What stood out to me this week was how many industries are being forced to confront the same question from different angles: what, in fact, sits between the product and the person now? In beauty, that increasingly looks like messaging; in retail, it looks like experience as infrastructure; in wellness, it looks like a correction to the science itself; and in fashion tech, it looks like the quiet but necessary shift from front-end excitement to back-end utility.

Sharing insights and highlights from Vogue Business’ Future of Wellness event, one of our favourite fashion tech newsletters right here on Substack, ATFT’s Q1 highlights, and more news on our radar for the end of the week.

If you are new here, or want to catch up on the best of Codes of Culture, we’d recommend you start here and remember to subscribe for full access to our news, insights, podcast and global events.

📖In this issue:

1. Fenty Beauty moved its beauty advisor to WhatsApp.

2. Meta signed a 10-year lease on Fifth Avenue.

3. Wellness in 2026 is correcting the science it was built on, and the market is bifurcating as a result.

4. Coty withdrew its guidance, lost its CEO, and now faces a securities class action.

5. All Things Fashion Tech’s Q1 review.

1. BEAUTY AND COMMERCE INFRASTRUCTURE

Fenty Beauty moved its beauty advisor to WhatsApp.

What’s happening: Fenty Beauty has launched Rose Amber, an AI-powered beauty advisor built directly into WhatsApp, in its first formal partnership with Meta in the US. Named after one of Rihanna’s favourite Gloss Bomb shades, the advisor offers shade matching, product recommendations, tutorials, and customer reviews across Fenty Beauty, Fenty Skin, and Fenty Hair. Charles powers the commerce layer behind the integration. Fenty has already said that international expansion and in-app purchasing are the next steps. That matters because L’Oréal is already further ahead: in Brazil, more than 20% of its direct-to-consumer sales now come through conversational commerce on WhatsApp.

TLDR:

• Rose Amber is live in the US across all three Fenty lines. The next move is in-app purchasing, not more experimentation.

• L’Oréal’s Brazil business has already shown what scaled WhatsApp commerce can look like. The benchmark exists.

• Meta now reports more than one billion active daily business conversations across its messaging platforms. Consumer behaviour has outpaced most brand strategies.

• The opportunity is not customer service alone. It is discovery, recommendation, and conversion inside a channel people already use constantly.

• Messaging is becoming infrastructure. The brands that move early will have more control over how that layer feels.

Why it matters: Conversational commerce is starting to look less like a brand experiment and more like a channel strategy. In markets where messaging already sits close to transaction, the advantage will go to brands that can make that experience feel guided, premium, and native to the wider brand world. Beauty is especially well-suited to that shift because the category depends so heavily on recommendation, reassurance, and routine. What Fenty is really testing here is not a chatbot. It is whether messaging can become a high-intent commerce layer for prestige beauty.

2. FASHION, TECH AND CULTURAL INFRASTRUCTURE

Meta signed a 10-year lease on Fifth Avenue.

What’s happening: Meta has extended its Fifth Avenue presence in New York with a 10-year lease, taking over a five-level, 15,000-square-foot townhouse on Millionaires’ Row, between Gucci, Prada, Louis Vuitton, and Dior. What began as a short-term pop-up in late 2025 is now a permanent experiential space, with a café, content studio, community area, and in-store customisation for its AI glasses. A second flagship, Meta Lab LA, opened last October. Nothing is pursuing a similar logic, using physical retail and fashion-coded activations to build hardware appeal. The shift here is clear: tech companies are no longer borrowing fashion’s symbolism for a campaign or a collaboration. They are building the same kind of brand infrastructure that luxury has relied on for years.

TLDR:

• Fifth Avenue is not just a retail address. It is a positioning statement.

• The operating model mirrors luxury more than electronics retail: experiential, staffed, clienteling-led, and built to hold attention.

• Tech brands are moving beyond collabs and runway adjacency. They are building stores, environments, and narratives of their own.

• The problem they are solving is familiar: how to create desire around products with functional alternatives.

• Fashion’s toolkit now belongs to a much wider competitive set.

Why it matters: Meta’s Fifth Avenue move matters because it turns a familiar cultural borrowing exercise into something much more durable: commercial infrastructure. Luxury brands have long had an advantage in world-building, physical experience, and symbolic positioning. That advantage starts to narrow when tech companies stop referencing fashion and start replicating the experience architecture that once set luxury apart. A collaboration is fleeting. A long lease on Fifth Avenue is a claim on territory, attention, and cultural legitimacy.

3. WELLNESS, LONGEVITY AND CAPITAL

Wellness in 2026 is correcting the science it was built on, and the market is bifurcating as a result.

What’s happening: The wellness market is being reshaped by two structural shifts at once. The first is a long-overdue correction inside longevity: women age differently from men, and a growing body of research now points to ovarian decline as a central driver of systemic ageing. That is pushing the market beyond generic longevity language and into a more specific category built around women’s healthspan. The second shift runs in the opposite direction. As optimisation culture becomes more exhausting than aspirational, some of the fastest-growing parts of wellness are moving away from constant tracking and toward social saunas, nervous system regulation, communal rituals, and lower-stimulation experiences. The global wellness economy reached $6.8 trillion in 2024 and is projected to approach $10 trillion by 2029.

TLDR:

• Longevity science is correcting for male biological defaults, and that correction is now shaping product design, clinical focus, and capital.

• Women’s healthspan is becoming a category in its own right, not a side conversation within menopause or general wellness.

• In beauty, skin longevity is replacing anti-ageing as the preferred language, with skin framed as a health marker rather than a surface problem.

• At the same time, there is a growing backlash against over-optimisation and constant self-measurement.

• The market is not consolidating around one future. It is splitting into hardcare and softcare, and both are growing.

Why it matters: The important thing here is that wellness is no longer moving in a single direction. One part of the market is becoming more clinical, more data-led, and more biologically precise. Another is becoming more emotional, more communal, and less interested in performance as a lifestyle. Brands that try to speak to both without understanding the difference will sound vague at best and inauthentic at worst. The opportunity is significant in both lanes, but the language, product architecture, and trust signals required for each are completely different.

4. BEAUTY CAPITAL AND GOVERNANCE

Coty withdrew its guidance, lost its CEO, and now faces a securities class action.

What’s happening: A federal securities class action filed in March 2026 names Coty, former CEO Sue Nabi, and other senior executives. The complaint covers the period from November 2025 to February 2026, during which management continued to say that sales trends were improving and reaffirmed a $1 billion adjusted EBITDA target for fiscal 2026. In early February, Coty reported a 17% decline in adjusted EBITDA, weakness across both Prestige and Consumer Beauty, and withdrew full-year guidance. Nabi departed the same day. Coty shares fell by roughly 22% across the period. The complaint argues that softness in Consumer Beauty, slowing Prestige fragrance growth, and margin pressure linked to marketing spend were not adequately reflected in the company’s earlier guidance.

TLDR:

• The class period covers exactly the months in which Coty maintained an improving outlook that later results did not support.

• Prestige fragrance, one of the sector’s strongest recent categories, was already showing signs of slowing.

• Consumer Beauty was under pressure at the same time, making the group picture weaker than the headline narrative suggested.

• The timing of the guidance withdrawal and CEO exit deepened the damage.

• The broader issue is visibility: how clearly public markets can really see what is happening inside large beauty portfolios.

Why it matters: The significance lies less in the litigation itself than in the structural question underneath it. Large beauty groups present investors with a consolidated narrative, but the underlying categories often move at very different speeds and for very different reasons. That becomes more important as prestige fragrance loses some of the momentum that helped carry the sector over the past two years. When one category can no longer hide softness in another, disclosure, sequencing, and management credibility come under much harder scrutiny.

5. FASHION TECH AND AGENTIC COMMERCE

All Things Fashion Tech’s Q1 review.

What’s happening: Q1 2026 made one thing much clearer: the most commercially credible AI story in fashion right now is not consumer-facing styling, but operational infrastructure. All Things Fashion Tech’s quarterly review captured the gap between agentic commerce as a concept and the systems required to make it work in practice. OpenAI scaled back its more ambitious in-app checkout plans and shifted toward brand plug-in integrations, a quieter approach that better matches the still-limited number of merchants actually set up for agentic transactions. Swap raised $100 million to build the transaction layer for AI agents. Microsoft and PayPal launched seamless checkout inside Copilot. The broader pattern is increasingly obvious. The glamorous front-end vision is still compelling, but the near-term value is being created in logistics, forecasting, returns, and merchandising.

TLDR:

• OpenAI’s checkout reset looks more like sequencing than retreat. Merchant readiness remains the bottleneck.

• Swap’s raise points to where the real work is happening: the infrastructure layer beneath agentic commerce.

• Microsoft and PayPal’s Copilot integration is one of the clearest signs that checkout is beginning to move into AI environments.

• Q1’s strongest shift was away from styling narratives and toward operational AI with measurable commercial impact.

• Fully agent-owned checkout still faces unresolved trust, liability, and permission questions.

Why it matters: Fashion tech has spent the last year talking loudly about AI at the point of inspiration. The more interesting shift now is happening deeper in the stack. Back-office infrastructure is proving easier to deploy, easier to justify, and far more likely to produce real commercial returns in the short term. The longer-term question remains the biggest one: who controls the agent that ultimately acts on the consumer’s behalf? But before that comes into view, brands need machine-readable product data, cleaner inventory architecture, and checkout systems that can actually support that future when it arrives.

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I have been thinking about the difference between a funding round and a land grab. Yesterday, with OpenAI closing $122 billion at an $852 billion valuation, it feels like a land grab. The numbers are unreal! The investors are not backing a product. They are staking a claim on the layer on which everything else will run. Once you see that frame, it is hard to unsee it, and that’s what I kept returning to this week. Last week, I also shared a quick link news recap about OpenAI sunsetting Sora, but I wanted to go a bit deeper into why it matters in today’s issue.

In other news, (more exciting news!) I will be at Watches and Wonders in Geneva in a couple of weeks as a guest of Hermes (still in shock!), and I look forward to sharing more about it soon. Plans are also in full swing for the F1 Miami race weekend, and the official Miami fan fest has been announced, along with Cannes Lions programming for many of Future+’s partners and clients. If you are looking to have a presence at either, please reply to this email so we can share more information.

If you are new here, or want to catch up on the best of Codes of Culture, we’d recommend you start here and remember to subscribe for full access to our news, insights, podcast and global events.

📖In this issue:

1. OpenAI closed Silicon Valley’s largest-ever funding round

2. Starcloud raised $170 million to build data centres in space

3. Bluesky built an AI app that lets users write their own algorithm

4. Sora shut down by OpenAI six months after launch

5. Anthropic accidentally leaked the source code for Claude Code

1. AI, CAPITAL, AND CORPORATE STRATEGY

OpenAI closed Silicon Valley’s largest-ever funding round.

What’s happening: OpenAI closed a $122 billion funding round at an $852 billion post-money valuation, the largest in Silicon Valley history. The round was anchored by Amazon, Nvidia, and SoftBank, with continued participation from Microsoft and co-leadership from Andreessen Horowitz, D.E. Shaw Ventures, MGX, TPG, and T. Rowe Price. For the first time, OpenAI extended participation to individual investors through bank channels. The company is generating $2 billion in monthly revenue and consolidating its product stack into a unified AI system that combines ChatGPT, Codex, browsing, and agentic workflows. A potential IPO is being prepared for as early as late 2026.

TLDR:

• $122 billion at an $852 billion valuation. OpenAI has broken its own funding record twice in twelve months.

• The structural signal is not the size. Amazon, Nvidia, and SoftBank supply the compute and distribution that OpenAI’s products run on. They are now also shareholders. The line between supplier and backer has gone.

• Amazon’s $50 billion includes $35 billion conditional on AGI or an IPO. The capital has terms attached that tie investment to product outcomes.

• The unified superapp signals consolidation of the interface. One system for ChatGPT, Codex, browsing, and agentic workflows has fewer entry points and more lock-in.

• Retail investor access through bank channels is a pre-IPO positioning move. OpenAI is broadening its shareholder base before going public.

Why it matters: For the capital allocators and infrastructure-adjacent operators in Future+’s network, the important signal is not the size of the round but the collapse of the boundary between supplier, distributor, and shareholder. Amazon, Nvidia, and SoftBank are not betting on a product. They are underwriting the physical layer that Frontier AI runs on, and now hold equity in the company that those products build. AI is no longer being financed as a product category. It is being financed as infrastructure. The competitive position is increasingly determined at that layer, and everything built above it is downstream.

2. INFRASTRUCTURE AND FRONTIER CAPITAL

Starcloud raised $170 million to build data centres in space.

What’s happening: Starcloud, a Redmond-based space compute company founded in 2024, closed a $170 million Series A at a $1.1 billion valuation, led by Benchmark and EQT Ventures. The round makes it the fastest company in Y Combinator history to reach unicorn status, just 17 months after demo day. Total funding stands at $200 million. Starcloud launched its first satellite in November 2025, carrying an Nvidia H100 GPU, the first terrestrial-grade chip of that class to reach orbit, and subsequently trained an AI model in space. Starcloud-2, due later this year, will carry Nvidia’s Blackwell B200 and AWS server hardware.

TLDR:

• The premise: terrestrial data centres are colliding with hard limits around power, land, water, and permitting. In low Earth orbit, solar power is abundant, cooling is passive, and grid dependency disappears.

• Starcloud-1 proved the thesis at a technical level. The company now holds proprietary data on operating high-performance AI chips in orbit, knowledge that competitors are not yet able to replicate.

• Cost-competitiveness depends on launch compression. CEO Philip Johnston estimates viability when launch costs reach roughly $500 per kilogram, tied to commercial Starship availability in 2028 or 2029.

• Starcloud is not alone. SpaceX, Blue Origin, Google’s Project Suncatcher, and Aethero are all pursuing adjacent positions. The infrastructure race has moved beyond Earth.

• Benchmark’s board seat is the signal beneath the valuation. This is conviction capital pricing a long-duration infrastructure map, not current revenue.

Why it matters: For the sovereign wealth funds, infrastructure investors, and enterprise operators in our network building positions in the AI compute stack, Starcloud is a proxy for where the constraint is heading. Space computing will not replace terrestrial infrastructure in this decade. But the capital being deployed now is pricing the trajectory of launch economics and energy access over the next ten years. When Benchmark leads a round of this size into a company with one satellite and no commercial revenue, they are making a structural view on where compute will live. The geography of AI infrastructure is becoming a strategic question, not just a technical one.

3. SOCIAL INFRASTRUCTURE AND OPEN PROTOCOLS

Bluesky built an AI app that lets users write their own algorithm.

What’s happening: At the ATmosphere developer conference in Vancouver, Bluesky unveiled Attie, a standalone AI app built on the AT Protocol and powered by Anthropic’s Claude. It lets users build personalised social feeds in plain language rather than code: describing what they want to see and letting the system construct the logic. Because the AT Protocol is an open data system, Attie draws on a user’s full activity across the Bluesky ecosystem rather than a single platform’s proprietary graph. The longer-term roadmap extends to user-built social applications. The launch coincides with Bluesky disclosing a further $100 million in funding, giving the 43.4 million-user platform more than three years of runway.

TLDR:

• Attie is a standalone logic layer, not a feature inside the main app. That separation is the point: it positions recommendation as a configurable infrastructure rather than a platform-controlled output.

• The AT Protocol’s openness is the structural enabler. Feed logic can be built and ported across any app in the ecosystem without requiring any platform to release proprietary data.

• Bluesky’s founder, Jay Graber, is explicit: dominant platforms use AI to increase time spent and harvest training data through systems users cannot inspect. Attie is designed as the inverse.

• The roadmap extends to user-built social apps in natural language. Schneider has compared the potential of the Atmosphere ecosystem to WordPress, a platform layer that enables independent construction.

• $100 million in new funding gives Bluesky a runway to pursue this as a structural infrastructure bet rather than a monetisation experiment.

Why it matters: For the media platforms, cultural institutions, and brand operators in our network that have spent years building audiences inside closed recommendation systems, the strategic relevance here is not Attie as a consumer product. It is what happens to the distribution logic as the open protocol model scales. The algorithm has functioned as a proprietary moat; it determines what gets seen, by whom, and in what context. If the recommendation becomes a configurable infrastructure that any operator can build on, that moat erodes. The contest over who controls distribution logic will define media, culture, and commerce in the next cycle.

4. AI OPERATIONS AND COMPETITIVE INTELLIGENCE

Anthropic accidentally leaked the source code for Claude Code.

What’s happening: Anthropic confirmed it had inadvertently published internal source code for Claude Code within a release package on the npm registry. A source map file pointed to a zip archive containing nearly 2,000 TypeScript files and more than 500,000 lines of code. The package was pulled within hours, but the code had already been widely mirrored, reaching over 84,000 GitHub stars before DMCA takedowns were issued. Anthropic attributed the exposure to a release packaging error. No customer data or credentials were involved. The incident came days after a separate accidental exposure of an internal blog post detailing an unreleased model known internally as Capybara.

TLDR:

• What leaked was not the model weights but the agentic harness: the orchestration layer that instructs Claude Code how to use tools, manage memory, and govern its behaviour. That layer is where Claude Code’s commercial distinctiveness lives.

• Claude Code had reached an annualised run-rate of $2.5 billion as of February, with enterprise accounting for 80% of revenue. The leak provides competitors with a detailed blueprint for one of the fastest-growing AI products on the market.

• The exposed code revealed an autonomous background mode called KAIROS and a three-layer memory architecture built to prevent agent confusion in long-running sessions. These are hard-won engineering decisions now in the open.

• This was the second accidental exposure in a week. The pattern points to process gaps where engineering velocity meets release infrastructure; not a structural security failure, but a material operational risk at scale.

• Code that reached 84,000 stars before removal has already circulated beyond containment. The legal response was fast. The practical containment was not.

Why it matters: For the enterprise AI buyers, frontier founders, and operators in our network who build on or compete with Anthropic’s tooling, this incident is worth reading as an operational signal rather than a security story. At the pace the leading AI companies are shipping, release hygiene is a material risk. What circulated was not just code but the architectural decisions that make Claude Code commercially distinctive; the orchestration logic that sits above the model and shapes how agents reason, remember, and act. Anthropic’s position remains strong, but the incident is a reminder that in AI, the infrastructure built around the model can be as strategically sensitive as the model itself.

5. AI STRATEGY AND PRODUCT

Sora shut down by OpenAI six months after launch.

What’s happening: OpenAI discontinued Sora, the AI video generator it launched in September 2025, along with the Sora API. The product peaked at roughly one million users before active users fell below 500,000. Video generation at scale was reportedly costing around $1 million per day in infrastructure against limited revenue. OpenAI is reallocating that compute toward coding tools, enterprise AI, and agentic systems. The Disney partnership, a three-year licensing agreement covering more than 200 characters across Marvel, Pixar, Star Wars, and Disney properties, together with a planned $1 billion Disney investment, collapsed. Disney was informed less than an hour before the public announcement.

TLDR:

• Six months from launch to discontinuation. Early App Store traction proved insufficient once retention and compute economics came into focus.

• Video generation operates on a fundamentally different cost curve from text. The infrastructure burden is heavier, the consumer monetisation logic weaker, and the path to margin far less forgiving.

• Disney’s $1 billion commitment was structured in stock warrants, not cash. The partnership carried public weight before it carried operational finality; a pattern worth noting for anyone tracking AI partnership announcements.

• The compute freed from Sora is being redirected toward enterprise, coding agents, and agentic systems. That reallocation is the signal, not the shutdown.

• Consumer AI products are now being held to product-market fit and margin discipline. The phase where demo quality and partnership announcements could sustain a product is ending.

Why it matters: For the founders, operators, and investors in our network evaluating AI product bets, Sora is not a cautionary tale about video. It is a data point about where the market’s tolerance has moved. The window in which novelty and launch momentum could carry a product through weak retention is closing. What replaces it is durability: whether the tool generates revenue at the compute cost it requires, whether users return, and whether the workflow it fits is real. OpenAI’s pivot toward enterprise and agentic systems is where the recurring revenue logic is strongest. The consumer AI layer is being filtered, not abandoned. The filters are getting sharper.

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One of my favourite parts of this work is the conversations that happen before the newsletter gets written. This week, I met with a founder building a wearable company with a fine jewellery angle, specifically for women, and something clicked. Women’s health is no longer a niche conversation. It is becoming one of the most serious investment theses in consumer tech, and luxury and fine jewellery are naturally finding their way into it.

The story that confirmed it for me: fine jewellers across the US are now building bespoke diamond-encrusted jackets to dress the Oura Ring, with some pieces reaching $10,000. The women buying them say the same thing: they want to track their health, but they refuse to wear something ugly to do it. That was always true. The industry is finally catching up.

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📖In this issue:

1. Estée Lauder confirms merger talks with Puig.

2. Sephora built itself into ChatGPT.

3. Brunello Cucinelli is showing luxury’s most credible version of AI.

4. Aerie cast Pamela Anderson against AI-generated bodies.

5. HSBC put buy ratings on seven luxury stocks.

1. LUXURY AND BEAUTY M&A

Estée Lauder confirms merger talks with Puig

What’s happening: Estée Lauder has confirmed it is in discussions with Spanish beauty group Puig regarding a potential business merger. No agreement has been reached. If completed, the deal would unite Estée Lauder’s portfolio- Clinique, MAC, Tom Ford Beauty, Jo Malone, La Mer with Puig’s Charlotte Tilbury, Carolina Herrera, Jean Paul Gaultier, Nina Ricci, Rabanne, and Penhaligon’s, creating a combined entity with roughly $20 billion in annual sales. The market read the asymmetry immediately. Puig rose on the news. Estée Lauder fell. That split captures the deal logic clearly: Puig is negotiating from a position of strength, while Estée Lauder is trying to accelerate a turnaround after years of declining sales, restructuring, and a strategic reset under CEO Stéphane de La Faverie.

TLDR:

• The strategic logic is fragrance. Estée Lauder has scale in beauty, but Puig is structurally stronger in scent. A combination would materially shift the balance of power in the prestige fragrance market.

• Puig is not entering these talks out of weakness. Charlotte Tilbury, Carolina Herrera, and its fragrance portfolio have held up well through the luxury slowdown.

• Estée Lauder is making a recovery bet, not an expansionist move from strength. That is why investors are treating execution risk seriously.

• The market reaction was telling: Puig up, Estée Lauder down. Strategic logic is clear; confidence in integration is not.

• This would be the most consequential beauty-industry consolidation move in years, narrowing the field of serious global acquirers.

Why it matters: Fragrance is the one beauty category that held its cultural and commercial power through the luxury contraction, and the major groups are now moving accordingly. Control of prestige scent is becoming a strategic question rather than a category decision. For founders, operators, and investors across the Future+ network, the more important implication is what this does to the exit map. Fewer scaled buyers, more pressure on cultural distinction, and greater value placed on brands that arrive with identity intact. The appetite is still there. The bar is simply getting higher.

2. BEAUTY AND AI COMMERCE

Sephora built itself into ChatGPT

What’s happening: Sephora has launched its app inside ChatGPT, piloting in the United States. Users can prompt beauty queries directly in chat, receive personalised product recommendations, and access Beauty Insider rewards and member benefits. In-app checkout is still to come, but the architecture is already clear: beauty discovery is moving into the AI layer. This is not a chatbot activation. It is a retail infrastructure play built on loyalty data, purchase history, and consumer preference. Sephora is not simply showing up inside a new interface. It is attempting to bring its relationship graph with it.

TLDR:

• Beauty discovery is now happening inside ChatGPT, personalised through Sephora’s loyalty ecosystem rather than generic search logic.

• Beauty Insider is the real asset. Tens of millions of profiles, preferences, and behaviours give Sephora an advantage few retailers can replicate.

• Checkout comes later. Discovery comes first. That sequencing matters because it shows where the real control point is shifting.

• Other retailers are building similar integrations, but beauty has moved earliest and with the clearest use case.

• The front door of retail is beginning to migrate from owned environments to AI interfaces.

Why it matters: This is one of the cleanest signals yet that the interface layer is becoming commercially strategic. For luxury, beauty, and retail operators, the question is no longer whether AI will shape consumer discovery. It already is. The question is whose data, content, and product architecture are structured well enough to win inside it. Brands that invested early in direct consumer relationships and first-party data will have an advantage. Brands that still treat those systems as back-end functions will find them harder to discover in the environments that increasingly shape demand.

3. LUXURY AND TECHNOLOGY

Brunello Cucinelli is showing luxury’s most credible version of AI.

What’s happening: Brunello Cucinelli launched Callimacus, a new e-commerce platform developed by Solomei AI, the brand’s in-house research centre. The system replaces conventional site logic with a multi-agent structure that composes interface and content in real time around visitor intent. The agents are named after classical figures, including Socrates and Demosthenes. That could sound ornamental elsewhere. Here, it does not. What makes the move distinctive is not novelty but coherence. Brunello Cucinelli has spent years building a language around “humanistic technology,” and it now has an operating model to match. In a luxury sector flooded with AI pilots, this is one of the few examples where the philosophy appears inseparable from the product.

TLDR:

• Callimacus abandons conventional e-commerce structure. The interface is composed dynamically around visitor intent rather than built from fixed pages and menus.

• Solomei AI is an internal research centre, not an outsourced experiment. That gives the project more cultural depth and strategic control.

• The classical naming system is not decorative. It reflects a longer institutional position on humanistic technology and the role of intelligence inside luxury.

• Brunello Cucinelli is one of the few brands attempting to define what AI should mean in a luxury context, rather than simply applying tools to existing systems.

• In a market where many AI initiatives feel opportunistic, coherence has become a competitive advantage in its own right.

Why it matters: Luxury is beginning to divide into two camps: brands using AI as an efficiency layer, and brands using it to clarify their philosophy of service, judgment, and human value. Brunello Cucinelli is the most persuasive example so far of the second. For the founders and brand leaders Future+ advises, that distinction matters. The technology position is becoming inseparable from the brand position. The relevant question is not whether to use AI, but what kind of intelligence your brand is prepared to stand behind publicly and operationally.

4. FASHION, CULTURE, AND AI

Aerie cast Pamela Anderson against AI-generated bodies.

What’s happening: Aerie has announced it will not use generative AI to create images of people or bodies in its advertising, extending the brand’s long-standing anti-retouching stance into the synthetic-image era. Pamela Anderson fronts the campaign, which Vogue covered this week. The pledge will also apply to partners and creators. The choice of Anderson is especially sharp. Her recent cultural reappraisal has been built on rejecting the image machinery that once defined her. That makes her more than a celebrity face. She is the message.

TLDR:

• Aerie is not simply avoiding AI imagery. It is making a visible, public brand claim against it.

• The commitment extends to partners and creators, which gives the position operational weight rather than leaving it as campaign language.

• Pamela Anderson gives the story cultural precision. Her presence turns a brand stance into a broader argument about image, agency, and credibility.

• Consumer appetite for visibly human aesthetics is becoming measurable rather than theoretical.

• A new split is emerging: brands embracing synthetic image production, and brands using refusal as a trust signal.

Why it matters: Authenticity has moved from vague values language into a real positioning category. For fashion and luxury brands, the question is no longer whether synthetic imagery will become controversial. It already has. The question is whether your stance is legible before you are forced to explain it. The brands arriving at this now still have room to define their own codes. The brands that wait will be responding to someone else’s framing. In visual culture, believability is starting to behave like a premium asset again.

5. CAPITAL AND LUXURY

HSBC put buy ratings on seven luxury stocks.

What’s happening: HSBC issued a sector report forecasting mid-single-digit organic growth for luxury in 2026, assigning buy ratings to seven of the eight stocks it covers: LVMH, Richemont, Burberry, Prada, Moncler, Hermès, and Kering. The optimism is notable not because it predicts recovery, but because of the diagnosis attached to it. HSBC’s view, as reported by WWD, is that much of luxury’s recent contraction was self-inflicted. Brands raised prices faster than they added value, while creative inconsistency and leadership churn weakened momentum. The implication is clear: recovery is possible, but it will not be delivered by macro conditions alone. It has to be earned.

TLDR:

• HSBC is broadly constructive on luxury again. Seven out of eight names covered received buy ratings.

• The bank’s diagnosis is unusually blunt: luxury damaged itself through overpricing and creative stagnation, not just external headwinds.

• The recovery thesis depends on volume returning, not further price escalation. That is healthier, but also more demanding.

• The brands best positioned for recovery are those that directly repaired desirability and value perception.

• The rebound story is real only if brands stop behaving as though pricing power alone can substitute for product, creativity, and conviction.

Why it matters: This matters less as a stock call than as a framework. The most useful part of the HSBC thesis is the condition attached to its optimism: recovery will not be evenly distributed, and it will not be inherited automatically. For luxury groups, founders, and capital allocators, the relevant question is simple. Has the brand rebuilt enough cultural and creative authority to deserve renewed demand, or is it still waiting for consumers to tolerate the old model again? Those are not the same thing. This next phase of luxury growth will likely reward the brands that understand the difference.

Quick links in case you missed:

1. OpenAI scraps Sora

2. Kering’s new jewellery division

3. Nano diamond cooling fabric for fashion

4. Oura’s gold and diamond luxury upgrade

5. Fashion Weeks’ EMV shift

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What’s on my radar for this mid-week issue is a simple pattern: the real contest is shifting beneath the surface. Less about the headline technology itself, more about who controls the infrastructure, regulation, and behaviour around it. That matters because these systems will shape how the next generation of brands, companies, and markets are built. Across this week’s stories, that plays out in politics, mobility, manufacturing, airspace, and wearable hardware.

AI is being absorbed into public governance before most policymakers fully understand it. The Bernie Sanders–Claude exchange was ironic for precisely that reason: a public critique of AI that also demonstrated how easily these systems can be bent into performance. Autonomous transport is quickly becoming a capital and fleet question, not just a software one. Physical AI is starting to attract serious capital to the industrial base, and commercial airspace is opening faster than most people expected. Meanwhile, Meta’s clearest signal is not coming from the metaverse, but from eyewear people are already prepared to adopt.

Remember to subscribe for full access to our news, insights reports, and global events. We are currently working on being at F1 in Miami, the Milken Global Conference in LA, and Cannes Lions. Reply to this email if you will be there too and want to stay in the loop for what we get up to.

📖In this issue:

1. Senator Bernie Sanders interviewed an AI chatbot about AI dangers.

2. Uber invested $1.25 billion in Rivian to build 50,000 robotaxis.

3. Jeff Bezos is raising $100 billion to buy manufacturers and automate them with AI.

4. The FAA greenlit electric air taxis across 26 states.

5. Meta spent $83.6 billion building a world nobody wanted to live in.

Senator Bernie Sanders interviewed an AI chatbot about AI dangers.

What’s happening: Bernie Sanders posted a nine-minute video in which he questioned Anthropic’s Claude about data collection and privacy. It reached 4.4 million views. Sanders opened by introducing himself to the model - a move that primed its tone - then asked a series of leading questions. Claude accepted each premise and shaped its answers to fit. When it offered nuance, Sanders pushed back; the model conceded. The stated goal was exposure. What the video demonstrated instead was AI sycophancy: a system telling its user what he wanted to hear. The noted irony: the model Sanders used to make his case is built by a company that has publicly committed to running no targeted advertising on its products.

TLDR:

• Sanders framed every question as a premise. Claude is designed to be agreeable. The combination produced not a whistleblower but a mirror.

• The video was widely criticised for conflating AI output with evidence. Several outlets noted he mistakenly called Claude an AI “agent” rather than a language model.

• The political intent is real regardless. Sanders has proposed a moratorium on new data centres and is building a legislative posture on AI privacy ahead of the next regulatory cycle.

• The more consequential development is not the video itself. It is that AI model outputs are now being treated as testimony in public political discourse.

• Every company building AI products with any government adjacency needs to understand that the governance conversation is no longer confined to people who understand how the technology works.

Why it matters: The irony cuts both ways. Sanders used a sycophantic model to argue that AI is dangerous, thereby demonstrating how AI can be misused. But beneath the media moment lies a genuine regulatory signal: Washington is now treating AI outputs as authoritative, and the policy frame built around that assumption will outlast the memes. The contract and governance terms for every enterprise AI deployment are being shaped in rooms where the technical reality is an optional context.

Uber invested $1.25 billion in Rivian to build 50,000 robotaxis.

What’s happening: Rivian and Uber announced a partnership to deploy up to 50,000 autonomous R2 robotaxis exclusively on Uber’s platform, beginning with 10,000 vehicles in San Francisco and Miami in 2028, and scaling to 25 cities across the US, Canada, and Europe by 2031. Uber’s initial investment is $300 million, with up to $1.25 billion committed through 2031, subject to autonomous milestones. Rivian has not yet begun R2 production; manufacturing is expected to start by June, from a Georgia factory that is still under construction. The Rivian Autonomy Platform runs on two in-house RAP1 chips,s delivering 1,600 TOPS of AI computing and is fed by data from Rivian's growing consumer vehicle fleet.

TLDR:

• Uber has spent years insisting it is an asset-light marketplace that does not own cars. This deal ends that position. Uber will now bear asset depreciation and operational risks for a fleet of highly specialised vehicles in specific cities.

• The thesis Uber is backing: vertical integration as a moat. Rivian designs the vehicle, the compute platform, and the autonomy stack together. Khosrowshahi explicitly cited this as the reason for the conviction.

• Uber’s AV partner roster now includes Waymo, Zoox, Lucid, Waabi, and Rivian. The strategy is platform-based, not single-stack: position as the operating layer for autonomous mobility rather than bet on a single winner.

• The milestones attached to the remaining $950 million are unspecified. The ambition and the execution risk are both significant.

• Scaringe told SXSW the rate of progress in autonomy over the next five years will make the previous five look static. The partnership is a bet that he is right.

Why it matters: Whoever controls the full stack - vehicle, compute, software, data - controls the dependency on everything else that runs on it. That logic runs through the NVIDIA GTC keynote, the Bezos Prometheus fund, and this deal simultaneously. For luxury, hospitality, and premium mobility operators thinking about how their customers move in 2030, the infrastructure decisions are being made now. The window to shape the premium tier of autonomous transport is not wide.

Jeff Bezos is raising $100 billion to buy manufacturers and automate them with AI.

What’s happening: Jeff Bezos has been travelling between Riyadh and Singapore, pitching sovereign wealth funds on a $100 billion fund to acquire companies across chipmaking, aerospace, and defence, then overhaul them using AI. The fund is the acquisition engine for Project Prometheus, a stealth AI startup Bezos has been building for the past year, co-led with physicist and former Google Verily co-founder Vik Bajaj. The team has recruited from OpenAI, DeepMind, and Meta. Blue Origin CEO David Limp recently joined the board. Prometheus is building digital twin technology: AI systems that simulate entire factories, stress-test materials, and design products in a virtual environment before physical production begins. The fund launched with $6.2 billion.

TLDR:

• The thesis stated directly that the biggest AI value-creation opportunity is not in models or chatbots. It is in applying physical AI to the $16 trillion global manufacturing sector, which has not been fundamentally restructured since the last industrial revolution.

• Bezos is not licensing software and waiting for adoption. He is acquiring the production chain and deploying Prometheus technology inside it. Amazon did not sell inventory management to bookstores. It became the bookstore.

• The target sectors - chipmaking, defence, aerospace - are simultaneously the most strategically sensitive and the most operationally under-automated industries in the world.

• The scale matches SoftBank’s Vision Fund, the most consequential technology investment vehicle in history

• —the difference: SoftBank-backed software companies. Prometheus is buying the physical substrate.

• JPMorgan and Abu Dhabi are among those reported to be in conversation. Sovereign capital is taking the thesis seriously.

Why it matters: The Prometheus fund makes legible what a series of signals this month have been building toward: the contest for AI value is moving from the model layer to the infrastructure layer, and from software to atoms. NVIDIA’s GTC keynote framed the same shift, and so did Mind Robotics. The organisations that understand what it means to operate within someone else’s physical AI infrastructure and where the leverage points lie within it are the ones positioned for the next decade.

The FAA greenlit electric air taxis across 26 states.

What’s happening: The US Department of Transportation and FAA selected eight projects for the eVTOL Integration Pilot Program, authorising electric aircraft that have not yet received full FAA type certification to operate in commercial airspace across 26 states, with flights beginning this summer. The programme was created under a Trump executive order on aviation innovation and received more than 30 proposals. Aircraft involved include Archer’s Midnight, Joby’s S4, Beta’s Alia, Wisk’s Generation 6, Electra’s EL9, and Elroy Air’s Chaparral - spanning cargo, passenger, and autonomous operations. Archer’s partners in Texas, Florida, and New York were selected; the Port Authority of New York and New Jersey will run passenger concepts at the Manhattan heliport.

TLDR:

• Pre-certified aircraft in Class B and C commercial airspace, under negotiated operating agreements, generating the regulatory data needed for permanent rules. This is a new legal category in US aviation with no direct precedent.

• Cargo before passengers. The autonomous freight operations - Reliable Robotics in Albuquerque, Elroy Air in Louisiana, Beta’s medical supply runs - face simpler liability timelines and are the realistic Q4 2026 story.

• Paying passengers in urban US airspace remain 2027 at the earliest. The summer 2026 start date is accurate for cargo. For air taxis, it is a target.

• Each landing pad requires 1 to 2 megawatts of charging capacity. Vertiports need to be built. Digital airspace management systems need to be deployed. The infrastructure question is open.

• China certified eHang for fully autonomous commercial passenger flights in 2023. The eIPP is explicitly a catch-up programme, framed as such in DOT communications.

Why it matters: The comparison to draw is Waymo’s early robotaxi permits: years of demonstration followed by a moment when the proof-of-concept phase quietly ended, and the data-gathering phase that enables permanent regulation began. That moment has arrived for eVTOL. For luxury hospitality, premium travel, and urban mobility operators, the question of what the air taxi tier looks like, and who shapes the experience layer above the aircraft, is now a near-term planning question rather than a futures exercise.

Meta spent $83.6 billion building a world nobody wanted to live in.

What’s happening: Meta announced Horizon Worlds will be removed from Quest headsets by 15 June and will survive only as a mobile app. Within 48 hours, CTO Andrew Bosworth reversed the decision on Instagram Stories, citing user feedback. The reversal changed nothing of substance. Reality Labs has accumulated $83.6 billion in cumulative operating losses since 2020. In Q4 2025, the division posted a $6.02 billion operating loss on revenue that accounted for roughly 1% of Meta’s total. Quest headset sales fell 16% year-over-year in 2025. The Horizon Worlds mobile app has 45 million downloads and $1.1 million in lifetime consumer spending. Meanwhile, Ray-Ban Meta AI glasses sold more than 7 million units in 2025. EssilorLuxottica reported that the category now drives more than a third of its quarterly revenue growth. Meta has paused the international rollout due to supply constraints and is in discussions to increase annual production capacity to up to 30 million units by the end of 2026.

TLDR:

• The 48-hour reversal is the detail that tells the story: the platform is too symbolically loaded to close, but no new development is planned. It continues as a monument, not a product.

• The metaverse required users to step into a new world. The Ray-Ban glasses sit on your face in the existing ones. That is not a technology distinction. It is a behaviour distinction, and it explains everything.

• EssilorLuxottica licenses to Oliver Peoples, Persol, and virtually every major luxury fashion house. It is now generating meaningful hardware revenue from AI glasses. That changes the category map.

• Meta, Samsung, and Google all reached the same form-factor conclusion in the same quarter: wearable, lightweight, and ambient. Three of the world’s largest technology companies converging on a single hardware thesis in a single season is the signal, not the noise.

• Reality Labs also covers AR and some AI research. The $83.6 billion figure is not purely metaverse spend. But Horizon Worlds is, and the mobile app has earned $1.1 million against it.

Why it matters: The eyewear angle is where the strategic implications are concentrated. EssilorLuxottica is the infrastructure of the premium eyewear category globally; it manufactures or licenses for the brands your customers already wear. That company is now a growth story in the technology hardware sector. For luxury houses with eyewear licensing agreements, the competitive question has shifted. The conversation about what an eyewear partnership is worth and what it means to be the frame on which the AI interface sits looks different this week than it did last.

Share Codes of Culture by Future+

When I curate the news every week, I always look for patterns and the same red threads across industries. To find the signals in the noise. In the future, on Wednesdays, we will share macro stories on geopolitics, AI, robotics, space, and capital markets. On Fridays, we will focus on soft power industries, cultural trends, experiential, luxury, fashion, and, always, technology.

In this issue, Zalando is showing public markets what it looks like when AI moves from experiment to margin engine. At the same time, Quince’s valuation reflects investor conviction that the operating layer in retail now commands the premium. John Lewis, Picsart, and Sephora each make the same broader point in different ways: the next advantage lies in infrastructure, interface, and context, not only in brand.

We also have some news to share as we evolve Future+ and the Codes of Culture platform. Stay tuned for exciting announcements about our podcast (currently in development) and our 4th annual Codes of Culture summit coming to London this fall.

Remember to subscribe for full access to our news, insights reports, and global events. We are currently working on being at F1 in Miami, the Milken Global Conference in LA, and Cannes Lions. Reply to this email if you will be there too and want to stay in the loop for what we get up to.

📖In this issue:

1. Zalando turned AI into a profit line.

2. Quince raised at a $10 billion valuation.

3. John Lewis is repositioning inside AI platforms and TikTok Shop.

4. Picsart launched an agent marketplace.

5. Sephora became F1 Academy’s official beauty partner.

Zalando turned AI into a profit line.

What’s happening: Zalando’s results announcement sent shares up sharply in a single session, with AI cited explicitly as the driver across marketing, logistics, and personalisation. The company scaled AI-generated content from near zero to 90% of total marketing output in a single year, at the same cost, with 70% more volume. Its size-and-fit AI reduced returns. Its SCAYLE software unit signed Levi’s to run its global e-commerce. And Zalando is now positioning its products to be discoverable and purchasable directly through Google Gemini, placing itself between fashion inventory and AI-native search.

TLDR:

• AI-generated content went from near zero to 90% of total marketing output in a year, at comparable cost. The efficiency shift is structural, not incremental.

• Size-and-fit AI reduced size-related returns. Returns are one of fashion e-commerce’s highest operational costs. This is a direct margin story.

• Levi’s signs with SCAYLE to run its worldwide e-commerce. Zalando is building a B2B operating system for fashion retail, not only a consumer platform.

• Zalando products will be discoverable and purchasable through Gemini. The platform is positioned between fashion inventory and AI-native search.

• The scale at which AI is compounding inside Zalando is now large enough to move public markets.

Why it matters: Zalando’s results are the clearest public-market proof yet that AI in fashion commerce is a profit engine, not a cost centre. The more consequential question is structural: as Zalando positions itself as the operating system for European fashion e-commerce, the brands building on that infrastructure are placing a dependency. Understanding where the leverage lies and where the data accumulates is now a strategic question for every brand with exposure to Zalando.

Quince raised at a $10 billion valuation.

What’s happening: Quince closed a $500 million Series E led by ICONIQ, with Wellington Management, DST Global, Ballie Gifford, and others participating, more than doubling its valuation from the prior round less than a year earlier. Quince’s manufacturer-to-consumer model removes traditional retail intermediaries by partnering directly with specialist manufacturers and using AI-driven demand forecasting to align supply with customer demand before production begins. The company has surpassed $1 billion in revenue and has maintained triple-digit growth since launching from beta in 2020.

TLDR:

• The valuation more than doubled from the prior round in under a year. Capital is pricing the operating system, not the cashmere sweater.

• The manufacturer-to-consumer model removes every layer of traditional retail markup. Quince aligns supply with demand at the production stage, not the markdown stage.

• ICONIQ, Wellington, DST Global, and Ballie Gifford in the round. Long-horizon, multi-asset-class conviction.

• Design litigation from several legacy brands is live. The structural advantage is real; the IP questions are unresolved.

• Revenue has crossed $1 billion. Quince is a category-defining platform, not a DTC experiment.

Why it matters: The Quince round is worth reading as a signal of where investors now believe durable margins live in fashion retail. Not in brand premium alone. In the system. The organisations that control the operating layer, rather than only the product, are where value is accumulating. That thesis runs through every story in this issue.

John Lewis is repositioning inside AI platforms and TikTok Shop.

What’s happening: John Lewis announced a significant investment in AI-powered shopping as part of its multi-year transformation programme, with the stated ambition of being among the first UK retailers to fully integrate the technology. The plan places John Lewis products inside AI discovery interfaces, including ChatGPT and Google Gemini, with checkout to follow. On the same day, the retailer launched a 90-day TikTok Shop pilot focused on beauty and gifting. It has extended its partnership with commercetools, an AI-first digital commerce platform, to build the infrastructure required for AI-native checkout. On-demand delivery through Uber Eats is expanding to additional UK cities.

TLDR:

• John Lewis products inside ChatGPT and Gemini, with checkout capability to follow. Discovery is migrating from the retailer’s owned environment to the AI interface.

• A 90-day TikTok Shop pilot, beauty and gifting focus, instant purchase in-platform. A channel test, not a brand moment.

• The multi-year transformation programme is the structural context. The TikTok and AI investments are the declared direction.

• Commercetools extended partnership provides the technical infrastructure for AI-native commerce. The plumbing is being built now, not after launch.

• On-demand delivery via Uber Eats is expanding. Immediacy is the third axis of the omnichannel repositioning.

Why it matters: John Lewis carries institutional weight precisely because it is not a fast mover. When a 162-year-old retailer declares that the AI interface is a primary discovery channel, the direction is set. The question for retail and brand operators with UK consumer exposure is not whether product discovery will migrate to AI platforms. It is how quickly your inventory is structured to be discoverable, recommended, and purchasable there. Data architecture is the new front door.

Picsart launched an agent marketplace.

What’s happening: Picsart launched an AI agent marketplace allowing creators to assign specialised assistants to production tasks, including social content resizing, visual remixing, and Shopify product photo editing. Agents operate asynchronously, building plans from data before executing on creator approval, with autonomy levels that creators can calibrate. The launch includes four agents, with new ones added weekly. The Flair agent integrates directly with Shopify, analyses store data, and will eventually run A/B tests autonomously. Agents are accessible via WhatsApp and Telegram, as well as on the platform itself, to a user base of over 130 million people.

TLDR:

• Agents that plan, propose, and execute with creator approval—a workflow partner operating between creative briefs, not a feature inside an existing tool.

• Flair integrates with Shopify and reads store data to surface commercial recommendations. The line between a creative tool and a commerce assistant is blurring.

• Autonomy levels allow creators to calibrate how much the agent acts before human sign-off. The consent architecture is part of the product.

• WhatsApp and Telegram integration means the agent lives in the creator’s existing communication stack. Adoption friction is minimal by design.

• Agentic creative workflow is arriving at consumer scale, not just at enterprise scale.

Why it matters: For creative directors, brand operators, and luxury comms teams tracking this, the production layer of creative work is being automated at the task level. What remains human is the brief, the judgment, and the direction. The workflow has already changed.

Sephora became F1 Academy’s official beauty partner.

What’s happening: Sephora has been named the official beauty retail partner of F1 Academy, the female-focused Formula One championship. The partnership spans the full 2026 racing season, with Sephora operating glam bars in the Paddock Club at selected Grand Prix events. New F1 Academy driver Natalia Granada will compete in a Prema car carrying Sephora livery, and Sephora will sponsor a new end-of-year drivers’ celebration. The LVMH-owned retailer follows Charlotte Tilbury and Wella into F1 Academy partnerships, while LVMH itself is two years into a long-term deal with the main Formula 1 championship.

TLDR:

• Glam bars in the Paddock Club across the 2026 season. Sephora is building a physical brand experience inside one of the world’s most globally distributed live event formats.

• Natalia Granada races in Sephora livery. The brand is embedded at the competitive level, not at the hospitality level.

• LVMH holds a long-term main F1 partnership alongside the Sephora F1 Academy deal. The motorsport positioning is a group strategy.

• Charlotte Tilbury, Wella, Sephora. F1 Academy is becoming a meaningful axis for the positioning of beauty brands around women’s sport.

• The partnership frames beauty alongside confidence, ambition, and global visibility, deliberately repositioning the category beyond aesthetics.

Why it matters: Women’s sport is delivering the cultural alignment that traditional luxury advertising has struggled to manufacture. The audience is global, the earned media is real, and the values association resonates with the next generation of luxury consumers. The question is not whether beauty belongs in sport. It is the brands that arrive with enough credibility to own the positioning before the category becomes crowded.

I’ve been thinking about the word declared this week. Jensen Huang didn’t announce a product at GTC. He declared something. An age. A new unit of industrial organisation. The kind of statement that tends to sound grandiose in the moment and obvious in retrospect. I’ve been paying attention to that register lately, because I think we’re in a period where the declarations are arriving faster than the frameworks to receive them.

Amy Webb staged a funeral at SXSW. L Catterton moved $313 million into Japan. A startup backed by Antoine Arnault is solving fashion’s oldest problem with physics.

None of these is a trend story. Each one is a signal that the systems underneath the systems are being renegotiated. That’s the thread this week.

Remember to subscribe for full access to our news, insights reports, and global events. We are currently working on being at F1 in Miami, the Milken Global Conference in LA, and Cannes Lions. Reply to this email if you will be there too and want to stay in the loop for what we get up to.

📖In this issue:

1. Jensen Huang declared the age of the AI factory. NVIDIA is no longer a chip company.

2. Humanoid robots are on the production line. The physical AI inflexion point has arrived.

3. Amy Webb staged a funeral for the annual trend report. The intelligence format itself is being redesigned.

4. L Catterton is deploying $313 million into Japan. The luxury capital map is being redrawn.

5. NVIDIA and Antoine Arnault are backing virtual try-on. Fashion’s fit problem finally has serious investors.

Jensen Huang declared the age of the AI factory. NVIDIA is no longer a chip company.

What’s happening: At GTC 2026 in San Jose on 16 March, NVIDIA CEO Jensen Huang delivered a two-hour keynote to more than 30,000 developers at the SAP Centre, reframing the company’s identity in full. The strategic claim is now full-stack AI infrastructure: inference, agentic systems, AI factories, physical AI, and robotics. Huang announced that cumulative orders for the Blackwell and Vera Rubin chip architectures are projected to reach $1 trillion through 2027, doubling the $500 billion estimate issued six months prior. The keynote’s five themes were inference, the AI factory, the NemoClaw agentic framework, physical AI, and robotics. Huang closed by observing that he could not think of a single company building robots that was not working with NVIDIA.

TLDR:

• $1 trillion in cumulative orders through 2027, doubled from prior estimates. Demand for AI compute has not plateaued; it has steepened.

• The AI factory is the new unit of industrial investment: purpose-built compute environments for continuous AI production. NVIDIA is positioning itself as its own operating system.

• NemoClaw: NVIDIA’s enterprise-secure agentic AI framework for long-running autonomous agents. The shift from prompts to persistent agents is now an infrastructure-level event.

• Physical AI and robotics: Huang noted that every major robotics company is building on NVIDIA. The Omniverse simulation-to-deployment pipeline is becoming the industry standard.

• The Groq 3 LPU, from NVIDIA’s $20B Groq acquisition, ships Q3 2026 as a dedicated inference accelerator alongside Vera Rubin. NVIDIA is closing the inference cost gap against in-house hyperscaler chips.

Why it matters: The GTC keynote is not a product announcement. It is a positioning statement about where industrial value is accumulating in this decade. For the founders, operators, and capital allocators in our network, the signal is that NVIDIA’s moat is now architectural: it spans compute, simulation, and agentic deployment. The organisations building on that stack are placing a structural dependency they may not fully see yet. Understanding what it means to operate inside the NVIDIA infrastructure layer and where the leverage points sit is becoming a strategic question, not just a technical one.

Humanoid robots are on the production line. The physical AI inflexion point has arrived.

What’s happening: Schaeffler, the German precision engineering group, has deployed a humanoid robot called Digit at its South Carolina plant to handle repetitive material-handling work previously performed by humans, one of the first documented deployments of a humanoid in a live, mainstream industrial facility. In parallel, Mind Robotics, the industrial robotics company spun out of Rivian by founder and CEO RJ Scaringe in November 2025, announced a $500 million Series A on 11 March, co-led by Accel and Andreessen Horowitz, valuing the company at $2 billion and bringing total funding to $615 million. The company is building a full-stack platform of foundation models, purpose-built robots, and deployment infrastructure, using Rivian’s production data as a training flywheel, with large-scale deployment inside Rivian’s own factories targeted by the end of 2026.

TLDR:

• Schaeffler’s Digit deployment is not a controlled lab test. It is a live production environment. The proof-of-concept phase for humanoid robots in manufacturing is over.

• Mind Robotics’ $500M Series A is among the largest in industrial robotics history. The $2B valuation comes just months after a $115M seed round. This is structural conviction, not speculative capital.

• The thesis is that existing industrial robots handle repetitive, pre-programmed tasks. Mind Robotics is building for dexterous, adaptive, reasoning-intensive work; the majority of factory value-add that automation has never reached.

• Rivian’s production data, used as a training flywheel, is a competitive moat that very few startups can replicate. Real factory data at scale is the scarcest resource in physical AI.

• NVIDIA’s GTC keynote and Mind Robotics land in the same week. The compute infrastructure and the application layer are scaling in parallel.

Why it matters: Future+ tracks physical AI as one of the forces reshaping the operational economics of industries that touch manufacturing, logistics, and high-touch physical services. Together, the Schaeffler deployment and the Mind Robotics round mark the transition from pilot to production. For the operators and investors in our network-building or backing businesses with physical-process dependencies, the planning horizon for AI-driven operational change has just compressed. The labour-cost calculus and the capital-investment logic for physical automation are being rewritten now, not in five years.

Amy Webb staged a funeral for the annual trend report. The intelligence format itself is being redesigned.

What’s happening: At SXSW 2026, Amy Webb, CEO of the Future Today Strategy Group, opened her session by staging a mock funeral for the trends report format her firm helped define. Guests received tissues at the door; the ballroom was set with sombre music and a slideshow. The argument was blunt: an annual PDF captures a snapshot of a moment in a landscape now shifting too fast to summarise once a year. The new framework replaces discrete trend lists with what Webb calls convergences: tracking what happens when AI, robotics, biotech, energy infrastructure, and geopolitical competition collide simultaneously. Her framing borrowed from meteorology: if trends are individual weather data points, convergences are the storm systems that form when those forces combine. FTSG’s clients include Mastercard, Ford, and NASA; the session played to roughly 1,500 people.

TLDR:

• Webb is not updating the format. She is retiring it. The person most responsible for institutionalising the annual tech trend report has concluded it is structurally inadequate for the current moment.

• The convergence argument: trends observed in isolation mislead. The value is in tracking where AI, biology, robotics, energy, and geopolitics intersect and compound. A yearly snapshot cannot track a live system.

• Webb introduced the concept of the agentic economy: AI systems that plan and act autonomously could shift the internet from search and browsing toward delegation, and the companies running those agents become the new gatekeepers.

• Her closing line onstage: the next internet is being built not for people, but for machines. That is a planning problem for every organisation that assumes the consumer is the endpoint.

• The position Webb has just vacated at the institution that produces the authoritative annual report is now open. The demand is shifting toward continuous, contextualised intelligence.

Why it matters: The organisations in our network that still calibrate their strategic environment using annual benchmarks are working with an instrument that Webb has now publicly declared obsolete. The competitive advantage is shifting to operators who maintain continuous analytical fluency: reading forces as they move, not as they appeared twelve months ago. Webb’s provocation is also an opening: the space she is leaving behind is precisely the one Codes of Culture and Future+ are built to occupy.

L Catterton is deploying $313 million into Japan. The luxury capital map is being redrawn.

What’s happening: L Catterton, the private equity firm backed by LVMH, is targeting approximately 50 billion yen ($313 million) for investment in five Japanese businesses over the next three years, focusing on cosmetics, food, pet care, and restaurants. The commitment comes as Japan’s private equity market recorded an 81% jump in total deal value last year, even as deal activity across Asia declined 14%. L Catterton has operated in Japan since 2017, investing in nine companies, including denim brand Kapital and the world’s largest Kobe beef restaurant chain. One recent investment is a stake in premium restaurant operator HUGE, which is targeting a doubling of annual sales and expansion across Hong Kong and Singapore ahead of a 2030 IPO.

TLDR:

• Five businesses, three years, $313M committed. This is a structural deployment, not opportunistic deal flow: L Catterton is building a Japan portfolio with the full LVMH network behind it.

• Japan’s PE deal value rose 81% last year while Asia-wide activity fell 14%. The divergence is not coincidental: Japan is attracting capital precisely because the rest of the region is contracting.

• L Catterton’s focus: founder-led and family-run businesses facing succession challenges, and younger companies seeking scale support. Traditional financial investors structurally underserve these.

• The HUGE investment signals the thesis clearly: back premium consumer brands with genuine domestic depth, then use the LVMH network to take them into Southeast Asia and beyond.

• The geography of luxury capital is now India, the Gulf, Japan, and Southeast Asia. Europe and the US are structurally losing ground.

Why it matters: Future+ tracks the rebalancing of luxury capital as a core intelligence line, and the L Catterton Japan deployment is one of the clearest expressions of a pattern we have been watching: premium capital is following culturally embedded demand rather than aspirational Western proxies. Japan’s combination of consumer depth, a favourable currency environment, and an active succession pipeline in family-run businesses is producing a specific window. For the luxury founders and brand operators in our network with Japan presence or ambitions, the capital is moving toward markets you may already be in.

NVIDIA and Antoine Arnault are backing virtual try-on. Fashion’s fit problem finally has serious investors.

What’s happening: At GTC 2026 on 16 March, Nvidia announced a partnership with AI startup Catches to launch RealFit, a virtual try-on platform for fashion e-commerce. Catches, Nvidia’s official independent software vendor for the fashion industry, has secured $10 million in investment from investors including LVMH’s Antoine Arnault, model and entrepreneur Natalia Vodianova, former Tommy Hilfiger CEO Gary Sheinbaum, and former BCG luxury head Sarah Willersdorf. RealFit’s differentiating claim is physics: rather than merging two images, the system models how a garment actually drapes, moves, and fits on a specific body, accounting for size, shape, cut, and texture. The technology is already live on Amiri’s website, with further luxury and mass-market brands due to be announced.

TLDR:

• Physics simulation, not image overlay. RealFit models how a garment behaves on a body: drape, texture, movement, and fit imperfections. That is a material shift in fidelity, not an iteration on existing technology.

• Antoine Arnault is an investor, not a brand partner. Alongside Willersdorf (BCG luxury) and Sheinbaum (Tommy Hilfiger), the cap table signals strategic conviction about where luxury e-commerce is heading.

• Already live on Amiri. The technology is in production, not in pilot: more luxury and mass-market brands to follow.

• The return rate problem is the highest operational cost in luxury e-commerce. A credible physics-based fit solution restructures unit economics across the industry, and, as Catches notes, could grow the total addressable market, not just redistribute it.

• NVIDIA’s involvement means the compute infrastructure for real-time physics simulation is now commercially accessible. The technology constraint is no longer the binding one.

Why it matters: For luxury houses, multi-brand platforms, and e-commerce operators in our network, RealFit is the first virtual try-on product to combine technical credibility with luxury-insider backing. The question is no longer whether physics-based fit simulation works. It is how quickly it becomes the expected baseline and who controls the body data it generates at scale. As Vodianova framed it: Catches does not guess how a garment drapes: it knows. That distinction, applied across millions of fit interactions, will be one of the more significant proprietary data assets in luxury retail over the next decade.

Fashion month wrapped this week, and something about it felt different. Of course, Mathieu Blazy’s Chanel mania is everywhere. Across all the collections, though, there was a groundedness I haven’t felt in a while- real clothes, for real women, with real lives. The fantasy is still there, but it was wearing a coat you could actually put on.

Piccioli’s ClairObscur for Balenciaga was the moment that stayed with me longest. A handwritten poem was delivered to every guest before the first look appeared. That kind of gesture, in a season full of noise, says everything about where Piccioli believes luxury is going. His argument, that the tactile, the human, the irreducibly physical is exactly where luxury value lives when AI can generate everything else, landed differently this season than it might have a year ago.

The wearable stories this week also excited me for related reasons. The opportunity for fashion, luxury, and beauty to shape what these technologies feel like, not just what they do, is arriving faster than most of the industry has noticed. And the beauty M&A and AI adoption data, sitting alongside all of that, only reinforced what I keep coming back to: the map of where taste, capital, and growth are being set is being redrawn. This issue is my attempt to make sense of a very full week.

Remember to subscribe for full access to our news, insights reports, and global events. We are currently working on being at F1 in Miami, the Milken Global Conference in LA, and Cannes Lions. Reply to this email if you will be there too and want to stay in the loop for what we get up to.

📖In this issue:

1. Balenciaga is keeping a human-first approach.

2. Estée Lauder acquires Forest Essentials. Indian luxury beauty has become a strategic priority.

3. WHOOP made Samuel Ross its Global Creative Director. Health tech is becoming a design problem.

4. Andreesen Horowitz publishes its 6th edition of Top 100 Gen AI Consumer Apps.

5. A skin patch that reads your sweat, and what it tells us about the future of luxury wellness.

Balenciaga is keeping a human-first approach.

What’s happening: Pierpaolo Piccioli presented ClairObscur, his first co-ed collection for Balenciaga, on 8 March in Paris. The show opened with a handwritten poem from Piccioli delivered to every guest before the first look appeared. Filmmaker Sam Levinson built a cinematic fresco of video installations around a multi-generational cast. The collection draws from the High Renaissance technique of chiaroscuro, translating light and shadow into silhouette, cut, colour, and fabric sheen. It is Piccioli’s third outing at Balenciaga and his second runway show, following Summer 26’s Heartbeat and pre-fall’s Body and Being. Each has centred the same question: what does the person wearing this need? The George, Fan, and HG Avenue bags extend the collection’s architectural logic into accessories. The show is Balenciaga’s explicit response to AI acceleration: when technology can simulate emotion and generate images, the tactile reality of garment, body, and maker becomes the territory that cannot be replicated.

TLDR:

• ClairObscur: chiaroscuro as a design system. Light and shadow are used to shape silhouettes and give garments presence, not as surface decoration.

• The body is the internal structure of every garment. This represents Cristóbal Balenciaga’s foundational methodology, reinterpreted as a contemporary stance.

• Each collection in Piccioli’s Balenciaga journey builds upon the last: Heartbeat, Body and Being, ClairObscur. He is crafting a narrative, not resetting each season.

• Couture craftsmanship is integrated into ready-to-wear, with athletic elements alongside formal construction. Wearability is not a compromise; it is the aim.

• In a world reshaped by AI, the real heartbeat, the tactile exchange, the glance between people, these remain territories that algorithms cannot reach.

Why it matters: For Future+, this is the most strategically significant show of the Paris season, and not primarily for fashion reasons. Piccioli is making a public argument about where luxury value lives when AI can simulate creativity at scale. His answer, the body, the maker, the lived experience of a garment, is not nostalgia. It is a commercial and cultural thesis. The luxury founders, brand operators, and creative directors in our network are navigating the same question right now. The Balenciaga show is the clearest articulation from inside a major house of where the premium is moving: toward the irreducibly human.

Estée Lauder acquires Forest Essentials. Indian luxury beauty has become a strategic priority.

What’s happening: On 5 March, Estée Lauder Companies announced it will acquire the remaining 51% of Forest Essentials, the Indian luxury Ayurveda brand founded by Mira Kulkarni in 2000. Estée Lauder first invested in 2008 and raised its stake to 49% in 2020. The transaction terms were not disclosed; closing is expected in the second half of 2026. Kulkarni and her son Samrath Bedi will continue to lead the brand from New Delhi. Forest Essentials is India’s top-ranked prestige skincare brand, with nearly 200 freestanding stores. The acquisition makes India Estée Lauder’s largest emerging market. BoF called it the conglomerate’s first major deal under CEO Stéphane de La Faverie.

TLDR:

• An 18-year relationship completed via full acquisition. Estée Lauder used the same phased approach it took with Deciem.

• Forest Essentials stays Indian: New Delhi HQ, founder-led, name and product strategy unchanged. The deal is for scale, not absorption.

• India becomes Estée Lauder’s largest emerging market. After years of China’s dependency, the geographic rebalancing is now explicit.

• Ayurvedic beauty has not translated globally at scale. The complexity is real. Challengers including Kama Ayurveda (backed by Puig) are already in the race.

• The broader signal: Western beauty conglomerates are buying into culturally rooted, regionally specific brands rather than trying to export a Western template.

Why it matters: This story operates on two levels; the first is beauty M&A. The second is the rebalancing of where luxury taste and growth are being set. Estée Lauder is making a public bet that Indian luxury beauty has global resonance — not as an export, but on its own terms. The same logic applies to the Gulf art market, to Indian tech founders raising in Europe, and to the Middle East collector class. The gravitational centre of prestige is shifting. The brands and operators that understand this earliest will hold better positions.

WHOOP made Samuel Ross its Global Creative Director. Health tech is becoming a design problem.

What’s happening: In January, WHOOP announced a multi-year creative partnership with Samuel Ross MBE, naming him Global Creative Director for a new initiative titled Project Terrain. SR_A, Ross’s design studio, joins as an investor alongside Cristiano Ronaldo and Niall Horan. Under the collaboration, Ross will lead a capsule collection of limited-edition WHOOP bands and technical garments within the WHOOP Body collection, dropping in batches from 2026 to 2028. Ross previously founded A-Cold-Wall and has worked with Nike, LVMH via Hublot, Acqua di Parma, Oakley, and Apple Group as Principal Design Consultant at Beats. WHOOP ships to 56 markets and has raised over $400M since its founding in 2012.

TLDR:

• Project Terrain: apparel described as a wearable toolkit for the body, built around zone-based movement, recovery, and demanding environments for nomads and city dwellers.

• SR_A joins as an investor, not just a collaborator. Skin in the game on both sides.

• Ross’s track record: LVMH prize, Nike, Hublot, Beats. He is not a brand ambassador. He is a product designer who also shapes culture.

• WHOOP’s stated ambition: wearable technology that is invisible or cool. Project Terrain is the first serious attempt to make it both.

• The WHOOP Body collection already enables wearing the sensor beyond the wrist. Project Terrain builds the aesthetic language around that.

Why it matters: The collision of health tech and fashion has largely resulted in branded merchandise. Project Terrain feels different because Ross is a materials and systems designer, not a stylist. For luxury brands watching the wearable space: the design moment is arriving. The question is no longer whether health data will become part of the premium lifestyle category; it is who shapes its aesthetic language when it does. Samsung did it from the hardware side. WHOOP and Samuel Ross are doing it from the culture side. Both moves are happening in the same week.

Andreessen Horowitz publishes its 6th edition of Top 100 Gen AI Consumer Apps.

What’s happening: Andreessen Horowitz published the sixth edition of its Top 100 Gen AI Consumer Apps ranking, drawing on Similarweb and Sensor Tower data through January 2026. ChatGPT reaches 900M weekly active users, 2.7x Gemini on web traffic. Claude paid subscribers grew 200%+ year-on-year; Gemini grew 258%. About 20% of weekly ChatGPT users also used Gemini that same week. Singapore, UAE, Hong Kong, and South Korea lead per-capita AI adoption. The US ranks 20th. CapCut, Canva, Notion, and Grammarly are included in this edition as AI-core platforms.

TLDR:

• ChatGPT has 900M weekly active users, but Claude and Gemini are growing fast enough that no single default is locked in.

• Singapore, UAE, Hong Kong, and South Korea lead per-capita adoption. The US ranks 20th.

• 20% of weekly ChatGPT users also use Gemini in the same week. Multi-tenancy is becoming the norm.

• The line between AI-native and AI-enabled has dissolved. CapCut, Canva, and Notion are now AI companies.

• The window to shape AI habits in high-adoption markets is open — but not indefinitely.

Why it matters: Future+ operates across Europe, the Middle East, India, and the US. The regions leading per-capita AI adoption in this report are precisely where our network is most active. The US-centric AI narrative obscures a more important structural reality: the next wave of AI-native behaviour is being set in markets that already operate outside Western defaults. The distribution story and the culture story are the same.

A skin patch that reads your sweat — and what it tells us about the future of luxury wellness.

What’s happening: Seveno Capital backed PointFit, a Hong Kong startup incubated at HKUST, at a US$10M valuation. PointFit makes a skin patch for non-invasive real-time biomarker monitoring through sweat, starting with continuous lactate tracking for endurance athletes. It is Seveno’s first Hong Kong transaction, led by incoming Partner Jean-Baptiste Roy. PointFit received a CES 2026 Innovation Award in Digital Health and has completed demos with global sports federations and elite teams. The global wearable market is projected to reach a TAM of US$200B by 2030.

TLDR:

• Continuous lactate monitoring moves out of elite labs and into an accessible wearable format for the first time.

• The category shift: from measuring proxies (steps, heart rate) to measuring biology directly. That is a fundamentally different value proposition.

• Asian capital is consistently setting the pace in performance health. PointFit, WHOOP x Samuel Ross, and Samsung glasses all land in the same week.

• For luxury wellness, longevity, and performance lifestyle brands: the infrastructure for the next generation of premium health experiences is being built now.

• The regions investing here are the same as those with the highest per-capita AI adoption. These are compounding trends.

Why it matters: Devices that measure proxies are being replaced by tools that measure biology. For luxury and wellness brands in our network, the question is not whether this lands in your market; it is whether you are early enough to shape the experience layer above it. Asian capital is defining the infrastructure. The narrative and cultural positioning above that layer is still wide open.

This week, three stories broke within hours of each other on Sunday night, and I found myself reading them in sequence, struck by how much they were saying the same thing in different registers. A lawsuit. A billion-dollar seed round with no product. Europe’s largest-ever Series C for a company most people outside the industry have never heard of.

Each one is a different angle on the same underlying question: who controls the infrastructure of AI, and what are they willing to fight for to keep it? The hardware stories that follow ask something adjacent: what does it actually feel like to wear that future on your body? A lot moved this week.

Scroll on for 5 stories in this mid-week issue, which I think deserve the most attention.

Remember to subscribe for full access to our news, insights reports, and global events. We are currently working on being at F1 in Miami, the Milken Global Conference in LA, and Cannes Lions. Reply to this email if you will be there too and want to stay in the loop for what we get up to.

📖In this issue:

1. Anthropic sued the Pentagon. Every AI contract is now in scope.

2. LeCun bets $1B that LLMs are a dead end

3. Europe’s biggest-ever AI Series C — and why it is a compute story.

4. Samsung reveals its new AI smart glasses

5. The AI ring that wants to replace your notebook. Sandbar closes $23M.

Anthropic sued the Pentagon. Every AI contract is now in scope.

What’s happening: Anthropic filed two federal lawsuits against the US DOD on 9 March 2026 after the Pentagon designated the company a supply chain risk, a classification historically reserved for foreign adversaries. The dispute centres on Anthropic’s refusal to permit Claude for mass surveillance of Americans or fully autonomous weapons without human oversight. The DOD sought unrestricted access for all lawful purposes. OpenAI reached a deal with the Pentagon within hours. More than 30 OpenAI and Google DeepMind employees, including DeepMind chief scientist Jeff Dean, filed an amicus brief in Anthropic’s support. Claude briefly surpassed ChatGPT in the US App Store following the designation.

TLDR:

• Anthropic refused the DOD’s request regarding autonomous weapons and domestic surveillance. The Pentagon responded with a supply chain risk designation.

• That label is historically reserved for foreign adversaries. Applying to a US AI company for a product position is unprecedented.

• OpenAI reached a deal with the DOD the same day. 30+ employees from OpenAI and Google DeepMind filed in support of Anthropic.

• The case turns on one question: can product guardrails be treated as a national security threat?

• Every founder or operator with government adjacency needs to be tracking this. The precedent will not stop at Anthropic.

Why it matters: This is a commercial and constitutional-precedent story, not an AI safety story. Anthropic’s position: product limits cannot justify a national security designation. The Pentagon’s counter: the military cannot be subject to contractor-imposed constraints on lawful use. For founders and operators in our network building AI products with any government adjacency, this case will set the frame for every enterprise AI contract negotiation that follows.

LeCun bets $1B that LLMs are a dead end.

What’s happening: Months after leaving Meta, Turing Prize winner Yann LeCun closed a $1.03B seed round for AMI Labs at a $3.5B pre-money valuation. The startup is less than three months old, with no product and no revenue. The thesis is confrontational: LLMs are not the end state, and the real frontier lies in world models, AI systems built to reason about physical reality rather than predict the next word. Bezos Expeditions, Temasek, Nvidia, Eric Schmidt, and others backed the round. The first commercial partner is Nabla, the digital health startup co-founded by AMI Labs CEO Alexandre LeBrun. HQ: Paris.

TLDR:

• One of the largest seed financings ever for a company with no product. The bet is entirely on the thesis.

• World models: AI with memory, spatial reasoning, and planning capability, versus LLMs that pattern-match language.

• Paris HQ is deliberate—European AI positioning as an alternative architecture, not just an alternative geography.

• Bezos Expeditions, Temasek, Nvidia, and Eric Schmidt among backers. Conviction capital, not a speculative swing.

• Downstream implications for luxury, healthcare, and industrial automation are significant if the thesis holds.

Why it matters: If world models mature, AI shifts from generating outputs to genuinely operating in environments, with memory, planning, and physical consequences. The $1B without a product is the tell: this is a paradigm bet. Future+ has been tracking European AI as a long-term structural story, and AMI Labs is the clearest signal yet that Paris intends to be a credible alternative to the Silicon Valley consensus on architecture.

Europe has a new decacorn, and it’s a compute company, not a model company.

What’s happening: Nscale closed the largest Series C in European history: $2B at a $14.6B valuation, co-led by Aker and 8090 Industries with Goldman Sachs, JPMorgan, Dell, Nvidia, Citadel, and Jane Street participating. Former Meta COO Sheryl Sandberg, former Yahoo president Susan Decker, and former UK Deputy Prime Minister Nick Clegg join the board. Nscale’s Stargate Norway JV targets 100,000 Nvidia GPUs by the end of 2026 with OpenAI as anchor customer. Stargate UK adds a second sovereign compute node. CEO Josh Payne has signalled an IPO as early as this year.

TLDR:

• A European decacorn built on physical infrastructure, not a model. The moat is vertical integration across energy, data centres, compute, and orchestration.

• Sandberg, Clegg, and Decker on the board: political fluency, regulatory navigation, and public-market experience ahead of a likely IPO.

• Stargate Norway: 100,000 Nvidia GPUs by year-end, OpenAI as anchor. Sovereign compute is being built now.

• Goldman Sachs, JPMorgan, Citadel, Jane Street in the round. This is financial infrastructure capital, not pure venture.

• Europe’s AI story is increasingly being written in hardware and governance. This raise is one of the clearest expressions of that.

Why it matters: Sovereign compute is the story underneath the European AI story. Nscale is building control over the physical substrate on which everything else runs. Sandberg and Clegg bring the consumer, policy, and regulatory muscle that a company navigating EU AI governance and a public listing will need. For Future+ clients operating across Europe and the Middle East: as compute becomes sovereign, infrastructure relationships are what matter.

Samsung reveals its new AI smart glasses.

What’s happening: At Mobile World Congress in Barcelona, Samsung EVP Jay Kim gave the first substantive public briefing on the company’s AI smart glasses, confirming a 2026 launch. Kim confirmed the device will carry a camera positioned at eye level and be connected to a Galaxy smartphone, which handles all AI processing. The glasses feed what the wearer sees to the phone; the phone processes it and returns information. Kim declined to confirm whether the glasses will include a built-in display, pointing to Samsung’s existing watch and phone lineup for screen needs. Qualcomm CEO Cristiano Amon separately confirmed the 2026 timeline, framing the glasses as the next frontier for agentic AI. Meta’s Ray-Ban glasses currently hold 82% of the global smart glasses market, according to Counterpoint Research.

TLDR:

• Eye-level camera, smartphone tethering, Galaxy AI. The glasses are sensors; the phone is the brain.

• No confirmed built-in display in V1. Kim’s framing: if you need a screen, use your phone or watch.

• Qualcomm confirmed 2026 alongside Samsung. The Qualcomm-Google-Samsung partnership on XR has been running since 2023.

• Meta holds 82% market share. Samsung is entering the category, not yet disrupting it; the first product is described as targeting the industry.

• Agentic use cases are the pitch: glasses that see your environment and act on your behalf, booking rides, surfacing information, without you touching a phone.

Why it matters: The strategic shift here is not the hardware. It is the input model. Glasses that continuously see what you see create a fundamentally different data layer than a phone you occasionally raise. For luxury and creative brands in our network: the person wearing your product will soon be wearing a camera at eye level. The contextual and proximity brand moment that is created is not a future consideration. It is a current design brief.

The AI ring that wants to replace your notebook just raised $23M.

What’s happening: Sandbar, founded by former Meta employees Mina Fahmi and Kirak Hong, closed a $23M Series A led by Adjacent and Kindred Ventures, bringing total funding to $36M. The Stream ring features a proximity-tuned microphone that activates when you hold the touch panel and lift your hand to your face, capturing voice notes, AI assistant queries, and media controls. Pre-orders for the first batch sold out; a second batch followed. Sandbar plans to begin shipping this summer. The founding team previously worked at CTRL-Labs, Magic Leap, Amazon, Fitbit, and Google.

TLDR:

• Stream is a smart ring for note-taking, not health tracking. Microphone off by default, activated by gesture. Proximity-tuned to capture you, not the room.

• First pre-order batch sold out. Some early users are logging over 50 interactions a day for planning, trips, and presentations.

• Shipping this summer. Roadmap includes agentic workflows, so captured notes can trigger actions, not just transcriptions.

• A design-forward wearable aimed at broad adoption, not just tech early adopters.

• The note-taking hardware category is growing: Plaud, Pebble, Taya, and now Sandbar. The form factor race is on.

Why it matters: Sandbar sits at the intersection of two things Future+ tracks closely: ambient wearable AI and the premium hardware design question. The gesture activation — lifting your hand to your face to record — makes private use legible in public. Wearables that capture ambient context are quietly building the data layer for the next generation of personal AI. The ring is the form factor that is actually wearable.

→ Codes of Culture is published by Future+, a global network and strategic advisory firm, founded by Ashumi Sanghvi. To explore the Future+ network and strategic partnerships, click here. To subscribe, access the full archive, or get in touch: codesofculture.futureplus.xyz.

Disclaimer: Information in this newsletter is only for the purpose of sharing knowledge, news and insights.

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After a short hiatus, we are back to sharing the top news and insights shaping luxury, culture and technology with a slightly longer version for today’s newsletter. Back in London after a few weeks on the road — India Impact AI Summit, then the first Founders Forum India, where I hosted a fireside chat with the visionary CEO of Brahma AI. The conversations happening in Mumbai and Delhi were operating on a different frequency: more urgent, more geopolitical, and far less deferential to the Western tech consensus than they were even two years ago. Sovereign AI, cultural infrastructure, the question of who gets to shape the next generation of platforms- these topics came up repeatedly, and seriously.

It felt like the right moment to relaunch this newsletter under its evolved form. Codes of Culture has always been about the systems underneath the surface — the forces shaping luxury, culture, capital, and influence before they become obvious. That brief hasn’t changed; the lens has sharpened.

This issue covers the standoff between Anthropic and the PentagonAI loyalty shift playing out in real time, what fashion’s OpenAI partnership actually signals, Zara’s virtual try-on and the questions it raises, and the quiet acquisition that may say more about the future of computing than anything announced at CES. It’s a week that underscores the shifting drivers of fashion and culture: tech innovation, cultural capital, and the renewed power of storytelling.

Remember to subscribe for full access to our news, insights reports, and global events.

📖 In this week’s issue-

1. The new power struggle: Governments vs AI Companies

2. Claude tops the App Store. The timing is everything.

3. OpenAI and the CFDA’s two-year bet on American fashion

4. Zara’s AI try-on and the return problem it’s actually solving

5. Oura acquires Doublepoint. The body is now the interface.

1. The new power struggle: Governments vs AI Companies

   

   What’s Happening: Anthropic’s $200 million Department of Defence contract collapsed after the company refused to grant the military unrestricted access to its Claude AI model. The Pentagon, under Defence Secretary Pete Hegseth, demanded the right to deploy Claude for “any lawful purpose.” Anthropic drew the line at two specific uses: domestic mass surveillance and fully autonomous weapons. Trump ordered a federal phaseout of Claude. Hegseth declared Anthropic a “supply chain risk” — a designation typically reserved for foreign adversaries like Huawei. Talks have since partially resumed.

   ---

   TLDR:

   • Anthropic refused a Pentagon demand for unrestricted AI access, citing two non-negotiable red lines: no mass domestic surveillance, no fully autonomous weapons

   • The DoD labelled Anthropic a “supply chain risk” and turned to OpenAI, which accepted the deal — Amodei called this “safety theatre” in an internal memo.

   • Trump ordered federal agencies to stop using Claude immediately

   • Anthropic has said it will challenge the supply chain designation in court; negotiations are reportedly ongoing

   • The episode is being read, beyond the contract dispute, as an early test of who actually governs powerful AI systems

   ---

   Why It Matters: This is not primarily a story about a contract. It is about who holds authority over technology within classified military networks that could soon guide autonomous systems in conflict.

   Amodei’s red lines — no mass surveillance of Americans, no fully autonomous weapons — are not fringe concerns. They are positions that AI safety researchers, ethicists, and parts of the military itself have held for years. The fact that OpenAI accepted a contract that Anthropic described as substantively identical, while publicly claiming the same protections, raises legitimate questions about the value of those assurances.

   The more uncomfortable read is that Anthropic’s ethical posture has been selectively applied. The company scrapped its ban on selling to government spy agencies in 2024, partnered with Palantir and Amazon for military customers, and its technology was used in Pentagon operations that resulted in deaths. The line it drew with Hegseth was real, but drawn close to the edge of what it had already agreed to.

   What this week makes undeniable is that AI companies are political actors, whether they intend to be or not. The institutions that might ordinarily arbitrate these decisions, legal, democratic, and international, don’t yet have the frameworks to do so. That gap is where the real power struggle lives.

2. Claude tops the App Store. The timing is everything

   

What’s happening: Anthropic’s Claude overtook ChatGPT as the number one free app on the Apple U.S. App Store — two days after reports emerged that the Trump administration had moved to restrict federal use of Anthropic’s models, following the company’s refusal to grant unrestricted government access.

TDLR:

• Claude is now the most downloaded free app in the U.S., overtaking ChatGPT.

• The surge followed, not preceded, reports of a government-led attempt to restrict.

• Users seem to be supporting Anthropic’s stance rather than punishing it

  ---

Why it matters:

The sequence here is worth reading carefully. A government attempts to limit a company’s reach. Within 48 hours, consumers push that company to the top of the charts. That’s not a coincidence. It’s a signal about where trust sits in the AI market right now. For three years, the generative AI conversation has been dominated by capability benchmarks: which model writes better, codes faster, reasons more accurately. That race still matters. But the App Store moment suggests something else is also in play. Users are beginning to choose AI the way they choose a bank or a news source. Institutional character counts. Where a company draws its lines, and why, is becoming part of the product. Anthropic has cultivated that reputation deliberately. It may now be its most defensible asset.

3. OpenAI and the CFDA’s two-year bet on American fashion

   

   What’s happening: OpenAI has partnered with the Council of Fashion Designers of America to launch a two-year AI innovation hub, pairing American fashion brands with AI builders to co-develop tools across design, production, and creative workflow.

   ---

   TLDR:

   • The partnership will embed AI tooling directly into American fashion brand workflows

   • Focus areas: design ideation, production planning, operational efficiency

   • The CFDA’s institutional endorsement signals industry-level acceptance, not just experimentation

     ---

   Why it matters:

   The CFDA is not a startup accelerator. It is where the American fashion industry forms consensus. When it commits to an AI partnership for two years and institutional credibility, it is not experimenting — it is signalling direction.

   The framing of the initiative is also notable. AI here is positioned not as a cost-reduction tool but as a creative collaborator — something that expands what designers can explore, rather than simply automating what already exists. That distinction matters because fashion’s relationship with technology has historically been defensive: brands adopting digital tools reluctantly, after the moment has passed.

   The harder question the CFDA partnership doesn’t yet answer is authorship. As AI becomes embedded in the design process, the industry will need frameworks for what it means to be the creative originator of a collection. That conversation is coming, and the brands building fluency with these tools now will be better positioned to shape it.

4. Zara’s AI Try-On and the return problem it’s actually solving

   

   What’s happening: Zara has rolled out an AI-powered virtual try-on feature allowing shoppers to upload a photo, generate a digital version of themselves, and visualise garments before purchase.

   ---

   TLDR:

   • Shoppers can now see clothes on a simulated version of their own body before buying

   • Primary commercial logic: reducing the fashion industry’s chronic returns problem

   • Secondary question: What does it mean to mediate our relationship with clothing through an AI render of ourselves

     ---

   Why it matters:

   Online fashion returns run at 20–30%. In fast fashion, where margins are already compressed, that’s an existential inefficiency. Zara isn’t building this feature because it’s interesting. It’s building it because returns are expensive, wasteful, and structurally difficult to solve through any other means.

   The technology itself is imperfect — no AI render yet captures how fabric moves or how light hits a material. But it doesn’t need to be perfect to be effective. It needs to reduce uncertainty enough to change purchasing behaviour at the margin. Even a modest reduction in return rates at Zara’s volume is a significant commercial outcome.

   The more durable question is what happens when this becomes standard. Once consumers can visualise garments on their own bodies across every major retailer, the brands that win won’t just be the ones with the best try-on technology. They’ll be the ones whose clothes still look compelling when the fantasy of the campaign image is removed, and a realistic render of your own body is in the frame instead.

5. Oura acquires Doublepoint. The body is now the interface.

   

   What’s happening: Oura has acquired Doublepoint, a Helsinki-based AI gesture recognition company founded in 2020. Doublepoint’s technology enables users to control devices through small, natural hand and finger movements — no touchscreen required.

   TLDR:

   • Oura moves from passive health tracker to active control device

   • Doublepoint’s AI reads biometric signals to detect intentional gestures

   • The acquisition positions Oura in a direct conversation with Apple and Meta’s spatial computing ambitions
     

   Why it matters:

   Oura has spent five years building one of the most trusted biometric devices in the market. The ring’s reputation rests on accuracy and restraint — it reads the body without demanding attention. The Doublepoint acquisition asks a different question of the same hardware: what if it could also take instructions from the body?

   Gesture-based computing — controlling devices through subtle finger movements rather than touchscreens — has been a credible concept for years. What’s changed is the maturity of the AI required to reliably distinguish intentional gestures from ambient movement for it to be useful. Doublepoint appears to have crossed that threshold.

   The strategic context is significant. Apple’s Vision Pro, Meta’s Ray-Ban smart glasses, and Samsung’s Galaxy Ring are all, in different ways, exploring the same territory: a world where the screen is no longer the primary interface between the body and the digital environment. Oura’s acquisition places it in that conversation from a position of genuine biometric credibility — a foundation neither Apple nor Meta can easily replicate.

   The wearables market has been described as the next computing platform for a decade. Oura just made its most convincing move yet toward actually building one.

What we’re building

Codes of Culture is the editorial and intelligence expression of Future+, a global network and strategic advisory spanning Europe, the Middle East, India, and the United States.

After a six-month pause, this newsletter returns in a sharpened form. The brief remains the same: to decode the systems shaping modern influence across capital, culture, luxury, and technology. Not trends. Not hype. The forces that are quietly restructuring markets before they become obvious.

Future+ operates as a curator of strategic access, advising leaders, founders and organisations navigating the intersection of luxury, culture, capital, and technology. Codes of Culture is the public-facing layer of that thinking: a weekly brief for the executives, founders, and capital allocators who want the analytical frame, not just the headlines.

If you’re reading this and it’s useful, forward it to someone who should be reading it too.

→ Codes of Culture is published by Future+ and founded by Ashumi Sanghvi. To explore Future+ advisory and strategic partnerships: futureplus.xyz. To subscribe, access the full archive, or get in touch: codesofculture.futureplus.xyz.

Disclaimer: Information in this newsletter is only for the purpose of sharing knowledge, news and insights.

Codes of Culture is the editorial and intelligence expression of Future+, a global network and strategic advisory firm spanning the US, Europe, the Middle East, and India. The brief: to decode the sy…

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After a short summer hiatus, we are back to sharing the top news and insights shaping luxury, culture and technology with a slightly longer version for today’s newsletter. At times, it feels like it’s hard to keep up with the pace of change and rapid developments, especially across AI, but taking a pause and zooming out is important to understand the broader context of these changes and the macro conditions that they affect.

In today’s roundup, we share the top stories making headlines and more quicklinks for what’s been on our radar over the summer.

AI continues to set the tempo, with Google upgrading Gemini’s image editing, Meta striking a creative pact with Midjourney, and Saks Global reshaping luxury retail through personalisation. Fashion is experimenting across every layer: Louis Vuitton shocks beauty with $160 lipsticks, Lacoste courts culture at the US Open, and Oakley doubles down on its identity as a tech company. Meanwhile, platforms from Pinterest to ShopMy are rewriting social commerce rules, while Gap proves joy and inclusivity still sell with a denim campaign that went instantly viral.

It’s a week that underscores fashion and culture’s shifting drivers: tech innovation, cultural capital, and the renewed power of storytelling. Scroll on for 15 things on our radar.

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This week’s signals point to a quiet but decisive shift: from broadcast to embedded, from scraping to simulating, from passive retail to intelligent interaction.

CommerceGPT is a glimpse into what comes after search, where AI agents don’t just respond, they anticipate. Fashion, for all its climate claims, is still chasing volume over impact, while Forest Green Rovers are rewriting the playbook with the first fully vegan-certified kit. Boots is turning fragrance into a full-sensory retail strategy. And Spotify? It’s laying the groundwork for a future where entertainment and commerce blend invisibly into everyday interaction.

Zoom out, and a pattern emerges: brands are moving from scale to specificity, from owning channels to shaping context.

Scroll on for our deep dive on the 5 stories shaping the week across luxury, fashion, tech, and culture.

See You in August!

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As sustainability narratives collide with retail reinvention, we’re seeing fashion, tech, and design rewire both aesthetics and infrastructure in real time.

In this week’s roundup: Bravest Studios turns packaging into wearable satire, Lone Design Club launches an Airbnb-style platform for IRL retail, Dover Street Market pivots from curator to creator, and Crocs gets a tactical makeover via Aries. Plus, a major spike in fashion’s emissions reignites scrutiny over polyester, Phlur’s scent-driven rise attracts new investment, and Figma gears up for a billion-dollar IPO.

From AI-fuelled shopping shifts to Arctic mythologies in UK art, these stories signal a cultural economy in flux, philosophical, commercial, and increasingly climate-conscious.

Scroll on for ten stories shaping the week in innovation, fashion, beauty, and design.
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This week has been all about high-speed crossovers and slow-burn influence. From London’s record-breaking heat to Formula 1 fever, the summer's cultural calendar is racing ahead.

Tommy Hilfiger just hit the gas on brand storytelling, embedding itself into F1: The Movie and reviving its motorsport legacy through a fictional racing team and curated events in China. It’s more than a product play; it's cultural choreography. And it’s not the only brand rewriting its strategy.

From fashion houses betting on local wellness leaders to Netflix integrating GenAI across its ecosystem, influence is shifting from broadcast to embedded. Brands are no longer just sponsoring culture; they're participating, producing, and in some cases, engineering it.

Even Somerset House is weighing in, examining how identity itself is being digitally sculpted with its newest “Virtual Beauty” exhibition. Finally, Versace’s grand London retrospective reminds us of an era when spectacle was analogue, yet no less calculated.

Scroll on for our deep dive on the 5 stories shaping the week across luxury, fashion, tech, and culture.

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As fashion courts football, AI finds a human voice, and textiles travel across centuries, creative industries are redefining the boundaries of identity, time, and expression. Whether it’s Meta’s voice-first future, Puma’s £1 billion brand play, or Zara’s painterly pivot in Accra, the message is clear: culture is the new capital, and technology is its sharpest tool.

In this week’s roundup: MFAH juxtaposes Indian textile legacies with AI-driven organisms, Laura Weir maps a new vision for the British Fashion Council, and luxury’s beach club activations offer a masterclass in narrative-led exclusivity. Plus, Von Dutch enters the F&B scene, and Marie Claire distills the aesthetics of summer living into a multisensory edit.

Scroll on for ten stories shaping the week in innovation, fashion, tech, and design.
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On that note, one of the biggest trends that has come out of this year’s events and conferences, is that we’re living through a shift where creators are becoming some of the most powerful voices in media, culture, and commerce. As platforms like TikTok, YouTube, and Twitch redefine influence, brands and institutions are learning to collaborate—not just advertise. The 2025 TIME100 Creators list makes that clear: cultural storytelling now moves through people, not just products.

Cross-cultural partnerships are also gaining ground as brands reach across borders, industries, and identities to stay relevant. From Maybelline entering the WWE ring to OpenAI reimagining the web, we’re seeing unlikely but timely collaborations spark global conversation. Even Couture Week spotlighted this—blending legacy and innovation with diverse voices and narratives.

But as influence decentralizes, so do the risks. Grok’s antisemitic outputs on X show what happens when AI and audience manipulation collide unchecked. It’s a reminder that while creators and culture drive the future, trust, ethics, and responsibility need to keep pace.

Thanks for reading and have a great weekend!

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In this week’s roundup: Dior expands its global education program with UNESCO, Adidas reclaims cultural cachet through an intergenerational Superstar reboot, and H&M experiments with AI avatars to future-proof its campaigns. Meanwhile, Brussels stages a quiet creative coup, and Roblox becomes a new breeding ground for IP with a Japanese twist.

Scroll on for ten stories shaping the week in innovation, fashion, beauty, and design.
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The more time goes on, the clearer it becomes: AI isn’t just smart, it’s becoming hands-on. It’s showing up in how we create, shop, and even shape physical products bringing more people into the process, not pushing them out.

In this week’s issue, Wedgwood and XXII launched a generative AI platform inviting the public to design vases using its historic Jasperware forms one winning entry will be made into a real piece and shown at the V&A. One of my favorite reads this week was Zoe Scaman’s roundup on everything she learnt on her immersion trip to Silicon Valley- we’ve covered all the main points. In other news, beauty giants like L’Oréal and Estée Lauder are going all in on GenAI across R&D and content, McLaren partners with Sonic the Hedgehog in a nostalgia-fueled move, and TikTok continues to change how luxury is discovered less billboard, more algorithm.

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In this week’s roundup: TikTok Shop integrates into Neteven’s enterprise stack, Superdrug launches its most immersive beauty concept yet, and Google drops Doppl an AI-powered try-on app redefining mobile commerce. L’Oréal acquires Color Wow to elevate science-driven prestige and much more.

Scroll on for ten stories shaping the week in innovation, fashion, beauty, and design.
Don’t forget to subscribe for full access to our news, monthly meet-ups, and events.

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This week, I spent a day at Parliament hosted by my friend and Future+ ambassador Noelle Reno – gathering family offices, academia and policy makers to discuss the state of investments, regulatory environment and the most innovative startups across crypto, AI, biotech, security and defence. It was interesting to hear perspectives from investment and regulatory pov as we were also joined by Dr Lisa Cameron, former MP, Andrew Rosindell, MP and Chairwoman of the CFTC 🇺🇸 Caroline Pham.

In the news, Daydream’s AI stylist officially launched, Google backed Gentle Monster, Ledger made its debut on Spurs jerseys, agentic AI took a step into luxury strategy, and Louis Vuitton ramped up immersive retail efforts in China.

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