The 'people’s airline,' SpaceXAI, and the Enterprise AI Race

Everyone wants a piece of the enterprise AI pie, and this week, we saw a string of companies making their moves. From Anthropic and OpenAI announcing new joint ventures (techcrunch.com/2026/05/04/anthropic-and-openai…) targeting enterprise AI deployment to SAP dropping $1B (techcrunch.com/2026/05/05/sap-bets-1-16b-on-18…) on German AI startup Prior Labs, it's becoming clear that if you're a startup building enterprise tools, you're likely an acquisition target.

On this episode of TechCrunch's Equity (techcrunch.com/podcasts/equity) podcast, hosts Kirsten Korosec, Anthony Ha, and Sean O'Kane dig into the week's enterprise AI deals, the xAI-Anthropic compute arrangement (techcrunch.com/2026/05/06/is-xai-a-neocloud-now), and what it all means ahead of what could be a big IPO season.

Listen to the full episode to hear about:

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Why a TikToker is trying to crowdfund the purchase of Spirit Airlines (techcrunch.com/2026/05/03/well-take-it-a-tikto…), and whether anyone really loves Spirit enough to make it work

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Why Katie Haun's venture fund (techcrunch.com/2026/05/04/katie-haun-raises-1-…) and Andreessen Horowitz are both raising billions (techcrunch.com/2026/05/05/as-crypto-cools-a16z…) to back a crypto comeback

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Aurora Innovation's milestone commercial trucking contract (techcrunch.com/2026/05/06/aurora-lands-mclane-…) with a Berkshire Hathaway subsidiary, announced shortly after we caught up with Aurora’s CEO, Chris Urmson (techcrunch.com/podcast/auroras-chris-urmson-on…), at HumanX

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The Pentagon's latest AI spending spree,inking deals with Nvidia, Microsoft, and AWS (techcrunch.com/2026/05/01/pentagon-inks-deals-…)

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Chapters:

00:00 Intro

00:31 Spirit Airlines & the crowdfunded "people's airline"

03:25 xAI x Anthropic deal: is xAI becoming a NEO cloud?

13:47 Haun Ventures & a16z's crypto comeback

17:48 Aurora Innovation lands a commercial trucking contract

19:27 A big week for enterprise AI: who's actually making money?

26:45 The Pentagon's AI spending spree

31:04 Outro

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