The Week in AI: May 18–24, 2026 (Week 21)

News of the week: May 18–24, 2026 (Week 21)

The week was dominated by the Google I/O conference, where Google unveiled the Gemini 3.5 Flash model, Gemini Spark, an agent that works around the clock, and smart glasses. Anthropic bought Stainless, brought on Andrej Karpathy and faced off against the Department of Defense at an appeals court in Washington. A jury in Oakland rejected Elon Musk’s lawsuit against OpenAI. Nvidia beat expectations once again, and the SpaceX IPO prospectus revealed how much money xAI is burning.

New models

Google launches Gemini 3.5 Flash and announces Gemini 3.5 Pro

On May 19, at its I/O conference, Google introduced Gemini 3.5 Flash, the first model in a new series designed to combine high performance with the ability to act autonomously. According to Google, it outperforms the older Gemini 3.1 Pro on demanding coding tasks and agentic work (Google).

The new model is the default in the search engine’s AI Mode for all users, and developers can access it through the Gemini API, Google AI Studio and the Antigravity tool. The more powerful Gemini 3.5 Pro is due in June (TechCrunch).

Gemini Omni: a model that creates from anything

On May 19, Google also announced Gemini Omni, a model meant to generate output from any kind of input, for now mainly video. The Gemini Omni Flash version is available to Google AI Plus, Pro and Ultra subscribers in the Gemini app and in the Flow tool (Google).

Products and agents

Gemini Spark: a personal agent that runs 24 hours a day

Gemini Spark is an agent in the Gemini app that handles tasks on the user’s behalf even when their laptop is closed. An agent is a program that plans and carries out steps on its own rather than just answering questions. It runs on dedicated virtual machines in Google Cloud and connects to services such as Gmail (TechCrunch).

Selected testers and AI Ultra subscribers will get the beta first, and a version built directly into the Chrome browser is expected this summer. CEO Sundar Pichai spoke of the start of the “agentic era of Gemini” (CNBC).

Search with agents and cheaper subscriptions

May 19 – Google Search is getting information agents that keep track of what the user needs in the background. Search will also gain a generative interface that builds a custom overview and interactive graphics for each query (Google).
May 19 – Google cut the price of its top AI Ultra plan from 250 to 200 dollars a month. It also added a new AI Ultra plan for 100 dollars aimed at developers and power users (Google).
May 19 – Google showed smart glasses running Android XR with the Gemini assistant. Audio glasses from Gentle Monster, Warby Parker and Samsung arrive in the fall, with display glasses coming later (CNBC, TechCrunch).

Anthropic at Code with Claude in London

At its Code with Claude developer conference in London on May 19, Anthropic expanded its Claude Managed Agents service. Companies can now run an agent’s tools in their own environment (self-hosted sandboxes, public beta), while orchestration of the agent stays with Anthropic (Claude).

The new MCP tunnels, in preview, let agents connect securely to MCP servers inside a company network without the company having to expose them to the internet. MCP is an open standard through which AI models access data and tools.

May 18 – OpenAI and Dell Technologies agreed to bring the Codex coding agent to companies’ own data centers. Codex will connect to the Dell AI Data Platform; OpenAI says more than 4 million developers use it every week (OpenAI).
May 19 – Consulting firm KPMG formed a global alliance with Anthropic. All of its roughly 276,000 employees will get Claude, which will become part of the Digital Gateway platform, starting with tax and legal services (Anthropic).
May 21 – Spotify and Universal Music Group signed licensing agreements that will let fans create covers and remixes using AI. The tool will be a paid add-on to Spotify Premium, and artists can decide whether to take part (Spotify, CNBC).
May 22 – Research firm Gartner named OpenAI a leader in enterprise coding agents (OpenAI).

Business and investment

Nvidia: record revenue of 81.6 billion dollars

On May 20, Nvidia reported revenue of 81.6 billion dollars for the first quarter of fiscal 2027, up 85% from a year earlier. The data center division, which sells AI chips, brought in 75.2 billion dollars (Nvidia).

For the next quarter, the company expects revenue of around 91 billion dollars, without any revenue from data center chips in China. Even so, the stock fell after the results were released (CNBC).

Anthropic buys Stainless and lands Karpathy

On May 18, Anthropic announced the acquisition of Stainless, a startup that builds tools for generating SDKs (software libraries for working with APIs) and MCP servers. Terms were not disclosed; The Information reported a price of more than 300 million dollars (Anthropic).

Stainless tools had also been used by OpenAI, Google and Cloudflare. The company is now shutting down its hosted services, but customers will keep the libraries already generated (TechCrunch).

On May 19, OpenAI co-founder and former head of AI at Tesla Andrej Karpathy announced that he had joined Anthropic. He will work on model pre-training and build a team to accelerate this research using Claude (TechCrunch, CNBC).

May 19 – Anthropic took first place in the CNBC Disruptor 50 ranking (CNBC).
May 20 – According to a CNBC source, Anthropic is set to reach revenue of 10.9 billion dollars in the second quarter (CNBC).

SpaceX prospectus reveals xAI losses

SpaceX, which absorbed Elon Musk’s AI company xAI this year, published its prospectus for an initial public offering (IPO) on May 20. According to the filing, xAI posted an operating loss of 6.4 billion dollars in 2025 on revenue of 3.2 billion (TechCrunch).

The AI part of the company lost another 2.5 billion dollars in the first quarter of 2026 alone. Features of the Grok chatbot had 117 million monthly active users in March (CNBC).

May 18 – Meta began laying off roughly 8,000 people this week, about 10% of its workforce. At the same time, it is increasing its AI investment, with planned spending for 2026 expected to reach up to 145 billion dollars (CNBC).
May 20 – AI search startups are raising big money. According to Bloomberg, Exa Labs raised 250 million dollars at a valuation of 2.2 billion, and Parallel Web Systems, founded by former Twitter CEO Parag Agrawal, raised 100 million at a valuation of 2 billion (TechCrunch).
May 21 – Hark, the AI lab founded by Brett Adcock, raised 700 million dollars in a Series A round at a valuation of 6 billion. Investors include Nvidia, AMD Ventures and Intel Capital (TechCrunch).

Regulation and law

Musk loses his case against OpenAI

On May 18, a jury in federal court in Oakland unanimously found that Elon Musk had filed his lawsuit against OpenAI and Sam Altman too late. Judge Yvonne Gonzalez Rogers immediately adopted the verdict (CNBC).

The court therefore did not rule on the merits of the dispute, only on the statute of limitations. Musk had sought up to 180 billion dollars and the reversal of OpenAI’s conversion into a for-profit company; he called the verdict a “technicality” and announced an appeal (TechCrunch).

Anthropic versus the Pentagon at the appeals court

On May 19, an appeals court in Washington heard the dispute between Anthropic and the U.S. Department of Defense, which had designated the company a supply chain risk. Such a designation effectively prevents it from working with the military and its contractors (CNBC).

During the hearing, Judge Henderson described the department’s actions as a “flagrant overreach of authority.” The judges also asked about the court’s jurisdiction and why the department had not chosen a milder remedy.

Research

Gemini for Science

On May 19, Google introduced Gemini for Science, a set of experimental tools for researchers. The Hypothesis Generation tool, built on the Co-Scientist system, has several agents propose, challenge and rank scientific hypotheses, backing every claim with a citation (Google).

Computational Discovery uses AlphaEvolve to test and evaluate thousands of code variants in parallel, for example to forecast solar power generation.
Literature Insights, built on NotebookLM, searches the scientific literature and organizes the results into clear tables.
The Science Skills package connects agents to more than 30 life science databases, such as UniProt and the AlphaFold Database.