This week on the GeekWire Podcast: Newly unsealed court documents reveal the behind-the-scenes history of Microsoft and OpenAI, including a surprise: Amazon Web Services was OpenAI’s original partner. We tell the story behind the story, explaining how it all came to light.
Markets showed signs of life after a sudden political retreat in Davos. Prices that had tumbled earlier this week found buyers again, though the mood stayed cautious and quick to keep an eye on the next headline.
Political Shift Calms Markets
According to Reuters, US President Donald Trump announced he would not go ahead with planned tariffs tied to Greenland after talks with NATO officials, calling the outcome an outline for future cooperation.
Reports say the initial shock knocked big chunks off crypto positions. More than $600 million in leveraged bets were wiped out within a day as Bitcoin and major altcoins slid during the selloff.
Market sentinels counted over $620 million in liquidations, while other market trackers put the toll as high as about $870 million as traders rushed to close risky positions.
Risk Appetite Returned, Slowly
After the tariff threat was pulled, stock indexes rallied. The pan-European STOXX 600 gained back ground, rising about 1.2% as traders stepped back into risk assets and some panic cooled. London shares also moved up in a broad rally that reflected relief across sectors.
Short, sharp moves hit markets. One minute confidence; the next minute forced selling. That pattern left bitcoin and ether lower from recent highs, and it reminded many investors that headlines still drive big swings.
Some long holders were squeezed out. Some traders were burned by over-extended bets. Reports note rare split liquidations where both long and short positions were affected.
Recovery Was Cautious Not Complete
According to market stories, crypto prices rebounded after the immediate scare, but volume stayed thin and sentiment stayed tilted toward fear.
Traders who saw the drop as a buying chance kept their distance, while short-term players moved back in to chase quick gains. The bounce was real, but fragile.
On Crypto & Geopolitical Noise
This episode shows that geopolitical noise can still push crypto the same way it pushes stocks. Even when the issue is not directly about digital assets, risk appetite matters.
When big, headline-driven moves happen, leveraged markets get whipsawed and people who bet too much either lose a lot or get forced out of their positions.
According to reports, the tariff retreat eased immediate worry and allowed markets to recover some lost ground, but the relief felt measured and watchful.
News can move markets fast. The mental framing of the selloff will probably keep traders cautious for a while, and any new twist in policy or diplomacy could bring fresh volatility.
Featured image from Unsplash, chart from TradingView
XRP is increasingly being positioned as the core infrastructure for moving massive amounts of value across global financial networks. As trillions of dollars move daily across borders, platforms, and asset classes, the limitations of legacy systems are becoming impossible to ignore. Its core value lies in its ability to function as a neutral, high-speed bridge between disparate financial systems.
Is XRP Becoming A Standard Layer For Value Transfer?
XRP is building the rails for trillions, and the shift is already happening. Crypto analyst Xfinancebull reported a video on X where Ripple CEO Brad Garlinghouse revealed at Davos 2026 that the payment firm has been working directly with banks around the world to connect tokenization and DeFi through the XRP Ledger, thereby turning it into a bridge between traditional finance and on-chain markets.
The number alone shows how fast the tokenized asset is moving. In just one year, the volume has grown from $19 trillion to $33 trillion, which is a 75% increase. According to Xfinancebull, most people still have no idea how big this will get.
This is the shift; the rails are being laid right now, and XRP Ledger is one of the few networks that are ready to handle it. When institutional money starts moving at scale, it won’t care about the narratives or favorite altcoins. Instead, it will flow to where the infrastructure already exists, which is bullish for XRP.
Why Respecting Channel Levels Signals A Healthy Market Structure
The XRP market capitalization structure still looks constructive. An analyst known as Bird has highlighted that on the higher-time frame chart, XRP has been moving inside a clear descending accumulation channel for the past six months, and price has respected the top, mid-range, and bottom of that channel almost perfectly, which is exactly what should play out during a healthy accumulation phase.
Recently, the price pushed into the upper half of the channel, and then pulled back this week to retest the mid-range support. If this level continues to hold, the structure suggests that the altcoin is set up for another push higher, in Bird’s opinion. However, what makes this setup more interesting is how well it lines up with what’s happening across the broader market.
The Russel 2000 is sitting at all-time highs, metals are starting to look like they are topping, Bitcoin dominance is beginning to feel heavy, Brad Garlinghouse speaks at Davos today, and the recent wave of community riddles has dropped this week. Bird concluded that when multiple signals start lining up like this, it usually means the market is preparing for a larger move. From the chart perspective, Bird remains bullish on the XRP setup.
This year’s Davos gathering and the 2026 outlook reveal a global economy in a state of “nervous acceleration.” The official stages are focused on the $3 trillion to $5 trillion potential of agentic commerce, and the private hallways are filled with anxiety over Trump and the shifting geopolitical power of AI. This acceleration means that companies like xAI are pushing Human Emulators, but Google’s Enterprise Surge shows a different pattern. Let’s dive in and stay curious.
Davos has AI on Stage, Trump in the Wings
🧰 AI Tools — Master Agentic Commerce
xAI’s Human Emulators Vs. Google’s Enterprise Surge
📚Learning Corner — AI Agents in LangChain & CrewAI
The AI Shopping Wars, big Tech’s Race to Become Your Personal Buyer
Subscribe today and get 60% off for a year, free access to our 1,500+ AI tools database, and a complimentary 30-minute personalized consulting session to help you supercharge your AI strategy. Act now as it expires in 3 days…
Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei equated Washington’s decision to allow Nvidia to manufacture AI chips for China with “selling nuclear weapons to North Korea.”
Amazon Could Open Up to AI Shopping Agents (read article below)
Gen Z women in China are all in on digital companionship, even setting up dates with real-world versions of their AI boyfriends.
Physical AI takes robots to a new level. Combining autonomy with hardware that moves objects in the physical world using sensors to perceive their surroundings.
The US is looking to Australia and Africa for minerals in an attempt to sidestep Chinese restrictions.
The first commercial space station, Haven-1, is now undergoing assembly for launch
Moderna, Merck Report Positive Results From Cancer-Vaccine Study.
The 233-year-old NYSE doesn’t want to find itself outmoded in a rapidly changing fintech landscape. It recently invested $2 billion in prediction platform Polymarket to develop future tokenization initiatives.
Looming water supply ‘bankruptcy’ puts billions at risk (Not Tech, but very important in all aspects of life, especially if water is being overly utilized and prioritized for data centers’ purposes)
This year’s Davos gathering and the 2026 outlook reveal a global economy in a state of “nervous acceleration.” At the World Economic Forum, the “tech capture” of the global economy is complete; the Promenade is now a wall of tech “houses” (Palantir, Cloudflare, C3.ai).
The Bottom Line: Corporations like Saudi Aramco are reporting $3B–$5B in cost savings through AI efficiency.
The Political Shadow: While CEOs talk about “scaling,” the real conversation is about the White House. Governor Gavin Newsom and other leaders are openly clashing over Trump’s “law of the jungle” approach to global alliances and his push for an “AI Revolution” that prioritizes American dominance at any cost.
Agentic Commerce is the 2026 North Star
We are moving past chatbots to Agents that Act:
Visa and Mastercard are racing to build the authentication layers needed for AI agents to shop, book vacations, and manage groceries autonomously.
The White House is branding this as a new Industrial Revolution, but polls shows 66% of Americans still fear these agents will lead to massive job losses.
The DeepSeek Moment & The Rise of China
A major trend for 2026 is the “Silicon Valley pivot” to Chinese open-source models.
After the success of DeepSeek’s R1, U.S. startups are increasingly building on Chinese models like Alibaba’s Qwen because they are open, customizable, and often perform as well as “closed” U.S. models from OpenAI or Google.
Trump’s December executive order aims to neuter state-level AI safety laws (like California’s). This sets up a massive legal showdown between federal “light-touch” regulation and states trying to prevent AI-related harms.
The 2026 Trend to Watch: “Scientific LLMs”
Keep an eye on AlphaEvolveand similar systems. We are entering an era where LLMs aren’t just writing emails; they are discovering new mathematical algorithms and power-saving techniques for data centers. Scientific discovery is being systematized into an iterative, algorithmic process.
This is a free (or low-cost) short course taught by industry leaders. It moves you past “prompting” and teaches you how to give an AI a tool (like a browser or a credit card) and a goal.
What you’ll learn: How to design “loops” where an AI checks its own work, how to handle “hallucinations” in commerce, and how to connect an LLM to the live internet.
xAI’s Human Emulators Vs. Google’s Enterprise Surge
While AI giants promise a white-collar revolution, the reality on the ground is a mix of surreal technical “hiccups” and strategic shifts. At xAI, the push to replace staff with “human emulators” has led to bizarre internal confusion: these AI agents appear on company org charts and have even “hallucinated” physical presence, inviting human coworkers to meetings at non-existent desks. Beyond these comedic glitches, xAI faces a fundamental “missing manual” problem, where developers struggle to automate tasks because human employees often forget to mention the dozens of intuitive, “invisible” steps they take to get work done. To scale this ambitious “Macrohard” project, xAI is even considering tapping into the idle compute power of charging Teslas.
Meanwhile, Google is finding its footing by capturing the “builder” market rather than the casual office worker. While corporate adoption of its enterprise chatbots remains a hurdle, usage of the Gemini API by developers doubled in just five months. This surge is a major win for Google Cloud, as the exclusivity of Gemini forces developers onto their platform, finally providing a credible threat to the cloud dominance of Microsoft and Amazon.
While xAI attempts to emulate the messy nuance of human labor, Google is successfully cementing itself as the preferred engine for the next generation of AI-powered software.
🧰 AI Tools of The Day
Agentic Commerce
Skyvern — (Browser-Based Agents) Uses computer vision and LLMs to navigate websites exactly like a human would. It can go to a site it has never seen before, find a product, add it to a cart, and navigate through the checkout process.
MultiOn — A browser extension and API that acts as a “remote control” for the web. You can give it a high-level command like, “Find the best deal on a 10x12 wool rug and buy it,” and it will execute the search and transaction across multiple tabs.
CrewAI — Multi-Agent Orchestration allows you to build a team of agents (one agent to research prices, one to check reviews, and one to handle the booking). Agents can “talk” to each other to complete a complex commercial goal.
Stripe Agent Toolkit — Tools to allow AI agents to handle money securely. Allows developers to give agents “virtual cards” with spending limits so they can make purchases without having full access to a bank account.
Google Shopping Graph API (via Gemini) — Gemini’s API to access their Shopping Graph. Gives agents access to real-time inventory, pricing, and “deals” from billions of product listings across the web.
The AI Shopping Wars
Big Tech’s Race to Become Your Personal Buyer
A new front has opened in the AI arms race: Agentic Commerce. Industry giants are no longer content just showing you links; they want to handle the entire transaction from “search” to “buy,” effectively turning themselves into the interface for all global retail.
Major players playbook:
Amazon’s Bold Annexation: Amazon’s new AI assistant, Rufus, has been caught scraping independent sites to fulfill orders. Through a “Buy for me” feature, Amazon-powered bots browse external sites, check inventory, and handle payments, even for merchants who never signed up for Amazon. It’s a brazen move to keep users inside the Amazon ecosystem, even when the product isn’t in their warehouse.
Google & OpenAI’s Partnership Play: While Amazon is “annexing” stores, Google and OpenAI are “inviting” them. Google is co-developing the Universal Commerce Protocol, an open standard to pull products from Shopify, Etsy, and Walmart directly into its AI. Meanwhile, OpenAI is partnering with Shopify to monetize its massive user base by allowing seamless in-chat shopping.
The Death of the “Storefront”: The endgame for all three is a world where customers never leave their chat interface.
Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella and former UK Prime Minister Rishi Sunak at the World Economic Forum in Davos. (Screenshot via LinkedIn)
Bicycles for the mind. … Information at your fingertips. … Managers of infinite minds?
Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella riffed on some famous lines from tech leaders past this week in an appearance at the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland, and offered up his own trippy candidate to join the canon of computing metaphors.
Nadella traced the lineage in a conversation with former UK Prime Minister Rishi Sunak.
“Computers are like a bicycle for the mind” was the famous line from Apple’s Steve Jobs.
“Information at your fingertips” was Bill Gates’ classic Microsoft refrain back in the day.
And now? “All of us are going to be managers of infinite minds,” Nadella said. “And so if we have that as the theory, then the question is, what can we do with it?”
He was referring to AI agents — the autonomous software that can take on tasks, work through problems, and keep going while you sleep. Microsoft and others have been talking for the better part of a year now about people starting to oversee large fleets of them.
Nadella said it’s already reshaping how teams are structured. At Microsoft-owned LinkedIn, the company has merged design, program management, product management, and front-end engineering into a single new role: full-stack builders. Overall, he called it the biggest structural change to software teams he’s seen in a career that started at Microsoft in the 1990s.
“The jobs of the future are here,” Nadella said, putting his own spin on a famous line often attributed to sci-fi writer William Gibson. “They’re just not evenly distributed.”
Nadella’s comments came during a live stream for LinkedIn Premium members, hosted from Davos by LinkedIn VP and Editor in Chief Daniel Roth, after Sunak mentioned his two teenage daughters, and the world they’ll enter. Young people may not manage lots of people at age 20 or 21, he said, “but they will be managing a team of agents.”
Sunak was referencing an essay by Goldman Sachs CIO Marco Argenti in Time.
The agentic shift, Argenti wrote, requires “moving from being a sole performer to an orchestra conductor” — your team now includes AI agents that “must be guided and supervised with the same approach you would apply to a new, junior colleague.”
Nadella agreed, saying “we do need a new theory of the mind” to navigate what’s coming, before he offered up his new metaphor about managing infinite minds.
In other remarks at Davos, Nadella made headlines with his warning that AI’s massive energy demands risk eroding its “social permission” unless it delivers tangible benefits in health, education, and productivity. Energy costs, he added, will decide the AI race’s winners, with GDP growth tied to cheap power for processing AI tokens.
Whether “infinite minds” catches on like “bicycles” and “fingertips” remains to be seen. But it’s definitely more psychedelic. And if this shift is stranger than what came before, maybe we do need a mind-expanding metaphor to make sense of it all.
U.S. President Donald Trump said Wednesday that he wants to sign sweeping cryptocurrency market structure legislation “very soon,” arguing that digital assets are both a political priority and a strategic battleground in the United States’ economic competition with China.
Speaking during a wide-ranging address to world leaders and financial executives at the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland, Trump framed his administration’s embrace of crypto as central to preserving U.S. leadership in financial innovation.
His comments came as bitcoin surged above $90,000, extending gains amid optimism that clearer U.S. regulation could further legitimize the asset class.
“To unleash innovation and savings and financing, I’m also working to ensure America remains the crypto capital of the world,” Trump said.
He pointed to legislation he said he signed last year — the GENIUS Act, focused on stablecoins — as a foundational step toward that goal, while signaling that broader crypto market structure rules are now close to becoming law.
“Congress is working very hard on crypto market structure legislation — bitcoin, all of them — which I hope to sign very soon,” Trump said, adding that the effort would unlock new pathways for Americans to achieve what he described as “financial freedom.”
Trump openly acknowledged the political calculus behind his support for crypto, saying it delivered “tremendous political support,” but stressed that geopolitical competition was the more important driver.
“China wanted that market too,” he said. “It’s just like they want the AI. And we’ve got that market, I think, pretty well locked up.”
He also took aim at former President Joe Biden, claiming Democrats only softened their stance on crypto late in the 2024 election cycle after realizing how many voters cared about digital assets.
“All of a sudden they loved it very much, but it was too late,” Trump said. “They blew it.”
Trump’s support for crypto legislation in the United States
Trump’s remarks come as U.S. lawmakers continue to negotiate a long-awaited framework to define how cryptocurrencies are regulated, including whether tokens fall under securities or commodities law and which agencies will oversee the sector.
The Senate is currently advancing market structure legislation through multiple committees, though final language has yet to be released and markups keep getting delayed.
Political action committees backed by crypto firms spent hundreds of millions of dollars during the 2024 election cycle and are already mobilizing ahead of the 2026 midterms.
As Trump speaks, Bitcoin is trading at $89,942, down 1% over the past 24 hours on $60 billion in volume, leaving it about 1% below its seven-day high of $90,778 and 2% above its seven-day low of $87,902.
The AI startup is on track to announce its first hardware device in the second half of this year, OpenAI Chief Global Affairs Officer Chris Lehane said during an interview at Davos.
Coinbase CEO Brian Armstrong challenged skepticism earlier today toward Bitcoin from the head of France’s central bank during a World Economic Forum panel in Davos.
Armstrong took a public stand on stage arguing that the asset’s lack of centralized control makes it more independent than traditional monetary authorities.
The exchange unfolded after Banque de France Governor François Villeroy de Galhau questioned Bitcoin’s credibility, saying he places more trust in independent central banks with democratic mandates than in what he described as “private issuers” of Bitcoin.
François Villeroy de Galhau said “I trust more independent central banks with a democratic mandate than private issuers of Bitcoin”.
Armstrong leaned in and hit back, saying, “bitcoin is a decentralized protocol. There’s actually no issuer of it. So in the sense that central banks have independence, Bitcoin is even more independent. There’s no country or company or individual who controls it in the world.”
“Bitcoin doesn’t have a money printer,” Armstrong said. “It’s more independent”
The discussion took place during a panel focused on tokenization at the WEF Annual Meeting, an event where conversations more commonly center on blockchain infrastructure and central bank digital currencies rather than BTC itself.
Framing Bitcoin as a monetary counterweight, Armstrong argued that competition between state-issued currencies and decentralized alternatives is healthy.
He said BTC’s fixed supply and lack of a “money printer” provide a check on government overspending, likening its role during periods of uncertainty to gold’s historical function.
Villeroy de Galhau maintained that trust ultimately comes from central bank independence paired with accountability to citizens.
JUST IN: Coinbase CEO calls out Franch Central Bank governer:
At events centered around the conference, Armstrong also reiterated his long-held prediction that BTC could reach $1 million by 2030, arguing that its fixed 21 million supply and rising global demand matter more than short-term volatility, even as prices hovered near $89,000 and the broader crypto market lost $160 billion in a day.
Speaking at Bloomberg House during the World Economic Forum in Davos, Armstrong urged investors to focus on long-term trends and said he remains optimistic about U.S. crypto legislation.
Armstrong also said Coinbase can no longer support the current Senate Banking Committee crypto market structure bill, calling it worse than the status quo and harmful to innovation and competition.
For context, the U.S. Senate committee postponed debate last week on the landmark crypto “Clarity Act” after Armstrong said the company could not support the bill, dealing a major blow to its prospects.
In essence, the legislation would establish a regulatory framework for cryptocurrencies by defining when tokens are securities or commodities and clarifying the SEC’s authority, marking the culmination of years of industry lobbying for clearer rules.
Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei unloaded on both the administration and U.S. chip companies over plans to sell to China. The criticism was particularly notable because one of those chipmakers, Nvidia, is a major partner and investor in Anthropic.
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