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The advisory jury returned its verdict today — and it took them 90 minutes. Elon Musk lost his lawsuit against OpenAI on all counts. The jury found against Musk on his central claim that OpenAI violated a charitable trust by converting to a for-profit structure. The statute of limitations was a decisive factor: the jury concluded Musk's claims were filed too late, effectively ending the case before reaching the merits. Judge Yvonne Gonzalez Rogers is not bound by the advisory verdict, but analysts expect her to align with the jury's findings.

The consequences are immediate and enormous. OpenAI's path to an IPO — which had been legally clouded since Musk filed suit — is now clear. The structural conversion that moves OpenAI from nonprofit to a public benefit corporation can proceed without the threat of injunction. Prediction markets had given Musk only 34% odds of winning. The result also removes the last major legal overhang on the company's $300 billion private valuation and its plans to go public later this year. For the AI industry, the ruling confirms that AI labs can restructure from nonprofit origins without triggering charitable trust claims — a question that affected every major lab still holding nonprofit status.

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Google I/O kicks off tomorrow, May 19, and the pre-show leaks have been unusually detailed. The Android Show that ran last week confirmed the two biggest hardware bets: Googlebook — Google's new AI-native laptop category that merges Android and ChromeOS into a single OS — and Android XR glasses, the company's answer to Meta Ray-Bans. Both were previewed with working demos. Devices come from Acer, ASUS, Dell, HP, and Lenovo; all feature a "Glowbar" keyboard strip and deep Gemini integration.

On the model side, Google is expected to announce Gemini 4.0 — the first release to integrate native multimodal reasoning across text, code, image, audio, and video in a single pass. Project Astra, Google's real-time AI agent with persistent memory and camera awareness, is expected to move from research preview into public availability. Also on the keynote list: updates to NotebookLM, Google Search's AI Overviews, and the expansion of Google Workspace agents that can draft, schedule, and send on your behalf. The keynote starts at 10 AM PT. We'll have the full breakdown in tomorrow's issue.

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Anthropic has closed a $30 billion funding round at a post-money valuation of approximately $900 billion — the largest private fundraise in the history of artificial intelligence and one of the largest in the history of any private company. Bloomberg broke the news last week; it has since been confirmed across multiple outlets. The round is led by existing investors with significant new participation from sovereign wealth funds in the Middle East and Asia.

The valuation lands Anthropic at roughly three times OpenAI's last private valuation of $300 billion, and puts it within striking distance of public tech giants. For context: $900 billion would make Anthropic the third most valuable company in the world if it were public today, behind only Apple and Nvidia. The company has not announced IPO plans. CEO Dario Amodei has consistently said he prefers to remain private until safety and governance structures are mature enough to handle public market pressure. The fundraise gives Anthropic the runway to do that on its own timeline — and the compute budget to compete at scale with OpenAI, Google, and Meta.

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NextEra Energy — the country's largest renewable power producer — is in talks to acquire Dominion Energy at roughly $76 per share, or about $66 billion, in what would be by far the largest power deal ever recorded. The deal, structured as mostly stock with a small cash component, could be announced as soon as this week. NextEra would exchange roughly 0.8 of its own shares for each Dominion share outstanding.

The underlying driver is AI. Data centers are now consuming electricity at a pace that has turned the once-sleepy utility sector into a high-stakes M&A arena. Big Tech has committed trillions to AI infrastructure, but none of it runs without power — and the grid isn't built for it. Dominion supplies electricity across Virginia, which has become the world's largest data center hub. Whoever controls that supply chain controls a chokepoint for AI at scale. If it closes, the deal would instantly become the defining infrastructure transaction of the AI era — not a chip, not a model, but a power line.

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