Larry Dignan

Microsoft said it is launching the Microsoft Frontier Company, a unit that will deliver AI transformation. The company said it is investing $2.5 billion in the new unit and embedding 6,000 industry and engineering experts.

In a statement, Microsoft said:

"This goes beyond what has been labeled as Forward Deployed Engineering (FDE) and will be the largest, most capable, outcome-driven engineering organization in the industry."

Microsoft's move comes after AWS launched a forward deployed engineering effort.

• Forward deployed engineers: The promise, peril in AI deployments

According to the Financial Times, OpenAI has discussed giving a 5% stake to the US government. The early talks are aimed at clearing political hurdles as it releases models. Reaction is mixed to say the least.Say what you will about OpenAI CEO Sam Altman, but he's a master of raising money and playing the game.

Amazon said its Amazon Leo unit has completed 14 missions and launched more than 375 satellites. The company started scaling its satellite deployment in April and is not the third-largest constellation in orbit.

• Amazon doubles down on Leo, acquires Globalstar for $11.6 billion

Meta launched a $20 month Meta One Premium subscription for its glasses. Free users (nevermind that you paid for the creepy Ray Bans in the first place) will have limits on conversations. I'm sure this'll go over well.

"No subscription is required to use AI glasses. All AI glasses owners get free monthly usage for certain features. If you reach your free monthly usage limit, you can upgrade to a paid Meta One Premium plan, or wait until your free limit refreshes each calendar month.

If you reach your paid subscription usage limit, it will refresh at the start of the next billing cycle.

Conversation focus is currently available for free for 3 hours per month, or for 15 hours per month for Meta One Premium subscribers."

Here's what's next: If you don't pay up, Meta will limit your ability to see out of the glasses. Eyesight is now under a consumption plan.

Yay, Anthropic's latest models are back after a lot of thrash with the US government. The biggest takeaway from Anthropic's statement and my recap is this:

The same jailbreak that sidelined Fable 5. Anthropic said Amazon researchers found a way to bypass Fable 5's safeguards to identify software vulnerabilities. Anthropic said its testing found that other models had the same ability including Claude Haiku 4.5, Sonnet 4.6, Opus 4.6, Opus 4.7, Opus 4.8, GPT-5.4, GPT-5.5 and Kimi K2.7.

Schneider Electric acquired Cognite for $3.1 billion in a deal that'll beef up its industrial AI efforts. The plan is to combine Cognite with Scheider Electric's AVEVA industrial software unit.

Genesys said it will acquire Pinkfish, an agentic orchestration workflow company. Genesys said the acquisition will expand its Genesys Cloud AI efforts with MCP tool integration and workflow automation. Terms of the acquisition weren't disclosed.

California said state agencies will use Anthropic's Claude across operations at a 50% discount with free workforce training. Local government in California will also have access to Claude.

CoreWeave launched CoreWeave ARIA, an AI research and iteration agent designed to continuously improve models and AI agents. ARIA is designed to accelerate the AI research loop by analyzing thousands of runs and tens of thousands of metrics in mnutes.

In the big picture, CoreWeave ARIA is another data point indicating that the AI neocloud is building out its software game.

• CoreWeave launches latest Nvidia instances, adds Weights & Biases tools
• CoreWeave tops $5 billion in revenue for 2025, projects more hypergrowth 2026, 2027
  

Bain said the first five months of 2026 has led to a 41% surge in deal value to $2.4 trillion. That's the second highest tally ever.

In its 2026 M&A Midyear Report, Bain said these massive deals create a "winners paradox" where companies need to pair an M&A agenda with AI transformation programs. In other words, executives need to integrate two businesses and manage an AI transformation at the same time.

Key stats on M&A:

• Overall valuations held flat at 11.6 times enterprise value/EBITDA.
• Venture capital deal surged due to OpenAI's $122 billion funding round.
• Megadeals drove a 77% year-over-year gain across Europe, the Middle East, and Africa (EMEA) through May 31.

Comcast is breaking up with plans to spin off NBCUniversal and Sky within a year. Mike Cavanaugh will be CEO of NBC Universal and Comcast former CFO Michael Angelakis will become CEO of Comcast. CEO Brian Roberts will "continue to be actively involved in the leadership of Comcast and NBCUniversal."

Here's the deck.

Here's a deep dive on the all-CPU Chinese LineShine supercomputer.