The Brief
H200s approved but Beijing declines, Cerebras surges 68% on debut, Mythos cracks Apple's M5 chip vulnerabilities, and now, AI labs plug into your bank accounts.
FIELD NOTES
This week, the push-and-pull with China continues. In Trump’s trip to Beijing this week, they brought an “offering” of H200 Nvidia chips - which Xi declined. China’s going all in on building their own, putting in billions to acquire domestic foundries and vertically integrating its domestic chip stack. Meanwhile, Chinese developers find ways to access OpenAI and Anthropic models for cheap through proxy stations, a grey market workaround to get US frontier models at Deepseek prices.
Wafer chip maker Cerebras nearly doubles on IPO open, signaling a massive appetite for AI stocks. SpaceX is coming up next in June, and with a $1.75T valuation, set to be the largest IPO of all time.
Anthropic and OpenAI continue their advance up through the stack into the application layer. This week, OpenAI announced integrations into the personal finance stack, to be able to advise users on everything from investments to mortgage to budgeting. Anthropic went the small business route, releasing Claude for Small Business to help with invoicing, payroll, and more. I predict we’ll see many more moves in like categories like taxes, accounting, legal docs, healthcare benefits, insurance by the end of this year.
Enjoy the update.
Tara
THE DOWNLOAD
H200s approved for China, but Beijing says they “will develop their own”
As Trump met Xi in Beijing on May 14, Reuters reported the U.S. Commerce Department had cleared roughly 10 Chinese firms (Alibaba, Tencent, ByteDance, JD.com, and others) to buy up to 75,000 H200s each through Nvidia or distributors like Lenovo and Foxconn, with a 25% revenue share to the U.S. Treasury and chips routed through U.S. territory before delivery. By the time the summit closed Friday, Trump publicly acknowledged Beijing “chose not to” approve purchases because “they want to develop their own.”
Why it matters: Three days earlier, the Shanghai Stock Exchange approved SMIC's ~$6B acquisition of the remaining 49% of its Beijing 300mm fab from five state-backed investors, the largest semiconductor M&A in China's foundry history. Both the SMIC M&A and the H200 stall are two sides of the same policy: Beijing is building a vertically integrated domestic AI chip stack, not waiting for U.S. licensing to work. Domestic Chinese AI accelerator shipments hit 41% market share in 2025, with Huawei alone at 20%, and SMIC is the exclusive foundry for Huawei's Ascend chips.
Security researchers use Anthropic’s Mythos to exploit Apple’s M5 chip in five days
A three-person team at security startup Calif used Anthropic’s Mythos Preview to find and exploit two vulnerabilities in Apple’s M5 chip, going from bug discovery to a working root-access exploit in five days. The exploit bypasses Apple’s Memory Integrity Enforcement (MIE), the hardware-level security feature Apple built specifically to stop this class of attack. Calif reported the vulnerabilities to Apple in person at Apple Park and will publish the full 55-page technical report after Apple ships a fix.
Why it matters: Apple's MIE is the most advanced memory protection on any consumer chip. Calif exploited it on current hardware and software, with just a small team and using an AI model that didn't exist a year ago.
Cerebras debuts on Nasdaq, doubles on first day
Cerebras began trading on Nasdaq on May 14 under ticker CBRS, opening at $350 and closing at $311.07 — a 68% gain over its $185 IPO price — giving the company a market cap of roughly $95 billion. The offering raised $5.55B, the largest U.S. tech IPO since Uber in 2019. The company currently carries a $24.6B revenue backlog, anchored by a $20B+ multi-year OpenAI deal and an AWS deployment signed in March.
Why it matters: Cerebras proved the IPO window is open and hungry for AI infrastructure, and the next test is bigger. SpaceX is pricing as early as June 11 at a $1.75T valuation and ~$75B raise, which would be the largest IPO in history.
OpenAI and Anthropic plug into personal financials and small business tools
OpenAI launched a personal finance feature in ChatGPT Pro this week, letting U.S. users connect over 12,000 financial institutions through Plaid, including Schwab, Fidelity, Chase, and Robinhood, to get budgeting advice and spending analysis grounded in their actual account data. More than 200 million users already ask financial questions through ChatGPT each month. Anthropic also launched Claude for Small Business, a package of agentic workflows that plug into QuickBooks, PayPal, HubSpot, Canva, DocuSign, and Google Workspace to handle payroll, invoicing, month-end close, and marketing campaigns.
Why it matters: Both moves point the same direction: the AI labs are no longer just building chat interfaces, but are wiring themselves into the transaction layer where money moves. This is a direct threat to incumbent fintech, bookkeeping, and advisory software. I’d watch for the same pattern in health and healthcare, taxes, work benefits, and more.
Isomorphic Labs raises $2.1B Series B to scale AlphaFold into drug design
Alphabet’s Isomorphic Labs raised a $2.1B Series B led by Thrive Capital, with participation from Abu Dhabi’s MGX, Singapore’s Temasek, and the UK Sovereign AI Fund, bringing total capital to ~$2.6B. Isomorphic has not dosed a human patient yet but holds multi-billion-dollar R&D partnerships with Eli Lilly, Novartis, and J&J. The company’s AI drug design engine, IsoDDE, is built on the same foundations as DeepMind’s Nobel Prize-winning AlphaFold.
Why it matters: AlphaFold proved AI could predict protein structures. Isomorphic is the bet that the same approach can design drugs end to end, from target to clinical candidate. Three pharma giants are already customers for that capability.
There’s a Chinese Grey Market for GPT & Claude tokens
A Chinese CS student posted a detailed breakdown of the proxy station economy on Reddit this week. On Xianyu and Taobao (China’s eBay and Amazon), vendors openly sell GPT-5.4 and GPT-5.5 API access at 70-90% cheaper than OpenAI’s official pricing (roughly $1 for 100M tokens). The arbitrage works by converting Codex subscriptions from low-price regions into standard API endpoints using open-source tools, then pooling accounts and reselling at scale. Adoption among Chinese developers and CS students is described as near-universal.
Why it matters: Some proxy operators reportedly sell user interaction data to domestic AI labs for distillation and post-training. The post also notes that when grey-market GPT costs roughly the same as DeepSeek, most Chinese developers default to GPT, which means U.S. frontier models may have far more usage in China than official numbers suggest, running through infrastructure that neither OpenAI nor Anthropic controls.
xAI open-sources the X recommendation engine
xAI pushed a major update to the open-source X “For You” algorithm, replacing the prior heuristic-based system with Phoenix, a ranking engine built on xAI’s Grok transformer architecture. The release includes a runnable end-to-end inference pipeline, a downloadable 3GB pre-trained mini model, and for the first time, the ads blending system.
Why it matters: This is the first global-scale recommendation system released with a working model checkpoint. Researchers and startups building social or content products can now benchmark against an industrial recommender instead of simplified proxies.
DEEP DIVE FROM THE REVIEW
Submissions to one of the top physics journals more than doubled last year.
The editor’s take: most of it is people who think they’re doing science by chatting with an LLM.
This is the part of AI x science maybe nobody really wants to talk about.
AI is making it dramatically easier to produce work that looks like science. Whether it’s actually making science better is a totally different question, and the benchmarks we use can’t tell us either way.
Strange Research Fellow Mason Rodriguez Rand on what we’re getting wrong about how we measure all this, plus three suggestions for what better measurement could look like.
EVENTS
We are hosting an AI x Science Jeffersonian dinner in San Francisco! We are keeping 1 or 2 seats for people we haven’t met. If you’re interested in attending, please request an invite here.
