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The Briefing: AI and Sports

The Briefing
The biggest stars of MLB, Shohei Ohtani of the Los Angeles Dodgers and Aaron Judge of the New York Yankees, are taking the field on day one of the playoffs this evening. The league's attendance and TV ratings are up. America's pastime, often left for dead, has proven to be good business for its players and owners. I mention this not just because I am writing with one eye on the Red Sox–Yankees game—but because sports are emerging as a safe haven for investors from the unpredictable world of artificial intelligence. 
Sep 30, 2025

The Briefing

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Join The Information and IBM on October 7 during San Francisco Tech Week for a cocktail reception and a discussion on how AI is reshaping sports and its fans. Speakers include Olympic Gold Medalist Aly Wagner, who is also a Co-founder and co-chair of Bay Football Club. Reserve your spot here.


Greetings!

The biggest stars of MLB, Shohei Ohtani of the Los Angeles Dodgers and Aaron Judge of the New York Yankees, are taking the field on day one of the playoffs this evening. The league's attendance and TV ratings are up. America's pastime, often left for dead, has proven to be good business for its players and owners.

I mention this not just because I am writing with one eye on the Red Sox–Yankees game—but because sports are emerging as a safe haven for investors from the unpredictable world of artificial intelligence. 

Don't take my word for it. That's how private equity behemoth Silver Lake is thinking about the world after taking a multibillion-dollar stake in the take-private of EA, which publishes some of the biggest sports videogame franchises, especially in soccer and football. The Financial Times wrote in a behind-the-scenes feature on the deal today that Silver Lake "believes AI will lead to an explosion of leisure time, fueling growing spending on sports and entertainment." The private equity firm also has stakes in the Ultimate Fighting Championship, Manchester City soccer club and minor league baseball teams. 

An increase in leisure time sounds great—or foreboding. (Will we still have jobs after the invention of AI superintelligence?) Another way to look at it is that people will be starved for any kind of live-action entertainment if they get hooked on feeds of AI-generated videos. OpenAI's latest buzzy product launch today was Sora 2, which allows people to create AI-generated videos. Expect to hear the word "slop" a lot more if Sora 2 takes off. (Slop mongering has taken over my X feed—a sentence that would have made no sense a few years ago.)

The Sora 2 launch is a reminder that a lot of the money swirling around AI represents a bet that the technology will make good in bigger ways, not just on its promise to disrupt coding, finance and other desk jobs that don't require much imagination. (Even that may take years, speakers at The Information's AI Agenda summit said Tuesday.) AI's other promise is to create stunning visual scenes and beautiful songs, thanks to lots and lots of capital and compute, while requiring less labor.

The development isn't terrible for the Ohtanis or Judges of their field. Paul Thomas Anderson doesn't have much to worry about in the creative world. Interest in the best athletes and artists is sure to remain strong in what is emerging as a superstar economy. Where will that leave everyone else? Maybe with more leisure time, if we're lucky. 

The looming government shutdown is the biggest national news of the day. In tech, such an event could mean a tougher funding environment for anyone trying to sell education software, healthcare tools or climate technology to the government.

But the venture capitalists and startups in the ever-trendy area of defense tech aren't sweating as much. (Have we started calling it war tech? The Defense Department's recent rebrand begs the question.) 

That's because national security agencies largely can keep spending even during the shutdown, and it's the start of a new fiscal year, so new budget dollars are up for grabs. "The mission continues," Ian Kalin, CEO of defense startup TurbineOne, which has contracts with the U.S. Army, told me. "We anticipate essential national security work to move forward without interruption."

An interesting question is whether defense tech startups will take advantage of President Donald Trump's plan to use U.S. cities as a "training ground" to fight the "invasion from within," as he said in a speech to generals today. If Trump's rhetoric becomes policy, will new-age drones get used on American citizens? How about autonomous warships? 

Startups like Anduril, Shield AI and Saronic have lapped up billions of venture dollars in recent years when enemy lines were relatively uncontroversial: to beat China and Russia, protect Taiwan and Ukraine, safeguard the border.

Now those lines are getting fuzzier. 

• Spotify founder and CEO Daniel Ek is kicking himself upstairs, shifting to the role of executive chair, the music-streaming firm announced on Tuesday. Spotify's co-presidents, Gustav Söderström and Alex Norström, will succeed Ek, becoming co-CEOs.

• The U.S. Department of Commerce is expanding its export restrictions to cover the subsidiaries of blacklisted firms in a move that steps up Washington's effort to block Chinese companies' access to U.S. technology and suppliers.

Check out today's episode of TITV in which Vercel's COO Jeanne DeWitt Grosser, discusses the company's $300 million funding round and its aspirations to become the "AWS of AI."

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