Air Street Press

Nathan Benaich (Air Street Capital)
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As an AI-native investor, we believe it’s important to be a hands-on contributor to the community. Since our earliest days, we’ve been building in public - whether that’s sharing our perspectives on the direction of the field, emerging best practice for building AI-first companies, organizing meet-ups, and campaigning for policy change. Air Street Press brings together all of our content under one umbrella. Subscribe to listen to our analysis, portfolio news, Guide to AI monthly newsletter, annual State of AI Report, and our policy work.

  1. APR 12

    State of AI Report: 2026 newsletter

    Episode Description Welcome back to the State of AI! In this packed Q1 2026 episode, we dive into a quarter defined by unprecedented geopolitical friction, staggering capital concentration, and the rapidly blurring lines between commercial cloud infrastructure and national defense. From a constitutional showdown between Anthropic and the Trump administration to the first-ever kinetic military strike on commercial data centers, the stakes for frontier AI have never been higher. Plus, we break down Anthropic’s explosive $19B ARR sprint, the escalating "distillation wars" with Chinese AI labs, and the historic $1.25 trillion merger between xAI and SpaceX. If you want to understand where the frontier is heading next, you can't miss this one. The Pentagon Standoff: Anthropic's $200M DOD contract, its refusal to drop safety guardrails, and the ensuing White House blacklist and federal lawsuit. Cloud as a Theater of War: Breaking down the unprecedented Iranian drone strikes on AWS data centers in the Middle East. Revenues Go Vertical: How Anthropic surged to a $19B ARR on the back of Claude Cowork, and OpenAI's massive $50B strategic alliance with Amazon. The Model Treadmill: The rapid succession of new model releases, including Claude Sonnet 4.6, Gemini 3.1 Pro, and GPT-5.4. The Distillation Wars: Inside the industrial-scale IP theft by Chinese labs cloning Claude, and the $2.5B NVIDIA GPU smuggling bust. Safety Meets Reality: Sabotage risks, machine-speed SQL injections, and the UK AI Safety Institute's chilling findings on AI-assisted cyber attacks. The Physical Layer & NIMBYism: The pushback against hyper-scale data centers and NVIDIA's complete exit from the China-compliant chip market. Breakthrough Research: From zero-loss cache compression (TurboQuant) to an Australian entrepreneur curing his dog's cancer with AlphaFold. Historic Mega-Deals: OpenAI's record-shattering $110B raise and xAI's trillion-dollar merger into SpaceX. 00:00 - Intro, Air Street Capital Epoch 3, & RAAIS 2026 01:28 - Geopolitics: Anthropic vs. The White House 03:12 - The Iran-AWS Conflict & Cloud Warfare 04:12 - Financials: Anthropic's $19B ARR & OpenAI's Hyperscaler Strategy 08:04 - The Model Treadmill: Claude Sonnet 4.6, Gemini 3.1 Pro, & GPT-5.4 08:56 - Open Source, IP Warfare, & the $2.5B Smuggling Ring 10:44 - AI Safety: Catastrophic Sabotage & The Sabotage Risk Report 13:20 - Data Center NIMBYism & The Contested Physical Layer 16:00 - Research Highlights: UK AISI, TurboQuant, & World Action Models 22:40 - Investments & Exits: OpenAI's $110B Round & The SpaceX/xAI Merger Stay Connected:Love hearing what you’re up to! Hit reply to our newsletter or connect with us at the upcoming Air Street AI meetups in SF (April 28) and NYC (May 14). We are also actively recruiting Research Analysts for the State of AI Report—reach out if you live and breathe this space. Produced by the State of AI & Air Street Press. In This Episode, We Cover:Episode Timestamps (Estimated):

    37 min

  2. APR 2

    From catastrophic forgetting to frontier AI - Raia Hadsell, Google DeepMind

    Raia Hadsell is VP of Research at Google DeepMind, co-leading the Frontier AI unit. Her work spans Siamese nets and elastic weight consolidation to Gemini 2.5, RoboCat, and a UK AI Ambassador role. A RAAIS 2026 speaker profile from Air Street Press.

    5 min

  3. MAR 30

    When agents need to keep learning - Roberta Raileanu, Google DeepMind

    Roberta Raileanu leads open-ended learning at Google DeepMind and co-authored Toolformer. From RIDE and AMIGo to Llama 3's tool use and MLGym, her research tackles what it takes for AI agents to keep acquiring skills. A RAAIS 2026 speaker profile from Air Street Press.

    6 min

  4. MAR 29

    The data centre that orbits Earth - Philip Johnston, Starcloud

    Starcloud launched the first NVIDIA H100 GPU in space and trained the first LLM in orbit. CEO Philip Johnston explains why AI's energy bottleneck leads to orbital data centres — with 10x lower energy costs and 5 gigawatts of solar-powered compute on the roadmap. A RAAIS 2026 speaker profile from Air Street Press.

    4 min

  5. MAR 23

    Air Street Capital announces $232M Fund III to back AI-first companies

    Air Street Capital has raised a third fund of $232M to back AI-first companies from the earliest stages. In this post, founder Nathan Benaich shares the conviction behind the firm - from his first investments in 2013 through to a portfolio that now includes Synthesia, Black Forest Labs, Wayve, Profluent, and poolside - and explains what Fund III enables for the most ambitious AI founders in Europe and North America. Read more: https://press.airstreet.com/p/fund-iii

    6 min

  6. FEB 23

    Dreaming in latent space

    Sereact's Cortex 2.0 marks a shift in robotics from reactive control to predictive planning. In this episode, we examine how Sereact’s world-model architecture generates and scores imagined futures before acting, improving success rates and eliminating human intervention across complex warehouse tasks. We break down the benchmark results, the planning budget trade-off, and what it means to deploy world models in real industrial environments rather than simulation.

    7 min

  7. FEB 22

    A letter from the Munich Security Conference

    European voters say they support higher defense spending. But when higher taxes or welfare cuts are mentioned, support collapses. In this episode from Munich Security Conference 2026, we explore Europe’s fiscal test: Germany’s industrial flywheel, the reality of attrition warfare in Ukraine, the broken procurement model, and the tension between welfare and warfare. Europe has demonstrated urgency. Now it must prove permanence.

    11 min

  8. FEB 9

    State of AI: February 2026 newsletter

    In this episode of the State of AI, we break down the growing disconnect between rapid AI capability gains and collapsing software valuations, with nearly $300B wiped from public markets in weeks. We cover the agent shock triggered by Anthropic and OpenAI’s latest releases, why investors are repricing long-term SaaS revenues, and how AI sovereignty is fracturing across U.S. policy, state-level infrastructure pushback, and China’s accelerating model and talent pipeline. We also look at the security risks of computer-use agents, the infrastructure arms race spanning GPUs, memory, power, and data centers, and the latest research breakthroughs in autonomy, medicine, and reinforcement learning. Plus, a full rundown of the month’s largest AI financings, IPOs, and acquisitions.

    31 min
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About

As an AI-native investor, we believe it’s important to be a hands-on contributor to the community. Since our earliest days, we’ve been building in public - whether that’s sharing our perspectives on the direction of the field, emerging best practice for building AI-first companies, organizing meet-ups, and campaigning for policy change. Air Street Press brings together all of our content under one umbrella. Subscribe to listen to our analysis, portfolio news, Guide to AI monthly newsletter, annual State of AI Report, and our policy work.

Information

  • Creator
    Nathan Benaich (Air Street Capital)
  • Years Active
    2021 - 2026
  • Episodes
    118
  • Rating
    Clean
  • Copyright
    © Nathan Benaich (Air Street Capital)
  • Show Website
    Air Street Press

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