Introduction
May 2025
Major events
May was the month AI became statecraft. The Commerce Department moved to rescind the Biden-era rule that would have rationed AI chips by country, and within a week President Trump’s Gulf trip produced deals for Nvidia and AMD chips in Saudi Arabia and a 5-gigawatt AI campus in Abu Dhabi. Nvidia’s Jensen Huang called US export controls on China “a failure.” A new pope, Leo XIV, explained his name by pointing to the first industrial revolution and the age of AI, while 40 state attorneys general fought a proposed 10-year ban on state AI laws.
The releases kept coming. OpenAI kept its nonprofit in control of a restructured company, was reported to be buying Windsurf and launched OpenAI for Countries. Google DeepMind’s AlphaEvolve used Gemini and automated tests to search for better algorithms, Google’s I/O brought AI Mode to US search and Veo 3 video with sound, and Anthropic released Claude Opus 4 and Sonnet 4. Meta launched a standalone assistant app and said Llama had been downloaded 1.2 billion times.
Patterns and trends
The month turned on how far to trust what developers said about their own systems. A study questioned how the Chatbot Arena leaderboard ranked models. OpenAI rolled back a GPT-4o update that had become excessively agreeable and explained what its testing had missed; xAI blamed an unauthorized prompt change for Grok’s off-topic claims about South Africa. In each case the evidence came largely from the companies themselves, and the question was how outsiders could check it.
Long-term threads
Chip diplomacy became a year-long story: in August Nvidia and AMD agreed to share revenue from China sales with Washington, and in November Microsoft received licenses to ship advanced chips to the UAE while China was reported to bar foreign chips from state-funded data centers. The fight over state AI laws continued into June, and California passed its frontier-AI disclosure law in September. AI Mode gained Gemini 2.5 Pro and Deep Search in July, reached more than 180 more countries in August and added five languages in September. AlphaEvolve’s automated search anticipated the AI-scientist systems the panel examined in October. And Windsurf, reported here as an OpenAI acquisition, ended up in July with its leaders joining Google DeepMind.