allows you to describe the functionality you want in natural language and let AI create a custom widget. Google's examples include a custom weather widget for a cyclist who wants to see wind speed and precipitation at a glance, and a dashboard to surface specific recipe suggestions like three high-protein meal prep recipes every week. These widgets will also carry over to Wear OS, so they'll be available on watches too. It's a pretty simple idea on the face of it, but if you think about the widgets as tiny apps that you can vibe code right onto your phone's home screen, it gets a little more interesting. Maybe this really is a small step toward an interface that just creates itself on the fly, or maybe that's a lot of pressure to put on a humble widget feature. Either way, I'll be curious if we hear more during the I.O. keynote about generative UI, end quote. WhatsApp has launched Incognito Chat, an AI chat mode built on private processing that Meta says lets users talk to AI without Meta being able to access those chats. Quoting TechCrunch, Meta on Wednesday said it is adding the ability to start incognito conversations with its Meta AI chatbot within WhatsApp. These conversations, the company said, will be processed in a secure environment and can't be seen by anyone. Users can start an incognito session by tapping on a new icon in one-on-one chats with the Meta AI. The company said the feature will also be available on the standalone Meta AI app as well. Incognito chats will roll out to WhatsApp and the Meta AI app over the next few months. Meta said these incognito conversations are not saved and messages will disappear by default once you close the chat. The session will also end if you close the app or lock your phone and meta AI will lose the context of that particular conversation, the people said. People are starting to use AI for everything, including some of their most private thoughts, whether that's tackling financial or health questions or for advice on how to respond to a tricky message from a friend or a colleague. We think it's really important to give people the ability to ask these questions as privately as possible, Alice Newton-Rex, VP of product at WhatsApp, told TechCrunch over a call. The company has been laying down the groundwork for secure AI chats on WhatsApp for a while now. Last year, it detailed its private processing infrastructure that would let it build AI features without breaking end-to-end encryption. Since then, WhatsApp has added features like AI-powered summaries of messages that use this architecture. Newton-Rex said Meta used smaller models to power its previous features, but the new incognito chat uses its latest Muse Spark model, which was released last month. The company is already working on its next feature that taps its private processing infrastructure. Called side chat, it will let users invoke Meta AI within chats to ask questions and get answers privately without notifying or showing it to other people in the chat. Currently you need to tag a message and ask a question to the AI assistant to get an answer that other participants in the chat can see If you privately need to ask a question you have to paste the text in a separate chat window ChatGPT and Claude offer incognito modes too and companies like DuckDuckGo and Proton have launched their own privacy-first chatbots. Meta's move toward private AI chats comes at a key time. Last month, Reuters cited lawyers who opined that users' conversations with an AI chatbot could be used against them in litigation, end quote. Sure, AI is everywhere, but that doesn't mean enterprise value is a given. In a recent survey, PwC found the amount of CEOs who reported revenue gains or cost reductions from AI is nearly equal to the amount who say they're still stuck. So what's causing the issues? PwC boiled it down to clarity. Leaders aren't clear about what's hype, what's reality, or where AI can actually create measurable impact. To help change that, PwC is offering their AI expertise and data. They explore how to tune out noise around AI and get clarity on what successful adoption looks like. Learn from the experts by heading to pwc.com slash US slash brew AI. That's pwc.com slash US slash brew AI. When you're locked into a conversation, you're probably not taking the best notes, and that's normal. It's hard to listen closely and write everything down at the same time. So turn on PlodNote Pro instead. PlodNote Pro is a small AI-powered device that records conversations and turns them into clean, structured summaries automatically. It's built for people who spend a lot of time in conversations, interviews, or calls and don't want to lose any important info. Instead of scrambling to type, you just press a button and stay focused. Plod handles transcription, summaries, and key takeaways. It's also built with privacy in mind, with enterprise-grade compliance like SOC2, HIPAA, and GDPR. Get started at plod.ai slash tbrh. That's p-l-a-u-d dot a-i slash t-b-r-h. Use code t-b-r-h for 10% off all Plod devices. The journal has seen investor documents suggesting that Anthropics' revenue run rate is now on track to hit $50 billion a year by the end of June. Ramp says that more of its customers now use Anthropic, or at least we should say pay for Anthropic, than they do pay for OpenAI, which would be a first. Quote, Anthropics' revenue run rate, a figure commonly used by startups that forecasts annual revenue based on short-term sales is on track to reach $50 billion by the end of next month, according to figures shared with investors. Their run rate topped $30 billion just in April, up from $9 billion just from the end of 2025. The company had planned for growth to increase tenfold this year, but it saw 80-fold growth in annualized revenue and usage in the first quarter. OpenAI said in late March that its revenue had reached $2 billion a month or $24 billion on an annualized basis, though the figures aren't perfectly comparable because Anthropic counts sales through cloud partners as revenue while OpenAI doesn't. A spokesman for OpenAI said the monthly revenue data shared in March wasn't intended to represent a precise annualized revenue run rate. In data release Wednesday, finance startup Ramp said more of its customers used Anthropic's models than OpenAI's for the first time, with 34.4% using Anthropic versus 32.3% using OpenAI. Adoption of Anthropik's Claude tools jumped 3.8% from March to April, while OpenAI adoption fell 2.9% according to the data. Ramp analyzed the spend of approximately 50,000 customers to track AI adoption trends. We've seen time and time again in this market that a large dominant player can be unseated in a matter of a couple months, said Ara Karajanian, lead economist in Ramp's economics lab. Anthropic has just done that. An OpenAI spokesperson said the Ramp figures offer an incomplete picture of business customers because large enterprise clients don't pay for software services through credit cards. The AI race is far from over and both companies face challenges, including the looming threat of Google. For Anthropic in particular, computing constraints have caused outages and forced it to throttle users, while OpenAI's codex is rapidly gaining popularity, adding pressure as Anthropic struggles to keep pace with its own growth. Before this year, OpenAI had long been seen as the default front-runner in the AI race, and its ChatGPT chatbot still maintains a sizable lead over Anthropic Claude and overall users Anthropic has caught up by focusing on developing a handful of products rather than trying to dominate every corner of the market and its success with coding users and businesses has reset the AI race on its terms By the way if you click through on the link to this particular story there a chart in there that is just amazing. Start of 2025, Anthropic is so far behind OpenAI, like maybe three times behind, then OpenAI gets a huge burst in Q1 of that year, going even further ahead. But since Q1 of 2025, it's basically, OpenAI has basically been flat. And essentially, all of the growth in the entire AI space since that Q1 of 2025 has been anthropic. They're basically eating everyone's lunch in terms of paying users at the moment. So, From the defense, startups are the only other real game in town beyond AI startups file, quoting the Times. Anderil, the defense tech company that makes artificial intelligence-backed weapons, said on Wednesday that it had raised $5 billion in new funding as modernizing the U.S. military has become a top priority for the Trump administration. The financing values Anderil at $61 billion double the $30.5 billion that it was valued at in June in its last funding round. The latest fundraising was led by longtime investors Thrive Capital and Andreessen Horowitz, amid talk that Anderil could try to go public in the next year. In total, the company has raised $6.82 billion through eight funding rounds from investors, including Founders Fund and Lux Capital. Anderil has established itself as a top player among U.S. defense companies. founded by the tech entrepreneur Palmer Luckey and others in 2017, the company has developed autonomous submarines and jets, weaponized drones, and augmented reality helmets for the military. The firm, based in South Los Angeles, has said it wants to remake American national defense. In its early years, Andrew created border surveillance software for the U.S. government before expanding into other products. When Russia invaded Ukraine in 2022, the company began testing AI-backed drones on the battlefield and has since developed a range of pilotless aircraft. In March, Andrews signed a 10-year, $20 billion deal with the U.S. Army for some of its software products and AI-backed weapons. That same month, the company announced that it was part of a consortium of companies building a $185 billion space interceptor missile system for the U.S. government, which is known as Golden Dome, end quote. And we'll end today with an interesting raise, quoting the Times. many of the world's leading researchers believe that AI will soon be powerful enough to improve itself with little or no help from human developers. AI is code, and now AI can code, a veteran researcher Richard Schocker said. The ingredients are there. Dr. Schocker recently founded with seven other researchers a company to pursue this mind-bending goal, which is often called recursive self-improvement. His startup, Recursive Superintelligence, has raised more than $650 million from venture capital firms, including Google Ventures and Graycroft and the chip-making giants NVIDIA and AMD. The six-month-old company, which has offices in San Francisco and London, has fewer than 30 employees, but it is now valued at more than $4 billion. The company should not be confused with recursive intelligence, which is pursuing a similar goal and is also valued at $4 billion. The prominent AI startups Anthropic and OpenAI are also chasing recursive self-improvement, which has been an obsession among Silicon Valley technologists for decades. Dr. Soker was previously head of AI research at the business software maker Salesforce and chief executive of the AI startup U.com. His seven co-founders include notable researchers from many of the industry's leading AI companies, including OpenAI and Meta. Recursive Superintelligence has also hired Peter Norvig, who spent 25 years as director of research at Google and co-wrote an AI textbook, Artificial Intelligence, a Modern Approach that has been a standard inside universities for three decades. Recursion, a term that is common among mathematicians and computer programmers, refers to a mathematical function that feeds itself. After a recursive procedure generates information, it uses that information to generate something else, and so on, end quote. I've heard people whispering, we're maybe six months or less away from AI being able to write the next version of itself. And if that happens, I cannot stress this enough. All bets are off on everything everywhere. Nothing more for you today. Talk to you tomorrow.
