News & Updates
The latest news and updates from companies in the WLTH portfolio.
Judge Strikes Pentagon Risk Label Against Anthropic
A California federal judge said the Trump administration's designation of Anthropic was unlawful retaliation and violated constitutional protections.Thank you for reading this post, don't forget to subscribe! A federal judge in California has thrown out the Trump administration's designation of Anthropic as a supply chain risk, handing the company its first court win in a fight that has put the Pentagon's AI procurement practices under a bright light. U.S. District Judge Rita Lin ruled Thursday evening that Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth's move was "unlawful retaliation" and violated the First Amendment. She also said the action was "arbitrary and capricious" and denied Anthropic due process under the Fifth Amendment. The label, the backlash, and the legal break The dispute started after Anthropic drew hard lines around safety guardrails that would have allowed the Pentagon to use its models for fully autonomous weapons and mass surveillance of American citizens. The Pentagon said it would use Anthropic models only for lawful purposes and argued the company was trying to control how the military used technology it had already bought. Hegseth and President Donald Trump later labeled Anthropic a supply-chain risk and ordered federal agencies, including those outside the Defense Department, to stop working with the Claude maker. Lin said the government's "words and deeds" showed the action was driven by a desire to make Anthropic "a public example" for its criticism of the administration. She also pointed to the disconnect between the risk label and other government actions, including Hegseth's proposal to apply the Defense Production Act to Anthropic, which would have treated the company as essential to national security rather than a threat to it. Why the court said the designation did not hold up The judge also cited the Defense Department's continued pursuit of a contract with Anthropic and the government's collaboration with the company's new model, Mythos, for cybersecurity. In Lin's view, those facts cut against the idea that Anthropic posed a supply-chain threat. She wrote that Anthropic "undisputedly lacks" any backdoor access to its technology once it is handed over to the Defense Department. That mattered. The ruling said the broad restrictions imposed on the company were not supported by the record. Also Read: Entercom Station News Radio 1120 Kmox in St. Louis Returns as Chiefs Radio Network Affiliate "Though the Department of War is undisputedly free to select the AI vendor of its choice, the evidence demonstrates that the broad measures imposed on Anthropic were illegal and baseless," Lin wrote. "The empty invocation of national security is not a blank check to punish and retaliate against government critics," she added. What Anthropic gets from the ruling Anthropic welcomed the decision. "We welcome the court's ruling that this supply chain risk designation was unlawful," a spokesperson said in a statement shared with TechCrunch. "We remain focused on working productively with the government to harness AI for our national security so all Americans benefit from this technology." The company filed two complaints against the Defense Department in March, one in California and one in Washington, D.C. The D.C. case is still . The ruling does not end the broader fight over how federal agencies buy and use frontier AI systems. It does, however, strip away one of the government's most aggressive moves against a major model provider and puts the administration on the defensive over how far national security can be stretched when a vendor pushes back on military use cases.
Judge blocks Pentagon blacklist of Anthropic as supply chain risk
Dario Amodei, co-founder and chief executive officer of Anthropic, during an interview on "The Circuit with Emily Chang" at Anthropic's headquarters in San Francisco, California, US, on Thursday, April 30, 2026. Jason Henry | Bloomberg | Getty Images A federal judge in California on Thursday ruled that the Pentagon's effort to blacklist Anthropic earlier this year violated the First Amendment and deprived the artificial intelligence company of its constitutionally protected liberties. This is breaking news. Please refresh for updates. Choose CNBC as your preferred source on Google and never miss a moment from the most trusted name in business news.
Judge Rules Trump Administration Violated Anthropic's First Amendment Rights
SAN FRANCISCO -- A federal judge ruled late Thursday that the Trump administration violated Anthropic's First Amendment rights and barred it from blacklisting Anthropic as a supply-chain risk, granting relief to the artificial-intelligence lab that has been embroiled in a monthslong fight with the ...
Anthropic Wins Court Challenge to US Supply-Chain Risk Label
The Trump administration must lift its ban on Anthropic PBC's artificial intelligence technology for federal agencies, a US judge ruled. US District Judge Rita F. Lin in San Francisco sided late Thursday with the Claude chatbot maker in its challenge to the Department of Defense, finding that the ...
US judge rules Pentagon blacklisting of Anthropic unlawful
WASHINGTON, Aug 27 (Reuters) - A U.S. judge ruled on Thursday that the Pentagon's blacklisting of Anthropic was unlawful. "The undisputed record shows that the challenged actions constituted unlawful retaliation in violation of the First Amendment, and that Anthropic was denied the pre-deprivation process required under the Fifth Amendment," U.S. District Judge Rita F. Lin wrote in a ruling. "The record further shows no material dispute that Secretary Hegseth's decision to designate Anthropic a supply chain risk violated the governing statutory scheme...and was arbitrary and capricious." (Reporting by Christian Martinez and Jasper Ward) Copyright Reuters or USA Today via Reuters Connect This story was originally published August 27, 2026 at 7:22 PM.
US judge rules Pentagon blacklisting of Anthropic unlawful
WASHINGTON, Aug 27 (Reuters) - A U.S. judge ruled on Thursday that the Pentagon's blacklisting of Anthropic was unlawful. "The undisputed record shows that the challenged actions constituted unlawful retaliation in violation of the First Amendment, and that Anthropic was denied the pre-deprivation process required under the Fifth Amendment," U.S. District Judge Rita F. Lin wrote in a ruling. "The record further shows no material dispute that Secretary Hegseth's decision to designate Anthropic a supply chain risk violated the governing statutory scheme...and was arbitrary and capricious." (Reporting by Christian Martinez and Jasper Ward) Copyright Reuters or USA Today via Reuters Connect This story was originally published August 27, 2026 at 8:22 PM.
US judge rules Pentagon blacklisting of Anthropic unlawful
WASHINGTON, Aug 27 (Reuters) - A U.S. judge ruled on Thursday that the Pentagon's blacklisting of Anthropic was unlawful. "The undisputed record shows that the challenged actions constituted unlawful retaliation in violation of the First Amendment, and that Anthropic was denied the pre-deprivation process required under the Fifth Amendment," U.S. District Judge Rita F. Lin wrote in a ruling. "The record further shows no material dispute that Secretary Hegseth's decision to designate Anthropic a supply chain risk violated the governing statutory scheme...and was arbitrary and capricious." (Reporting by Christian Martinez and Jasper Ward) Copyright Reuters or USA Today via Reuters Connect This story was originally published August 27, 2026 at 9:22 PM.
US judge rules Pentagon blacklisting of Anthropic unlawful
WASHINGTON, Aug 27 (Reuters) - A U.S. judge ruled on Thursday that the Pentagon's blacklisting of Anthropic was unlawful. "The undisputed record shows that the challenged actions constituted unlawful retaliation in violation of the First Amendment, and that Anthropic was denied the pre-deprivation process required under the Fifth Amendment," U.S. District Judge Rita F. Lin wrote in a ruling. "The record further shows no material dispute that Secretary Hegseth's decision to designate Anthropic a supply chain risk violated the governing statutory scheme...and was arbitrary and capricious." (Reporting by Christian Martinez and Jasper Ward) Copyright Reuters or USA Today via Reuters Connect This story was originally published August 27, 2026 at 6:22 PM.
US judge rules Pentagon blacklisting of Anthropic unlawful
WASHINGTON, Aug 27 (Reuters) - A U.S. judge ruled on Thursday that the Pentagon's blacklisting of Anthropic was unlawful. "The undisputed record shows that the challenged actions constituted unlawful retaliation in violation of the First Amendment, and that Anthropic was denied the pre-deprivation process required under the Fifth Amendment," U.S. District Judge Rita F. Lin wrote in a ruling. "The record further shows no material dispute that Secretary Hegseth's decision to designate Anthropic a supply chain risk violated the governing statutory scheme...and was arbitrary and capricious." Reporting by Christian Martinez and Jasper Ward Our Standards: The Thomson Reuters Trust Principles., opens new tab
Trump administration actions against Anthropic 'illegal and baseless,' US judge rules | MLex | Specialist news and analysis on legal risk and regulation
( August 28, 2026, 01:22 GMT | Official Statement) -- MLex Summary: A federal judge in California has ruled that the Department of War's action to remove Anthropic from the US supply chain for national security concerns was "illegal and baseless." "The undisputed record shows that the challenged actions constituted unlawful retaliation in violation of the First Amendment, and that Anthropic was denied the pre-deprivation process required under the Fifth Amendment," US District Judge Rita F. Lin ruled in San Francisco, granting Anthropic's motion for summary judgment against the government. "The government is certainly owed deference on weighty issues of national security," Lin added. "But Defendants' contemporaneous words and deeds confirm that the challenged actions were based on a desire to make a public example out of Anthropic for its 'arrogance' in criticizing the government, not based on any articulable basis to believe that Anthropic would actually sabotage its model."See attached order.... Prepare for tomorrow's regulatory change, today MLex identifies risk to business wherever it emerges, with specialist reporters across the globe providing exclusive news and deep-dive analysis on the proposals, probes, enforcement actions and rulings that matter to your organization and clients, now and in the longer term. Know what others in the room don't, with features including: * Daily newsletters for Antitrust, M&A, Trade, Data Privacy & Security, Technology, AI and more * Custom alerts on specific filters including geographies, industries, topics and companies to suit your practice needs * Predictive analysis from expert journalists across North America, the UK and Europe, Latin America and Asia-Pacific * Curated case files bringing together news, analysis and source documents in a single timeline Experience MLex today with a 14-day free trial.
Kraken Restricts Accounts After 12,000 Transfers From HTX-Linked Wallet | Market Kraken
Kraken temporarily restricted some customer accounts after nearly 12,000 small crypto transfers from a wallet linked to HTX arrived between Aug. 17 and Aug. 24, which the exchange flagged as a possible dust attack involving UK- and EU-sanctioned funds. HTX denies sending the transfers and is investigating while Kraken restored access to affected customers as it continues compliance reviews, underscoring sanctions, security and regulatory risk for CEXs and broader crypto adoption.
AI giant Anthropic in talks to lease massive Bastrop County data center, sources said
by: Justin Sayers- Senior Staff Writer, Austin Business Journal AUSTIN (ABJ) -- Fresh off its huge data center lease in Milam County northeast of Austin, Silicon Valley-based Anthropic PBC is in talks to occupy a gargantuan data center development on the east side in Bastrop County. While no agreement has been finalized, the artificial intelligence company has been working with Washington, D.C.-based BlackChamber Partners LLC and Dallas-based Pacifico Energy LLC on what's been described as a 2,842-acre gas-fired electric generation facility to support a major data center development in the Cedar Creek area, several sources told ABJ. Read the full article on the Austin Business Journal.
Companies not as keen on Anthropic's best AI model
Enterprises appear to be prioritizing cheaper AI tools instead. endif; ?> New payment data from Ramp suggests that Anthropic's most advanced AI model, Fable 5, has had a slow start among enterprise customers, the Financial Times reports. Two months after launch, Fable 5 accounts for about 11% of total enterprise spending on Anthropic models, breaking the previous trend of customers quickly moving to the most powerful model. According to analysts and investors, the development is mainly due to Fable 5's high price and the fact that cheaper models are good enough for most tasks.
Anthropic upgrades Claude's streaming renderer, claims 9x fewer stalls on slower laptops
The frontend optimization delivers smoother token streaming for long responses without changing Claude's underlying models or API Anthropic rolled out a frontend optimization to Claude's streaming response renderer on August 24, targeting a problem that anyone who's tried to get a long answer from an AI chatbot on an older machine knows well: the maddening stutter-and-freeze cycle that turns a conversation into a slideshow. The update applies to Claude's web and desktop applications. According to Anthropic, long answers now stream roughly 4x smoother, stalls on slower laptops drop by 9x, and worst-case freezes shrink by 4.5x. On hardware that supports it, like 120 Hz MacBooks, the renderer can sustain 120 fps during streaming output. What actually changed under the hood The core fix is elegant in its simplicity. Previously, each incoming token from Claude's model triggered a repaint of the full response container, or at least a substantial portion of it. The new approach restricts UI updates to only the elements that have actually changed, resulting in dramatically less computational overhead per token, which matters most on machines with limited GPU headroom or older processors. Critically, Anthropic made no changes to its models or API with this release. Generation speed, output quality, and the underlying inference pipeline remain untouched. This is purely a presentation-layer improvement. Why UI performance matters in the AI race The 120 fps sustained frame rate figure is particularly telling. Most web applications don't need to think about frame rates at all, but streaming text renderers are effectively animations. Each new token is a frame update. When you're generating hundreds of tokens for a long response, that's hundreds of sequential frame updates, and any hitch becomes visible as a stutter or freeze. Hitting 120 fps on compatible hardware means Anthropic's renderer can now match the refresh rate of Apple's ProMotion displays without dropping frames. The feedback loop, and its limits User reception on social media was largely positive, with many noting that the improvement was immediately noticeable during extended conversations. But some responses highlighted a tension that Anthropic and every other AI company faces: polishing the interface doesn't fix the model. Several users pointed out that smoother streaming doesn't help when Claude hallucinates a citation or confidently delivers incorrect information. The update also has implications for Anthropic's enterprise ambitions. Corporate users often run standardized hardware that skews older than what developers and early adopters use. A 9x reduction in stalls on slower laptops isn't just a nice stat for a blog post. It's the difference between an enterprise deployment that employees actually use and one they abandon for a competitor after a week of frustrating freezes.
xAI asks US appeals court to reverse dismissal of trade secret case against OpenAI | MLex | Specialist news and analysis on legal risk and regulation
( August 24, 2026, 22:26 GMT | Official Statement) -- MLex Summary: xAI argues a US judge erred by dismissing the company's lawsuit accusing OpenAI of running a coordinated campaign to poach xAI engineers and acquire trade secrets through them in an opening brief to the US Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit. The lower court misapplied the Defend Trade Secrets Act and improperly discounted corroborating allegations from former xAI employees, xAI said. "The district court's decision sets an impossibly high bar for pleading trade secret claims ... supplying a roadmap for bad actors to evade liability," xAI said.See attached brief.... Prepare for tomorrow's regulatory change, today MLex identifies risk to business wherever it emerges, with specialist reporters across the globe providing exclusive news and deep-dive analysis on the proposals, probes, enforcement actions and rulings that matter to your organization and clients, now and in the longer term. Know what others in the room don't, with features including: * Daily newsletters for Antitrust, M&A, Trade, Data Privacy & Security, Technology, AI and more * Custom alerts on specific filters including geographies, industries, topics and companies to suit your practice needs * Predictive analysis from expert journalists across North America, the UK and Europe, Latin America and Asia-Pacific * Curated case files bringing together news, analysis and source documents in a single timeline Experience MLex today with a 14-day free trial.
CFTC, US soldier Accused of Illegal Polymarket Bet Spar over Interpretation of Prediction Markets
A judge stayed the CFTC's civil case against a soldier who allegedly used nonpublic information for a Polymarket bet, but the regulator is trying to weigh in on the criminal case. Gannon Ken Van Dyke, a soldier who allegedly made more than $400,000 using nonpublic information to trade event contracts on prediction market platform Polymarket, is pushing back against attempts by the US Commodity Futures Trading Commission (CFTC) to weigh in on his criminal case. In a Monday filing in the US District Court for the Southern District of New York, Van Dyke's lawyers opposed the CFTC's efforts to file an amicus brief relating to claims in his case. The letter referred to the commodities regulator's counsel filing a notice requesting permission from the court to provide its views on many of Van Dyke's defense claims, including that event contracts on platforms like Polymarket were not "swaps" under the purview of the CFTC. "The CFTC is no sheep 'friend of the Court' here," said defense attorneys. "It is a regulatory wolf, with its own case against Mr. Van Dyke that it refuses to pursue itself. Rather, like a true coursing predator, the CTFC seeks to advance its own interests through the back door of an amicus brief instead of facing its own case against Mr. Van Dyke head on. This Court should not countenance the CFTC's litigation gambits." US authorities charged Van Dyke with fraud in April over allegations he traded event contracts on Polymarket related to the removal of Venezuelan President Nicolás Maduro in January, an operation for which he was privy to nonpublic information. The incident has been one of the leading cases lawmakers and critics of prediction markets point to as an example of potential manipulation on platforms like Kalshi and Polymarket. A federal judge already ordered that the CFTC's civil case against Van Dyke be stayed "pending the outcome of the criminal proceeding." He has pleaded not guilty to all charges and a criminal trial could potentially begin in late 2026 or early 2027.
Anthropic Intros Invisible Watermarks to Claude-Generated Text -- THE Journal
Anthropic Intros Invisible Watermarks to Claude-Generated Text * By John K. Waters * 08/24/26 Anthropic announced it is incorporating invisible watermarks into text generated by its Claude AI models, offering an early look at how major AI companies may respond to new European rules requiring machine-readable identification of AI-generated content. The AI company detailed its approach as part of changes designed to comply with transparency requirements under the European Union's AI Act. The measures apply globally to supported Claude models, rather than only to users in Europe. For text, Anthropic is using a version of SynthID-Text, an open source watermarking approach developed by Google DeepMind. Instead of adding visible labels or hidden characters, the system subtly influences the model's choices as it generates text, creating a statistical pattern that can later be detected. The process takes advantage of the fact that large language models often have several plausible choices for the next token in a response. The watermarking system can influence those choices in ways that create a detectable signature while preserving the overall meaning of the text. Anthropic says the watermark has no practical impact on the quality or content of Claude's output and does not increase the cost of using the model. The company is taking a different approach for images. Claude-processed images will use the Coalition for Content Provenance and Authenticity (C2PA) standard to attach provenance information to supported image files. The changes come as AI developers face growing pressure to make synthetic content easier to identify. Article 50 of the EU AI Act requires providers of systems that generate synthetic audio, images, video, or text to ensure their outputs are marked in a machine-readable format and detectable as artificially generated or manipulated. Anthropic has linked its watermarking changes directly to those requirements. The rules could make watermarking a more common feature across generative AI services as other companies operating in Europe address the same requirements. But watermarking AI-generated text presents challenges that do not exist in the same way for images or video. Anthropic acknowledges that its watermark is not intended to provide definitive proof that a piece of text was written by Claude. The company has also warned that quoted Claude-generated text could carry the watermark into another document, while text without a detectable watermark should not automatically be considered human-written. The watermark may survive copying, pasting, and some editing, but more extensive changes to generated text can make detection more difficult. The approach has also prompted criticism from some Claude users who are concerned about how watermarked text could be interpreted when AI is used for tasks such as editing, translation, or formatting rather than generating an entire document. Anthropic has said the presence of a watermark indicates that text was processed by Claude, not necessarily that Claude was responsible for its authorship. For more information, go to the Anthropic blog.
Anthropic Adding Invisible Watermarks to Claude-Generated Text -- Campus Technology
Anthropic Adding Invisible Watermarks to Claude-Generated Text * By John K. Waters * 08/24/26 Anthropic announced it is adding invisible watermarks to text generated by its Claude AI models, offering an early look at how major AI companies may respond to new European rules requiring machine-readable identification of AI-generated content. The AI company detailed its approach as part of changes designed to comply with transparency requirements under the European Union's AI Act. The measures apply globally to supported Claude models, rather than only to users in Europe. For text, Anthropic is using a version of SynthID-Text, an open source watermarking approach developed by Google DeepMind. Instead of adding visible labels or hidden characters, the system subtly influences the model's choices as it generates text, creating a statistical pattern that can later be detected. The process takes advantage of the fact that large language models often have several plausible choices for the next token in a response. The watermarking system can influence those choices in ways that create a detectable signature while preserving the overall meaning of the text. Anthropic says the watermark has no practical impact on the quality or content of Claude's output and does not increase the cost of using the model. The company is taking a different approach for images. Claude-processed images will use the Coalition for Content Provenance and Authenticity (C2PA) standard to attach provenance information to supported image files. The changes come as AI developers face growing pressure to make synthetic content easier to identify. Article 50 of the EU AI Act requires providers of systems that generate synthetic audio, images, video, or text to ensure their outputs are marked in a machine-readable format and detectable as artificially generated or manipulated. Anthropic has linked its watermarking changes directly to those requirements. The rules could make watermarking a more common feature across generative AI services as other companies operating in Europe address the same requirements. But watermarking AI-generated text presents challenges that do not exist in the same way for images or video. Anthropic acknowledges that its watermark is not intended to provide definitive proof that a piece of text was written by Claude. The company has also warned that quoted Claude-generated text could carry the watermark into another document, while text without a detectable watermark should not automatically be considered human-written. The watermark may survive copying, pasting, and some editing, but more extensive changes to generated text can make detection more difficult. The approach has also prompted criticism from some Claude users who are concerned about how watermarked text could be interpreted when AI is used for tasks such as editing, translation, or formatting rather than generating an entire document. Anthropic has said the presence of a watermark indicates that text was processed by Claude, not necessarily that Claude was responsible for its authorship. For more information, read the Anthropic blog.
Who Should Control Anthropic?
Traditionally there are two main theories of corporate governance: * Shareholders are the owners of the firm, and they should have the final say in how it is run. Of course a board of directors and a chief executive officer run the company day to day, but the shareholders have the ultimate power to ...
David Sacks accuses Anthropic of regulatory capture against open source AI
The White House tech advisor warns that a proposed self-regulatory body could quietly kill open source AI models through compliance requirements they can never meet David Sacks, venture capitalist and co-chair of the President's Council of Advisors on Science and Technology, is sounding the alarm on what he calls a quiet regulatory strategy to suffocate open source AI. His argument: you don't need to ban something outright if you can just regulate it into irrelevance. During an episode of the All-In Podcast, Sacks laid out a scenario in which a self-regulatory organization designed for AI oversight gradually morphs into a mandatory pre-release approval agency. Think of it as a DMV for AI models, except instead of waiting in line to renew your license, developers would need to get their models blessed before releasing them to the public. The compliance trap The core of Sacks' concern is structural. A pre-release approval regime would impose compliance requirements that proprietary, closed models from companies like Anthropic could feasibly meet. Open source models, by their very nature, cannot. Once you release an open source model into the wild, it's out there. It's decentralized, forkable, and immutable. You can't recall it for a safety audit the way Anthropic can update Claude behind a closed API. Requiring pre-release certification would essentially create a regulatory framework where closed models pass and open models fail by default. Sacks specifically named Anthropic, the company led by CEO Dario Amodei, as the primary actor pursuing what he described as "sophisticated regulatory capture." In his telling, Anthropic has positioned itself as the responsible adult in the room, advocating loudly for AI safety while quietly lobbying for regulatory structures that happen to favor its own business model. The industry split What makes Sacks' framing notable is the degree of isolation he attributes to Anthropic. According to him, virtually the entire tech industry supports open source AI development, with Anthropic standing as the notable exception. Meta, which has invested heavily in its open-weight Llama model family, represents the other end of the spectrum, betting that open release accelerates adoption and ecosystem development. The competitive dimension extends well beyond Silicon Valley. Chinese-developed open-weight models have recently topped or approached critical benchmarks, a development that Sacks has used to sharpen his argument about American competitiveness. If the US constrains open source AI through regulatory friction while China faces no such limitations, the talent and innovation gap could widen in the wrong direction. Sacks has been vocal on X about this framing, repeatedly invoking the principle of "permissionless innovation," the idea that developers should be able to build and release technology without needing prior government approval. What this means for the AI landscape The companies most exposed to this regulatory risk are the ones building in the open. Meta's Llama ecosystem, Mistral, Stability AI, and the broader constellation of startups and research labs that depend on freely available model weights all face a scenario where their core distribution model becomes legally complicated, if not outright impossible. Sacks' warning also carries weight because of his current position. As co-chair of the President's Council of Advisors on Science and Technology, he's not just a podcast commentator. He has a direct channel to policy discussions, which means his framing of the issue, regulatory capture dressed up as safety, could influence how the White House approaches AI governance.
