Morning Digest, April 28, 2026

April 28, 2026 · 9 newsletters · 6 overlapping stories

Top Stories

OpenAI and Microsoft Rewrite Their Partnership

(5 newsletters)

OpenAI and Microsoft have restructured their relationship in a significant way: Microsoft loses exclusivity over OpenAI’s IP and models, freeing OpenAI to work with AWS, Google Cloud, and others. Microsoft will stop paying revenue share to OpenAI, while OpenAI will continue sharing revenue with Microsoft through 2030 with the amount now capped. The AGI clause that previously gave OpenAI a kill switch on Microsoft’s access is gone entirely. Both companies’ obligations now run on calendar dates rather than an ambiguous AGI milestone. The deal also resolves the threatened lawsuit over OpenAI’s $50B Amazon Bedrock deal. Microsoft retains Azure-first launch access through 2032.

China Blocks Meta’s $2B Acquisition of AI Startup Manus

(5 newsletters)

China’s National Development and Reform Commission ordered Meta to unwind its $2 billion purchase of Manus, a Singapore-based AI agent startup with Chinese roots. The two companies were already deeply integrated when the order came down. China cited export control and overseas investment laws; two Manus executives were reportedly barred from leaving the country during the probe. The intervention is widely read as Beijing asserting that AI talent and technology are national security assets. Meta says the purchase was legal and intends to resolve the situation. The issue may surface in Trump’s upcoming meeting with Xi Jinping.

DeepSeek V4 Challenges Frontier Models at a Fraction of the Price

(3 newsletters)

Chinese AI lab DeepSeek released two new open-weight models, V4-Pro and V4-Flash, that benchmark near GPT-5.4 and Opus 4.7 on reasoning, at roughly 1/6 the cost ($1.74/$3.48 per million tokens vs. $5/$30 for GPT-5.5). The models feature 1M-token context windows and support for Huawei’s Ascend chips, providing a working alternative to Nvidia infrastructure. US officials separately accused Chinese labs of IP theft from American companies. The release makes the AI race as much about price as raw capability, and the Huawei chip angle may matter even more than the benchmark numbers.

OpenAI Is Building Its Own Smartphone for 2028

(3 newsletters)

Industry analyst Ming-Chi Kuo reports that OpenAI is developing a phone in partnership with MediaTek, Qualcomm, and Luxshare, with mass production targeted for 2028 and specs finalized by late 2026 or Q1 2027. The device will lean on AI agents rather than traditional apps to complete tasks, a fundamentally different paradigm from current smartphones. The project is framed as a direct challenge to the iPhone at a time when Apple itself is navigating a Siri overhaul powered by Gemini.

Google Commits Up to $40B to Anthropic

(2 newsletters)

Google is investing $10 billion in Anthropic immediately, at a $350 billion valuation, with up to $30 billion more contingent on Anthropic hitting performance benchmarks. The deal also includes 5 gigawatts of Google Cloud compute. Amazon has a parallel performance-based deal worth $5 billion. Anthropic is now one of the most heavily capitalized AI labs in the world, with the funds going primarily toward closing the gap between compute demand and supply as agentic AI workloads accelerate.

AlphaGo Creator Raises $1.1B for a “Superlearner” AI Lab

(2 newsletters)

David Silver, who led DeepMind’s reinforcement learning team and built AlphaGo, AlphaZero, and AlphaProof, has launched Ineffable Intelligence in London. The lab raised $1.1 billion at a $5.1 billion valuation in Europe’s largest-ever seed round. Its approach skips pre-training on human data entirely, letting agents learn from experience in simulations. Silver describes human data as “a kind of fossil fuel.” The raise joins a growing cluster of well-funded bets that LLMs are not the endgame for AI development.

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