RIP Golden Age of Agent Experimentation 2026-2026

**Nathaniel Whittemore** (0:00)
Today on the AI Daily Brief, the big implications of Anthropic's new pricing plan, and before that in the headlines, the USAI envoy lands in Beijing.
The AI Daily Brief is a daily podcast and video about the most important news and discussions in AI.
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Well, the AI envoy has touched down in Beijing, and Jensen Huang ended up making the flight. Earlier this week, the White House announced that over a dozen executives would be joining the president on his trip to China, with those executives representing the industries that would form the core of trade negotiations. Despite NVIDIA being a major bargaining chip in US-China relations, Huang was reportedly excluded from the invite list. White House sources said that after Huang's exclusion made headlines, the president personally reached out to extend a last-minute invite.
Now, the full details of the trade agenda are still a little uncertain. Trump likened the deal to Nixon's summit with Chairman Mao in 1972, commenting, I will be asking President Xi, a leader of extraordinary distinction, to open up China so that these brilliant people can work their magic and help bring the People's Republic to an even higher level. Meanwhile, the commentary is all swirling around a renegotiation on the status of Taiwan. As with anything in current global politics, this week could be a wild nothing burger, or it could have incredible ramifications, particularly for tech and AI, which of course we'll cover in more detail if and as there's anything to discuss.
Next up, we turn to markets, where Cerebras has raised over $5 billion in the largest IPO so far this year. Interestingly, it apparently almost didn't happen. The IPO was priced on Wednesday after the close, with the final stock price set at $185.
This was significantly above the advertised range of 150 to 160, even after Cerebras supersized the offering on Monday. The final price implies a market value of $40 billion.
Now, CoreWeave was the last AI-related IPO, but the hype around Cerebras blew them out of the water. Bloomberg reports that Cerebras saw orders for 20 times more than the available shares. And as an additional twist, a last-minute acquisition bid almost derailed plans to go public. Sources told Bloomberg that chipmaker Arm and their majority owner SoftBank approached Cerebras for a takeover late last month. Cerebras reportedly rejected the bid, preferring to go it alone in the public market. And it's kind of hard to second-guess that decision now that they've raised what would have been one of the largest IPOs in any of the past few years. The stock was set to begin trading on Thursday morning after I record, so we'll check in and see how the market receives Cerebras on the Friday show.
Moving over to the political side of the house, a new Gallup poll has found that voter sentiment is breaking hard against data centers.
7 in 10 Americans now oppose data center construction in their local area, including 48% who said they're strongly opposed. Just 7% said they were strongly in favor. The survey was taken in mid-March and is the first time Gallup has polled specifically on data center sentiment. Gallup designed their polling questions to mirror polling on nuclear power plants, which has been conducted since 2001 In their March survey, they found that more people opposed data centers than nuclear plants. In fact, the opposition is so intense that it exceeds the all-time high of nuclear opposition at 63%.