AI and Unionization: A Current Snapshot  🔗 **Source:** [AI and Unionization: A Current Snapshot](https://share.snipd.com/episode/ac2e960d-93f8-46f1-b270-e7e38ab47961) ## Highlights - **AI Matched ER Doctors In Triage** - OpenAI's O1 model matched or outperformed ER attending doctors at triage, hitting correct or near-correct diagnoses 67% versus doctors' 55% and 50%. - Study used 76 real ER cases with text-only inputs and improved to 81.6% accuracy after admission, showing promise but limited to non-imaging data. Transcript: Jaeden Schafer They did it with Beth Israel Deaconess, the team over there, and they just published a science paper that basically said OpenAI's 01 preview. It was out beating a bunch of people inside of the ER, a bunch of doctors specifically. They put it head-to with two internal medicine attendees. So basically, they had 76 real ER cases. And ER, by the way, I'm going to say is kind of an interesting place, because this isn't like doctors that know their patients and work with their patients and understand their history, I think you get much better results there. But to be fair, ER is a real, you know, it's a real use case, it's real thing. And so inside of the ER, they gave the same electronic medical records, the same vitals, the same intake nurse notes, all of that. And at the triage stage where information is like, basically it's the hardest to get, you have to make a call and you have to do it very quickly in the ER, right? You're trying to keep people alive. They're like bleeding to death. They're having some sort of, you know, big issue. The O1 model hit the exact or very close diagnosis 67% of the time. And the two attending, the two attending doctors hit it 55 to 50% of the time of, you know, the diagnosis of what was actually wrong. So neither of these were perfect, but OpenAI was getting 67% and the doctors were getting 55% and 50%. Once patients were admitted, O1 hit a 81.6% versus a 78.9% and a 69.7% for the doctor. ([Time 0:01:30](https://share.snipd.com/snip/f25759a5-af3b-469f-8a36-3282ef41dfbf)) - **Liability Questions Loom Over Clinical AI Use** - The study raises unresolved malpractice and liability questions about when clinicians follow or override AI recommendations. - Jaeden highlights scenarios where physician agreement or disagreement with the model could shift legal blame, with no clear precedent. Transcript: Jaeden Schafer If O1 disagrees with the attending physicians and then the attendings override it, who's going to get sued when a patient has an issue for malpractice? Are they going to look at what the AI model said and what the physician disagreed with? I mean, this would go both ways, right? Let's say the physician agrees with what the AI model says and it turns out to be wrong. Who's liable? So these are some big questions that need to be solved. ([Time 0:04:01](https://share.snipd.com/snip/534331e5-70ff-4e67-b1da-7e05fd2aa5ec)) - **IBM Pivots To Governance Layer For Enterprise AI** - IBM repositioned WatsonX Orchestrate as an "agentic control plane" to let enterprises deploy Anthropic, OpenAI, Google models under one governance layer. - It bundles identity, audit, and sovereignty features plus Bob, CoFluent, Concert, and Sovereign Core for regulated customers. Transcript: Jaeden Schafer They held their Think 2026 keynote today and they announced what to me basically looks like their most aggressive enterprise AI repositioning that they've done in the last few years. I remember going to some AI conferences maybe like three or four years ago and IBM was there talking about IBM Watson. This isn't really something that you hear a ton in the mainstream. They've done some enterprise deals, but I don't think it's as big as they had hoped to. And what they're really pivoting and kind of pointing this towards is that it's called the Watson X orchestrate. And this is basically IBM now calling it a quote, agentic control plane. So this is basically the layer that's going to let all the Fortune 500 companies deploy agents from Anthropic, OpenAI, Google, plus all of their own internal agents. And they can do this all with a single policy. So they can, you know, they have some identity, they kind of have an audit layer, and it can look across everything. They also shipped IBM Bob, which is an agentic developer partner. I just I don't know, leave it up to IBM to name their agent Bob. It's just, I don't know, it feels so on brand for IBM versus like, you know, you have like Claude from Anthropic and you use, and you got like Gemini from Google and we got Bob from IBM. I love it. Okay. I'm a sucker for it. In any case, they're basically really targeting a different audience than I think a lot of these other tools are targeting. They have IBM CoFluent for real-time data. They have IBM Concert for ops. They have IBM Sovereign Core for customers who need to run AI inside of specific national jurisdictions. So they're really targeting a different audience. But I think this is a moment where they're not trying to compete on the model layer. They know that they've lost that to open AI Anthropik and Google. They're just trying to kind of rent theirself out as the governance layer between all of the regulated enterprises and the model providers. ([Time 0:04:25](https://share.snipd.com/snip/f3847773-b856-45c3-8cbd-37a2de3ab269)) - **Use AI To Drive Cost Cuts And Cloud Migration** - PayPal announced a $1.5B cost-cutting plan that includes ~4,500 layoffs and an AI-driven transformation to become "a technology company again." - The CEO plans cloud-native migration and an AI transformation team to automate workflows over 2–3 years. Transcript: Jaeden Schafer The next thing I want to talk about is PayPal. Their new CEO, Enrique Lors, just got off of their first earnings call today and they announced that they are doing a $1.5 billion cost-cutting plan and that includes laying off about 4,500 employees. That's about 20% of the entire workforce. And if I'm going to be honest, I still use PayPal for a number of different online businesses and projects. But it definitely feels like a company that has lost a lot of ground and just gotten, I don't know, kind of lazy and slow compared to other more hungry competitors. There's a lot of finance products out there. Stripe is just, you know, crushing it right now and getting ready for their IPO and really tapped into the developer field. And I think in a way that PayPal really should have, but it seems like PayPal is turning a lot of that around, but they got to do some cost cutting and reorganize the company. And 20% of their workforce is massive. And they're saying that they're going to be able to do this because of AI. So over the next two to three years, the framing is that they're going to do a quote unquote AI turnaround. He, their CEO initially said that PayPal needs to become a quote, a technology company again, which is kind of brutal when you talk about a company that, you know, literally invented Modern online payments. So saying like, look, we're going to become a technology company again. It's like, oof, they really have lost their way. It feels like even coming from their CEO. Over at Bloomberg, Madeline Speed was kind of talking about this and said that what they're actually doing is they're planning on spinning up a new AI transformation and simplification Team, which is going to be moving the platform to cloud native and they're going to be aggressively adopting AI inside of their developer workflow. We have this on the back of a bunch of other companies that are doing this. Snapchat announced something similar, Meta announced something similar, Microsoft, Amazon, there's a lot of layoffs. And I think that we're seeing this, the AI is really getting put to the test right now to see if it can actually push, automate and grow companies. And so we're just in a really interesting moment in the industry. ([Time 0:06:13](https://share.snipd.com/snip/e967052e-3384-47ee-ad95-dc7359a40a07)) - **OpenAI Took A Stake In A Nvidia Rival** - Cerebras filed for an IPO targeting a $26.6B valuation while OpenAI previously loaned Cerebras $1B secured by warrants for ~33M shares. - That makes OpenAI a major potential shareholder in a Nvidia competitor, diversifying AI compute supply risk. Transcript: Jaeden Schafer They have just filed their IPO yesterday. They're looking to do a $26.6 billion valuation. And that's kind of the high end of their range. They're going to sell 28 million shares at $115 to $125 a piece. That will bring them about $3.5 billion. Now, this is, you know, this is kind of exciting. IPO, this is an awesome company. It's funny to me, though, their total raise that they're trying to get out of this is about $3.5 billion. Meanwhile, just yesterday, OpenAI announced that they're going to, you know, start this new company where they're getting OpenAI's, you know, their developers embedded into organizations. They're working with all these PE firms. And like, that's kind of just like a random spinoff company. And that raised like $4 billion to do that. Then we have this entire seat, this entire IPO for another company that's coming in at like three and a half billion. It just goes to show you how absolutely astronomical these rounds of funding are for Anthropic and opening eye right now, you kind of have these giants just scooping up so much money. But in any case, for Cerebras, their ticker is going to be CBRS. The pricing is May 13th. Trading starts the next day after that. And I think what not a lot of people are talking about is that in December, OpenAI actually loaned Cerebras a billion dollars. They secured it by warrants on about 33 million shares. So that's basically a multi-billion dollar stake that converts on an IPO. ([Time 0:08:08](https://share.snipd.com/snip/cf244671-172b-45c0-b434-30b7bb365a40)) - **DeepMind Researchers Vote To Unionize Over Defense Work** - DeepMind London staff voted ~98% to unionize, demanding rollback of Pentagon and IDF contracts and reinstatement of Google’s no-AI-for-weapons pledge. - The vote is framed as the first frontier lab union and may affect recruitment and corporate decisions amid layoffs. Transcript: Jaeden Schafer They just voted 98% in favor of unionizing today. So it's basically, I don't know, everyone but like one or two employees. And this is what the CW is calling the world's first union at a frontier AI lab. There's about a thousand DeepMind staff involved in this. Okay, so I guess 20 people decided they didn't want to unionize. And they're asking Google to recognize the CW and unite the, or and unite the union as their official representatives. And they're asking for one thing in particular with this new union. They want to walk back the classified Pentagon Gemini deal and end the Israeli Defense Force contract work and reinstate the no AI for weapons commitment that Google deleted from its Public site in February of last year. The thing that makes this a little bit different than, you know, we have, you know, back in 2018, Project Maven had a whole revolt from inside of Google, and that killed a defense contract And had Google kind of pull away from doing defense work. Now, everyone over at DeepMind, there's a lot of researchers that are publicly posting on X, and they're quite upset about it. But the reason why I think the environment today is definitely different than back in 2018, when they were actually able to kill that contract, is because right now you have stock prices That are an all-time high for Google specifically, but also the labor market for AI engineers is not as hot as it used to be. Back in, you know, 2018, 2019, 2020, 2021, things got really, really hot. And so a lot of the engineers were saying, hey, we're going to walk away and Google didn't want to lose them. And so they it felt like they kind of bent to their will a little bit. Today, we have Sundar Pichai, who is publicly defending the deal. So he's, you know, his own reputation is on the line. And with the union kind of asking them to do this, you also have basically every tech firm, Microsoft, Amazon, Snapchat, Meta, every single tech firm is laying off all of like tons of Engineers, because they're saying, look, we have AI that's kind of helping us. So I kind of get a lot of this work down with less people. And I imagine they'll scale up at some point in the future. But right now, we have this interesting moment where there are a lot of layoffs happening. And so kind of having a union come in and try to force Google's hand to cancel a contract feels like I don't know, it's an interesting place. But at the same time, we only have so many AI researchers. And so there might just be a moment where Google completely loses control of them. And they all want to walk over to Nvidia or over to Anthropic or OpenAI or some other company. Personally, I don't think it's going to have a huge impact on Google's decision, but it might impact who they're able to recruit in the future. But that's kind of a company by company thing. ([Time 0:10:54](https://share.snipd.com/snip/ad91eeb3-9aa1-4463-a90b-5cc9b44345b7)) - **Government Will Red Team Frontier Models Before Launch** - The Commerce Department's CAISI will test frontier models from major labs for national security risks pre-release with no safety guardrails, marking federal third-party red teaming. - Labs will submit models unprotected so CAISI can probe worst-case capabilities before public launch. Transcript: Jaeden Schafer The next thing I want to talk about is that the Commerce Department's Center for AI Standards and Innovation, that's the CAISI, it's basically the Trump administration's renamed Successor to the AI Safety Institute. They have signed an agreement with Google DeepMind, Microsoft and XAI to test all of their frontier models for national security risks before public release. Some people are saying this is fantastic for, you know, AI safety and regulation and everything that we see coming from there. Other people are more concerned about it. They don't like the government being able to, I guess, hold back a model if they don't think it's safe. But operationally, how this would actually work is that all of the frontier labs, they're going to give their newest models to the government with no safety guardrails at all. So this is all going to be done by the CAISI. And they're going to be able to probe those models and actually basically push them to the limits to see what they can do if there was no, you know, if there was no guardrails on them. The thing that I do think is interesting about this is kind of the first time that a third party has will be given access, we have kind of red teaming researchers that go and try to push the Models to their limits. But those are inside of OpenAI or firms that are kind of hired by OpenAI or researchers or security professionals. And OpenAI doesn't really have to tell anyone what the outcome was, what these models were capable of doing. And you have Anthropic that'll say like, hey, look, we have this model mythos, and it can like hack every, you know, code base in the world, and it's super powerful, yada, yada. ([Time 0:13:36](https://share.snipd.com/snip/f37eafd2-42d0-4588-a7b3-9f5730d71209)) - **Anthropic Targets Finance With Prebuilt Agents And 365 Integration** - Anthropic launched 10 prebuilt finance agents, full Microsoft 365 integration, and finance-tuned Claude Opus 4.7 to target pitch books, KYC, AML, underwriting, and statement audits. - Partnerships with Moody's, Dunn & Bradstreet, ThirdBridge, and FIS enable data plumbing and SOX-compliant deployment into banks. Transcript: Jaeden Schafer First of all, they just had this big kind of glitzy event. It was like invite only and it was called Briefing Financial Services. So Dario Amadeo, the CEO of Anthropic, and then also JP Morgan Chase CEO Jamie Dimion were both there on stage talking about the future of AI and finance. And they weren't just talking about, you know, like, oh, possibly this is what it could look like or this was what it could do. It's something that I feel like I've seen at a lot of conferences. Anthropic was actually showing off specific agents they've built for finance. So they have 10 prebuilt agents, which are for kind of the most labor intensive workflows inside of finance, which are pitch books, earnings analysis, credit memos, underwriting, KYC, know your customer, month end close, statement audits, insurance claims. And each of those is going to ship as a reference architecture with all of the skills, connectors, and sub agents that it needs out of the box. So a finance person can grab those things, a finance professional, and can like immediately start running with them. They built out all of the most common use cases. On top of that, Anthropic rolled out a full Microsoft 365 integration, which means that they can not only use those things, but they all integrate directly with Microsoft 365. So it can, you know, PowerPoint, Excel, Word, OneDrive immediately once Anthropic generates something, it can actually put it into all of those systems, which people are so, you know, Use all the time, Outlook, everything, right? And it can carry context across all four of those apps. On the data side, there is a Moody MCP that pipes credit ratings and credit data directly into Claude. There's also an expanded partnership with Dunn and Bradstreet and ThirdBridge. And the model itself, Claude Opus 4.7, has actually been finance tuned. So they fine-tuned this for a lot of the jobs that finance needs. And it feels kind of like what they did initially targeting really heavily onto developers. And they saw such huge growth from the developer industry and what they were building. It feels like the next big frontier for them is finance. They also have a partnership with FIS, which is FIS, the bank tech vendor that basically runs the back office for thousands of banks. Specifically, the first product that is coming out of that partnership I thought was very interesting. It is a financial crimes AI agent that compresses anti-money laundering investigations, and it's just like helping identify what might be money laundering and flag that so it's not Going to take hours. All of this lining up, I think, is a really big deal. One big part of this, it feels like Anthropic, they kind of won with developers and opening eyes trying to play catch up. It feels like Anthropic is about to crush it in finance as well. And I think one of the biggest signals is Jamie Dimion, you know, or Jamie Dimon being on stage with Dario at all. Dimon, he doesn't, you know, show up for most vendor events. He's the CEO of America's most, you know, famous biggest bank. But I think the reason he showed up is because JP Morgan is already really deep into this. And he gave a quote that I thought was phenomenal. And I'm sure Anthropik thought it was phenomenal considering their upcoming IPO. He said, quote, the technology is so powerful, it's worth the trillion dollar investment. So Felix Salmon was kind of reporting on this. And he said that, you know, Dimion is basically blessing the AI CapEx boom and that the framing is right because now the procurement and the compliance objection that I think a lot of These firms have had is kind of going away. FIS already has SOX compliance rails on thousands of banks. And so Anthropic plugging into FIS is, I think, basically how all of these agents actually become legally deployable. So there's not kind of this, you know, end runaround audit. And I think the run rate numbers that we're seeing from Anthropic hitting 30 billion or yeah, $30 billion in annual recurring revenue shows, look, this company is growing insanely Fast. ([Time 0:17:03](https://share.snipd.com/snip/35380779-0ae5-4746-8323-cff88b8b6d04)) - **Financial Embedding Could Shield Anthropic From Harsh Regulation** - Deep integration of Anthropic into US finance (JP Morgan, FIS) could make the company too critical to heavily regulate, shielding it from punitive government action. - Jaeden notes that embedding into payments and compliance rails raises political and systemic stakes. Transcript: Jaeden Schafer And that is that Anthropic might just be making itself too important for the US financial system to be regulated out of existence, right? We already see that they have kind of this battle going with the Pentagon, and they have some, you know, government issues where they're kind of fighting. And you could see, you know, in a really punitive environment where they would kind of get hammered by a lot of government agencies, like we've seen in all sorts of administrations for Different tech companies. But it feels like right now by integrating themselves deeply into the US financial system, working with Wall Street, like what's the US government going to do? Hey, like, look, we can't use Anthropic for anything because we don't like their stance on one particular, you know, one particular area, and it's going to cripple our financial markets. It's really interesting the way that they are working into everything. ([Time 0:20:39](https://share.snipd.com/snip/01624ddf-e480-4a7d-ba69-41e0331e71b6))