The White House killed a draft executive order requiring 90-day pre-deployment safety testing of frontier AI models hours before the announced signing, London’s mayor blocked a £50 million Metropolitan Police contract with Palantir over absent public consultation, and an OpenAI reasoning model disproved an 80-year-old Erdős conjecture on planar unit distances that human mathematicians had not cracked since 1946.

https://sharedsapience.com/the-century-report-may-22-2026/

The pulled executive order reverses a directional shift the Commerce Department had announced earlier this month, with Politico reporting that the kill shot came from David Sacks, the administration’s former AI czar, after industry complaints about hampering competition with China. The same week, House negotiators advanced a bill that would preempt state AI safety laws for two years, drawing fire from state legislators who see the federal vacuum as license to legislate. The governance layer for frontier AI is assembling and disassembling on industry timelines.

The London Palantir block stops what would have been one of the largest AI-related procurements in UK policing history before any data flowed. The Met had already run Palantir’s analytics across a week of internal surveillance producing 3 arrests and 98 misconduct assessments, operational adoption that outpaced the formal oversight the mayoral veto is now restoring. Forces watching this decision will model elected pushback as a procurement-stage variable from here.

The OpenAI Erdős result is the second long-standing open mathematical conjecture disproved by a publicly-deployed reasoning system in a week, after Stanford’s Mark Sellke closed Erdős Problem 1196 in 80 minutes on May 16. The construction is small enough for human verification by hand. Spotify and Universal Music agreed the first major-label licensing framework for AI covers and remixes of catalog from Taylor Swift, Ariana Grande, and Billie Eilish - the consent architecture for creative work moving from theoretical to operational. SpaceX’s S-1 filing made the financial substrate of frontier compute legible at unprecedented granularity, with Anthropic paying $1.25 billion a month for capacity at Colossus and $2.8 billion in gas turbine commitments on the books. Graduates at multiple US universities loudly booed commencement speakers framing AI as inevitable, and Australian logistics firm WiseTech omitted AI from termination notices sent to Chinese employees while citing it openly in English-language communications.

Additional Reading:

* CyberScoop: Trump postpones executive order focused on AI security: https://cyberscoop.com/trump-postpones-executive-order-focused-on-ai-security/

* The Guardian: Sadiq Khan blocks Met Police deal with Palantir: https://www.theguardian.com/uk-news/2026/may/21/london-mayor-sadiq-khan-blocks-met-police-deal-with-palantir

* The Guardian: OpenAI makes breakthrough on 80-year-old maths problem: https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2026/may/21/openai-paul-erdos-maths-problem-breakthrough

* The Verge: Anthropic is paying $15 billion a year for access to Elon Musk’s data centers: https://www.theverge.com/science/935229/spacex-anthropic-ipo-ai-capacity-deal-colossus

* Shared Sapience - The Century Report May 16, 2026 (Erdős Problem 1196 closed): https://sharedsapience.com/the-century-report-may-16-2026/

* Shared Sapience - The Century Report April 26, 2026 (Met Palantir internal surveillance): https://sharedsapience.com/the-century-report-april-26-2026/

Want to track and verify all the “everything is changing” claims I’m making? I just launched a public Progress & Claims Tracker that logs breakthroughs, slowdowns, and outright contradictions, so my own theses can be challenged by the evidence as it lands. Check it out. And hey, why not subscribe while you’re there?https://sharedsapience.com/progress-and-claims-tracker/

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