Good morning. It's Friday, April 17, and we're covering hiring’s 20% drop (and why AI isn’t to blame), Microsoft’s massive new AI datacenter push, Anthropic’s latest Claude 4.7 release, and more.

Anthropic Releases Claude Opus 4.7
Anthropic’s newest model emphasizes stronger coding autonomy while deliberately dialing back certain high-risk capabilities, a rare case of capability restraint in a flagship release. The company announced Claude Opus 4.7, positioning it as a direct upgrade over Opus 4.6 with improvements in software engineering, instruction-following, and multimodal vision. The model supports images up to 2,576 pixels, maintains pricing at $5 per million input tokens and $25 per million output tokens, and introduces new controls like “xhigh” effort levels and task budgets.

xAI Turns GPU Surplus Into Cloud Play With Cursor Deal
Elon Musk’s xAI is repurposing its massive compute stockpile for external customers, signaling a shift from pure model-building to infrastructure monetization. The company plans to supply tens of thousands of GPUs to Cursor to train its upcoming Composer 2.5 model, effectively positioning xAI as a cloud provider. The move comes as xAI scales toward 1 million GPUs from roughly 200,000 and grapples with low utilization rates—about 11% MFU versus an industry norm of 35–45%.

Anthropic Expands London Footprint
Anthropic is scaling up in London just days after OpenAI committed to its first permanent office there, underscoring intensifying competition for AI talent and policy influence in the U.K. The company plans a new office in London’s Knowledge Quarter with capacity for 800 employees, up from its current base of more than 200 staff in the city. The expansion follows a reported push by U.K. officials to attract Anthropic amid tensions with the U.S. Pentagon, and comes as the company reports over $30 billion in annualized revenue and a $380 billion valuation.

AI Shopping Traffic Surges
AI-driven shoppers are now more valuable than human visitors, reversing a year-old trend and reshaping how retailers think about traffic. New data from Adobe shows AI-referred traffic to U.S. retail sites rose 393% year over year in Q1 2026, with conversion rates 42% higher than traditional users in March. The analysis—spanning over 1 trillion visits—also found AI users spend 48% more time on sites, view 13% more pages, and generate 37% higher revenue per visit.

FRIDAY FACTS

But what's this space cloud made of? Stick around to find out.

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LinkedIn reports that global hiring has declined about 20% since 2022, according to chief legal officer Blake Lawit, speaking on April 15, 2026, at the Semafor World Economy summit. The company’s data—spanning over 1 billion users—shows no clear evidence that AI is driving the slowdown, despite widespread concern about job displacement.

Instead, Lawit pointed to higher interest rates as the more likely cause of reduced hiring. He added that entry-level hiring has not declined disproportionately compared to mid- or late-career roles. → Read the full article here.

Max Hodak’s startup Science Corporation is preparing for its first human brain implant to test a new sensor, a foundational step toward its long-term goal of building a biohybrid brain-computer interface that blends lab-grown neurons with electronics. The company has enlisted Murat Günel to advise on U.S. clinical trials, which could begin as early as 2027. Unlike traditional implants, the initial sensor—containing 520 electrodes—will sit on the brain’s surface rather than penetrate tissue, potentially reducing damage. Science recently raised $230 million at a $1.5 billion valuation and is advancing both therapeutic devices (like its PRIMA vision implant) and longer-term human enhancement goals. → Read the full article here.

Alibaba’s Qwen team released Qwen3.6-35B-A3B on April 16, 2026, an open-source multimodal AI model using a sparse mixture-of-experts (MoE) architecture. The model has 35 billion total parameters but activates only 3 billion at runtime, aiming to deliver significantly higher efficiency without sacrificing performance. Qwen claims the model matches or exceeds larger systems on coding and vision-language benchmarks, including agentic coding tasks and spatial reasoning. → Read the full article here.

The Salesforce Platform lets you build AI agents, connect your own data, and run across every cloud – all from one unified environment. Open, extensible, and enterprise-ready. See what’s possible when your entire stack is unified.

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Cursor Adds Claude Opus 4.7: Cursor launches Anthropic’s latest model with improved autonomy and creative reasoning, offering a limited-time 50% discount to accelerate developer adoption and experimentation.

OpenAI Revamps Codex: The revamp gives Codex the ability to run background agents on a user's desktop, opening apps and operating a cursor without disrupting active work.

ASML, TSMC Boost AI Outlook: Strong forecasts from ASML and TSMC signal sustained AI chip demand, with cloud giants set to exceed $600 billion in 2026 data center spending despite ongoing capacity constraints.

Runway Launches Seedance 2.0 API: Runway releases Seedance 2.0 via its API, expanding developer access to its generative video tools and enabling broader integration into production and creative workflows.

Windsurf Unveils Agent Command Platform: Windsurf 2.0 introduces a unified command center, project “Spaces,” and cloud-based Devin agents, enabling developers to delegate tasks and maintain workflows asynchronously.

Ulysses Raises $46M for Ocean Tech: Ulysses secures $46 million led by Andreessen Horowitz to build technology for ocean exploration, infrastructure, and defense, targeting a largely uncharted domain critical to global systems.

FRIDAY FACTS

Deep in space, molecular clouds contain massive volumes of alcohol, such as a cloud in the constellation Aquila packed with ethanol. Another cloud 26,000 light-years away, Sagittarius B2, contains ethyl formate, which gives raspberries their smell and rum its taste.

Thanks for reading. See you next time!

— Matthew Berman, Nick Wentz & the Forward Future Team