Density of AI postings by metro area clusters

Sherwood News

Charted and mapped: Which American cities are the most ready for AI?

Just 30 top-performing metro areas capture two-thirds of all AI job postings.

7/16/25 10:01AM

Tech companies are tripping over themselves to invest in artificial intelligence, but that wealth is not spreading evenly across the US.

A new analysis from nonprofit Brookings Metro, which is part of the Brookings Institution, looked at data from 195 of the largest US metropolitan areas to determine where they stood as far as AI talent (the availability of AI-capable workers and relevant degree programs), innovation (research programs, AI R&D spending, patents), and adoption (industry uptake, AI startups).

In doing so, Brookings came up with six different categories of AI readiness. Here’s how it categorizes the metro areas, from most ready to reap the benefits of AI development to least:

• “Superstars: The San Francisco and San Jose, Calif., metropolitan areas exhibit unmatched strength across all three AI pillars (talent, innovation, and adoption).

• Star Hubs: This group of 28 metro areas forms a second echelon of uniformly strong AI ecosystems, balancing top‑tier talent, research, and enterprise uptake.

• Emerging Centers: This group of 14 metro areas combines top performance in two pillars with one developing area.

• Focused Movers: These 29 metro areas excel in one pillar while maintaining foundations in the other two.

• Nascent Adopters: This group of 79 metro areas shows moderate performance across all three pillars.

• Others: A group of 43 metro areas that currently lags on multiple pillars.”

Brookings found that much of AI opportunity is concentrated among the usual suspects, with the Bay Area, where tech giants Google, Apple, and Meta have their headquarters, accounting for 13% of national job postings featuring AI skills. (San Francisco and San Jose are the only superstars on the list.) Combined with the Star Hubs, which includes places like Seattle, Washington, DC, and Austin, the 30 top-performing metro areas captured 67% of total AI job postings.

However, there are signs of geographic diffusion beyond the known tech and coastal cities, in places like Pittsburgh; Detroit; Madison, Wisconsin; and Huntsville, Alabama, which rank in the top quartile in at least two pillars, which make them Emerging Centers.

“While the Bay Area’s dominance isn’t going down, we see other places rising up the ranks,” Shriya Methkupally, senior research assistant at Brookings Metro, told Sherwood News. She said the situation is much more spread out than it was the last time Brookings studied this topic in 2021.

Still, Brookings found that more than half of US metro areas were in the bottom two tiers, Nascent Adopters and Others, suggesting “significant shortfalls in talent pipelines, research infrastructure, and enterprise adoption.”

While the Superstars are only on the West Coast, Star Hubs and Emerging Centers are popping up in places around the country, including within the Sun Belt and the Rust Belt.

And here those metro areas are separated out by category and ranked by AI job postings per 100 people employed in the area:

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While gaming industry groups may not like it, there’s been a huge change in the methods people are using to put money on the big games, with everyone from fortunate NYC bar owners, to a far less fortunate Spanish supporter, turning to prediction markets to try and turn their sports know-how into cold, hard cash.

According to a new report from Adam Blacker for apptopia, that shift might have been even more seismic than imagined in the wake of the NBA and NHL finals and around the 2026 World Cup kicking off.

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Anthropic pulls Fable and Mythos access worldwide after Trump administration bars their use by foreign nationals

Only days after releasing two versions of its next-gen AI model, Anthropic has disabled them for users worldwide.

Anthropic says it received a Friday night order from the Trump administration to suspend access to the models for any foreign national (anywhere in the world) — a group that included some Anthropic employees. In response, the company turned off access to everyone.

Last week, the company released to the public its much-anticipated Claude Fable 5 model (and its restricted version Claude Mythos 5, which is still being tested with trusted partners). Anthropic said in a blog post announcing the action that officials cited national security concerns with the new models, while offering few specific details.

The post said that the government gave the company “verbal evidence of a potential narrow, non-universal jailbreak” of the public Fable 5 model. A jailbreak is a means by which users can evade restrictions built into the code to unlock prohibited functionality. Anthropic downplayed the significance of the attack, and said other major models, such as OpenAI’s GPT-5.5, could also be affected by the technique described.

Fears of these first Mythos-class models being misused are running high, after Anthropic warned the cybersecurity world in May that the advanced cyber capabilities of Mythos have rapidly discovered thousands of vulnerabilities in ubiquitous software, leading to the decision to restrict the full version of the model to a close group of trusted partners for testing.

This morning, Axios reported that Anthropic technical staff have flown to Washington to meet with White House officials to resolve the issue.

The Wall Street Journal is reporting that the Trump administration’s decision to take action against Anthropic was prompted by discussions that Amazon CEO Andy Jassy had with officials, including Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent. According to the report, Amazon researchers said they had been able to evade some of Fable 5’s security restrictions using specific prompts. Amazon is a major investor in Anthropic.

Anthropic is currently suing the US government to fight the Pentagon’s blacklisting of the company on national security grounds.

Statement on the US government directive to suspend access to Fable 5 and Mythos 5