AI Trends — 2 September 2026

Pentagon launches GenAI.mil, leaves Claude out

The Department of Defense opened GenAI.mil, a secure portal bundling OpenAI's ChatGPT Mil, xAI/Starshield's Grok for Government, and Google Gemini for roughly 3 million DoD personnel. The portal has already logged 1.7 million unique users. Notably absent: Anthropic's Claude, after the Trump administration flagged it as a supply-chain risk. Separately, government lawyers say the Defense Department is still moving off Anthropic's models entirely, with the transition expected to wrap by September 30, 2026.

Enterprise AI price war heats up

OpenAI is reportedly exploring steep cuts to its token pricing to defend enterprise customers against Anthropic, which is expected to counter with similar cuts ahead of a potential IPO. Google has already acted, dropping its entry-level AI Plus consumer subscription from $7.99 to $4.99 a month. The moves suggest margins across the major labs are under real pressure as the market matures.

OpenAI unwinds Cursor model contract

OpenAI told SpaceX on August 28 that it will end its contract supplying models to Cursor on November 12, citing a change-of-control clause triggered by SpaceX's $60 billion acquisition of Cursor's parent, Anysphere. Cursor will continue to offer Anthropic, Google, and SpaceX-affiliated AI models after the cutoff.

Agentic AI adoption climbs in the enterprise

McKinsey's "State of AI in 2026" survey found that 32% of organizations have skipped buying at least one software product or feature because they could build it internally using agentic coding tools. The share of large enterprises scaling AI agents across one or more business functions rose from 27% to 40% year over year, underscoring how quickly agentic tooling is moving from pilot to production.

Leadership shakeup at Apple

John Ternus became Apple's CEO on September 1, 2026, after 24 years leading the company's hardware engineering team. He inherits a company facing pressure to sharpen its AI strategy after a slower-than-expected rollout of AI features.

Also worth watching

Clay, an AI-powered sales and marketing platform, is raising a new round led by Wellington Management at a $7 billion pre-money valuation. DeepSeek is reportedly nearing a $74 billion funding round of its own, a sign that capital is still flowing freely into the sector even as pricing pressure mounts downstream.

This newsletter was compiled from public reporting on AI industry developments over the past 48 hours.