The transition from experimental AI to operational AI hit a breaking point this week. The Pentagon designated Anthropic a supply chain risk while OpenAI's Sam Altman secured a defense contract by promising government-grade technical safeguards. ServiceNow automated 90% of its internal IT requests, proving the per-seat SaaS billing model is structurally obsolete. AT&T slashed AI operating costs by 90% processing 8 billion tokens daily. Meta committed $100 billion toward AMD to break Nvidia's hardware monopoly. And Anthropic alleged that DeepSeek, Moonshot, and MiniMax used 24,000 fake accounts to steal training data from Claude. This is the week AI stopped being a product feature and became a geopolitical asset.

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Anthropic closes in on $20B, Musk merges xAI into SpaceX, Super Bowl ads signal AI's mass-market moment, and over $30 billion in disclosed funding lands in a single week. Our first weekly recap of the biggest stories from McGauley Labs.