 | Jul 02, 2025 | | | | | Supported by |  | | | | | | Happy Wednesday! Anthropic's revenue hits a pace of $4 billion. Senate votes to remove AI provision from Trump's tax bill. The Federal Trade Commission has opened a review of SoftBank's acquisition of chip firm Ampere.
| | | | Anthropic's revenue reached a pace of $4 billion annually, or $333 million per month, up almost four times from the start of the year, The Information reported Tuesday. At the same time, competition with other startups offering AI to help engineers code faster is intensifying. Anysphere, the maker of Cursor, an artificial intelligence-powered coding app, has hired two leaders of Anthropic's competing coding product, Claude Code, according to one of the leaders. The move is notable because Cursor relies on AI from Anthropic to power its app and is one of Anthropic's biggest customers. Cursor co-founder Sualeh Asif said in a statement that Anthropic is one of the company's "closest partners" and the company is "excited to deepen our work with Anthropic." | | | | The Senate has voted to drop a provision from President Trump's signature tax and spending bill that would have blocked states from regulating AI, ending a controversial measure that several Silicon Valley leaders had been pushing for. The provision was initially designed to prevent states from regulating AI for the next decade. Several Republicans opposed the plan, including Josh Hawley of Missouri and Marsha Blackburn of Tennessee. As of early Monday, the provision looked set to move forward, after Blackburn agreed to reduce the time frame on the ban to five years. However, after considerable backlash, she reversed course, and senators voted 99-1 early Tuesday to strip the provision from the bill entirely. Silicon Valley companies that had supported the measure included Meta Platforms, Microsoft and Anduril. Inside the administration, tech advisors Michael Kratsios and David Sacks were also in favor. | | | | The Federal Trade Commission has opened an in-depth review of SoftBank's acquisition of Santa Clara-based chip designer Ampere Computing, Bloomberg reported on Tuesday. The FTC made what is known as a "second request for information," signaling the start of a lengthy probe that could delay the closing of the deal, which SoftBank initially projected would happen in the latter half of the year. SoftBank in March said it agreed to pay $6.5 billion in cash to buy Ampere, which makes energy-efficient chips based on designs from Arm—a chip firm SoftBank owns. The FTC blocked SoftBank's 2020 plan to sell Arm to Nvidia. Spokespeople for the FTC, SoftBank and Ampere declined to comment on the Bloomberg report. | | | | Meta Platforms' efforts to recruit OpenAI researchers with high compensation offers are "somewhat distasteful," OpenAI CEO Sam Altman said in a Slack message to the company Monday night, Wired reported. The Slack message came after Meta revealed the lineup of its new AI division, which includes at least nine researchers recently recruited from OpenAI. But Altman said Meta "didn't get their top people and had to go quite far down their list" of prospects at OpenAI. OpenAI is reassessing how it handles compensation for its research organization, he said, echoing a memo research chief Mark Chen sent over the weekend. Altman also said OpenAI is more committed to developing powerful AI technology than Meta. "Long after Meta has moved on to their next flavor of the week, or defending their social moat, we will be here" focusing on AI, he said, adding that "missionaries will beat mercenaries." | | | | Amazon now has over one million robots in its warehouses, nearly as many human workers as the e-commerce giant employees in the facilities, The Wall Street Journal reported. Robots now contribute to about 75% of Amazon's deliveries around the world, according to the report. That automation has increased the productivity of each of Amazon's workers, allowing the average warehouse worker to handle 3,870 packages per year—up more than 20 times from 2015. Meanwhile, the average number of workers in each facility has fallen to about 670, the lowest number in the past 16 years, said the report. Amazon also announced DeepFleet, an AI model to coordinate the movements of its various robots. The company has been a leader in robotic automation for warehouse logistics for years, since it paid $775 million to purchase Kiva Systems in 2012, which developed robots to ferry packages using barcodes on warehouse floors. | | | | Design software firm Figma said revenue rose 46% in the first three months of the year, to $228 million, and it tripled its operating income to $40 million, according to a securities filing for a planned public offering. It generated a gross profit margin of 91%, ranking it among the highest margins for enterprise software companies. The financial report also showed the steep costs of an employee stock sale arranged after its planned $20 billion-valuation sale to Adobe Systems fell apart in late 2023. Figma said revenue rose 48% last year to $749 million last year but it lost $877 million in operating income after it gave some employees and early backers a chance to sell their shares last May at a valuation of $12.5 billion. It recorded nearly $950 million in stock-based compensation expense costs last year, the majority of which related to the tender offer. Excluding stock-based compensation expenses altogether, Figma would have generated around $70 million in operating income last year. The 15-year-old company, which has raised money from venture capital firms including Index Ventures and Greylock Partners, warned in its filing that the costs associated with developing generative artificial intelligence tools for its customers, specifically for AI inference and model training, could hurt its margins in the long-term. Figma's chief executive officer, Dylan Field, has 75.3% of the company's voting power largely through his ownership of the company's Class B shares, which grant holders 15 votes per share. The filing showed it also owned $70 million of bitcoin through an exchange-traded fund. | | | | Surge AI, a competitor to data labeling firm Scale AI, has hired banks including J.P. Morgan to help it sell up to $1 billion in shares at a valuation of more than $15 billion, according to a person with knowledge of the deal. The transaction will mostly involve existing shares held by Surge's founder and employees rather than newly issued shares, the person said. Unlike Scale, which has raised $17.4 billion in funding, including $14.3 billion from Meta Platforms, Surge hasn't raised outside capital despite surpassing Scale in revenue last year, The Information reported. Both companies handle a process known as post-training in which human contractors rate the performance of artificial intelligence models in solving problems in fields like biology, coding and math, and effectively teach the models what good answers look like. Both companies' customers include Meta and Google, among other AI developers. "We don't comment on rumor and speculation," a spokesperson for Surge said. A spokesperson for J.P. Morgan declined to comment. Reuters first reported on some details of the deal talks. | | | | Grammarly announced on Tuesday that it acquired AI email assistant Superhuman, part of the startup's effort to build a broad range of workplace software. The company didn't disclose financial terms of the deal. Superhuman was last valued at $825 million in a round led by IVP and Andreessen Horowitz in 2021. It was among the startups that could be up for sale this year, according to The Information's Enterprise Software Takeover List. Grammarly has been on an acquisition spree to expand its business beyond writing assistant software that checks grammar and syntax, including buying workplace collaboration startup Coda last December. The company also raised $1 billion from General Catalyst in May. | | | | Cloudflare, which manages web traffic and cybersecurity for around 20% of the internet, launched a new default setting that lets news outlets and other content providers block the web crawlers that AI firms use to scrape their data without permission. The company also announced a program, currently in private beta, which lets content owners strike agreements with AI companies for the use of their original content. Several customers, including Conde Nast, Dotdash Meredith, Gannett, Pinterest and Reddit, applauded the effort as a step toward giving publishers more control in the AI boom. The moves aren't out of character for Cloudflare, which has a history of taking strong positions on challenges its customers have faced. That includes publicly campaigning against the fees Amazon Web Services charges customers to move data out of its cloud and launching a tool that makes it easier for companies to move their data between different cloud providers. Cloudflare, which sells access to a content delivery network that speeds up customers' websites and protects them from cyberattacks, has also played content cop by knocking a Neo-Nazi website off the Internet in 2017. Now it is playing a similar role by attempting to mediate the simmering legal battles between news outlets and AI firms like OpenAI, Anthropic and Perplexity. | | | | Warner Bros. Discovery's second biggest shareholder, the Newhouse family, has sold half its stake in the entertainment company for $1.1 billion. The sale cuts the Newhouses' stake in WBD to 4%, below the disclosure threshold, which means it will be tough to track whether the family sells more stock in the coming months. The Newhouses are selling after three years of stagnation in WBD's stock price, as the company has struggled both to cope with the impact of cord-cutting on its TV business and to establish its Max streaming service as a competitor to Netflix, Disney and Amazon Prime Video. The company recently announced it was splitting in two, carving off its traditional TV channels from its streaming operations and the Warner Bros. studio. In a filing, the Newhouses said the sale was "intended to provide financial flexibility" related to estate planning. WBD stock fell 4.5% to $10.94. | | | | | Popular articles By Aaron Holmes and Sri Muppidi
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