Paul Meade, the Apple vice president in charge of the Vision Pro headset, is leaving the company to join OpenAI’s hardware team, according to Bloomberg’s Mark Gurman.

Meade also reportedly led the development of the AI-powered smart glasses that Apple plans to launch next year. The costly Vision Pro was not a hit, but Apple is hoping that more affordable smart glasses will help it compete with wearable devices from Meta.

Gurman frames this departure as a byproduct of John Ternus’ imminent elevation to Apple CEO, and of Ternus’ decision to shake up the hardware engineering team, which left some of the company’s vice presidents feeling like they’d been demoted.

OpenAI, meanwhile, is already working with Apple’s former chief design officer Jony Ive on an AI device that CEO Sam Altman has claimed will be more peaceful and calm than an iPhone, though reports last fall suggested the company was struggling to get the details right.

TechCrunch has reached out to Apple and OpenAI for comment.

Conno Christou doesn’t leave things to chance. He tracks his sleep with a Whoop band, cross-references it with an Oura ring, and gets nearly 100 biomarkers checked every year. He had been doing the annual bloodwork for four consecutive years, following the protocols of longevity researchers like Peter Attia and Rhonda Patrick. He was optimizing his supplements, his circadian rhythm, his protein intake.

At 35, building his second company, he was as dialed-in on the latest in health research as anyone he knew. His last checkup, in 2025, was green across the board. “It was the best I’d had in years,” he says.

Then, after a workout, his arm swelled.

He didn’t think much of it at first. A week passed before he saw a doctor, who found two blood clots in his veins and scheduled surgery. But the pre-op exams changed everything. A doctor walked back into the room and told him the procedure wasn’t happening.

“We see an 11-by-11-by-8 centimeter mass behind your sternum,” the doctor said.

A biopsy confirmed what Christou had never before even contemplated. He had an aggressive, fast-growing form of non-Hodgkin’s lymphoma — a rare diagnosis affecting roughly one in 420,000 people, caused by a random genetic mutation with no connection to lifestyle, diet, or stress.

The tumor had only existed for about three months. In three more weeks, it would have reached stage four.

“Lucky in my unluckiness,” Christou told this editor this week from his home in Athens, where he lives part time. “It was only found because I went in for something else entirely.”

What followed was an education in the limits of the medical system, and in what a determined patient can do about that with tools now available.

His first oncologist, a renowned specialist, recommended the lighter of two available chemotherapy regimens. Christou booked his first infusion three days out. Then, the night before, he sought a second opinion.

That doctor didn’t hesitate. He recommended the harder regimen — continuous in-hospital infusion, cycling every three weeks across six months — citing Christou’s specific pathology. The lighter treatment carried roughly a 60% success rate for his presentation. The aggressive one brought that number to around 85%. Two world-class doctors. Diametrically opposite recommendations.

“As founders, we hold the wheel,” Christou says of the propensity of many people to accept what they are told — and why more should not. “You hear many things. You don’t have to follow the first advice.”

He didn’t opt to just follow the second advice, either. Over the next two days, he gathered 12 opinions in total — drawing on his professional network, reaching out to hematologists and oncologists in the US and abroad, calling in every favor he could. Eleven to one voted in favor of the harder path. He took it. The decision, he says, didn’t feel brave so much as logical. When the stakes are existential, you collect data.

Over six months of treatment, Christou approached chemotherapy the way he approached building a company: as a marathon of sprints, each of them with a finite cycle, each week filled with data points. He had done a mandatory 25-month military service in Cyprus at age 18 and he borrowed from that experience, too. He was going to be a good soldier, he told himself. Trust the process. Six cycles. Get through it.

He wore his Whoop throughout, and found it remarkably accurate at predicting the days his immune system would bottom out, sometimes flagging them before symptoms arrived. He kept a symptom journal using voice transcription, logging every shift, every side effect, every medication and counter-medication. He narrowed his focus to three variables: sleep, nutrition, and, first and foremost, psychology. (“It moves the needle more than anything,” said Christou. “I never asked ‘why me’ — not once. That question has no useful answer.”)

He fed all of it — blood results, scan data, wearable output, journal entries — into Claude. He’s far form alone in turning to chatbots for medical guidance. A public opinion poll released in March found that a third of American adults now use them for health information and advice. The stories accumulating online suggest that for some patients, AI is delivering what the system couldn’t.

Experts urge caution; Danielle Bitterman, clinical lead for data science and AI at Mass General Brigham, has told the New York Times in recent months that general-purpose chatbots are frequently wrong and “have not been thoroughly evaluated” for personalized diagnoses.

Christou doesn’t disagree. “It didn’t replace the doctors,” he says, but it “helped me ask the right questions.”

For a condition as rare as his — one an oncologist might see once a year — access to a model that had absorbed the full body of medical literature was, he says, simply not the same as a Google search.

That distinction proved critical at the end of treatment. His final PET scan — the imaging used to detect active disease — came back ambiguous. His oncologist began discussing a second line of therapy, potentially radiotherapy, near his heart and lungs. It was an alarming development.

Christou again did his homework. He read that for this specific lymphoma, the false-positive rate on end-of-treatment PET scans is around 60% — a statistic that still astonishes him. “It’s 2026,” he says. “Sixty percent.”

He fed all three of his PET scans and his MRI into Claude, which flagged a known but easily overlooked phenomenon: in patients under 40 recovering from this type of lymphoma, the thymus gland can reactivate after chemotherapy, showing up on imaging as what appears to be active disease. Given his age, his specific scan characteristics, the model put the probability of that explanation at roughly 90%.

He sought three more opinions. The fourth doctor confirmed it: thymus rebound. There was no active disease. No radiotherapy was needed. He was clear.

Christou is still unfolding what the last year has meant, for his health, how he works, and how he thinks about time. He built Keragon, his current company, before any of this happened; it’s an AI-powered platform that helps medical practices automate their administrative operations.

But going through the system as a patient has given him new perspective. He watched nurses and doctors buried under tasks that had nothing to do with care. He received the same chemotherapy protocol as an 80-year-old woman, the side effects managed through a cascading chain of additional drugs, each causing problems of their own. He says he’s certain that we will look back at this era of treatment and cringe.

He takes Sundays off now, mostly. He tries to be present — at lunch with friends, at home with his dog, in conversations that might once have felt like a distraction from work. A VC friend told him something years ago that he said he kept replaying during treatment: Be happy now. He says it’s among the hardest things to do and yet he finally appreciates its importance.

He says he’d be happy to talk to anyone going through something similar to share notes, compare experiences. He seems to means it.

“It’s not happening in 10 years,” he says of what AI can already do for patients willing to use it. “It’s happening today.”

On Wednesday, Chinese cybersecurity firm 360 reportedly unveiled Tulongfeng, an AI tool it says can go head-to-head with Anthropic’s Mythos. That’s the cybersecurity-focused AI model that is reportedly so powerful, the Trump Administration has currently banned it and its more restricted version, Fable 5, from the hands of non-Americans.

Earlier the same week Sakana AI, a Tokyo-based AI startup launched Fugu, a model named after the Japanese word for blowfish. The company says this frontier AI model “stands shoulder-to-shoulder with leading models like Anthropic’s Fable 5 and Mythos Preview.” It is also designed for agents, with an ability to orchestrate access to other models though their APIs.

The two new Asian model products come as the U.S. government’s ban drags on. It’s order that prevents Anthropic from global access to Mythos and Fable occurred two weeks ago.

A spokesperson at Sakana AI told TechCrunch that release of its new model was “entirely coincidental,” yet that hasn’t stopped it from capitalizing on the moment. It’s website advertises “delivering frontier capability without the risk of export controls.”

“Sakana Fugu is something we have been building since last year — the research behind it was presented at ICLR this spring, and it reflects an approach that is central to how we deliver frontier-level value at Sakana AI. We were confident in the product on its own merits; the timing simply happened to coincide with a moment that brought it more attention than we expected,” the spokesperson said about launching during the Mythos/Fable export ban.

Sakana, co-founded in 2023 by former Google researchers Ren Ito,  Llion Jones and David Ha, makes affordable generative AI models that work well with small datasets and are optimized for the Japanese language and culture.

While the company is targeting Fugu at Japanese businesses and government agencies looking to reduce their exposure to tightening export controls, it isn’t yet proclaiming a lasting shift away from U.S. AI in Asia.

“U.S. models remain important to Asia,” the spokesperson said, a view consistent with remarks co-founder Ren Ito made at the G7 summit in Evian last week, where AI access and export controls were one of the central topics. “We’d characterize the current moment in those terms rather than as a permanent realignment toward any one set of players.”

Sakana co-founder Ren Ito elaborated on that view in an op-ed published in the Project Syndicate last week. He urged the US federal government, that consider that its “first priority should be to preserve access,” for America’s closest allies, and argued that “AI should not become a technology that is hoarded; it should be one that is developed together.”

David Ha, co-founder and CEO of Sakana, described Fugu as more than just a land grab during a vulnerable moment for a US competitors. It is designed to coordinate agent usage among many models.

“Orchestration Models are the next frontier, beyond bigger models,” he wrote on X. Relying on a single provider for national infrastructure, he argued, is a risk the recent export controls made impossible to ignore.

“Access to top models can disappear overnight,” he wrote. “Collective intelligence is the practical hedge against this concentration of power.”

While Tokyo-based Sakana positioned Fugu as a hedge strategy, a way to preserve access to frontier AI, not replace it, China’s 360 wasn’t hedging.

The Chinese firm reportedly unveiled two AI security tools. Tulongfeng is designed to automatically discover software vulnerabilities, and Yitianzhen is built to automate cyber defence and incident response.

The product launch, however, came with a message. According to Reuters, 360’s founder Zhou Hongyi described vulnerability-finding AI as a national strategic asset, and flagged what he called the risk of “one-way transparency”, a situation in which some actors could access advanced vulnerability-detection capabilities while others could not.

Anthropic had been on a historic growth trajectory. The US AI lab said its run-rate revenue crossed $47 billion in May 2026. How much of that depends on Asian enterprise customers is not publicly known.

But in the weeks since the export order took effect, at least two companies, one in Tokyo, one in Beijing, have stepped into the space it left behind. Even if US companies could win back trust should this ban ever end, local alternatives, trained to better understand local language and nuance, are already filling the gap.

360 did not respond to a request for comment.