Altman cross-examined on honesty + Anthropic flips OpenAI in Ramp share

In Elon Musk's federal suit to block OpenAI's for-profit conversion, Sam Altman took the stand and was cross-examined by Musk attorney Steve Molo. Molo pressed Altman on his 2023 testimony to Congress that he had "no equity in OpenAI" — a statement Altman later acknowledged understated his economic exposure through a Y Combinator fund limited-partner position, which he characterized as "passive ownership" that was "well understood." Asked whether he could be trusted, Altman replied that he believed he was "an honest and trustworthy businessperson." Former OpenAI directors Helen Toner and Tasha McCauley had previously testified to a "toxic culture of lying" inside the company; Altman disputed their account. The trial continues this week.

Ramp's index of 50,000-plus companies on its corporate expense card now shows 34.4% of businesses paying for Anthropic services versus 32.3% for OpenAI — the first time Anthropic has led, and a 26 percentage point jump for Anthropic over the past 12 months while OpenAI declined 1 point. The same day, Anthropic launched Claude for Small Business, a bundle of 15 agentic workflows wiring Claude into QuickBooks, HubSpot, Canva, PayPal, Docusign, Google Workspace, and Microsoft 365, plus a free AI Fluency course and a multi-city training tour. Ramp economist Ara Kharazian credits Anthropic's strategy of starting with technical buyers in finance and professional services, then broadening through Cowork and now SMB. He cautions the index covers only Ramp customers and is not a perfect proxy for the wider market.

CEO Chuck Robbins told staff Cisco will eliminate fewer than 4,000 roles — under 5% of its workforce — with notifications starting today. The same week, Cisco posted a record $15.8 billion in Q3 FY26 revenue, up 12% year over year. Robbins frames the cuts as a refocusing exercise: "The companies that will win in the AI era will be those with focus, urgency, and the discipline to continuously shift investment" — particularly toward silicon, optics, security, and employee AI fluency. This is the third major enterprise-tech layoff this month explicitly tied to AI, after Cloudflare's 1,100 cuts last week and the Amazon "tokenmaxxing" performance-review story in yesterday's brief. The pattern is now unmistakable: AI productivity gains and headcount reductions are being announced in the same memo, regardless of whether earnings are weak.

In this week's Stratechery essay, Ben Thompson argues the three frontier labs have quietly become forward-deployed engineering firms — sending armies of consultants into enterprises to restructure operations around AI, not to empower workers but to help executives replace them. He calls it the "Deployment Company" model and frames the work as a deliberate echo of 1970s mainframe vendors that sold to CIOs rather than end-users. The implication: AGI is not "good enough" for self-service enterprise adoption, so the labs are buying their way in with engineers who do the integration manually. Notion's same-day launch of a developer platform that orchestrates Claude Code, Cursor, Codex, and Decagon inside a workspace reads as a parallel bet that the labs will not own that orchestration layer themselves.

The Southern Environmental Law Center, on behalf of the NAACP, filed suit alleging xAI is operating 46 natural gas turbines at its Mississippi data center after state regulators permitted only 15 of them. Mississippi treats the trailer-mounted turbines as "mobile" equipment, which it argues exempts them from federal air-pollution standards for a year — but the complaint contends federal law allows states to regulate trailer-mounted power plants as stationary sources, and that Mississippi is simply declining to enforce. The NAACP frames the unchecked emissions as worsening air quality in an already polluted region. xAI has not responded publicly. The case is the first major regulatory test of the "neocloud" pattern of standing up frontier-scale data centers on temporary fossil-fuel power.

Princeton faculty voted — with a single dissenting vote — to mandate proctoring for all in-person exams starting July 1, 2026, ending a 133-year tradition of unproctored testing under the student honor code. The proposal cites "AI and personal electronic devices as major catalysts," noting that AI tools on small devices make cheating harder for peers to observe, which has hollowed out the peer-reporting model the honor system relied on. The Daily Princetonian's 2025 Senior Survey of over 500 graduating seniors found 29.9% admitted cheating on an assignment or exam, 44.6% said they knew of violations they did not report, and only 0.4% said they had reported a peer. Instructors will now serve as exam witnesses but will not actively monitor.