The White House has a new word for artificial intelligence. President Donald Trump signed an executive order this week that officially rebrands AI as "super intelligence." In the same week, the administration brought most of the industry's top executives together to sign an AI safety pledge.
TechCrunch's Equity podcast covered both moves in a recent episode. It also looked at how Meta and OpenAI are presenting their products to consumers, and at where the real money in AI comes from. This post covers what was reported and what it may mean.
One room, one pledge
The White House gathered nearly every major tech CEO in a single room. Mark Zuckerberg, Jeff Bezos, Elon Musk and Anthropic's Dario Amodei were among them. The purpose was to sign an AI safety pledge.
Apple is adding new restrictions to "Full Disk Access," one of the most powerful permissions an app can hold on macOS. The company says desktop AI agents have changed the risk picture. A setting that was once mostly about backups now opens a much bigger door.
The announcement came in a blog post aimed at developers. It follows a week of uncomfortable reporting about what AI apps on the Mac can see.
What Full Disk Access actually unlocks
Full Disk Access was built for a practical reason: backup software needs to reach everything on a machine to do its job. According to Apple, an app with this permission can read files, mail, messages and even browsing history.
US companies are running more AI workloads than ever, and they are paying less for them. That is the main finding of the latest Ramp AI Index, compiled by Ramp economist Ara Kharazian.
The two lines are moving in opposite directions. Spending peaked in July and has fallen since. Usage has climbed about 50 percent over the same period and reached a record high at the end of September.
Why the bill is shrinking
Kharazian identifies two causes:
Price cuts on top models. The most capable models have become cheaper to call.
Better budget options. Standard and lite models have become cheaper and more efficient, so more work can move to lower-cost tiers.
IBM has released a self-hosted version of IBM Bob, its agentic software development platform. Companies can now run AI-assisted development and application modernization on their own infrastructure instead of sending code to an outside service. The option covers on-premises data centers, private clouds, sovereign clouds and fully air-gapped environments. A sovereign cloud keeps data under a specific country's or region's jurisdiction. An air-gapped environment is cut off from external networks entirely.
The target customer is clear. These are organizations whose source code is sensitive, whose data is regulated, or whose systems are too critical to expose to an externally hosted AI tool. IBM is pitching the release to financial services, government, healthcare and critical infrastructure, and to any business worried about protecting its intellectual property.
Google has put one of its own AI chips into orbit for the first time. A prototype compute satellite carrying a Google Tensor Processing Unit (TPU) lifted off on a SpaceX rocket from California. It is the first hardware test of Project Suncatcher, the company's plan to build large compute clusters in space.
On the same day, Google published a peer-reviewed version of its white paper on orbital data centers. The paper sets out how much has to change before the idea becomes practical, and much of that depends on SpaceX's Starship flying far more often than it does today.
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