📖 2 min read
Sunday night, May 24 → Monday morning, May 25, 2026 — what moved while you were eating dinner.
Newsom Signs Executive Order on AI Job Losses — Hours Before Trump’s Got Yanked
California Governor Gavin Newsom signed an executive order Thursday directing every major state agency to draft a plan for AI-driven workforce displacement, with the first reports due inside 90 days. The timing was not subtle — it dropped a few hours before a competing White House AI order was reportedly pulled from the day’s signing lineup amid internal disagreement.
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Pair it with AB 2545, which cleared the Assembly the same afternoon and creates a state-level early-warning system for AI layoffs, and you get the most aggressive labor-side AI policy package any US jurisdiction has shipped to date. Affiliates and operators in CA — assume new disclosure rules are coming for AI-generated marketing roles by Q4.
Politico: Claude Mythos and GPT-5.5 Are “Jolting” Washington
Politico dropped a deep look at how Anthropic’s Claude Mythos and OpenAI’s GPT-5.5 are landing inside DC agencies — and the framing is no longer “interesting tools.” Palo Alto Networks’ Lee Klarich, who got early access, said the latest generation is materially more powerful than internal projections from just three months ago, particularly on multi-step security workflows.
The subtext: federal procurement teams are quietly accelerating their AI budget asks, and the lab-to-Beltway distance is shrinking fast. If you’re tracking which AI vendors are about to get the GSA stamp, the picks are narrowing.
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OpenAI + Anthropic Now Anchor Big Tech’s Cloud Backlog
Fresh reporting tonight: the combined committed-but-unfilled compute orders from OpenAI and Anthropic now make up the bulk of the multi-year backlog at Azure, AWS, and Google Cloud — a structural shift hyperscalers haven’t seen since the smartphone era. Alphabet alone booked $62.6B in Q1 2026 revenue, with AI infrastructure pulling the bigger and bigger share.
Translation: every other enterprise AI buyer is now queuing behind two customers. Expect “GPU available Q3 2027” to become a sales objection your vendors actually have to handle. Our running cheat sheet on which AI tools have real capacity right now lives at AiToolCrush.com.
Hot Take of the Day: “The Models Are Getting Worse”
r/ChatGPT and r/ClaudeAI lit up over the weekend with the same complaint, and TheStreet picked it up tonight: users across Anthropic, Google, and OpenAI products are convinced the models have been quietly nerfed — shorter answers, tighter refusals, lower usage caps. Top-voted thread on r/ChatGPT this evening is just a screenshot of GPT-5.5 refusing to draft a cover letter “because it could be used to mislead an employer.”
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Whether it’s real degradation or capacity rationing dressed up as safety, the perception is now the story. Power users are testing exits to open-weight models, and the affiliate angle is wide open — we’re tracking which AI products are actually delivering on their pricing promises over at BetOnAI.net.
That’s the wrap. Back at it tomorrow morning.