| |  | Jan 28, 2026 | | | | | Supported by |  | | | | | | Happy Wednesday! Anthropic increases 2026 revenue forecast to $18 billion. OpenAI CEO says "ICE is going too far" in internal memo. China approves the first batch of Nvidia H200 AI chip imports.
| | | | Anthropic, in December, projected to generate as much as $18 billion this year, about 20% more than its summer forecast, and $55 billion next year. The company expects to generate as much as $148 billion in 2029 in its most optimistic projections– about $3 billion more than what OpenAI projected to make that year. Some of the fast revenue growth is from the company's success in selling access to its AI models via an application programming interface to business customers. In particular, the company has become popular for coding-related tasks, in part due to its coding agent Claude Code, which generated more than $1 billion in annualized revenue in November. But costs are adding up. The company revised its most optimistic projections to delay turning cash flow positive till 2028, a year later than previously expected. It projects to generate $2.2 billion in cash in 2028. Higher costs to train and run its AI models have contributed to the delay. This year, the company expects to spend $12 billion on training its models and $7 billion on running them for its paying users. The company is raising more than $10 billion at a valuation of $350 billion before the financing in a round led by Singapore's GIC and Coatue Management. Strategic investors Nvidia and Microsoft in November committed to invest $10 billion and $5 billion respectively. | | | | As more tech executives weigh in on the weekend's fatal shooting by federal immigration agents in Minneapolis, OpenAI CEO Sam Altman told staff this week that he believes "ICE is going too far," according to a copy of the internal memo published by the New York Times' DealBook. "There is a big difference between deporting violent criminals and what's happening now, and we need to get the distinction right," Altman wrote. He added that "President Trump is a very strong leader" and he hopes Trump "will rise to this moment and unite the country." Other tech figures, including Google DeepMind chief scientist Jeff Dean, Meta's former chief AI scientist Yann LeCun and top venture capitalist Vinod Khosla, have denounced the shooting in recent days. | | | | China has approved imports of the first batch of Nvidia's H200 AI chips, according to Reuters, citing two people familiar with the matter. The approval was granted as Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang visits China this week, after weeks of uncertainty whether and at which scale Beijing will allow the powerful chips in. ByteDance, Alibaba Group and Tencent Holdings have been allowed to purchase over 400,000 H200 chips in total, while other companies are waiting for subsequent approvals, Reuters reported. President Donald Trump approved the H200 chip sales to China last month, representing the most significant rollback of the Biden-era semiconductor export restrictions to date. Chinese officials have spent the past weeks balancing the imports of the H200 chips—which are needed to develop China's AI systems—against the long-term goal of cultivating semiconductor technology independence. While the H200 is the most powerful AI chip currently available to Chinese buyers, it remains less advanced than Nvidia's latest Blackwell processors. The Information reported earlier this month that Beijing told tech companies they could only buy H200 chips in special circumstances, without specifying the criteria. Last week, Bloomberg reported that ByteDance, Alibaba, and Tencent had received in principle approval for the H200 chips. | | | | Meta Platforms plans to test premium subscriptions on its apps in the next few months, TechCrunch reported. The subscriptions would offer access to exclusive features, including "expanded AI capabilities," TechCrunch said. The move could signal that Meta is looking to generate new revenue from its AI services, as a way of offsetting the enormous sums it is pouring into AI development. Meta's spending has pressured its stock in the past few months. The expanded AI capabilities will include products from Manus, the AI agent Meta recently acquired for $2 billion. | | | | Amazon said Tuesday it would close its Amazon Fresh grocery stores and Amazon Go convenience stores in the U.S., as the e-commerce giant refocuses its grocery strategy on its Whole Foods stores and online grocery delivery. Amazon launched the Fresh concept in 2020, and pitched the stores as a high-tech alternative to a regular supermarket equipped with the company's Just Walk Out automatic checkout technology. But Amazon slowed store openings starting in 2022 and ditched the Just Walk Out tech in the stores altogether in 2024. Amazon said it's closing the nearly 60 U.S. Fresh store locations because it hadn't "created a truly distinctive customer experience." Amazon has pushed to aggressively grow its grocery business without expanding Fresh, both through its Whole Foods Market stores as well as its fast-growing grocery delivery services. In 2025, Amazon added smaller Whole Foods Market stores and 30-minute delivery for "everyday essentials" like paper towels, produce and energy drinks. Some of the Amazon Fresh locations will be converted to Whole Foods stores, Amazon said, and the company will also add five more of the smaller Whole Foods stores by the end of the year. Amazon plans to continue experimenting with new types of stores, including a new big-box store it's planning in the Chicago suburbs. | | | | TikTok settled a lawsuit brought against several social media firms by a 20-year-old girl from Chico, Calif., who claims her social media addiction led to depression and suicidal thoughts. It is the first in a series of cases to go to trial, testing whether social media companies can be held liable for harming youth mental health through addictive product design. Tiktok settled the case hours before jury selection was set to begin in the case, plaintiffs' lawyers confirmed Tuesday morning. The case, in California superior court in Los Angeles, will still go forward against Meta Platforms and Google's YouTube. Snap settled the case last week. Tuesday's case is the first of thousands of cases brought by families, school districts, state attorneys general and Native American tribes. Both TikTok and Snap remain defendants in the other cases. | | | | SoftBank is in talks to invest up to $30 billion in OpenAI, The Wall Street Journal reported on Tuesday. An investment of that size would add to its more than $30 billion investment in the ChatGPT maker, likely cementing its role as the biggest shareholder. The talks are part of an ongoing funding round. OpenAI is in the process of raising tens of billions of dollars—as much as $100 billion—at a valuation of around $750 billion before the financing, The Information was first to report. SoftBank led OpenAI's $41 billion round that valued OpenAI at $260 billion before the investment last year. It also invested in a prior fundraise and share sale. | | | | The average price to ride in Waymo's robotaxis has dropped by 3.6% since March to $19.69 per ride, according to a new report by ride-hailing analytics firm Obi. Riding in a Waymo is now, on average, 12.7% more expensive than riding in an Uber and 27.4% more expensive than riding in a Lyft, down from a 30% to 40% premium for Waymo rides last April, the month covered by Obi's previous report. Obi's report looked at more than 90,000 rides in the San Francisco Bay Area during December 2025. The convergence in pricing partly stems from Uber and Lyft having raised their average prices, by 12% to $17.47 and 7% to $15.47 respectively, since last spring, according to the Obi report. "I wonder if there's a Waymo effect to that in the sense that Waymo came out and had much higher prices and people showed that they were willing to pay those prices," said Ashwini Anburajan, CEO of Obi, about the finding, though she added that Obi's analysis did not take into account the potential impact of gas prices or economic inflation. Obi's report also noted that 63% of over 2,000 robotaxi riders surveyed by Obi across locales where such vehicles were available say they are comfortable with the technology, up from 35% in Obi's previous survey last spring. | | | | Pinterest said Tuesday it will lay off up to 15% of its employees, or around 700 staffers, as part of a restructuring to put more resources towards artificial intelligence-focused projects. The digital scrapbooking app has been fighting for user attention as AI chatbot apps like ChatGPT grab a larger share of user attention, and has also seen a slowdown in advertising revenue. In Pinterest's most recent quarterly report in November, CFO Julie Donnelly said that some U.S. retailers had pulled back on ad spending in part due to "tariff-related margin pressure." Additionally, ad pricing declined 24% from a year earlier as ads in cheaper overseas markets made up a greater share of Pinterest's revenue. As part of the restructuring, Pinterest said it will put more resources towards "prioritizing AI-powered products and capabilities." Still, the company has tried to walk a fine line between incorporating more AI into its features and angering existing users who don't want AI-generated content. Last week, Pinterest named former DoorDash executive Lee Brown as its new chief business officer to oversee sales, content and ad product marketing. | | | | Microsoft has started using the latest version of its in-house AI chip, the company said on Monday, as part of its efforts to lessen reliance on Nvidia's state-of-the-art chips. The new chips—called Maia 200—are already being used in one Microsoft data center, and the company plans to roll them out globally, executive vice president Scott Guthrie said in a blog post. Guthrie said that Microsoft has been able to use the chips to reduce the cost of running AI software like its 365 Copilot, which uses AI models from OpenAI and Anthropic to automate tasks in its Office 365 software. Microsoft isn't the only company trying to build in-house competitors to Nvidia's AI-specialized chips. Cloud rivals Amazon and Google have each developed their own proprietary AI chips, which they make available to cloud customers. It's not clear whether Microsoft plans to make servers equipped with Maia 200 available to Azure customers. This week's announcement comes after Microsoft revised its plans to roll out the chip globally following delays. | | | | | Popular articles By Ann Gehan and Catherine Perloff
By Kevin McLaughlin and Sri Muppidi
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