Axios

Elon Musk's xAI has secured a contract worth up to $200 million with the U.S. Department of Defense, the company announced Monday.

The big picture: The move is a part of the Pentagon's adoption of advanced artificial intelligence capabilities to address national security challenges.

Keke Palmer, fresh off the ESSENCE Festival stage in New Orleans, headlines this year's Black Tech Week, a rapidly growing Midwest-based tech summit that blends entrepreneurship, cultural influence and genuine funding opportunities for underrepresented founders.

Why it matters: The three-day event, which kicks off Monday, has become a hub for dealmaking, upskilling and ecosystem building for Black and brown innovators in the Midwest and beyond.

The X account for "Sesame Street's" Elmo was hacked over the weekend, spewing a series of antisemitic, racist and anti-President Trump posts.

The big picture: The hacked account is just the latest in a series of troublesome events for the social media platform.

Zip Security, a provider of cybersecurity solutions to small and midsized enterprises, tells Axios that it's raised $13.5 million in Series A funding.

Why it matters: All companies face hacking risks, but often only the largest can afford dedicated cybersecurity staffers.

Thank Big Tech for helping power the S&P 500 to its eighth record high of the year.

• That dominance could also be the market's biggest vulnerability.

Why it matters: Nearly half of the S&P 500's earnings growth this year is coming from tech. That kind of concentration raises the stakes — and the risk — if the sector falters.

President Trump and Sen. Dave McCormick (R-Pa.) will use a first-of-its-kind innovation summit in Pennsylvania on Tuesday to announce $70 billion in AI and energy investments for the state, including thousands of new jobs.

• The inaugural Pennsylvania Energy and Innovation Summit, at Carnegie Mellon University in Pittsburgh, aims to ignite "Pennsylvania's incredible potential to power the AI revolution," McCormick says.

Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang, bristling at Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei's warning of a looming white-collar apocalypse, tells Axios that artificial intelligence will create vastly more and superior jobs.

Why it matters: The Huang vs. Amodei debate, playing out in exclusive interviews with us, captures a deep divide among AI experts over America's job market in a highly automated world.

• Both of them agree we'll soon have AI that's smarter than humans — and will radically reshape how people work and companies operate.

A few years ago crypto was mostly a pariah in the financial services industry. Now, at the urging of the "first crypto president," Congress is on the verge of remaking American finance to embrace it.

Why it matters: "Crypto week" could change everything from how Americans make payments to how they invest.