Forget you

Plus, $5 billion for AI chips

May 20, 2026

Welcome back! ‘Tis the season for commencement speeches—but don’t say the “AI” word. Last week, a real estate executive at the University of Central Florida declared that "the rise of artificial intelligence is the next industrial revolution,” and the students started booing. Loudly. When she tried to continue with "Only a few years ago, AI was not a factor in our lives," they interrupted again, this time with cheers and applause. 

Former Google CEO Eric Schmidt got a similar reception at the University of Arizona when he told students, "You will help shape artificial intelligence." The booing was loud enough that he tried to talk over it.

Is AI optimism officially out of fashion? Hit reply with your thoughts.

— Matt, Catherine, and the Future Tools team

Is Anthropic Running the Uber Playbook on Claude Code?

Anthropic has been having a bad couple of weeks.

The first controversy hit when developers realized Claude Code was upcharging them on top of their $200/month subscriptions for references to third-party tools like OpenClaw and Hermes. One developer got hit with an extra ~$200 charge despite barely using his Claude subscription limits. He tracked it back to a single file: Hermes.md. Just having that string in his git commit history was enough to silently route him to API billing.

Anthropic eventually acknowledged the bug and refunded affected users—but only after the story blew up online.

Then last week, Anthropic announced an increase to Claude Code weekly limits by 50%. At first, that sounded like a huge win for developers. But almost immediately after, the company revealed another major change coming June 15: Claude subscriptions are moving to a credit-based system for third-party tools like OpenClaw and Hermes. And developers quickly did the math:

  • The credits appear to be priced at API rates.

  • Heavy users could burn through them way faster than before.

  • In practice, it looks like a significant price increase dressed up as "free credits."

My POV: Remember when people were warning that AI companies were running the Uber-era financing playbook—offer the product cheap to draw you in, then jack up prices once you're reliant on them? This may be the start of that.

My takeaway: learn how to use and build with AI really well right now (and with open-source models if you can) so you're flexible enough to roll with whatever pricing changes come next. If your whole workflow only works under one vendor's subscription pricing, you're one policy update away from a much bigger bill.

— Matt

Apple's New Siri Will Auto-Delete Your Chats

Via CNBC

Apple is leaning into privacy as a differentiator for its revamped Siri experience. According to Bloomberg's Mark Gurman, the new Siri app launching with iOS 27 will auto-delete chats after a set period of 30 days, one year, or never.

How it works: The feature mirrors how iMessage already handles disappearing messages. Unlike competitors, which typically require you to manually delete chats or start in incognito mode, Apple's approach makes privacy the default.

  • How it compares: Last week, Meta announced Incognito Chat with Meta AI—end-to-end encrypted conversations with no logs stored on servers. Google keeps temporary Gemini chats for up to 72 hours. ChatGPT stores them for up to 30 days. Claude keeps incognito chats for at least 30 days.

  • Still in beta: Gurman also reports the new Siri may launch with a beta label—notable given it's already been delayed two years since Apple first announced an AI overhaul at WWDC 2024.

Why it matters: Privacy in AI chat is quickly becoming a competitive feature. With chatbot logs now central to multiple lawsuits, the companies that make forgetting easy may have an edge.

Blackstone, Google Announce $5B Joint Venture for TPU Cloud

Blackstone and Google are teaming up to create a new US-based company that will provide Google's custom AI chips as a compute-as-a-service offering. Blackstone is making an initial $5 billion equity commitment, with plans to bring 500 MW of capacity online in 2027.

What they're building: The joint venture will offer data center capacity, operations, networking, and Google Cloud's Tensor Processing Units (TPUs)—custom chips purpose-built for AI training and inference. TPUs already power Gemini and AI-driven products Google delivers to billions of users.

Who's involved: Blackstone is the world's largest alternative asset manager with more than $1.3 trillion in assets under management and the largest global provider of data centers. Google brings a decade of TPU development and domain expertise. Benjamin Treynor Sloss, a Google executive with 20+ years building Google's global infrastructure, will lead the new company.

The bigger picture: This isn't just another cloud deal. The biggest money in the world sees AI chips as critical infrastructure worth billions in upfront commitment.

From brief to mockup in one pass

Via Glide Design

Glide Design turns a plain-English brief into product strategy, high-fidelity screens, UI copy, responsive layouts, and developer handoff notes. Its models reason about audience, flows, and UX to quickly produce designs.

How you can use it

  • Generate complete screen designs from a text description

  • Get UI copy and layout in a single pass

  • Speed up handoff with developer-ready notes

  • Iterate on product strategy and flows quickly

Pricing: Free and paid plans

Turn YouTube into a readable newsletter

Via ReadTube

ReadTube transforms your YouTube and Bilibili subscriptions into a searchable, readable archive. The tool uses AI to transcribe videos, generate headlines and summaries, and rewrite long videos into quick reads.

How you can use it

  • Read a 20-minute video in 5 minutes

  • Search your subscription history semantically

  • Add timestamped notes to any video

  • Self-host or bring your own API keys

Pricing: Free and paid plans

Jobs, announcements, and big ideas

  • OpenAI launches Guaranteed Capacity, giving enterprises reserved access to secure AI compute on demand.

  • Google unveils Gemini 3.5, claiming frontier-level intelligence and stronger agent-grade action capabilities.

  • Andrej Karpathy joins Anthropic, returning to frontier LLM research after his Tesla and OpenAI stints.

  • Amazon launches Alexa Podcasts, generating personalized AI audio episodes on demand for any topic.

  • A jury clears OpenAI in Musk v. Altman, dismissing Musk’s claims that the company breached its founding mission.

  • Boston Dynamics shows Atlas using AI to pick up and carry a mini-fridge across a warehouse floor.

I said too much...from paychecks to the purple lighting to that sword behind me, I answered everything you've been asking.

That’s a wrap! See you this Friday for more.