Delivered to your inbox every Monday, Press Clips is a rundown of the previous week’s happenings in politics and tech in America. News, opinion, podcasts, and more, to bring you up to speed for the week ahead.
NEED TO KNOW
SpaceX brokered a deal with AI coding startup Cursor, including the option to acquire for $60B
China has blocked Meta’s $2B acquisition of AI agent startup Manus.
A group of Discord users allegedly gained access to Anthropic’s unreleased Mythos model
Apple CEO Tim Cook stepped down, to be replaced by Senior VP of Engineering John Ternus.
TECH
SpaceX and Cursor announced a deal, with the option for SpaceX to acquire the agentic coding startup for $60 billion.
SpaceX@SpaceXSpaceXAI and @cursor_ai are now working closely together to create the world’s best coding and knowledge work AI. The combination of Cursor’s leading product and distribution to expert software engineers with SpaceX’s million H100 equivalent Colossus training supercomputer will10:11 PM · Apr 21, 2026 · 20.4M Views2.35K Replies · 5.06K Reposts · 38.3K LikesA group of amateur sleuths on Discord gained access to Anthropic’s Mythos Preview Model.
Earlier this month, the AI developer announced the new frontier model, highlighting its cutting edge cybersecurity capabilities.
Anthropic also announced that the model would not be made publicly available, and that they would be working with leading tech companies to bolster their security (an initiative known as ‘Project Glasswing’)
The same model recently found 271 security vulnerabilities in Mozilla Firefox.
We saw a fresh round of releases from AI developers:
OpenAI gave us two major releases:
Their GPT-5.5 (or ‘Spud’) model achieved frontier scores across many benchmarks.
OpenAI Developers@OpenAIDevsGPT-5.5 reaches state-of-the-art results across key evals for agentic coding, computer use, tool use, advanced math, and cybersecurity tasks. 82.7% on Terminal-Bench 2.0 78.7% on OSWorld-Verified 55.6% on Toolathlon 35.4% on FrontierMath Tier 4 81.8% on CyberGym
6:08 PM · Apr 23, 2026 · 58.2K Views12 Replies · 82 Reposts · 877 LikesImages 2.0, a new state-of-the-art image generation model, provides "an unprecedented level of specificity and fidelity.”
Meta released Muse Spark, their first model release in over a year.
DeepSeek released preview versions of their much-anticipated, open source V4 model.
Meta’s $2 billion acquisition of the Singaporean AI agent startup Manus has been blocked by the Chinese government.
The move comes after Chinese officials expressed concerns about the deal, and subsequently prevented Manus executives from leaving China.
“The decision to prohibit foreign investment in Manus was made in accordance with laws and regulations, the National Development and Reform Commission said in a brief statement.” (CNBC)
Anthropic published the results of ‘Project Deal,’ an experiment in which AI agents conducted negotiations on behalf of employees to buy and sell items.
Anthropic@AnthropicAINew Anthropic research: Project Deal. We created a marketplace for employees in our San Francisco office, with one big twist. We tasked Claude with buying, selling and negotiating on our colleagues’ behalf.5:24 PM · Apr 24, 2026 · 2.78M Views401 Replies · 721 Reposts · 7.45K LikesGoogle will invest up to $40 billion in Anthropic, provided as cash and compute.
Newly released emails suggest that Amazon colludes with rivals to raise prices.
Meta plans to capture employee behavioral data to help train its AI models.
POLITICS
President Trump canceled the latest round of peace talks with Iran.
Special envoys Steve Witkoff and Jared Kushner were expected to travel to Islamabad on Saturday.
The Pentagon has requested a $1.5 trillion budget for the upcoming fiscal year.
This includes $54 billion for military drones (this figure would see the US spend more on drones than all but 12 countries spend on their entire military).
A U.S. soldier has been charged with using classified information to bet on the capture of Nicolás Maduro via Polymarket.
The Wall Street Journal@WSJA U.S. soldier who took part in the raid to capture Nicolás Maduro has been charged over using insider knowledge to make $400,000 betting on Polymarketon.wsj.comU.S. Soldier in Maduro Raid Is Charged With Making Bets on Former Leader’s Ouster10:34 PM · Apr 23, 2026 · 472K Views73 Replies · 70 Reposts · 200 LikesRep. Sheila Cherfilus McCormick (D-FL) resigned from Congress amid allegations of financial misconduct.
FBI Director Kash Patel is suing the Atlantic for $250 million.
The suit follows reporting from the Atlantic that Patel fears losing his job due to his excessive drinking and unreliability.
It could take 6 months to clear Iranian mines from the Strait of Hormuz, the Pentagon told Congress.
MUST SEE
Sam Altman and Greg Brockman joined the Core Memory podcast to talk about OpenAI’s ‘great reset (Core Memory) 🎥
Trump is super unpopular. So why don’t Democrats have a bigger lead? (Silver Bulletin) ✍️
OpenAI Stargate: where the US sites stand (Epoch AI) 📊
The man growing organs on demand (Core Memory) ✍️
Q&A on AI with Professor Ethan Mollick, Wharton School (AI Policy Perspectives) 💬
How Much Do GPU Clusters Really Cost? (SemiAnalysis) 📊
China’s commitment to building nuclear fusion (ChinaTalk) ✍️
Inside the AI boom – jobs, jargon & jittery uptime (Exponential View) 📊
On assassination culture (Pirate Wires) ✍️
What is quantum computing, and why does it matter? An interview with the CEO of Elevate Quantum (ChinaTalk) 💬
AI safety PACs should be more transparent about who’s funding them (Transformer) ✍️
Notes on Jensen Huang’s appearance on the Dwarkesh Patel podcast (ChinaTalk) ✍️