🍭 The Pentagon Got Its Third Yes 🛡️

Good morning. There’s a version of Google that quit military AI in 2018.
That version is now buried somewhere under a pile of government contracts.

Let’s dive in 👇

🍭 What’s Cookin’:

• Google signs Gemini deal with Pentagon

• DeepSeek nukes API prices (again)

• $1.1B “superlearner” startup drops

Google
🫡 Said ‘Yes’ To The Pentagon

The Bite:

Google signed a deal with the U.S. Department of Defense granting access to Gemini for classified military work under "any lawful government purpose" terms.

The agreement includes language stating Google doesn't intend its AI to be used for domestic mass surveillance or autonomous weapons… but the contract gives the government final say over operational decisions.

Google is the third AI company to sign such a deal after Anthropic refused identical terms earlier this year.

OpenAI and xAI signed similar agreements in March.

More than 950 Google employees, including directors and VPs, signed an open letter urging the company to refuse.

Snacks:

• The contract was signed at 4 p.m. on Monday, April 28

• 950+ employees signed an open letter to Sundar Pichai. Google signed the deal one day later anyway

• Google's contract states it "does not confer any right to control or veto lawful government operational decision-making"

• Anthropic was labeled a "supply-chain risk" after refusing the same terms

• In 2018, Google withdrew from Project Maven after employee backlash over drone footage analysis

• Pentagon AI chief Cameron Stanley said Gemini is already saving "thousands of man hours on a weekly basis"

Why it Bites:

When Anthropic refused to give the Pentagon unrestricted access to Claude, it got blacklisted.

Google watched that happen, watched the backlash, watched the lawsuits…
and decided to sign anyway.

So did OpenAI. So did xAI.

The market learned the lesson the Pentagon intended:

Refuse, and someone else fills your seat within weeks.

And those seats are valuable because the government has the cash. As always.
Not because Big Tech have ‘patriotic values’ (or any value but money).

The 2018 Google that walked away from Project Maven over drone footage is gone.
This Google saw 950 employees protest and moved faster, not slower.

The contract language about not wanting Gemini used for mass surveillance is there, technically, but the same contract says the government doesn't need Google's permission to make operational decisions.

That's not a guardrail.

The power shifted when the first AI company signed with Pentagon.
Now, every new sign in these terms makes it harder for the next target to say no.

Anthropic's refusal tried to give an example to follow.
Big Tech’s financial logic turned it into an example to avoid.

And the Pentagon now has three willing vendors showing that the only leverage a safety-first company had…

…was the assumption it couldn't be replaced.

Steal This Prompt
🌗 Double Exposure Images Without Photoshop Trauma

This prompt turns any subject into a layered double-exposure composition, blending it with a second scene or element for surreal fine-art visuals.

Use it to:

• Create cinematic profile portraits

• Make album-cover / poster-style visuals

• Turn simple subjects into artsy “I own a Leica” content

Workflow:

1. Click this link (Prompt)

2. Paste into your AI model

3. Replace the #s with your subject + scene/elements

4. Watch it cook: your photo just discovered metaphor

   Try the prompt on Snack Prompt

_ToolBox™
🧰 5 BRAND NEW AI LAUNCHES

📄 File Generation in Gemini
Prompt → Docs, Sheets, Slides, PDFs, Excel, CSV, LaTeX. Copy-paste goblin officially unemployed.

🧠 Mistral Medium 3.5
128B open-weight model for coding, reasoning, and long-context chaos. Engineers, come get your self-hosted brain brick.

🕵️ Tinfoil
Private AI chat using secure NVIDIA GPU hardware. For people who whisper their prompts like government secrets.

🎧 ElevenMusic
Discover indie artists, remix tracks, make music with AI, and earn royalties when listeners bite.

🔬 Gemini Deep Research Agent
Gemini API gets research agents with MCP sources and native charts. Intern-level research, minus the cold brew dependency.

_{Everything Else}
🧠 You Need to Know

📜 South Africa Pulls AI Policy Over Fake Citations
→ The government withdrew its draft national AI policy after confirming it contained fictitious academic references that were likely AI-generated hallucinations.

🛡️ Google Signs Pentagon AI Deal Despite Employee Revolt
→ Google granted the DoD access to Gemini for classified work under "any lawful purpose" terms, one day after 950+ employees signed a letter urging the company to refuse.

🔧 Anthropic Tests Bugcrawl, A Repo-Wide Bug Hunter For Claude Code
→ A new Claude Code feature spotted in testing scans entire repositories for bugs using 10 parallel agents, with a token-burn warning suggesting Enterprise-tier targeting.

💸 DeepSeek Slashes V4-Pro API Prices By 75%
→ Cache hit fees across the entire DeepSeek API drop to one-tenth of launch prices, with a 75% V4-Pro discount running through May 5.

💰 Ineffable Intelligence Raises $1.1B Seed At $5.1B Valuation
→ AlphaGo creator David Silver left DeepMind to build a "superlearner" via reinforcement learning; Sequoia, Nvidia, and Google co-led Europe's largest seed round.