by Raphael Dudler | Jul 3, 2026 | gafam watch
Starting July 6, Tesla will cap employee AI spending at $200 per week, after software engineers were burning through thousands of dollars in tokens weekly. It follows near-identical caps at Uber, Meta, Amazon and Walmart — the industry-wide shift from “tokenmaxxing” to “token budgeting.” There’s a telling carve-out: Musk exempted his own xAI products, while Tesla’s engineers reportedly prefer Anthropic’s Claude. gafam.ai reads the great AI cost reckoning — and what it means for a Europe with no in-house model to fall back on.
by Raphael Dudler | May 27, 2026 | gafam watch
Over the weekend of May 24–25, 2026, Elon Musk, Mark Zuckerberg and AI czar David Sacks killed Trump’s draft AI safety executive order in three phone calls on a single Wednesday night. The same Saturday, Anthropic closed a $30 billion-plus funding round — the largest in AI history. And Microsoft quietly cancelled its internal Claude Code pilot after token billing ate its entire annual AI budget. Three stories. One weekend. The future of AI safety regulation was decided by phone calls between billionaires and a president.
by Raphael Dudler | May 27, 2026 | gafam watch
The Musk vs. Altman trial is over — and OpenAI won. On May 18, the advisory jury sided with OpenAI, finding Musk’s claims barred by a three-year statute of limitations. Judge Yvonne Gonzalez Rogers immediately adopted the verdict. Musk called it a “technicality” and vowed to appeal. But the trial’s most consequential revelation came from Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella — who testified under oath that by June 2026, Microsoft will have spent over $100 billion on OpenAI. gafam.ai’s complete analysis of the verdict, the testimony and what comes next.
by Raphael Dudler | May 26, 2026 | gafam watch
The most consequential AI lawsuit in history goes to trial this week. Elon Musk vs. Sam Altman — challenging OpenAI’s conversion from nonprofit to for-profit entity — begins jury selection in a San Francisco federal court. Microsoft’s $13 billion investment and Amazon’s $50 billion commitment are directly implicated. A Musk victory could force OpenAI to return billions in assets to nonprofit control. The European implications reach from Brussels to the boardrooms of every GAFAM company that has bet on OpenAI’s commercial future.
