Full May 2026 coverage: AI News May 2026.
Isomorphic Labs Closes $2.1 Billion Series B
Isomorphic Labs — the AI drug discovery company spun out of Google DeepMind and led by DeepMind co-founder Demis Hassabis — has closed a $2.1 billion Series B round led by Thrive Capital. The funding will go toward expanding its in-house drug discovery pipeline and scaling its research infrastructure. Isomorphic Labs is best known for AlphaFold, the protein structure prediction system that won Hassabis the 2024 Nobel Prize in Chemistry. The $2.1 billion round is one of the largest single raises in AI life sciences and reflects continued investor conviction in AI-native drug discovery as a category distinct from traditional pharmaceutical R&D.
OpenAI Rolls Out GPT-5.5-Cyber to EU Cybersecurity Teams
OpenAI announced it will grant the European Union access to GPT-5.5-Cyber — its cybersecurity-focused AI model — rolling out in limited preview to vetted cybersecurity teams including EU businesses, governments, cyber authorities, and EU institutions such as the EU AI Office. The EU rollout mirrors the US Trusted Access for Cyber program at chatgpt.com/cyber, which has been running since April 30.
Anthropic's competing model, Claude Mythos, was released approximately one month ago and prompted significant concern over cyberattack risks on critical software infrastructure. The European Commission has not yet secured access to Mythos. Anthropic has not announced an EU rollout timeline, leaving OpenAI with a significant first-mover advantage in European government cybersecurity AI deployments for now.
Anthropic Names Unauthorized Share Sellers — Warns Transactions Are Void
Anthropic named eight unauthorized secondary market sellers of its shares, including Hiive and Forge Global, in a formal warning to investors. The company stated that any share transactions conducted through these platforms are void. The move is a signal of tightening control ahead of a potential IPO — Anthropic's revenue run rate has now climbed above $30 billion and the company is widely expected to pursue a public offering later this year. Secondary market trading of pre-IPO shares in high-growth AI companies has become common; Anthropic is one of several frontier labs to formally push back against unauthorized brokers.
Google Hiring Hundreds of "Forward Deployed Engineers" for AI Customers
Google is hiring a team of "forward deployed engineers" — a source says in the hundreds — to help enterprise customers use its business-focused AI products. The role is modeled on a model popularized by Palantir: engineers embedded directly with customers to deploy and customize AI tools in production environments rather than handling customer support remotely. The hiring push reflects how complex enterprise AI deployment has become — selling a model API is different from getting it reliably embedded in a company's workflows, and Google is betting that human technical support at the customer site is the differentiator in enterprise AI sales.
Google's Threat Intelligence Group Catches First AI-Discovered Zero-Day
Google's Threat Intelligence Group has identified and stopped what it says is the first known case of an attacker using AI to discover and weaponize a zero-day vulnerability — a previously unknown software flaw with no existing patch. Google said it stopped the planned mass attack before it could be executed. The disclosure is significant: it confirms that AI-assisted zero-day discovery has moved from theoretical concern to documented real-world attack. This is the scenario that has driven both OpenAI's Trusted Access for Cyber program and Anthropic's restricted Mythos rollout — frontier AI models are capable enough to find previously unknown vulnerabilities, and access controls matter.
Full May 2026 AI news coverage: AI News May 2026 — All Releases and Announcements