Startups

Tokenmaxxing, OpenAI's shopping spree, and the AI Anxiety Gap

From OpenAI's shopping spree to the growing divide between AI insiders and everyone else, the Equity crew unpacks the biggest stories shaping the industry this week.

April 17, 2026 · Anthony Ha, Theresa Loconsolo, Kirsten Korosec, Sean O'Kane

Full Story

Listen on Apple Podcasts Listen on Spotify

The gap between AI insiders and everyone else is widening, and the spending, suspicion, and even new vocabulary are starting to show it. While OpenAI is busy buying up everything from finance apps to talk shows, a certain shoe company just rebranded as an AI infrastructure play, and Anthropic unveiled a model it says is too powerful to release publicly … but apparently not too powerful to demo to Federal Reserve Chair Jerome Powell.

On this episode of ’s Equity podcast, Kirsten Korosec, Anthony Ha, and Sean O’Kane dig into what’s actually being built in AI infrastructure, who’s winning the enterprise battle between OpenAI and Anthropic, and more of the week’s headlines.

Listen to the full episode to hear about:

  • Why chipmakers AMD, Arm, and Qualcomm just piled $60M into UK self-driving startup Wayve, and what Uber’s $300M milestone bid says about who’s winning the AV race
  • How data center startup Fluidstack is positioning itself for the frontier labs, including a reported $50B agreement with Anthropic
  • What Claude Code’s moment at the HumanX conference reveals about where the OpenAI vs. Anthropic rivalry is actually playing out
  • Why tokenmaxxing, and Meta’s leaked internal leaderboard, might say more about optics than actual productivity

Subscribe to Equity on YouTube, Apple Podcasts, Overcast, Spotify and all the casts. You also can follow Equity on X and Threads, at @EquityPod.