In the cutthroat AI race, one name has been noticeably missing in action: Apple. That might soon change. On Monday, Apple announced that Tim Cook will step down as CEO in September and longtime hardware engineering executive John Ternus will take over the reins of the $4 trillion company.

While not a household name, Ternus has been involved in several key product launches at Apple, including updating the Mac Mini, which later became popular for locally running AI agents like Open Claw, The Wall Street Journal reported. The University of Pennsylvania graduate also oversaw Mac computers’ transition from Intel chips to Apple silicon and is credited with leading the development of Apple Airpods, now a critical part of the company’s ecosystem.

But Ternus has some gigantic shoes to fill at a crucial time in Apple’s history. While iPhone sales continue to grow, all eyes (and ears) are on the company’s most prominent AI feature: its voice assistant Siri, notoriously unreliable and historically limited to basic functions like setting a timer or providing weather updates. The company’s efforts to launch a revamped version of Siri have run into snags, Bloomberg reported. It looks like Apple has decided not to spend boatloads to build its own models, and so far has relied on Google’s Gemini and OpenAI’s ChatGPT to power its AI features. Ternus will have to decide whether that’s the right long-term strategy as Apple continues to fall behind on AI development.

The Forbes AI 50 2026

In case you missed it, Forbes published its eighth annual AI 50 list, with sponsoring partner Mayfield, that highlights the most promising privately held AI companies in the world. There’s a lot of familiar names, like Anthropic, Harvey and ElevenLabs, but this year Forbes has also highlighted some exciting newcomers, including presentation builder Gamma, drug discovery startup Chai Discovery and New York-based Rogo, which is building AI for bankers and investors. We also launched our first ever AI 50 Brink list, featuring early stage companies with the potential to rival their more established peers in the future.

Now let’s get into the headlines.

Some unusual companies are cashing in on the AI boom. The latest example: Allbirds, a struggling shoemaker, which said last week that it’s selling its footwear assets and branding in a pivot to become an AI compute infrastructure company. The announcement alone caused the company’s stock price, which had cratered about 83% since IPO, to jump 800%.

After scraping and ingesting all the data on the public internet to train their models, AI titans are hungry for more. Now they’re turning to the Slack messages, Jira tickets, email threads and codebases of defunct startups, Forbes reported. Startups are selling that data for hundreds of thousands of dollars in some cases, as AI companies look for training data in unconventional places.

Arthur Mensch, the billionaire cofounder and CEO of French AI company Mistral has a simple but compelling pitch— countries should be in control of their own AI destiny instead of relying on American giants like OpenAI and Anthropic for powerful models. That’s why Mistral develops its own open source models, allowing companies to inspect or tweak the underlying code, run them locally and securely and train them on their own data. The pitch appears to be working, for now. The $14 billion behemoth clocked $200 million in revenue in 2025 and is on track to make $80 million every month by December. (Read Forbes’ profile on Mistral here.)

AI data centers have become a tempting wartime target, Forbes reported. In April, Iran’s Revolutionary Guard published a hit list that included facilities owned by Microsoft, Amazon and Oracle as well as Stargate UAE, the $30 billion-plus joint venture between OpenAI, Oracle, SoftBank and Gulf-based investment firm G42. In March, drone strikes damaged Amazon’s data centers in Bahrain and the UAE, disrupting services. As a result, companies are investing heavily in data center security, from counter-drone capabilities to vehicle barriers.

HED: Mercor’s 23-Year-Old Billionaire Founders Grapple With Employee Fraud And North Korean Infiltration

During an all-hands meeting earlier this year at data labeling startup Mercor, its then 22-year-old billionaire CEO Brendan Foody pulled up a slide with a single word: fraud.

An employee had embezzled company funds, he told his staff of more than 200. The person had since been fired. There would be no tolerance for this behavior, Foody said, according to four people familiar with the meeting.

Foody didn’t identify the employee or disclose the amount stolen at the meeting. But Forbes has learned that the culprit was an early hire and lead manager on the Anthropic account, one of the company’s most important, where Mercor’s contractors create training data to help build Claude. Multiple former Mercor employees said the manager had recruited his brother and father as “experts” and sent them hundreds of thousands of dollars in so-called bonus payments. He was reported in late December after it was discovered that contractors were paid more than the amount billed to Anthropic for multiple data generation projects, two sources said. Anthropic was not aware of the incident, they added.

Mercor eventually recovered the fraudulent bonus payments and it did not end up costing customers any money, Mercor spokesperson Heidi Hagberg told Forbes. The former Anthropic account lead, whom Forbes is not identifying, declined to comment for this story. Anthropic declined to comment.

It’s just one episode in what more than a dozen former employees describe as a series of operational mishaps at Mercor, a fast-growing startup that has recruited 50,000 highly-skilled experts—PhDs, lawyers, bankers, scientists and programmers—to create training data for big AI labs like OpenAI. It’s been hugely successful so far: Earlier this year, Mercor’s annualized revenue run rate crossed $1 billion, or $83.3 million in monthly revenue, according to a person familiar with the company.

Read the full story on Forbes.

Aron D’Souza, an Australian entrepreneur who helped fund the lawsuit that bankrupted media outfit Gawker, is launching a new startup called Objective that uses a panel of AI models by companies like OpenAI, Google and xAI and former law enforcement agents gather evidence and judge the accuracy of claims made in investigative journalistic stories, Techcrunch reported. The startup plans to charge $2,000 to adjudicate critical stories. Experts warn that this could make it more difficult for journalists to publish articles that hold powerful institutions and people accountable, which often rely on confidential sources.

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