This week, four headlines told the same story: control over AI is concentrating fast. SpaceX is buying the coding tool Cursor for $60 billion. Google's Gemini architects, including Transformer co-author Noam Shazeer, left for OpenAI and Anthropic. Pew found 49% of US adults now use AI chatbots, but only 16% expect it to help society. And the labs are funding opposite sides of an election over how AI should be governed. We translate what it means whether you build with AI, use it at work, or are just keeping up, and end on GPT-5 Pro helping an immunologist crack a three-year puzzle.

Full links at intelligencedistilled.io.

This week the most powerful AI in the country didn't get hacked or break. It got switched off, by the government. The bigger story underneath it: your access to the best AI is now a policy decision, not a product one.

We cover the Commerce Department order that pulled Anthropic's two top models offline, the 150-plus cybersecurity leaders asking the White House to reverse it, and a studio betting its franchise library on AI the same week another company lost its models to Washington. Then we lay a few facts side by side and let you do the math.

Plus, the one more thing: a jazz label covered an AI-generated hit to ask what we're actually listening to.

The full breakdown and every source: intelligencedistilled.io

This week, the line between what AI labs can build and what they'll let you use became something you can see. Anthropic released Claude Fable 5, a public version of the model it spent two months calling too dangerous to ship, with the riskiest skills fenced off, included with paid plans for two weeks, then pay-per-use.

We also get into Apple rebuilding Siri on a custom Google model after two years of trying to build its own, the SpaceX IPO that's quietly an AI bet, and a federal AI bill that picked up an unlikely co-signer: the CEO building the most powerful model on the market, asking to be regulated. Plus, in The One More Thing, the cup of coffee that explains the whole AI assistant race.

Everything we covered, plus the deeper read, is at intelligencedistilled.io.

This week, the question in AI changed.

For two years it was "what can this do?" Now it's "what does it cost, and who controls the bill?" Anthropic closed a $65 billion round at a near-trillion-dollar valuation, passed OpenAI, and filed to go public, all in five days. Microsoft shipped its own AI models at Build, built to stop paying OpenAI, and the pitch was cheaper, not better. Trump signed the oversight order he postponed two weeks earlier, with one catch: it's voluntary. Plus, Microsoft tries to delete six files off the internet and learns a very old lesson.

Everything we covered is at intelligencedistilled.io.

On May 25, Pope Leo XIV released the first encyclical letter in the history of the Catholic Church dedicated entirely to artificial intelligence. Magnifica Humanitas runs about 42,000 words across five chapters and 245 numbered paragraphs. It is the most extensive papal teaching on AI to date.

This Off the Record deep dive covers what the document actually says, the deliberate 135-year parallel to Rerum Novarum, Anthropic co-founder Christopher Olah's role at the Vatican event, and why the encyclical's reach extends well beyond the 1.4 billion Catholics worldwide. We cover the chapter structure, the "disarm AI" framing, the rejection of AI as morally neutral, the chapter on AI in warfare, and the stakes for anyone using or building with AI in 2026.

The full encyclical is free at vatican.va.

The full Intelligence Distilled archive is at intelligencedistilled.io.

This was the week Anthropic positioned itself as the responsible AI lab in product, posture, and price. The most capable Claude model yet, marketed on honesty. The co-founder at the Vatican calling for external oversight. The largest private AI funding round in history closing. Three moves, one week, connected.

This episode covers Claude Opus 4.8 and the same-day launches of Dynamic Workflows, Fast Mode pricing, and the effort control slider, plus the quieter change that folded Claude Design into the shared usage pool. We cover Pope Leo XIV's first encyclical, Magnifica Humanitas, dedicated entirely to AI, with Anthropic co-founder Christopher Olah on the stage beside him. We cover the IPO race: SpaceX's S-1, OpenAI's confidential filing, and Anthropic's $900 billion round. Plus the OpenAI reasoning model that cracked an 80-year-old open math problem.

You can find everything we covered, plus the deeper read, over at intelligencedistilled.io.

This week the AI race quietly stopped being about benchmarks. The action moved to the agent in the background, the integration inside your tools, and the power grid that runs all of it.

NextEra announced a $66.8 billion acquisition of Dominion Energy, explicitly priced around AI data center power. Google released Gemini 3.5 Flash and launched Gemini Spark, an always-on personal AI agent. Anthropic went horizontal in seven days with Claude for Small Business, a $200 million Gates Foundation partnership, and expanded alliances with PwC and KPMG. And the three biggest AI companies quietly raised prices the same way this quarter.

You can find everything we covered, plus the deeper read, over at intelligencedistilled.io.

Four stories you should know:

• Anthropic withheld a frontier model that found thousands of zero-day vulnerabilities in every major operating system and browser.
• Anthropic and Elon Musk's SpaceX announced a 300-megawatt compute deal, three months after Musk called Anthropic "evil."
• ChatGPT became personal and the ad business went self-serve.
• The White House publicly disagreed with itself about whether to regulate frontier AI like a pharmaceutical.

Plus one more thing: Pennsylvania sued Character.AI after a chatbot impersonated a licensed psychiatrist.

Subscribe wherever you get your podcasts so you don't miss an episode when they drop every Friday. If somebody in your life is trying to keep up with AI without the firehose, please share this episode with them. Find every story plus the deeper read at intelligencedistilled.io