AI and Tech News May 2026

AI & Big Tech — May 2026 Recap

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Google I/O 2026 (May 19–20) — the week's biggest event

Google released two new models — Gemini Omni and Gemini 3.5. Gemini Omni can create anything from any input starting with video, while Gemini 3.5 Flash is the first in their latest family combining frontier intelligence with agentic action.

Gemini 3.5 Flash surpasses 3.1 Pro in coding, agentic, and multimodal benchmarks, at 4x faster output tokens per second than other frontier models. 

Google also upgraded Antigravity, their agent-first development platform, with new capabilities to orchestrate and build agents — signalling a shift from AI that assists to agents that independently navigate complex tasks.

On AI content authenticity, OpenAI, Kakao, and ElevenLabs are now adopting Google's SynthID watermarking technology, expanding cross-industry AI content verification.

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Anthropic turns profitable

Anthropic is on track to hit $10.9 billion in revenue in Q2 2026, which would mark its first profitable quarter — well ahead of its previously projected 2028 profitability timeline.

Anthropic led global LLM revenue share in Q1 2026 with 31.4%, narrowly ahead of OpenAI at 29%, with roughly 80% of revenue coming from enterprise customers.

Anthropic also acquired Stainless on May 18 — a startup that builds SDKs for API products, previously responsible for the OpenAI API, Cloudflare, and Merge SDKs — signalling investment in the developer experience layer around Claude.

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The IPO wave

OpenAI is filing a confidential S-1 with the SEC targeting a public listing, with pricing potentially as early as June. Anthropic is targeting an October 2026 listing, raising at approximately a $900 billion valuation. 

OpenAI posted around $5.7 billion in Q1 sales, while Anthropic's meteoric growth rate is helping it reach profitability sooner despite lower absolute revenue. 

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OpenAI cracks an 80-year maths problem

OpenAI claimed one of its research models cracked the "Erdős planar unit distance problem," a mathematical challenge that has stumped researchers for 80 years. 

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Anthropic + Gates Foundation

Anthropic and the Gates Foundation announced a $200 million partnership over four years to develop AI tools for healthcare, education, agriculture, and economic development in underserved regions. 

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AI regulation tightens

Governments — especially the US — are now pushing to test AI models before public release. Major AI companies including Microsoft and xAI have reportedly agreed to provide early access to their models to regulators, marking a shift away from the "move fast and break things" era.

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Hardware — AMD challenges Nvidia

AMD kicked off production of its 6th Generation EPYC processors, codenamed "Venice," built on TSMC's 2nm process — the first high-performance computing product at this node, representing a direct challenge to Nvidia's dominance in AI compute. 

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Developer tools

The emergence of the Model Context Protocol (MCP) and Agent-to-Agent (A2A) protocol is being compared to the introduction of HTTP and REST — allowing shared context exchange and automated orchestration, reducing tool integration time from months to minutes. 

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The big theme: AI is rapidly shifting from a product/tool into infrastructure — agentic, autonomous, and increasingly embedded into everything from search and shopping to government regulation and global health. The IPO race between OpenAI and Anthropic is set to be one of the defining financial events of the year.