A daily roundup of AI industry news from Korea and abroad.
Today is a day for the AI history books. Google I/O 2026 opened with Gemini Intelligence and the Googlebook front and center, and the Musk vs. Altman lawsuit that rocked Silicon Valley was settled by a unanimous jury verdict. The revenue race between OpenAI and Anthropic is entering a new phase as well.
Anthropic is shaking up the enterprise SaaS market with 12 practice-area plugins and more than 20 MCP connectors aimed at the legal market. At the Android Show 2026, Google unveiled Android 17 built around Gemini Intelligence and a new laptop category, the 'Googlebook', and a Microsoft report shows Korea's generative AI usage surging to among the highest in the world.
Nvidia has invested more than $40 billion in AI companies so far in 2026, transforming from 'chipmaker' into 'AI ecosystem investor'. Rising AI chip contender Cerebras sharply raised its IPO price range ahead of its Nasdaq listing this week, and Apple is preparing an 'Extensions' feature in iOS 27 that lets users choose their own AI model.
The new week opened with the global AI power map dividing one step further. The US Department of Defense signed AI tool contracts with eight Big Tech firms including SpaceX and OpenAI at once, officially excluding Anthropic, and the list included dark-horse newcomer 'Reflection AI', founded by an AlphaGo co-developer. Meanwhile, Anthropic signed a compute token deal with SpaceX and launched AI agents for financial work. Colorado is on the verge of passing a bill that repeals and replaces its own AI Act, and in Korea the KOSPI crossed 7,000 for the first time ever on AI and semiconductor tailwinds.
In its Q1 2026 'Global AI Diffusion Report', Microsoft singled out Korea, along with Japan and Thailand, as the countries with the 'largest gains'. At the same time, Anthropic's annualized revenue (ARR) of about $30 billion overtook OpenAI (about $24 billion), and Oracle is cutting 20,000–30,000 jobs while redirecting $8–10 billion into AI infrastructure. 'AI EXPO KOREA 2026' at COEX closes its final day with an 'AI Summit'.
Ten years after the AlphaGo–Lee Sedol match, Korea's AI industry is asking how to go from 'AI user' to 'AI sovereign'. Today the main conference of 'AI EXPO KOREA 2026' at COEX ran under the theme 'Beyond AlphaGo: Our way', capped by a special talk with Lee Sedol 9-dan. The same day, an Oxford study warned that 'LLMs trained to be warm are wrong 60% more often', and the UK AISI reported that 'frontier AI's cyberattack capability is doubling every four months'.
Anthropic and OpenAI unveiled their financial-sector AI agent strategies on the same day. Anthropic is forming a $1.5 billion joint venture with Wall Street heavyweights, while Chinese AI models are closing in on US frontier models on coding benchmarks. The numbers in Stanford's 2026 AI Index carry one message: AI is already spreading faster than the PC or the internet.
Over the long holiday weekend, the 'sovereign AI' front in Korea's AI industry came into sharper focus. Upstage raised 560 billion won, including the first direct investment from the National Growth Fund, and the industry ministry opened a new 52.75 billion won call for its 'AI Factory pilot program'. Globally, SoftBank's plan to spin off a $100 billion AI and robotics company, 'Roze', came to light, and Zhipu's Kimi K2.6 beat GPT-5.5 and Claude on coding benchmarks.
On the first day of May, the AI industry moved one step further into its 'prove the results' phase. Samsung Electronics reported a record Q1 operating profit of 57.2 trillion won on AI chip demand, and the US District Court for Northern California issued the first ruling that 'a platform is directly liable when its AI exercises ultimate authority over ad content'. The Musk trial carried on heatedly into its third and fourth days.
The AI industry's power map shifted once again. On day two of the OpenAI trial, a heated Musk testified under cross-examination that he had been "a fool who turned $38 million into an $800 billion company," while Anthropic brought Google, Amazon, Microsoft, and Nvidia all on board as investors, effectively dismantling the 'AI Big Three'. In Korea, the Ministry of Trade, Industry and Resources launched its 'M.AX' manufacturing AI transformation program.
The AI cloud and pricing map is being redrawn within a single day. The day after announcing the end of its Microsoft exclusivity, OpenAI immediately launched its models, Codex, and a dedicated agent service on AWS Bedrock. At the same time, China's DeepSeek cut its 'cache hit' input price to one-tenth, and Musk took direct aim at OpenAI in a California courtroom, warning that 'AI could kill us all'.
Today shook the global AI partnership map. Microsoft and OpenAI unwound their exclusive deal, making the multicloud era official, while Google DeepMind signed a 'K-Moonshot' cooperation MOU with the Korean government in Seoul. The same day, Anthropic's Claude took the wheel for NASA's autonomous drive on Mars.
The AI industry moved on two fronts today. Google jumped fully into the infrastructure race by unveiling its 8th-generation TPUs aimed at the agentic AI era, while Snap announced large layoffs, saying 'AI writes 65% of our code'. In Korea, Samsung and SK hynix posted record results on AI chip demand.
Google is investing up to $40 billion in Anthropic, and Meta is cutting 8,000 jobs in the name of AI efficiency. China's DeepSeek has closed the frontier-model gap once again with V4. Today marks an inflection point where the race for AI infrastructure and the commercialization of agents accelerate at the same time.
Google pledged up to $40 billion to Anthropic, tightening the AI infrastructure alliance. The same day, Meta and Microsoft announced large layoffs and a voluntary retirement program, making it explicit that AI investment money is coming out of payroll. Today's takeaway: the AI infrastructure race is reshaping the labor market itself.