#fact-check

2 articles

Google is not selling picks and shovels — it is underwriting the miner

2026-08-20AI

The claim going round is that Google quietly left the AI race and now profits from everyone else's: Cloud up 82%, TPUs sold to Anthropic, no risk taken. The growth figure is exactly right. The risk part is not — Google took roughly 20% of an Anthropic data centre and agreed to cover the lease and power if Anthropic defaults.

"Too dangerous to release" got called marketing — a government lab published its own numbers the next day

2026-08-20AI

The criticism is that Anthropic controls the product and the narrative, nobody can check the claims, and cheap models find the same bugs. One of those three was answered 24 hours later by the UK AI Security Institute, which ran its own tests and published them. The other two are still standing, and one of them is the interesting part.