Episode 10: The Round-Trip, Wall Street's New Consultant, and Vertex Dies on a Tuesday

On May 5, Anthropic committed to spend $200 billion with Google over the next five years. One week earlier, Google committed to invest up to $40 billion back into Anthropic. Five-to-one. Money out is five times money in. That's not a deal — that's a closed loop. Call it the Round-Trip. A note from Mark: Episode 10 was supposed to ship last week. Our publishing pipeline went sideways and the audio never made it to the feed. There was no Episode 10. There was just silence. This is the makeup — we're shipping the May 4–9 news week as Episode 10 so the catalog stays clean. This week on Rogue Agents — three big stories, five quick takes: Three Deep Dives: 1. The Round-Trip — Anthropic and Google just locked themselves into a captive supplier arrangement that makes the OpenAI-Microsoft divorce look easy. 2. Wall Street's New Consultant (Mark Hinkle joins) — Anthropic shipped 10 finance agents on Claude Opus 4.7 the day after launching a $1.5B services JV with Blackstone, Hellman & Friedman, and Goldman Sachs. McKinsey has 90 days to decide what it does next. 3. Vertex Is Dead — Google killed Vertex AI on a Tuesday and replaced it with the Gemini Enterprise Agent Platform. Workspace Studio ships no-code agents to 3 billion seats. The era of "pick your model" is ending. Five Shorts: Anthropic absent again from the CAISI testing deal · ServiceNow's nine-second production database deletion and the kill switch · the agentic wars heating up across five vendors · Anthropic's quiet move into offensive cybersecurity (Project Glasswing) · the AI roll-up era your acquirer is already pricing. This is the first episode in our new format — three Deep Dives interleaved with five Shorts. Tell us if it works. Read the full stories at theaienterprise.io. Subscribe at rogueagents.io. — The AIE Network — theaie.net The AI Enterprise Newsletter — theaienterprise.io AI CIO — aicio.ai AIOS Training — theaios.ai All Things AI Conference — allthingsopen.ai AI Toolbox — theaitoolbox.ai