| |  | Sep 26, 2025 | | | | | | TGIF! President Trump signs an executive order approving the TikTok deal, which values the video app's U.S. operation at $14 billion. Google considered selling part of its ad tech business last year. Amazon reaches a $2.5 billion settlement with the Federal Trade Commission.
| | | | Vice President JD Vance said Thursday that a new company poised to take over TikTok's U.S. operations will be valued at about $14 billion, well below what was expected. Vance made the comments at the Oval Office, where Trump was signing an executive order approving the proposed deal. ByteDance, which owns TikTok, was valued at $330 billion in a recent employee share sale. Earlier Thursday, Bloomberg reported that MGX, the United Arab Emirates-backed investment fund, was in talks to join the consortium of non-Chinese investors involved in the deal, which also includes Oracle. The administration has not yet disclosed the complete lineup of investors but Vance said they intend to announce more details in the coming days. Addressing a question from a reporter about whether he hoped to see TikTok's algorithm show more MAGA-related content on the U.S. app, Trump responded: "If I could make it 100% MAGA I would, but it's not gonna work out that way unfortunately." | | | | Google considered selling part of its ad tech unit as recently as 2024, a Google executive testified in federal court in Virginia on Thursday, after considering the same idea in 2021. The company also considered putting part of its ad tech business into Google Cloud and selling its software as aservice. The disclosures were made by Tim Craycroft, a Google vice president and general manager of ads, under questioning by a lawyer for the Justice Department. The lawyer was trying to demonstrate that it was technically feasible for Google to break off parts of its ad tech business, even as Google has argued that doing so wasn't possible. Craycroft added that the 2024 divestiture discussions concerned the ad tech unit's contracts, patents and revenue, but not the majority of its technology. The testimony came in the fourth day of a hearing on how Google's ad tech business should be overhauled to remedy its monopoly in the market for helping publishers sell ad space. The government wants Google to have to sell the part of its ad tech unit that deals with publishers. Craycroft didn't explain why Google had considered selling the unit in the past, although complaints about Google's power in the sector have circulated for several years, even as Google's revenue from handling ads on other people's websites has declined. Of note, Google has offered to sell parts of its business during the course of the Department of Justice's investigation and case, but Google and the government couldn't agree on terms, Bloomberg reported earlier this month. Chief Business Officer Philipp Schindler was involved in last year's consideration, Craycroft testified, and then-Chief Financial Officer Ruth Porat and Schindler were involved in the 2021 discussions. | | | | Amazon will pay $2.5 billion to settle the Federal Trade Commission's lawsuit over the e-commerce firm's alleged use of deceptive practices to unknowingly lock consumers into its Prime membership, the FTC announced Thursday. Amazon will pay a $1 billion civil penalty and refund $1.5 billion to roughly 35 million consumers, the statement said. In addition to the payments, the settlement will require Amazon to include a "clear and conspicuous" button for consumers to decline Prime enrollment and can no longer have a button that says "No, I don't want Free Shipping." Amazon must also have clear disclosures about the cost of Prime and how consumers will be charged, as well as have an easy way for shoppers to cancel their subscriptions. "Amazon and our executives have always followed the law and this settlement allows us to move forward and focus on innovating for customers," spokesperson Mark Blafkin said in a statement. "We work incredibly hard to make it clear and simple for customers to both sign up or cancel their Prime membership, and to offer substantial value for our many millions of loyal Prime members around the world. We will continue to do so, and look forward to what we'll deliver for Prime members in the coming years." The FTC originally sued Amazon in 2023, and the suit went to trial in Seattle earlier this week. The consumer protection lawsuit is separate from an FTC antitrust lawsuit against Amazon, which alleges that it uses illegal monopolization tactics to control online commerce. That suit isn't due to go to trial until 2027. | | | | Elon Musk's xAI sued OpenAI for hiring away several employees who xAI alleges stole trade secrets. Staff that have jumped from xAI to OpenAI include several engineers and former CFO Mike Liberatore. The lawsuit, filed late Wednesday, alleges that OpenAI poached eight xAI employees as part of a "deliberate scheme" to steal confidential information. xAI already filed a separate lawsuit last month against one of the former employees named in the lawsuit, Xuechen Li. Other employees named in the suit include former engineers Ethan Knight, Hieu Pham and former head of infrastructure engineering Uday Raddurraju. An OpenAI spokesperson said: "This new lawsuit is the latest chapter in Mr Musk's ongoing harassment. We have no tolerance for any breaches of confidentiality, nor any interest in trade secrets from other labs." The lawsuit didn't name Liberatore but it did include a screenshot of an email sent by xAI lawyer Alex Sprio to an unnamed "senior finance executive" in July, accusing the executive of breaching their confidentiality agreement. The former executive responded with "s— my d—", the lawsuit showed. Liberatore left the company in July after three months and joined OpenAI in September. | | | | The Trump administration is considering requiring companies to produce the same number of chips domestically as they import from overseas, with non-compliant companies facing tariffs, according to The Wall Street Journal, citing people familiar with the matter. The policy would create substantial operational challenges for major technology companies like Apple and Nvidia, which rely on products containing chips from multiple global suppliers. It would be challenging for companies to quickly match domestically produced chips with overseas ones, as expanding U.S. production capacity requires significant investments and time. However, the proposal could benefit companies already expanding their U.S. operations, including Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Company, Micron Technology, and GlobalFoundries. These manufacturers could gain increased leverage in customer negotiations as demand for domestic production grows. The proposal stems from President Trump's previous statements that tech companies need greater investments in the U.S. to avoid the roughly 100% semiconductor tariffs. Under the proposed rule, companies pledging to build chips domestically would receive credits over time, allowing continued imports without tariffs until their U.S. facilities become operational, according to the Journal. | | | | Cloud AI provider Databricks, through a new agreement with OpenAI, will be able to host models such as GPT-5 for its customers, in a move to address data security concerns for Fortune 500 companies. The partnership enables Databricks' customers to run OpenAI's models and design AI agents directly within the Databricks platform. Databricks expects to spend at least $100 million across multiple years to provide customers access to OpenAI's models. The agreement could help Databricks generate more revenue from customers building AI applications using the data they store and manage in its cloud service. The agreement, which is similar to one Databricks announced with Anthropic in March, is the latest example of AI companies making it easier for customers to build AI applications without moving their data. This is especially important for firms in regulated industries, such as banks, which have strict data security requirements. | | | | Apple has urged the European Union to repeal the Digital Markets Act, claiming it causes delays in new features and increases privacy and security risks for users on the continent. The company said the law has forced it to postpone features like iPhone mirroring to Mac and live translation with AirPods due to engineering challenges. Location-based features in Maps were also delayed because the DMA requires compatibility with non-Apple products. "Over time, it's become clear that the DMA isn't helping markets," the company said in a statement on its website. "It's making it harder to do business in Europe. Apple said it can't comply with the demands from the European Commission—the entity that oversees the DMA on the EU's behalf—without compromising user data and that its proposed safeguards were rejected. In June, Apple adjusted its App Store rules and fees in Europe to comply with an EU antitrust order. Apple said this has led to a riskier app experience for iPhone users, with scams, malware and pornography apps appearing due to sideloading and alternative marketplaces. The DMA, which came into force last year, mandates that large tech firms to open their platforms to competitors. European Commission officials told The Wall Street Journal the organization has no intention to repeal the law. | | | | OpenAI agreed to purchase up to $6.5 billion of cloud services from CoreWeave, pushing its contracted spending with the cloud provider to about $22.4 billion, the companies said Thursday. The expanded contract adds to OpenAI's spending commitments as it tries to secure enough computing power to train new artificial-intelligence models and serve its growing customer base. OpenAI said this week it's working on five new data center sites with Oracle and SoftBank and signed a $100 billion deal with Nvidia to use its chips. CoreWeave in July raised $2.6 billion in debt to help it deliver cloud computing to OpenAI. | | | | The U.S. government said Thursday that it had signed a deal with Elon Musk's xAI that will allow federal workers to use the Grok chatbot for a nominal fee. The government announced similar deals with OpenAI and Anthropic last month. "Thanks to President Trump and his administration, xAI's frontier AI is now unlocked for every federal agency empowering the U.S. Government to innovate faster and accomplish its mission more effectively than ever before," Musk said in a press release. Musk had been a close ally of President Trump during the first months of his presidency before the pair had a public falling-out over the summer. On Sunday, Musk was pictured speaking with Trump at Charlie Kirk's memorial. xAI will charge $0.42 per federal agency, according to the press release from the General Services Administration, which handles many government contracts. OpenAI and Anthropic are charging $1 per agency. All three startups, as well as Google, were also awarded $200 million Pentagon contracts this summer. | | | | Google DeepMind released the latest version of its flagship language model designed for powering robots, touting the model's ability to detect nearby objects, plan motions such as how to grab a mug and search the internet for information, such as local recycling laws. The unit of Alphabet's Google also made the model, Gemini Robotics-ER 1.5, available for developers to use. 'ER' stands for embodied reasoning, indicating the model's ability to understand the physical world. Those skills also allow a second model, Gemini Robotics 1.5, to control a robot to complete tasks, such as cleaning a table or sorting trash. Users can instruct ER 1.5 to "think" for longer to improve a robot's accuracy on more complex tasks. DeepMind announced earlier robotics models in March, but those were not made broadly available to developers. | | | Popular articles
By Wayne Ma, Aaron Tilley, Qianer Liu and Juro Osawa
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