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May

3 events

Editors' summary

Claude Code goes final, OpenAI reaches for a device without a screen

On 22 May, Anthropic released Claude Opus 4 and Sonnet 4, leading with how long they could work without stopping, and made Claude Code generally available.

On the 21st, OpenAI announced it was acquiring io, the device company founded by Jony Ive, saying it would build AI hardware that does not depend on a screen. Terms were not disclosed; press reports put the figure in the six billions.

On the 20th at I/O, Google put AI Mode into Search and announced Veo 3, showing video generation that comes with sound.

This block is written by the editors. It is kept separate from the sourced record below.

Record3 events
  1. 20
    ProductGoogle / Sundar Pichai

    Search gets AI Mode, and Veo 3 arrives

    At Google I/O, Google announced the broad rollout of AI Mode in Search — a conversational tab in which Gemini assembles an answer directly and takes follow-up questions, rather than returning a list of links — extending to all US users what had been an experiment since March, with Gemini 2.5 underneath. Google also announced Veo 3, which generates video together with audio; producing picture and sound in one pass was seen as raising the bar for generated video. The announcement pushed further into replacing Google's own revenue base with AI, and intensified concern in the media industry about how much less often people would follow a link.

  2. 21
    BusinessReportedOpenAI / Sam Altman / Jony Ive / io

    OpenAI announces acquisition of Jony Ive's device startup io

    OpenAI announced it would acquire and merge with io, the AI device startup founded by former Apple chief designer Jony Ive and colleagues. The all-equity deal was reported to be worth roughly $6.4-6.5 billion, OpenAI's largest acquisition to date. io's team of about 55 people joined OpenAI, while Ive and his design firm LoveFrom remained independent but took on deep design responsibilities across OpenAI and io. The move drew attention as OpenAI's full-scale entry into dedicated AI hardware.

  3. 22
    ModelAnthropic

    Claude Opus 4 and Sonnet 4 launch; Claude Code goes GA

    Anthropic released Claude Opus 4 and Claude Sonnet 4, calling Opus 4 the world's best coding model and emphasizing its ability to sustain long, complex tasks. The models supported extended thinking interleaved with tool use (beta), parallel tool execution, and memory when given local file access, and Anthropic reported a 65% reduction in shortcut-taking versus Sonnet 3.7. Opus 4 scored 72.5% on SWE-bench and 43.2% on Terminal-bench; Sonnet 4 scored 72.7% on SWE-bench. Claude Code moved from research preview to general availability with VS Code and JetBrains integrations, GitHub Actions support, and an SDK for building custom agents. Anthropic said the release came with measures for higher AI Safety Levels including ASL-3.

↑ 2025