Musk's record $75 billion SpaceX-xAI IPO; Anthropic urges an AI pause

SpaceX, now merged with Musk's AI lab xAI, set a fixed price of $135 per share for an offering that values the combined rocket, Starlink, and xAI group at roughly $1.75 trillion — the largest IPO on record, aiming to raise about $75 billion. The company prices on June 11 and begins trading on Nasdaq the next day under the ticker SPCX. Starlink, with about 10.3 million subscribers, is the profit engine; xAI folds frontier-AI ambitions into the same stock.

In a report titled "When AI Builds Itself," Anthropic called for a globally coordinated agreement to slow development of the most powerful AI models, warning that systems are nearing "recursive self-improvement" — the point where AI can make itself smarter with little human help. As evidence, it disclosed that Claude now writes more than 80 percent of the code merged into its production systems, and that its engineers ship roughly 8-times as much code per day as in 2024. Anthropic likened the problem to nuclear arms control, only harder, since AI training is far easier to hide.

OpenAI confirmed it will sign on to President Trump's June 2 executive order, which asks frontier-AI developers to give the federal government access to new models 30 days before release for a national-security benchmarking review. Participation is voluntary, and OpenAI is among the first major labs to formally commit. "It's quite right that democratic governments have a big role to play in how this technology is used and deployed," said George Osborne, the company's head of countries.

University of Cambridge researchers began human trials of what they call the first vaccine whose central component was designed entirely by AI. The shot targets the whole Sarbeco coronavirus family — including Covid-19, SARS, and related bat viruses — in hopes of guarding against outbreaks that have not yet emerged. An early 39-person trial tested safety; a roughly 200-person study will gauge immune response. The team is already applying the same AI design approach to influenza and Ebola vaccines.

At its Build conference, Microsoft introduced seven first-party MAI models spanning reasoning, coding, image, voice, and transcription — its clearest push yet to lessen reliance on partner OpenAI. The flagship, MAI-Thinking-1, is a 35-billion-parameter reasoning model with a 256K-token context window, now in private preview on Azure AI Foundry; Microsoft says it matches Anthropic's Claude Opus 4.6 on the SWE-Bench Pro coding benchmark. The models join MAI-Code-1-Flash, the lightweight coding model unveiled at the same event.

Microsoft also used Build to launch the GitHub Copilot app, a desktop technical preview that GitHub calls "a control center for agent-native development." It lets developers run multiple AI coding agents in parallel — each in its own isolated git worktree — and consolidates issues, pull requests, and background automations into one "My Work" dashboard. A new Agent Merge feature shepherds a pull request through CI checks, reviews, and merge. The preview spans Windows, macOS, and Linux for Copilot Business, Enterprise, Pro, and Pro+ users.

A new Apple-commissioned study by economists at Analysis Group found that App Store apps with consumer-facing AI features grew their billings about 4-times faster than other top apps in 2025, and that more than 40 of the store's top 100 apps now include such features. Apple says the broader App Store ecosystem facilitated over $1.4 trillion in developer billings and sales last year. The findings land as Apple faces continued pressure over its own slower-moving AI roadmap.