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“Gucci is a superbrand that is as much about pragmatic product as it is about emotion,” artistic director Demna believes — and he delivered that emotion with his debut fashion show.

Spring appeared to have sprung in Milan on Friday just as much outside Gucci’s venue as inside. How fitting that artistic director Demna dubbed the collection “Primavera,” or spring in English.

He was inspired by Sandro Botticelli’s painting of the same name, seen at the Uffizi Museum in Florence, which he admitted had left him emotional, and the collection he paraded at the former Milan fairgrounds felt like it would help the brand — ahem — spring forth, and open a new chapter.

“I have a good feeling, it’s one the great brands, it just needs to be revived,” Luca de Meo, chief executive officer of Gucci parent Kering, said confidently before the show.

Entering, there was definitely a good dose of new energy and expectation at the venue, reminiscent of a museum with classic marble statues on top of the tiered rows, similar to those seen in ancient Greek or Roman theaters. It was monumental and a reference to the Uffizi and that memorable visit to Florence, which led Demna to believe that “above the product, Gucci is culture, it is a way of thinking and a way of being.”

Gucci should also be fun, as he discovered that, for Gen Z, the name has become synonymous with “being flamboyant, having fun, going out, being crazy doing stuff. I don’t feel like there are so many other brands that could make sense in this context, you know. But Gucci does, and it’s kind of very inspiring I find,” he told WWD during a preview.

Donatella Versace and Alessandro Michele certainly appeared to be having fun, smiling and chatting amicably, seated front row with other guests, from Demi Moore, hugging her chihuahua Pilaf, to Shawn Mendes.

“I hope I made you feel Gucci today because that was my main purpose, to feel the energy, the passion, the fun, the sexy,” said Demna in the post-show scrum.

And so he did, all of the above and then some.

To the staccato sound of “Sopratutto” by Nicolini, the first look — a seamless, skinny minidress in white hosiery fabric, clinging to the body — appeared to be a palate cleanser. The look that followed was an about-turn, with a male model as buff as can be, his muscles bulging under a white sleeveless T-shirt and pants, “his chiseled Adonis looks that speak to Renaissance ideals of proportionality and physique,” wrote Demna in his press notes, explaining that Gucci had succeeded in developing seamless garments “cut as close as possible to the body, invisible heat-sealed edges and engineered curved hems.”

The effect? Run to the gym as fast as possible.

However, Demna had plenty more in store in terms of body shapes, height and age brackets — cue the returns of Karlie Kloss and Kate Moss closing the show — a sparkling white gold GG thong bedazzled with 10 carats of diamonds peeping out of her dramatic backless black gown that was reminiscent of the Tom Ford va-va-voom era. While Demna left his own mark with this collection, there were references to Ford, even sexier in his hands, and to Michele — the Princetown furry slippers just one example.

The sexy undercurrent ran throughout the collection and Demna admitted backstage that it was “very liberating, I finally allowed myself to do that. It’s also because of my relationship with my body, the way I see myself. I want to feel sexy, I want to feel attractive, and l want to like myself. There is so much more that I haven’t done, because I didn’t want to get closer to my body, to the emotional aspect of my body. For 10 years I was trying to impress myself, to be smart, and at Gucci I realized I can create an emotional rather than intellectual fashion — either you love it or not, but it opens a huge new scope of possibilities in terms of creative vision. Feeling attractive, seductive — it’s part of human nature and I want to put it out there. It’s something we need.”

After La Famiglia, his first project for Gucci, here Demna developed a whole set of archetypes, reaching out to the brand’s existing customers and the potential new ones, so next to leggings and tracksuits, fluid tailored suits in liquid-like fabrics stood out, with low-cut jackets and trousers with horizontal pockets.

With every phase of the collection, the soundtrack changed, as part of five genres curated by loki. Enter a more romantic lineup with pleated floral dresses — likely inspired by Botticelli’s “Primavera” — to the sound of “Milan” by Augxst. Worn under a mock-fur bubble blouson, the look turned more ladylike, seen in the strapless bustier-like furry tops. Vittoria Ceretti in a dark ankle-length coat over a black turtleneck and slim leather pants with a gold GG logo belt was as chic as can be. Artist Vittorio Accornero’s Flora motif, a Gucci signature since 1966 that was designed for Grace Kelly, was revisited in a silk slipdress.

At night, however, the Gucci woman can morph into a partygoer. Enter Emily Ratajkowski in a sparkling minidress and stiletto pumps, her hair, makeup and strut part of the character. Risqué gowns with waist-high slits for her were flanked by two-piece sets of embroidered and sparkling loose pants and navel grazing tops for him — and worn barefoot.

Make no mistake, though: Accessories, Gucci’s bread-and-butter, were ubiquitous on the runway. Almost every model carried a bag, in particular the signature Bamboo 1947, updated with a new, sleeker volume and a handle made of flexible, pieced leather sections, and rejuvenated archival minaudières to fit essentials. Supple leather boots, Demna’s first Gucci sneaker, the Manhattan, and the Giovanni and Cupertino loafers were among some of the footwear designs.

A selection of products from the collection was available in some Gucci stores and online after the show.

“Gucci is a superbrand that is as much about pragmatic product as it is about emotion,” Demna wrote in the letter he posted on social media a day earlier. There is no doubt that he delivered that emotion, and with his 83 looks, he showed naysayers that his design chops have range.

Anthropic’s chatbot Claude seems to have benefited from the attention around the company’s fraught negotiations with the Pentagon.

As first reported by CNBC, as of Saturday afternoon, Claude is currently ranked number two among free apps in Apple’s US App Store — the number one app is OpenAI’s ChatGPT, and number three is Google Gemini.

According to data from SensorTower, Claude was just outside the top 100 at the end of January, and has spent most of February somewhere in the top 20. Its ranking has climbed in the last few days, from sixth on Wednesday to fourth on Thursday to second on Saturday (today).

After Anthropic attempted to negotiate for safeguards preventing the Department of Defense from using its AI models for mass domestic surveillance or fully autonomous weapons, President Donald Trump directed federal agencies to stop using all Anthropic products and Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth said he’s designating the company a supply-chain threat.

OpenAI subsequently announced its own agreement with the Pentagon, which CEO Sam Altman claimed includes safeguards related to domestic surveillance and autonomous weapons.

Friday afternoon, just as this interview was getting underway, a news alert flashed across my computer screen: the Trump administration was severing ties with Anthropic, the San Francisco AI company founded in 2021 by Dario Amodei. Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth had invoked a national security law to blacklist the company from doing business with the Pentagon after Amodei refused to allow Anthropic’s tech to be used for mass surveillance of U.S. citizens or for autonomous armed drones that could select and kill targets without human input.

It was a jaw-dropping sequence of events. Anthropic stands to lose a contract worth up to $200 million and could be barred from working with other defense contractors after President Trump posted on Truth Social directing every federal agency to “immediately cease all use of Anthropic technology.” (Anthropic has since said it will challenge the Pentagon in court.)

Max Tegmark has spent the better part of a decade warning that the race to build ever-more-powerful AI systems is outpacing the world’s ability to govern them. The MIT physicist founded the Future of Life Institute in 2014 and helped organize an open letter — ultimately signed by more than 33,000 people, including Elon Musk — calling for a pause in advanced AI development.

His view of the Anthropic crisis is unsparing: the company, like its rivals, has sown the seeds of its own predicament. Tegmark’s argument doesn’t begin with the Pentagon but with a decision made years earlier — a choice, shared across the industry, to resist regulation. Anthropic, OpenAI, Google DeepMind and others have long promised to govern themselves responsibly. Anthropic this week even dropped the central tenet of its own safety pledge — its promise not to release increasingly powerful AI systems until the company was confident they wouldn’t cause harm.

Now, in the absence of rules, there’s not a lot to protect these players, says Tegmark. Here’s more from that interview, edited for length and clarity. You can hear the full conversation this coming week on TechCrunch’s StrictlyVC Download podcast.

When you saw this news just now about Anthropic, what was your first reaction?

The road to hell is paved with good intentions. It’s so interesting to think back a decade ago, when people were so excited about how we were going to make artificial intelligence to cure cancer, to grow the prosperity in America and make America strong. And here we are now where the U.S. government is pissed off at this company for not wanting AI to be used for domestic mass surveillance of Americans, and also not wanting to have killer robots that can autonomously — without any human input at all — decide who gets killed.

It is contradictory. If I can give a little cynical take on this — yes, Anthropic has been very good at marketing themselves as all about safety. But if you actually look at the facts rather than the claims, what you see is that Anthropic, OpenAI, Google DeepMind and xAI have all talked a lot about how they care about safety. None of them has come out supporting binding safety regulation the way we have in other industries. And all four of these companies have now broken their own promises. First we had Google — this big slogan, ‘Don’t be evil.’ Then they dropped that. Then they dropped another longer commitment that basically said they promised not to do harm with AI. They dropped that so they could sell AI for surveillance and weapons. OpenAI just dropped the word safety from their mission statement. xAI shut down their whole safety team. And now Anthropic, earlier in the week, dropped their most important safety commitment — the promise not to release powerful AI systems until they were sure they weren’t going to cause harm.

All of these companies, especially OpenAI and Google DeepMind but to some extent also Anthropic, have persistently lobbied against regulation of AI, saying, ‘Just trust us, we’re going to regulate ourselves.’ And they’ve successfully lobbied. So we right now have less regulation on AI systems in America than on sandwiches. You know, if you want to open a sandwich shop and the health inspector finds 15 rats in the kitchen, he won’t let you sell any sandwiches until you fix it. But if you say, ‘Don’t worry, I’m not going to sell sandwiches, I’m going to sell AI girlfriends for 11-year-olds, and they’ve been linked to suicides in the past, and then I’m going to release something called superintelligence which might overthrow the U.S. government, but I have a good feeling about mine’ — the inspector has to say, ‘Fine, go ahead, just don’t sell sandwiches.’

There’s food safety regulation and no AI regulation.

And this, I feel, all of these companies really share the blame for. Because if they had taken all these promises that they made back in the day for how they were going to be so safe and goody-goody, and gotten together, and then gone to the government and said, ‘Please take our voluntary commitments and turn them into U.S. law that binds even our most sloppy competitors’ — this would have happened. Instead, we’re in a complete regulatory vacuum. And we know what happens when there’s a complete corporate amnesty: you get thalidomide, you get tobacco companies pushing cigarettes on kids, you get asbestos causing lung cancer. So it’s sort of ironic that their own resistance to having laws saying what’s okay and not okay to do with AI is now coming back and biting them.

There is no law right now against building AI to kill Americans, so the government can just suddenly ask for it. If the companies themselves had earlier come out and said, ‘We want this law,’ they wouldn’t be in this pickle. They really shot themselves in the foot.

Let’s analyze that. The most common talking point from the lobbyists for the AI companies — they’re now better funded and more numerous than the lobbyists from the fossil fuel industry, the pharma industry and the military-industrial complex combined — is that whenever anyone proposes any kind of regulation, they say, ‘But China.’ So let’s look at that. China is in the process of banning AI girlfriends outright. Not just age limits — they’re looking at banning all anthropomorphic AI. Why? Not because they want to please America but because they feel this is screwing up Chinese youth and making China weak. Obviously, it’s making American youth weak, too.

And when people say we have to race to build superintelligence so we can win against China — when we don’t actually know how to control superintelligence, so that the default outcome is that humanity loses control of Earth to alien machines — guess what? The Chinese Communist Party really likes control. Who in their right mind thinks that Xi Jinping is going to tolerate some Chinese AI company building something that overthrows the Chinese government? No way. It’s clearly really bad for the American government too if it gets overthrown in a coup by the first American company to build superintelligence. This is a national security threat.

I think if people in the national security community listen to Dario Amodei describe his vision — he’s given a famous speech where he says we’ll soon have a country of geniuses in a data center — they might start thinking: ‘Wait, did Dario just use the word country? Maybe I should put that country of geniuses in a data center on the same threat list I’m keeping tabs on, because that sounds threatening to the U.S. government.’ And I think fairly soon, enough people in the U.S. national security community are going to realize that uncontrollable superintelligence is a threat, not a tool. This is totally analogous to the Cold War. There was a race for dominance — economic and military — against the Soviet Union. We Americans won that one without ever engaging in the second race, which was to see who could put the most nuclear craters in the other superpower. People realized that was just suicide. No one wins. The same logic applies here.

Six years ago, almost every expert in AI I knew predicted we were decades away from having AI that could master language and knowledge at human level — maybe 2040, maybe 2050. They were all wrong, because we already have that now. We’ve seen AI progress quite rapidly from high school level to college level to PhD level to university professor level in some areas. Last year, AI won the gold medal at the International Mathematics Olympiad, which is about as difficult as human tasks get. I wrote a paper together with Yoshua Bengio, Dan Hendrycks, and other top AI researchers just a few months ago giving a rigorous definition of AGI. According to this, GPT-4 was 27% of the way there. GPT-5 was 57% of the way there. So we’re not there yet, but going from 27% to 57% that quickly suggests it might not be that long.

When I lectured to my students yesterday at MIT, I told them that even if it takes four years, that means when they graduate, they might not be able to get any jobs anymore. It’s certainly not too soon to start preparing for it.

Anthropic is now blacklisted. I’m curious to see what happens next — will the other AI giants stand with it and say, ‘We won’t do this either?’ Or does someone like xAI raise their hand and say, ‘Anthropic didn’t want that contract, we’ll take it’? [Editor’s note: Hours after the interview, OpenAI announced its own deal with the Pentagon.]

Last night, Sam Altman came out and said he stands with Anthropic and has the same red lines. I admire him for the courage of saying that. Google, as of when we started this interview, had said nothing. If they just stay quiet, I think that’s incredibly embarrassing for them as a company, and a lot of their staff will feel the same. We haven’t heard anything from xAI yet either. So it’ll be interesting to see. Basically, there’s this moment where everybody has to show their true colors.

Yes, and this is why I’m actually optimistic in a strange way. There’s such an obvious alternative here. If we just start treating AI companies like any other companies — drop the corporate amnesty — they would clearly have to do something like a clinical trial before they released something this powerful, and demonstrate to independent experts that they know how to control it. Then we get a golden age with all the good stuff from AI, without the existential angst. That’s not the path we’re on right now. But it could be.