DTNS April 2026 in Review

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0:40Jenn Cutter: Oh my gosh, another month is gone. This is the Daily Tech News Month in Review for April 2026. We're going to look back on what the big stories of the month were and try to help each other understand them. This month, we've got a new CEO coming to Apple. Big tech companies raise revenue and spending. and Anthropics Too Hot for the Public Bug Finder breached with a URL hack. I'm Tom Barrett. I'm Jen Cutter. Let's take a look back on some of the biggest stories of April 2026. Now, first, we do like to ask an LLM what it thinks the big stories of the month are. It's very interesting to see. This month, I gave this prompt to Claude because Claude's in the news.

1:23Jenn Cutter: So I thought it was appropriate to use Claude. uh i said i'm doing an episode of daily tech news show wrapping up the big tech stories of april what should i pick and it said tim cook steps down at apple well we agree we're definitely going to talk about that amazon doubles down on anthropic i have noticed that sometimes these models do tend to pick stories about themselves uh amazon's five billion investment in anthropic certainly was a story this month i'm not sure it's the second biggest story of the month uh gpt 5.5 launches that didn't make our cut jen but i can see you know in the world of llms that those that was a big milestone one um spending on ai infrastructure is certainly part of the story we're going to talk about with the earnings and such uh deep seek seeking outside funding i don't know if that makes my my top list uh tech layoffs reaching nearly 80 000 workers so far uh this year is certainly a big one as well.

2:19Jenn Cutter: And then Google signing a classified agreement with the Department of Defense seems like throwing shade on itself by noting that it did that. It did not include Xbox's new identity and logo, nor did we include that either. Apple's revamped AI strategy before John Ternus was announced as the new CEO. That was a bigger story. Discontinuing the Mac Pro. it didn't consider that. We considered that. The Axios NPM package supply chain attack was a big story in the early part of the month. Later in the month, that rental car company, luxury rental car company that had an agent delete its production environment was a bigger story.

3:02Jenn Cutter: New designs for the Meta Ray-Ban glasses. OpenAI buying the podcast TBPN was another one that we could have talked about. Samsung discontinuing messages starting in July. They're just going to rely on Google after that. And the kind of more of the stuff coming from the astronauts trip around the moon, the photos and stuff coming out. Those are all things that we thought about including, but did not. Let's, however, get to our first topic, shall we? We start with John Ternus, announced as the new CEO of Apple starting September 1st. Jen, obviously this dominated the news after the moment it was announced.

3:47Jenn Cutter: Everyone's going to keep talking about it through WWDC and right up until September 1st when it gets announced. But what's your takeaway from the month? I was actually surprised at how big this story was and how it seems to keep going. To bring it back to the LLM story selection, it tended to focus more on companies where our selections tended to focus more on how does this affect people? Yeah, yeah. I think that's a good way of noting it because that is something we both try to do is like, OK, we're consumers of technology. We're users of technology. What is the news that affects us? And I'm trying to think, like, how does this really affect?

4:23I'm always surprised. Like, this is, to me, an Apple thing that like if Samsung changed hands or nothing changed hands or that one's a bit of a smaller company, but it would not have dominated the news this way. But Apple specifically always takes all this when I feel like Tim Cook gets a lot of credit for the fantastic designers that were under him. And I guess people are really kind of enjoying speculating where Apple goes from here. What new things will they push? Will Apple finally figure out the AI thing, which I still think was mostly accomplished under Tim Cook when the new iOS comes out.

5:02But the money was fun to see how much money CEOs like, that's not a job I can do. So I do understand why their compensation is extremely high. But it's like, oh, that's almost$100 million US.

5:17Jenn Cutter: Yeah. I mean, to me, that's like CEOs make lots of money is a dog bites man kind of story. But it's always interesting, I guess, to see that stuff. I think the reason this is such a big story is interesting to think about because, yes, if Satya Nadella leaves Microsoft, that'll be a story. That'll be a pretty big story, but I don't think it would be as big as this one. Mark Zuckerberg leaves Meta might be as big as this one. Yes. So I think it has to do with the personalities in relationship to the brands. And I don't know that I would say that Tim Cook is such a big personality, but Steve Jobs was such a big personality that that has that momentum has carried through Tim Cook's entire term.

6:08Because you see the Apple CEO so much like for NVIDIA, you're seeing that CEO a lot.

6:14Jenn Cutter: Yeah, Judson Long is getting to be that level of if NVIDIA gets a new CEO, it will be that big. It would be that kind of story. But for Apple, people who do not follow tech news do know who the Apple CEO is, where if I ask them any Microsoft questions, not a chance. They're going to say Bill Gates. They're not going to say Satya Nadella. And none of them are going to know Sundar Pichai, the Alphabet slash Google CEO. He's even less known in the wider world, although that would still be a big tech story if Sundar stepped down. But the speculation is fun. It's like, OK, where do they go next? Is there going to be like, is Apple like, OK, they're not going to announce like an air conditioner, but it would be fun if they did that.

6:55And right now is the time you can get away with saying such things.

6:58Jenn Cutter: It's a really interesting way of negotiating what is a very, as we've been discussing, highly magnified transition. Tim Cook is going to stay on as executive director, which most people think means he's going to continue to do some of the glad handling, especially of world leaders, talking to the leaders of China and the United States. he might still be able to step in and massage some supply chain relationships that he has built up over not only his time as CEO, but as COO before that. And they positioned it where Ternus, if all goes well, will be presiding over a number of new product category launches for several years.

7:39Jenn Cutter: There's been a lot of things in the works that are about to be introduced, glasses, pendants, foldables etc uh and so it is tim cook saying this is the time for me to step aside so that the new ceo is set up for success yeah uh cook had a good long run uh assuming turnus has a good long run uh he will always be compared to uh to cook and job so that is they are big shoes to fill and uh yeah september 1st is actually a while away so a lot can happen between now and then too I we're going to we're going to get our first look at John Ternus in the CEO light at WWDC in June. And then, yeah, by September, we're going to be like, yeah, wasn't he already the CEO?

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9:51It was a huge month for tech company earnings, with the big companies all posting double-digit earnings, while most companies, with the exception of Apple, posting expectations for triple-digit billion capital expenditures. There's a couple of other factors to keep track of. The spending done now will be spread out over years and impact profitability for those years to come. So the big revenues now are a bit of a bulwark against that because, you know, stuff costs money and you got to spend money to make money.

10:21Jenn Cutter: Yeah, we talked about this quite a bit on DT &S on Thursday and also the DTNS Live on Thursday, we talked about it some. Getting all of these earnings reports at once, basically, was very instructive. And we saw both the Financial Times, Next Web, Wall Street Journal, doing these kind of bigger overview pieces showing like, okay, there have been a lot of questions on whether these companies are actually making money or not. And the cloud revenues are showing they are. And in fact, some of the AI-specific revenues in Alphabet and Microsoft's case shows that they really are. Like this is real money coming in.

11:00Jenn Cutter: Most of them said we would be making more money if we had more capacity, which is why you get those big expenditures. So we are going to spend a lot to build data centers to handle the demand. And I know I've heard a lot of people say, yeah, but is there really a product there? Is there really demand there? And so far there is. I don't think you can argue that there is demand based on this set of earnings reports alone, along with stuff that's come before. And the question will then become, does that demand stay with these companies? And when does it peak? These companies are betting that it's going to go on for a while to continue to grow as they add capacity.

11:38Jenn Cutter: The company that times the peak right will be the company that wins the most out of this situation. But I know a lot of you have been like, is this a real business? It is looking like it is in fact a real business based on these earnings reports. And now it's a matter of who is going to be able to handle the uncertainty of where that business goes from here. Yeah, I was a bit more, we'll just go ahead and say pessimistic about the growth. But I completely agree with you now. The growth is there. I don't think it's anywhere near peak because companies continue to invest in it. I agree that long term, we don't know how far that's going to go.

12:16But the models do keep improving, even though they do require more hardware to continue that improvement. But the companies that are using it love it. Seeing Accenture this month signing that co-pilot deal and pushing it to almost a million employees, that's going to grow. Other companies dealing with the numbers and a lot of processes are going to keep growing. I've had people say that they're really surprised that the LLMs are, the area it's helping them most in is project management. And companies are going to do projects between now and the end of time. So if that really keeps helping them, they're going to keep paying for it.

12:55And then you will keep needing capacity. You will keep needing the improvements in the capacity to keep up with the improvements in the models.

13:02Jenn Cutter: Yeah. And we're starting to just begin to understand what it's good at. There will be a few more things that we discover that it's good at, especially as they get better, as they add the more capacity and all of that. That doesn't mean it's sunshine and roses forever, right? This could be two quarters of growth and then plateau. It might even be one quarter. I feel like it's probably going to be at least two quarters. I think that's reasonable. But after that, all bets are off. It could continue to go up, probably will. But nothing is for certain, especially with this level of expenditures going out there too, right?

13:35Jenn Cutter: And that thing you said about the fact that, yeah, they spend$190 billion this year, but that$190 billion gets spread out. That is a story for three years from now. Like, X company has horrible earnings because it's still paying for the data centers that it built in 2026. So file that one away. We're going to get that. Winners and losers here. Microsoft doing okay. Really good at cloud. Not so good with Xbox hardware and stuff like that. and not as good in cloud as it should be doing by some accounts. Alphabet doing gangbusters by all accounts. Meta scaring people. It actually had a decline in users.

14:16Jenn Cutter: It is not in front in the AI race. It's not a cloud company. Its advertising business is strong enough, but a lot of people are a little more skeptical of that company. And Apple's kind of in a whole different situation here. So yeah, quite interesting to have all the earnings reports come in at the end of the month like this. Yeah. Meta also has the unfortunate reputation and people are always very excited to dump on them for any possible excuse. Yeah. All right. That's two of the three or four if you're a patron. So hold, please, for the next one. oh we have to talk about anthropic uh anthropic continues to have its dispute with the u.s government and complicated that relationship by introducing project glasswing more well known and usually only referred to as mythos which is a part of project glasswing mythos is a generative model that only 40 organizations were initially given access to because anthropic says it is too good at finding bugs.

15:25Jenn Cutter: However, two weeks after it was launched to those 40 organizations, an employee of a third-party contractor for Anthropic, so he had legitimate access to Anthropic products, combined that access with some other information they gathered online, like how does Anthropic usually construct its URLs? And then they guessed the Mythos location and were playing around with it in a group Discord. It doesn't seem like they used it for any malicious reason. Anthropic has kind of hushed it up. But it was a bit of an embarrassment for something that is supposed to be about security. Nevertheless, the government seems very interested in it.

16:00Jenn Cutter: The NSA has been playing with it. There is a lot of discussion of either trying to resolve the supply chain risk accusation from the Department of Defense, or at least an executive order that would free other parts of the government to use mythos. And even a bit of a dispute, Anthropic wanting to open it up to more organizations and the U.S. government saying, hold on, don't go so fast, that could be a governmental security risk. So the U.S. government trying to weigh in, even in the mythos area, in a different way. Yeah, well, plenty of reports of hackers using AI to find exploits across the board for routers, companies, etc.

16:43Certainly, yeah. And it makes sense to be like, well, we'll just do that ourselves and turn that on ourselves and find the bugs before they can with the most powerful model that people have access to. Though the URL thing was funny because that's how a lot of gaming news used to break. If somebody uploads assets early on like Sony's website or, you know, various game companies, and that's how they find out like, oh, the Steam controller is coming.

17:07Jenn Cutter: Yeah, just keep searching for.jpg,.gif. You don't need AI to find that bug. That is a human solvable problem. Yeah. Yeah. And I don't think it's as big of a black eye as some people have said, because it was that. I mean, they probably should have figured that out. But this person had credentials. It's not like they were able to hack it. They were starting in the middle. Yeah, yeah, exactly. Worth noting, too, that OpenAI has now released 5.5 crypto, wait, 5.5 cyber, which is their version of Mythos. In other words, a model tuned specifically to find bugs. And they are also only giving it to people who they agree are going to responsibly use it to find bugs and not to exploit bugs.

17:51Jenn Cutter: So this is becoming the world we live in. Yeah, this is a part of AI that is, I think, never going to go away. This is going to be useful for as long as we are using computers and cloud computing. Yeah, I agree. I still think that some of the motivation, and not all of the motivation, but some of the motivation to keep Mythos restricted is due to computing capacity. And so I will apply that to OpenAI. They released 5.5 to everybody. That's different than what Anthropic did. Anthropic said Mythos' model is only for this. And OpenAI did it in reverse. They released 5.5 and said, yes, but we fine-tune a model that's really good at finding bugs.

18:32Jenn Cutter: And that is restricted. That is also probably a little bit of a capacity benefit for them to restrict it. Because it would be used by a lot of people who just want to play around with it. But I do think there is also something real to the ability of these models to find bugs. And I think that's a good thing because the more bugs it finds, the fewer bugs get exploited on zero day. Yeah, the AI will find it faster than humans because there are only so many humans in cybersecurity. Yeah, that was one of the things with the Firefox story. I don't know if you saw that, but they found out a lot of bugs at once.

19:06Jenn Cutter: But they weren't bugs that Mozilla thought they wouldn't have been able to find. It's just that they found them immediately instead of taking longer time. Giving everybody a really long to-do list to fix. But hey, fixes are better. That's the next job. Get the agent that can responsibly and securely fix the bugs for you. Yes, without deleting your prod. Without deleting your production environment. Exactly. All right. What did you think were our big stories of the month? Do you have insight into a story? Did you also delete your prod? Please share it with us at feedback at dailytechnewsshow.com.

19:40Jenn Cutter: Yes. Thanks to you for being along for Daily Tech News Show. You keep us in business by becoming a patron. please do so. Patreon.com slash DTNS. In fact, if you are a patron, stick around. We have one more story to talk about for you. It's about Sony.

20:02The DTNS family of podcasts. Helping each other understand.

20:08Jenn Cutter: Diamond Club hopes you have enjoyed this broker.

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