The Board Room

AT&T told The Information it will hold spending with OpenAI and Anthropic flat for years while usage grows — currently 45 billion tokens a day across 100,000 employees. Open-weight models already handle 40% of employee queries, against a 60–70% target, and routing cut AI coding costs 56% for a 2% measured quality drop. Your renewal now happens against a benchmark procurement teams will quote all year. The result is self-reported and unaudited.

Nvidia is reportedly paying $6B for a non-exclusive license to Poolside's code-generation model technology, plus $1B of equity at a $12B pre-money valuation. It has also hired 109 of roughly 115 technical staff, per Newcomer's reading of a leaked investor letter. The license alone equals about half the company's pre-money value, for rights that lock nobody out. Any corp-dev playbook holding only build and buy is missing the structure rivals will now use. Neither company has confirmed terms.

Fortune's Term Sheet has investors attaching numbers to model encroachment: one practitioner says 10–20% of his portfolio feels very vulnerable right now, and Vista Equity's Robert Smith said onstage that some of his software companies no longer have a right to exist. The four-lane sort they use — regulated license, proprietary data, workflow embedding, or renting time — is the one a board will apply to your product lines. Expect distressed software supply as sponsors act on it.

U.S. agencies warned that attackers are actively using AI-generated exploitation scripts against Siemens S7 programmable logic controllers — the small computers that run physical equipment — across six sectors, per CyberScoop. Siemens says no new S7 vulnerabilities have been identified, so exploitation runs on known issues, misconfiguration and internet exposure. That puts the liability with asset owners rather than the vendor. Separately, an advocacy group has proposed designating AI itself a critical infrastructure sector with CISA as lead agency.

Meta is handing resigning staff and principal engineers discretionary retainer equity of $400K to $1M+, per The Pragmatic Engineer. Three of three engineers who received seven-figure counteroffers against Anthropic offers still left — one forfeiting the grant a month after accepting. All seven confirmed recipients were IC6 or IC7, leaving the bench below them undefended at standard market bands. Private labs can now match megacap total compensation through secondary share sales.