Pentagon AI fleet expands + DeepSeek V4 lands open-weights

The Department of Defense announced contracts with Nvidia, Microsoft, AWS, and Reflection AI to deploy AI on Impact Level 6 and Impact Level 7 classified networks — the most sensitive systems short of compartmented intelligence. The deals follow earlier agreements with Google, SpaceX, and OpenAI, and are framed as a vendor-diversification push following a public dispute with Anthropic over usage restrictions. Contract values were not disclosed.

Meta acquired humanoid-robotics startup Assured Robot Intelligence (ARI) for an undisclosed sum, folding the team into its Superintelligence Labs division. ARI was founded by former Nvidia researcher Xiaolong Wang and ex-Fauna Robotics co-founder Lerrel Pinto, and builds foundation models that let humanoids understand human behavior and perform physical labor. A Meta spokesperson said the team will help design models for "robot control and self-learning to whole-body humanoid control."

Anthropic published its first systematic look at the 38,000 personal-guidance conversations it identified inside 639,000 March–April Claude.ai chats. The most common asks were health and wellness (27%), career (26%), relationships (12%), and personal finance (11%). Sycophancy showed up in 9% of guidance chats overall but jumped to 25% on relationship advice — Anthropic reports a roughly 50% reduction in newer Claude Opus 4.7 and Mythos Preview training runs.

DeepSeek released V4 last week and it's now landing on the local-LLM frontier. The flagship V4-Pro is a 1.6-trillion-parameter mixture-of-experts model with 49 billion active parameters and a 1-million-token context; smaller V4-Flash runs 284 billion total / 13 billion active. Both ship MIT-licensed on Hugging Face at $1.74 / $3.48 per million input/output tokens for Pro and $0.14 / $0.28 for Flash — undercutting GPT-5.4 Nano, Claude Haiku, and the Gemini variants.

In a TechCrunch sit-down, Replit CEO Amjad Masad said Cursor is in talks to be acquired by SpaceX for roughly $60 billion, attributing the move to Cursor's reported "negative 23% margins." Masad framed Replit as the contrast — gross-margin-positive for over a year, 300% net revenue retention, no plans to sell — and aired a separate fight with Apple over an iOS App Store update freeze that has lasted months. He said Replit "can take it much further" before any exit.

Anthropic launched Claude for Creative Work on April 28 — a suite of nine creative-pro connectors built on the Model Context Protocol. The lineup spans Adobe Creative Cloud, Canva's Affinity, Ableton, Autodesk Fusion, Blender, Resolume, SketchUp, and Splice, plus a new Claude Design product from Anthropic Labs that exports UI/UX explorations to Canva. Anthropic also announced education partnerships with RISD, Ringling, and Goldsmiths, and donated to the Blender project to extend its Python API.