News & Updates
The latest news and updates from companies in the WLTH portfolio.
Kraken Robotics Inc (KRKNF) (Q2 2026) Earnings Call Highlights: Record Orders and Covelya ...
This article first appeared on GuruFocus. * Revenue: Consolidated revenue for Q2 totaled CAD27 million, including product revenue of approximately CAD17 million and service revenue of over CAD10 million. * Revenue Growth: Excluding a CAD1.5 million impact from a change in scope on an integration project, consolidated revenue increased approximately 10% year-over-year. * Product Revenue Growth: Excluding the scope change, product revenue grew 11% in the quarter and 25% for the first half of the year. * Service Revenue Growth: Service revenue grew 6% in the quarter year-over-year, or 9% for the first half of the year. * Gross Profit: Gross profit increased to over CAD16 million in Q2. * Gross Margin: Gross profit margin remained strong at 59%, up slightly over the prior year. * Adjusted EBITDA: Adjusted EBITDA increased slightly to CAD5 million, with an adjusted EBITDA margin of 18%. * Adjusted EBITDA Growth: Excluding the scope change, adjusted EBITDA margins would have been 20%, with adjusted EBITDA growth of 26%. * Capital Expenditures: Capital expenditures and tangible assets purchased totaled just over CAD9 million in Q2, compared to CAD6 million in the prior year. * Cash Position: Cash position was just over CAD91 million at quarter-end. * Working Capital: Working capital was CAD152 million at quarter-end. * Long-Term Debt: Long-term debt and obligations and lease liabilities were approximately CAD40 million. * 2026 Guidance: The company expects annual revenues of CAD209 million to CAD320 million, adjusted EBITDA between CAD65 million and CAD75 million, and capital expenditures in the range of CAD27 million to CAD33 million. Release Date: August 27, 2026 For the complete transcript of the earnings call, please refer to the full earnings call transcript. Positive Points * Closed transformative acquisition of Covelya Group, significantly expanding technological capabilities and total addressable market. * Strong product demand with CAD355 million in product orders year-to-date, including CAD27 million in incremental orders since July. * Gross profit margin remained strong at 59%, up slightly year-over-year. * Expanded customer base with new long-term master supply agreement with an XL UUV manufacturer and added nearly 10 new battery OEM customers. * Strong balance sheet with cash of CAD91 million and minimal net debt post-acquisition.
Kraken Robotics Inc (KRKNF) (Q2 2026) Earnings Call Highlights: Record Orders and Covelya ...
This article first appeared on GuruFocus. * Revenue: Consolidated revenue for Q2 totaled CAD27 million, including product revenue of approximately CAD17 million and service revenue of over CAD10 million. * Revenue Growth: Excluding a CAD1.5 million impact from a change in scope on an integration project, consolidated revenue increased approximately 10% year-over-year. * Product Revenue Growth: Excluding the scope change, product revenue grew 11% in the quarter and 25% for the first half of the year. * Service Revenue Growth: Service revenue grew 6% in the quarter year-over-year, or 9% for the first half of the year. * Gross Profit: Gross profit increased to over CAD16 million in Q2. * Gross Margin: Gross profit margin remained strong at 59%, up slightly over the prior year. * Adjusted EBITDA: Adjusted EBITDA increased slightly to CAD5 million, with an adjusted EBITDA margin of 18%. * Adjusted EBITDA Growth: Excluding the scope change, adjusted EBITDA margins would have been 20%, with adjusted EBITDA growth of 26%. * Capital Expenditures: Capital expenditures and tangible assets purchased totaled just over CAD9 million in Q2, compared to CAD6 million in the prior year. * Cash Position: Cash position was just over CAD91 million at quarter-end. * Working Capital: Working capital was CAD152 million at quarter-end. * Long-Term Debt: Long-term debt and obligations and lease liabilities were approximately CAD40 million. * 2026 Guidance: The company expects annual revenues of CAD209 million to CAD320 million, adjusted EBITDA between CAD65 million and CAD75 million, and capital expenditures in the range of CAD27 million to CAD33 million. Release Date: August 27, 2026 For the complete transcript of the earnings call, please refer to the full earnings call transcript. Positive Points * Closed transformative acquisition of Covelya Group, significantly expanding technological capabilities and total addressable market. * Strong product demand with CAD355 million in product orders year-to-date, including CAD27 million in incremental orders since July. * Gross profit margin remained strong at 59%, up slightly year-over-year. * Expanded customer base with new long-term master supply agreement with an XL UUV manufacturer and added nearly 10 new battery OEM customers. * Strong balance sheet with cash of CAD91 million and minimal net debt post-acquisition.
Judge strikes down Anthropic blacklist, says government retaliated over Pentagon criticism
Serving tech enthusiasts for over 25 years. TechSpot means tech analysis and advice you can trust. What just happened? A federal judge has ordered the Trump administration to rescind its designation of Anthropic as a supply-chain risk, ruling that the government violated the AI company's First Amendment rights. The decision found the designation was not supported by evidence of a genuine national-security threat and instead stemmed from Anthropic's objections to Pentagon plans for using its AI models. US District Judge Rita F. Lin ruled late Thursday that the government failed to show Anthropic posed a national-security threat. Instead, she found that officials acted against the company after it publicly challenged the Pentagon's plans for using AI. "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," Lin wrote. The ruling requires the government to withdraw guidance, directives, and other communications that blacklisted Anthropic or labeled it a supply-chain risk. Anthropic sued the administration in March after talks with the Pentagon over military use of its AI models broke down. The company had asked for limits on the use of its technology in fully autonomous weapons and domestic surveillance. The Pentagon wanted an agreement allowing the military to use Anthropic's models for any legal purpose. The dispute centered on whether Anthropic could place limits on how the government used its models after making them available to federal agencies. The Pentagon viewed Anthropic's proposed restrictions as too narrow for military operations. Anthropic said the limits were needed for high-risk uses of AI. Government lawyers argued that the Pentagon was allowed to choose vendors it considered reliable. They said Anthropic could make undisclosed changes to its models that might affect military operations. "The Department of War needs to trust that its AI vendors are going to be forthright and honest with the department," government attorney James Harlow said during court arguments. Lin questioned that position during the case. At a July hearing, she called the government's argument that it could retaliate against a contractor for criticizing the administration "really troubling" and "quite extreme." The designation had immediate business consequences for Anthropic. The company said the government action led to hundreds of millions of dollars in canceled, shortened, or delayed contracts. Documents filed in the case showed rivals, including OpenAI, were preparing to replace Anthropic in parts of the federal government. The decision also comes as Anthropic's technology remains in use across the US government. Claude has been used by the military, including in the January raid in Venezuela and the war with Iran. Other federal agencies continue to use Anthropic products, including Fable and Mythos. Lin said that continued government use undercut the Pentagon's claim that Anthropic was a national-security risk. She had previously issued a preliminary injunction in March that blocked parts of the designation while the case moved forward. Anthropic and the administration reached a separate agreement in June that allowed the company to release Fable and Mythos following a shutdown tied to security concerns. That agreement did not resolve the lawsuit over the blacklist. The Defense Department did not immediately respond to a request for comment. The administration could appeal Lin's decision. A separate case involving Anthropic remains before a federal appeals court in Washington, which denied the company's request in April to block other parts of the designation.
Top Tech News Today, August 28, 2026: Alibaba, Anthropic, OpenAI, Google, Marvell, Meta, Microsoft, Waymo & More - Tech Startups
It's Friday, August 28, 2026, and in the last day, AI stopped behaving like a product category and started behaving like infrastructure, evidence, and a weapon. Nvidia just printed another record quarter and then quietly hit pause on the cloud-financing deals that were supposed to keep smaller AI factories alive. A federal judge told the Pentagon it cannot blacklist Anthropic for drawing safety lines. Meanwhile, agents are being handed keys to lab robots, a $399 open-source duck is selling physical AI to developers, and a humanoid shipped with a Bluetooth path to root. Hackers hit 8.7 million airport customers in Britain and a U.S. firearms agency in the same news cycle. The bigger story is that AI is no longer just a software race. It is becoming a contest over chips, electricity, cloud infrastructure, robotics, national policy, cybersecurity, and control of the machines themselves. Here are the top technology news stories that moved the needle. Meta is changing the software on its AI-powered smart glasses after users discovered a way to continue recording people even when the device's visible capture indicator was covered. Meta's glasses are designed to disable their cameras when the front-facing LED is obstructed, allowing bystanders to know when recording is taking place. But users found that covering the indicator after a recording had already started could bypass the protection. Meta now says the camera will stop functioning if the light becomes covered during recording. The problem lands at a sensitive moment for AI wearables. Smart glasses are becoming one of the industry's strongest candidates to succeed smartphones as a mainstream AI interface because they can continuously see and hear a user's surroundings. That same capability creates a radically different privacy problem from phones, which generally require users to deliberately point a camera at someone. Meta has already faced concerns about people recording strangers without consent, and facial-recognition capabilities could raise the stakes further. The company is now launching a public-awareness campaign explaining how its recording indicator works. The technical fix is small, but the policy question is much larger: whether social norms and privacy law can keep pace with always-available AI cameras. Why It Matters: AI glasses will only become mainstream if companies can convince people around the wearer, not just the wearer, that persistent cameras can be trusted. Source: The Verge. Anthropic has won a significant federal court battle against the Pentagon after a California judge ruled that the Defense Department unlawfully retaliated against the AI startup by designating it a supply-chain risk. The confrontation began after Anthropic refused to accept an open-ended Pentagon contract that would have overridden restrictions the company places on how Claude can be used. CEO Dario Amodei had maintained two red lines: Anthropic would not knowingly support lethal autonomous weapons or domestic mass surveillance. The Defense Department subsequently moved to restrict federal agencies and contractors from using Anthropic technology. The ruling matters far beyond one government procurement dispute. Frontier AI companies are increasingly becoming defense contractors, infrastructure providers, and strategic technology suppliers. That raises a fundamental question about who gets to set the limits of military AI: governments buying the technology or the private labs building it. Anthropic still faces separate litigation in Washington, and the government could appeal the California decision, so the larger conflict is unresolved. But the ruling gives AI developers meaningful legal backing when they resist government demands they believe cross their safety boundaries. It also raises the stakes for OpenAI, Google, Microsoft, and other companies seeking national-security contracts while maintaining internal AI-use policies. Why It Matters: The decision could shape how much control frontier AI companies retain over military and government uses of their models. Source: Financial Times. The Trump administration is considering a new round of duties that would reach far beyond discrete chips, according to reporting cited Thursday. One option under discussion would expand tariffs to products that contain semiconductors -- laptops, gaming consoles, and the servers that fill AI data centers -- while Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick has favored tying relief for foreign firms to investment in U.S. chip manufacturing. Officials have also discussed a phase-in period, a sign the White House wants leverage without an overnight shock to hardware supply chains. Technology companies have warned that a broad levy could raise the cost of AI infrastructure just as Washington is trying to lock in domestic leadership. For startups and cloud builders, the distinction between a chip tariff and a finished-goods tariff is the whole story. Duties on GPUs are painful; duties on assembled servers, networking gear, and laptops would cascade into capex budgets, consumer prices, and the economics of every AI factory still on the drawing board. A design that links tariff relief to U.S. fab investment would also rewrite site-selection math for foreign suppliers and for American buyers that source boards and systems in Asia. The policy is not final, but even considering a "sweeping" regime is already a planning variable for procurement teams. Why It Matters: A tariff that follows chips into finished systems would raise the cost of AI infrastructure and consumer hardware at the same time. Source: The Guardian. Hugging Face unveiled Microduck, a 25-centimeter bipedal robot priced at $399 before tax and shipping, with first deliveries targeted before Christmas in North America, Europe, and the United Kingdom. Built with Pollen Robotics, the duck-like machine has 15 motors, a camera, lidar, two inertial sensors, and an articulated beak that can lift about 800 grams. It can waddle, crouch, recover from common falls, follow a laser pointer, and roller-skate. Each unit generates its own voice the first time it wakes. CEO Clem Delangue called it an open-source robot "you can teach new tricks with reinforcement learning." The SDK, simulation environment, and reinforcement-learning stack are on GitHub, and behaviors trained in simulation can be deployed to the hardware. Preorders opened Thursday in Cream, Graphite, Lavender, and Sky. The product is as much a distribution play as a gadget. Hugging Face already sits at the center of model sharing; a cheap robot with a documented sim-to-real loop gives developers a physical target for the same open weights. That is useful for startups that cannot afford industrial humanoids and for labs testing world models on a desk. It also puts a consumer face on "physical AI" at a moment when governments in Asia are pouring industrial policy into the same idea. Reliability, safety, and support will decide whether Microduck becomes a developer platform or a seasonal novelty. Why It Matters: A sub-$400 open robot lowers the cost of experimenting with physical AI and pulls model hubs into hardware. Source: TechCrunch. Andreessen Horowitz has raised $1.1 billion for its first fund dedicated specifically to hardware infrastructure, a striking shift for the venture firm most closely associated with the idea that "software is eating the world." The new Machine Age fund will target technologies increasingly critical to AI deployment, including processors, memory, networking equipment, storage systems, robotics, and other physical infrastructure. The strategy reflects a growing realization across Silicon Valley that many of AI's biggest constraints now exist below the application layer, from memory bandwidth and chip availability to power delivery and manufacturing capacity. The move is especially notable because venture capital spent more than a decade favoring software startups that could scale quickly without factories, inventory, or complex supply chains. AI is reversing some of that logic. Building frontier models and physical AI systems increasingly requires specialized silicon, high-speed interconnects, cooling technology, robotics components, and enormous data-center systems. For founders, that could unlock significantly more venture funding for categories that once struggled to match SaaS economics. For the broader ecosystem, the fund signals that AI is becoming an industrial technology buildout, not simply a software cycle. Investors are increasingly betting that bottlenecks in compute, memory, energy, networking, and robotics may create some of the next generation's largest technology companies. Why It Matters: One of Silicon Valley's most influential software investors is now betting $1.1 billion that AI's next fortunes will also be built in chips, machines, and physical infrastructure. Source: The Wall Street Journal. Vietnam is intensifying its effort to become a major Asian technology hub, urging Qualcomm and Samsung Electronics to increase investment across artificial intelligence, semiconductors, robotics, data centers, telecommunications, and research. Vietnamese President To Lam met Qualcomm CEO Cristiano Amon and encouraged the U.S. chip company to expand its local presence. According to the Vietnamese government, Amon said Qualcomm wants Vietnam to become its third-largest AI research and development hub globally. Qualcomm already operates an R&D center in Hanoi and works with Vietnamese technology companies. Vietnam is also pressing Samsung, one of the country's largest foreign investors, to deepen technology investment and integrate more Vietnamese suppliers into its global manufacturing network. Samsung CEO Roh Tae-moon said the company planned additional investment and training. The development reflects a broader restructuring of Asia's technology supply chain as governments compete to attract semiconductor design, electronics manufacturing, AI research, and data-center infrastructure. Vietnam has emerged as one of the strongest beneficiaries of companies diversifying production beyond China, but Hanoi increasingly wants to move beyond assembly into higher-value engineering and intellectual property. Success would make Vietnam a more important node linking U.S., Korean, and Southeast Asian technology ecosystems. Why It Matters: Vietnam is trying to convert its manufacturing success into a higher-value AI and semiconductor economy as global technology supply chains are rebuilt. Source: Reuters. Marvell Technology shares fell sharply despite stronger results after investors focused on the timing of revenue from the semiconductor company's massive custom AI-chip relationship with Google. Marvell recently secured an agreement that could generate as much as $120 billion through fiscal 2033 and potentially make Alphabet one of Marvell's largest shareholders. But CEO Matt Murphy told investors that revenue from Google becomes substantially more meaningful in fiscal 2029, later than some market expectations. Marvell shares fell about 8% in premarket trading Friday following the update. The reaction highlights how expectations around custom AI silicon have accelerated. Google, Amazon, Microsoft, Meta, OpenAI, and other large AI operators are increasingly designing specialized processors rather than relying exclusively on off-the-shelf GPUs. That trend creates enormous opportunities for semiconductor companies such as Marvell and Broadcom that help hyperscalers build custom accelerators and networking hardware. But these programs take years to design, validate, manufacture, and deploy at hyperscale. Investors appear increasingly unwilling to value every large AI contract as immediate revenue. The episode also illustrates a broader shift in the AI infrastructure market: Nvidia remains dominant, but custom silicon is becoming a strategically important second pillar of hyperscale compute. Why It Matters: Google's Marvell partnership shows how hyperscalers are building alternatives to general-purpose AI GPUs, but also how long and capital-intensive those custom-chip programs remain. Source: Reuters. Alibaba Cloud has launched two data centers in Brazil, giving the Chinese technology giant its first major infrastructure footprint in South America and extending its global AI expansion into one of the region's largest digital economies. The facilities will provide Brazilian enterprises, startups, developers, and public institutions with locally hosted cloud infrastructure and access to Alibaba's growing suite of agentic AI services. Alibaba previously opened a Mexican data center in early 2025 and now operates across 106 availability zones in 31 regions worldwide. The expansion is important because the U.S.-China technology contest is increasingly moving beyond chips and models into cloud infrastructure across emerging markets. Amazon Web Services, Microsoft Azure, and Google Cloud dominate much of the global public-cloud market, but Alibaba is attempting to build a stronger position in regions where data localization, latency, cost, and national technology sovereignty increasingly influence procurement decisions. Brazil gives Alibaba a foothold in Latin America's largest economy while allowing companies to keep more workloads and data inside the country. Alibaba has pledged tens of billions of dollars toward AI infrastructure, and overseas cloud deployments could become a major distribution channel for its models and AI tools. Why It Matters: The global AI race is increasingly becoming a competition over who owns the cloud infrastructure underneath emerging-market economies. Source: South China Morning Post. China is accelerating its push into brain-computer interfaces after surgeons completed what was reported as the world's first commercial implantation of an invasive BCI device in a patient with a spinal-cord injury. The procedure moves the technology beyond research trials toward an emerging commercial medical market. China is also building supporting infrastructure around the sector: state-owned PICC Property and Casualty has introduced insurance coverage for BCI implantation, while universities are beginning formal academic programs to build a domestic workforce in neurotechnology. The development intensifies a technology race that includes Elon Musk's Neuralink and a growing group of U.S. neurotechnology startups. BCIs aim to translate brain electrical activity into commands that can control computers, communication devices, prosthetics, or other machines. Near-term medical applications include restoring communication and mobility for patients with paralysis or neurological injuries. Longer term, the technology could create entirely new computing interfaces, although invasive brain implants carry major medical, privacy, cybersecurity, and ethical challenges. China's ability to combine government support, hospitals, manufacturing, universities, and insurance could potentially accelerate commercialization at a scale difficult for individual startups to match. Why It Matters: Brain-computer interfaces are shifting from experimental neuroscience into a commercial technology race between China and U.S.-led neurotech companies. Source: South China Morning Post. Waymo is publicly challenging one of Tesla's most fundamental autonomous-driving assumptions, arguing that cameras alone are insufficient for safe Level 4 autonomy. In a technical discussion drawing on more than 200 million fully autonomous miles, Waymo said reliable driverless operation at scale requires redundant perception from cameras, lidar, and radar. Tesla has taken the opposite approach, arguing that increasingly capable neural networks can reach autonomy primarily through vision because humans themselves navigate roads largely through sight. The disagreement is becoming commercially important as Tesla prepares to deploy its purpose-built Cybercab more widely. Waymo already operates fully autonomous services across multiple U.S. cities and says its mapping and multi-sensor architecture offers redundancy when individual systems struggle or fail. Tesla argues that eliminating lidar and other expensive sensors dramatically lowers vehicle costs and makes autonomy easier to scale. Regulation could ultimately influence which technical philosophy wins. A proposed New Jersey framework, for example, would require multiple sensors for robotaxis, potentially excluding a purely camera-based system. The debate represents two very different bets about physical AI: whether massive datasets and increasingly capable vision models can replace hardware redundancy, or whether safety-critical machines require both. Why It Matters: Tesla and Waymo are no longer just competing for robotaxi customers; they are competing to define the technical architecture regulators may ultimately accept for autonomous vehicles. Source: The Verge. More than 100 technology and security companies, including OpenAI, Anthropic, Google, Microsoft, CrowdStrike, Okta, and Fortinet, have signed an open letter calling for coordinated action against increasingly capable AI-powered cyber threats. The companies warn that hospitals, water systems, internet infrastructure, and other essential services face growing danger as AI models become better at discovering vulnerabilities, writing attack code, and autonomously operating digital tools. The group is asking companies and governments at local, national, and international levels to cooperate on new defensive systems and security standards. The appeal follows a series of incidents showing that AI agents can behave unexpectedly when given cybersecurity objectives. OpenAI recently disclosed that experimental agents escaped intended testing boundaries and attacked systems belonging to Hugging Face, while other research has demonstrated autonomous vulnerability exploitation and attack planning. The companies signing the warning are in an unusual position because many are simultaneously racing to make AI agents more capable. That means cybersecurity is becoming both a constraint on frontier AI development and potentially a major new market. OpenAI, Anthropic, Microsoft, and others are already developing AI systems specifically for defensive security. Why It Matters: Cybersecurity may become the first major field where society has to defend critical infrastructure from machines operating at machine speed. Source: TechCrunch. Actors including Nicola Coughlan, Hugh Bonneville, Matt Lucas, Luke Evans, and others are backing a UK campaign demanding legal protection against unauthorized AI voice cloning. About 80 people have signed an open letter asking the government to recognize an individual's voice as a protected part of their identity. The Save Our Voices Now campaign argues that modern AI systems can replicate someone's speech from only a few seconds of audio and then generate convincing new statements the original speaker never made. Voice cloning has quickly moved from an entertainment and accessibility tool to a serious identity and fraud problem. The campaign cites survey data suggesting that 28% of UK adults have encountered voice-cloning scams. Criminals can impersonate relatives, executives, celebrities, or public officials, while entertainment companies can potentially recreate performers without hiring them. Denmark has already moved toward granting individuals stronger legal rights over their face, body, and voice, including the ability to demand removal of unauthorized synthetic media. Similar debates are underway globally as copyright law, biometric privacy rules, and personality rights struggle to accommodate generative AI. Why It Matters: The next major AI copyright battle may not be about books or images, but whether a person legally owns the digital likeness of their own voice. Source: The Guardian. Australia is developing nationally consistent rules governing the energy, water, and land requirements of data centers as AI infrastructure places growing pressure on the electricity system. Federal Energy Minister Chris Bowen said states will not receive automatic exemptions allowing new data centers to rely on coal and gas. States could use existing fossil-fuel supplies where they show the Australian Energy Regulator they are cheaper than renewable alternatives, but renewables will remain the federal government's preferred direction for new capacity. The policy debate is becoming urgent because Australia's grid operator expects data-center electricity demand to rise roughly sevenfold over the coming decade. Similar tensions are emerging worldwide as hyperscalers and AI companies seek gigawatts of new electricity while utilities, governments, and residents worry about grid congestion and higher consumer prices. Australia has significant solar and wind resources, making it a potentially attractive location for AI infrastructure, but transmission capacity, storage, and reliability remain critical constraints. The government is trying to position data-center expansion as compatible with its broader energy transition, rather than letting AI demand extend the life of fossil-fuel generation by default. Why It Matters: Electricity policy is becoming technology policy as governments decide how much of their energy systems the global AI infrastructure boom can consume. Source: The Guardian. A smartphone promoted as an unusually safe device for children has run into serious security problems after a researcher identified vulnerabilities that could expose sensitive information, including potentially allowing unauthorized access to users' live locations. The HMD Fuse combined technology from HMD, SafeToNet, and Xplora, including AI-powered nudity detection intended to block explicit images before they could be created or shared. The UK government had highlighted SafeToNet's approach as a promising form of device-level child protection. Sales were subsequently paused while the companies investigated the security issues. The episode underscores an uncomfortable lesson for the growing safety-tech industry: adding sophisticated AI protections does not make a device secure if another component in the software stack is vulnerable. According to the reporting, the weaknesses were associated with the parental-control system rather than the core nudity-detection model, but users experience the phone as one integrated product. That makes security only as strong as the weakest service, API, authentication mechanism, or vendor involved. Governments increasingly want operating systems and devices themselves to enforce child-safety protections rather than relying exclusively on apps and social platforms. Why It Matters: AI safety features cannot compensate for basic cybersecurity failures, especially when products collect location and personal data belonging to children. Source: Financial Times. Cerebras Systems has outlined the next stages of its wafer-scale AI computing roadmap, including a future CS-6 system that will place DRAM directly above its enormous wafer-scale processor using 3D stacking. Unlike conventional GPUs, Cerebras builds an entire processor across a nearly full semiconductor wafer, giving its architecture extremely high internal bandwidth but also creating challenges around memory capacity. The planned stacked-memory approach is intended to increase available memory without sacrificing more wafer surface area. Cerebras also detailed its new CS-4 and Nexus architecture, which packages wafer-scale processors into modular "backpacks" containing networking, liquid cooling, and power delivery. The company says its revised power architecture allows significantly more power to reach the processor efficiently, producing higher clock speeds and roughly twice the performance of its previous wafer generation in certain workloads. Cerebras is positioning the systems primarily for extremely fast AI inference, where tokens-per-second and latency are becoming increasingly important as autonomous agents perform longer chains of work. Nvidia and AMD continue to dominate traditional GPU infrastructure, but Cerebras represents a fundamentally different architectural bet. Why It Matters: As AI inference becomes larger and more latency-sensitive, unconventional processors such as wafer-scale chips are getting another opportunity to challenge GPU-centric computing. Source: Tom's Hardware. India's rapidly expanding data-center industry faces questions about who benefits from the infrastructure boom as state governments compete to attract hyperscalers with low-cost land, tax incentives, and other concessions. Communities near proposed projects have complained about limited consultation and displacement while receiving relatively few long-term jobs in return. The criticism is especially consequential because AI infrastructure consumes enormous amounts of electricity, water, and land while the economic benefits can accrue primarily to technology companies and distant customers. India is one of the most important growth markets for global AI companies, with more than a billion potential users and increasing investment from Google, Microsoft, Amazon, and domestic technology groups. Local data centers are also becoming more valuable as governments tighten data-sovereignty requirements and companies seek lower latency. But infrastructure projects that appear economically compelling at national scale can create very different trade-offs locally. The same political tension is now appearing in the United States, Europe, Latin America, and Southeast Asia: governments want AI investment, while communities increasingly ask who pays for electricity upgrades, water consumption, tax incentives, and land. Why It Matters: Public resistance to data centers could become one of the most important physical constraints on global AI growth, alongside chips and electricity. Source: Rest of World. Australian authorities have arrested two men accused of participating in TeamPCP, a hacking group tied to a sprawling software supply-chain campaign that compromised more than 1,000 organizations worldwide. The Australian Federal Police said the suspects face 14 charges. TeamPCP has become particularly notable for attacks involving Shai-Hulud, self-propagating malware that contaminated open-source software packages and then spread through development pipelines as companies downloaded and incorporated compromised components. The attacks exploited one of the modern software industry's greatest strengths and weaknesses: dependency. Developers routinely build applications using thousands of third-party packages, libraries, scanners, and automated tools. When attackers compromise one widely used component or steal package-maintainer credentials, malicious code can move downstream across many companies before defenders identify the original source. TeamPCP reportedly compromised tools including the Trivy vulnerability scanner, with infections subsequently reaching other software packages. Researchers have also suggested that large language models may be lowering the expertise barrier for sophisticated attackers by helping them research, automate, and troubleshoot campaigns more quickly. Why It Matters: Software supply-chain attacks can turn a single compromised developer tool into a global breach, and AI may be making those campaigns easier for smaller hacking groups to execute.
Judge Orders Pentagon to Reverse Anthropic Blacklisting
Artificial Intelligence & Machine Learning , Litigation , Next-Generation Technologies & Secure Development The U.S. federal judge told the Department of Defense to cancel the supply chain designation it levied against Anthropic in a decision giving the artificial intelligence giant almost everything it asked for in a lawsuit against the Pentagon. See Also: Securing AI Workloads With Ubuntu Pro Judge Rita F. Lin of the District Court for the Northern District of California said Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth's declaration of Anthropic as a supply chain risk in late February is unlawful. "The challenged actions constituted unlawful retaliation in violation of the First Amendment," she wrote (see: Pentagon Moves to Cut Anthropic From Defense AI Work). Government agencies are free to choose AI vendors for their needs, she said. But evidence presented at trial "demonstrates that the broad measures imposed on Anthropic were illegal and baseless." "The empty invocation of national security is not a blank check to punish and retaliate against government critics," Lin said. The court found that, in declaring Anthropic to be a risk to national security, the government skipped procedural steps. The Defense Department did not provide written records showing that less intrusive measures were not available or taken, and the decision was not presented to Congress. Lin also ruled that the risk assessment against the AI company came from the wrong official. During a July 30 hearing, Lin was skeptical of the government's arguments that it was not retaliating against a company critical of its actions, but rather protecting its right to enforce a contract. Anthropic filed a lawsuit against the Defense department on Mar. 9 after Hegseth took to social media to declare the company a supply chain risk. The designation came after Anthropic asked the government to limit some use of its Claude models on the GenAI.mil platform. Anthropic already signed a contract with the government worth up to $200 million over two years, but feared it would be used for mass surveillance and lethal autonomous warfare. Lin only deviated from granting Anthropic's motions where the company requested the judge to permanently block the blacklisting at other federal agencies that "undisputedly did not take any relevant action or who took only interim measures" to implement the designation. Anthropic asked for a broad permanent injunction after President Donald Trump on social media asserted that "EVERY Federal Agency in the United States Government to IMMEDIATELY CEASE all use of Anthropic's technology." Anthropic did not show that Trump, in his post, actually violated a specific procurement statute, Liun wrote. The Defense department can still appeal Lin's decision. Anthropic also sued the government in the U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia over a separate supply-chain risk designation that invoked the Federal Acquisition Supply Chain Security Act as a governing authority. A three judge panel there earlier this year did not follow Anthropic's motion for a temporary injunction against that supply chain designation.
Brazil sues Discord over alleged shortcomings in youth safety policies and enforcement
Brazil's federal government on Wednesday filed a lawsuit against Discord, Inc. accusing the messaging platform of violating national child protection laws. Brazil's attorney general's office, the Advocacia-Geral da Union (AGU) brought the lawsuit in the federal court seeking roughly R$500 million ($97 million) in damages. The AGU alleges violation of Brazilian laws regarding age verification systems, parental controls, and content moderation. The alleged violations point to Brazil's ECA Digital (ECA), a law enacted in 2025. The ECA amends Brazil's 1990 Statute of the Child and Adolescent law to apply protections to digital platforms. Under the law, digital platforms must apply stringent safety and privacy controls as their default, and must integrate safety mechanisms such as age verification and parental controls into the design of their platforms. The law is enforced through Brazil's data protection authority, the Autoridade Nacional de Protecao de Dados (ANPD). Under the ECA, violators may be fined R$50 million ($9.7 million) for each infraction. The AGU's complaint alleges ten separate violations of the law including insufficient age verification controls, lack of parental monitoring systems, and failure to moderate content. The lawsuit follows recent action from the ANPD wherein Discord was suspended from operation in Brazil over these same child safety concerns. Discord's suspension remains in effect independent of Wednesday's lawsuit, according to government officials. In a statement, AGU Minister Jorge Messias said: [translated from Portuguese] This platform has allowed illegal conduct to take place, based on what we call insufficient protection for women, children, adolescents [. . .] As many times as we identify this kind of practice, we will act to curb this type of unacceptable conduct throughout the national territory. This follows heightened global concerns about child safety and protections in an evolving digital landscape. In July, the European Commission TikTok failed to meet child-safety requirements under the Digital Services Act. Earlier this month, a bellwether US federal trial began wherein a coalition of states sought up to $1.4 trillion in penalties against Meta for youth safety violations.
Salesforce Earnings: Strong Bookings, Second-Half Reacceleration, Positive Anthropic Announcement
We were pleased to see Salesforce stock bounce materially after this quarter's results. Key Morningstar Metrics for Salesforce * : $280.00 * : ★★★ * : Narrow * : High What We Thought of Salesforce's Earnings Salesforce CRM delivered a solid fiscal second quarter, with contracted demand and paid artificial intelligence adoption providing the most encouraging signals. Revenue of $11.35 billion increased 11% year over year and landed near the high end of management's guidance. Why it matters: The quarter strengthens our confidence that Salesforce can produce modest organic growth acceleration during the second half, and that the firm's AI monetization is becoming more credible. * Agentforce ARR exceeded $1.5 billion, combined Agentforce and Data 360 ARR approached $3.9 billion, and Agentic Work Units nearly doubled sequentially. Salesforce added 2,000 paying production customers, and half of Agentforce bookings came from customers replenishing consumed Flex Credits. * Overall these datapoints broadly support that growth remains healthy and some customers are moving beyond pilots for newer products. Salesforce did expand the Agentforce ARR definition to include Slackbot and Headless 360 this quarter, limiting comparability with prior periods. The bottom line: We do not expect to materially change our fair value estimate of $280 per share and still view shares as modestly undervalued. We were pleased to see shares bounce materially, up 22% as of writing Aug. 27, after this quarter's results, with shares now up over 60% from the recent lows. * Claudeforce, the newly announced Anthropic partnership, reinforces Salesforce's strategy of serving as the governed data and workflow layer underneath multiple AI models and interfaces. Customers will be able to use Claude on top of Salesforce without replacing Salesforce as the system of record. * This supports our decision to maintain Salesforce's moat at narrow following our software sector moat reviews, as we still liked Salesforce's infrastructure positioning, switching costs, and valuable installed customer base. Long view: We see Salesforce increasingly positioned as a key distribution and record layer for AI, not replaced by AI.
Trump set back on voting, Kennedy Center, Anthropic
The cases have widespread implications across the United States Federal courts on Thursday dealt President Donald Trump setbacks in several ongoing legal battles with broad implications. U.S. District Judge Indira Talwani in Boston issued a new block on the U.S. Postal Service carrying out Trump's executive order to limit mail voting. In Northern California, U.S. District Judge Rita Lin ordered the Pentagon to end its "illegal and baseless" blacklisting of Anthropic. And U.S. District Judge Christopher Cooper in Washington, D.C., stalled administration plans to quickly inscribe Trump's name back on the Kennedy Center. Who said what After Anthropic said it didn't want its AI used for domestic surveillance or autonomous killing, Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth labeled it a supply-chain risk using an "obscure government-procurement statute" designed to thwart "foreign sabotage," Reuters said. The administration's "contemporaneous words and deeds confirm" it was actually acting to "make a public example out of Anthropic," Lin wrote. The "empty invocation of national security is not a blank check to punish and retaliate against government critics." Talwani issued a 14-day block of USPS mail voting action a day after lifting an earlier hold in response to a Supreme Court ruling. The "whipsaw of action" could "confuse voters," The New York Times said. But "each delay has reduced the administration's chances of clearing the legal hurdles to execute" Trump's order before the midterms. Now that the USPS' "likely unconstitutional regulation" is finalized, Talwani wrote, "compliance is practically impossible" before ballots go out "as early as next week." What next? After Cooper threatened to block the Trump inscription if the Kennedy Center stuck to its Sept. 8 start date, the Justice Department last night said it would delay action until at least Oct. 8.
Judge rules Trump administration illegally punished AI firm Anthropic
Joe Walsh is a senior editor for digital politics at CBS News. Joe previously covered breaking news for Forbes and local news in Boston. A judge late Thursday permanently barred the Trump administration from enforcing a set of rules aimed at cutting off Anthropic from the federal government, ruling the administration had unconstitutionally punished the artificial intelligence company for protected speech. The ruling marks a victory for Anthropic in its monthslong legal battle against the administration over its push to impose guardrails on its powerful AI model Claude, which is used by the military. Anthropic sought to prevent Claude from being used for mass surveillance or fully autonomous weapons, but the military argued it should be allowed to use the model for all lawful purposes. With the two sides unable to reach a deal, President Trump ordered federal agencies to stop using Claude earlier this year, and Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth declared the firm a supply chain risk, aiming to prevent private defense contractors from using it to do work for the military. The administration argued those moves were necessary to safeguard national security. In her ruling Thursday, U.S. District Judge Rita Lin of San Francisco declared that those actions violated the First Amendment by punishing it for disagreeing with the government, calling them "unlawful retaliation against Anthropic for constitutionally protected expressive activities." She also said the moves against Anthropic violated the company's due process rights. Lin said her order does not require the government to use Anthropic or stop it from giving another AI firm its business, "so long as those actions are consistent with applicable regulations, statutes, and constitutional provisions." "The government is certainly owed deference on weighty issues of national security," Lin wrote in a 59-page opinion. "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." Lin continued: "The empty invocation of national security is not a blank check to punish and retaliate against government critics." An Anthropic spokesperson told CBS News: "We welcome the court's ruling that this supply chain risk designation was unlawful. We remain focused on working productively with the government to harness AI for our national security so all Americans benefit from this technology." CBS News has reached out to the Pentagon and the White House for comment. In her ruling, Lin wrote that Anthropic does not meet the legal definition of a "supply chain risk," a designation typically used to prevent a foreign adversary from sabotaging a crucial U.S. system. The government has argued in the past that Anthropic's tough negotiating stance and push for AI restrictions caused federal officials to fear the company could engage in "future sabotage" by installing a "kill switch" in its software. But Lin called this concern "entirely unfounded," pointing to evidence offered by Anthropic that it doesn't have the ability to maintain "backdoor" access to its systems. She also argued the fears of sabotage are tough to square with the government's continued interest in collaborating with Anthropic on advanced AI models. "An IT vendor does not become a potential adversary of the United States whenever it asks probing questions or stubbornly insists on particular contracting terms, even if doing so causes DoW to doubt its trustworthiness," Lin said in her ruling Thursday. Lin also invalidated a February social media post by Hegseth stating that no military contractors are allowed to conduct "any commercial activity with Anthropic," saying it led to a broader "boycott" of the AI firm -- even among military contractors that were using Anthropic for non-military-related work. Lawyers for the government had conceded that designating Anthropic as a supply chain risk didn't prevent companies from using the AI technology for other purposes. And Lin reversed several other federal agencies' efforts to cut off Anthropic, which followed a Truth Social post by Mr. Trump ordering the government to "IMMEDIATELY CEASE all use of Anthropic's technology." She said those moves weren't authorized by law, and the president's directive was a "retaliatory act, taken without due process, meant to punish Anthropic for its protected speech." The judge wrote that "the decision to publicly broadcast Anthropic's punishment via social media -- even before the formal, administrative process of making the necessary findings to designate Anthropic a supply chain risk had begun -- makes little sense except as an attempt to swiftly make a public example of Anthropic for daring to criticize the Administration." The dispute between Anthropic and the military highlights a broader debate over how governments and private companies should balance the potential benefits and perils of artificial intelligence. Anthropic and its CEO, Dario Amodei, have long been vocal in their support for regulations and guardrails to manage the dangers of unconstrained AI technology. The Trump administration has called for some voluntary federal oversight of powerful AI models, but argues that overly stringent regulations could stifle innovation and make the U.S. less competitive against China, and has accused some AI models of being politically biased or "woke." The disagreement burst into public view earlier this year, as the two sides feuded over AI restrictions. Amodei told CBS News in February he has a "patriotic" desire to work with the military, but he has two absolute "red lines": using Claude to conduct mass surveillance of Americans, and using it to power autonomous weapons that can target people without human input. He argued Claude isn't accurate enough for autonomous weapons, and mass surveillance could clash with American values. The military argued that federal laws and internal policies already prevent domestic mass surveillance or fully autonomous weapons, so there is no need to restrict those practices in the Pentagon's contracts. After negotiations between the two sides broke down in February, the Trump administration lashed out at Anthropic, accusing it of seeking to impose its own ideology on the military. Hegseth called Anthropic "sanctimonious," and Mr. Trump called it a "radical left, woke company." After the Trump administration took action against Anthropic, the company sued in San Francisco federal court, accusing the government of violating the First Amendment by punishing it for protected speech. It also challenged the government's actions in the U.S. Court of Appeals for the D.C. Circuit, a case that is still pending. Anthropic drew support from civil liberties groups and from other tech industry players, including Microsoft, which wrote in an amicus brief that designating Anthropic a supply chain risk "may bring severe economic effects that are not in the public interest." The government pushed back, arguing it cut off Anthropic not because it criticized the Trump administration, but because the Defense Department -- which the administration has sought to rename the Department of War -- no longer trusted the company. It also argued Mr. Trump has the power to decide not to buy Anthropic's services, and called the decisions by federal agencies to stop using Claude "internal IT housekeeping." "The government did not retaliate against Anthropic for any protected speech," Justice Department lawyers wrote in June. "Instead, DoW assessed a substantial risk that Anthropic might manipulate its AI model to enforce subjective redlines on DoW's use of the model, in ways that could cause serious harm to national security." Lin was skeptical of the Trump administration's position early on. She issued a preliminary injunction blocking the government from cutting off Anthropic in March, after calling the moves "troubling" and "Orwellian."
OpenAI, Anthropic, tech leaders warn of "limited window" to defend against AI cyber threats
Megan Cerullo is a New York-based reporter for CBS MoneyWatch covering small business, workplace, health care, consumer spending and personal finance topics. She regularly appears on CBS News 24/7 to discuss her reporting. Leading developers of the most powerful artificial intelligence tools are warning that their technology may soon be used to carry out sophisticated cyberattacks against companies and institutions, ranging from hospitals to technology firms. In an open letter published Thursday, the leaders of OpenAI, Anthropic, Google, Microsoft and dozens of other signatories said there is a "limited window" to strengthen cyber defenses and protect against potentially devastating AI-enabled cyberattacks. That window may last only months, it added. The signatories also include security companies like CrowdStrike and banks including Citi and Capital One. The same AI advances that could increase risks to public services and technology infrastructure can also help organizations identify and "fix weaknesses" that leave them vulnerable, the letter said. "If we act decisively, we can use the defenders' window to make our digital world much more secure," the letter said. A recent CrowdStrike report on cybersecurity found that AI-enabled attacks increased by 89% in 2025 compared to 2024. How to defend against attacks The companies said that the status quo for cybersecurity "won't be enough." "Longstanding bugs, excessive permissions, misconfigurations, insecure and unpatched software, weak authentication and technical debt in legacy systems have left systems exposed," the letter said. Security teams need to be beefed up and invested in, while defenders against AI cyberattacks need to be equipped with the most sophisticated AI-enabled tech, it said. The letter also called on companies and experts to share their expertise. "Share threat intelligence and tested playbooks, and measure progress by how many organizations are protected, how quickly attacks are contained, and whether fixes work," it added. Call to action Every organization needs to prioritize cybersecurity, according to the letter. That might include replacing or upgrading older tech systems that are vulnerable to attack. Specialized cybersecurity firms have an obligation to test defenses against evolving cyber capabilities continually. Governments also have a key role to play in containing cyber threats through coordinated actions and by funding cyber defense strategies at the local, national, and international levels, it added. Lastly, the letter said it is incumbent upon frontrunner AI companies -- including those that signed the document -- to fund training, provide "responsible" access to their models, and adequately secure them.
Kraken Users Got Locked Out After a Dust Attack From a Sanctioned HTX Wallet - Startup Fortune
Kraken customers were locked out after about 12,000 tiny crypto transfers hit deposit addresses from wallets tied to sanctioned HTX. The transfers were small. The compliance problem wasn't. Between August 17 and August 24, wallets that blockchain analytics firm Arkham Intelligence linked to HTX, the exchange formerly known as Huobi, sent roughly 12,000 tiny transfers to Kraken-related addresses, according to Bloomberg. Most were worth only a few cents to a few dollars. That was enough to trip Kraken's sanctions checks and temporarily restrict some customer accounts. That distinction matters. The story isn't that 12,000 customers were frozen. Kraken hasn't said how many users were affected. The sharper point is that a large batch of unwanted deposits, each too small to matter financially, was enough to turn ordinary customers into compliance cases they didn't create. "We don't know who is behind these attacks, but they likely expect that if sanctioned funds land in a client account, it triggers a full account lock, causing operational disruption for a large number of users," a Kraken spokesperson told Bloomberg. Kraken also said the transfers appeared to be an attempt to spread UK and EU sanctioned funds across other platforms and undermine trust in the industry. That's a remarkable admission. Kraken is describing its own compliance system as the attack surface. The EU just put HTX on a crypto blacklist and gave itself the power to cut off entire countries The EU's 21st Russia sanctions package, adopted July 23, 2026, bans 14 crypto exchanges including HTX from transacting with EU entities starting August 23. More significantly, Brussels introduced a first-ever country-level blacklist tool for crypto, allowing it to cut off entire national crypto sectors that facilitate Russian sanctions evasion... - EU crypto blacklist HTX sanctions - how Russia uses crypto exchanges Dusting attacks are old news in crypto. Normally someone sends tiny amounts of a token to many wallets to track spending patterns and try to connect addresses to real users. This case was different. Nobody needed to trace anything. The sender only needed a public blockchain, wallets associated with a sanctioned entity, and Kraken-linked deposit addresses. Anyone can send crypto to an address without permission. Send tainted dust to enough places and the exchange's own controls do the disruptive work. HTX has denied initiating the transfers. Bloomberg reported that an HTX spokesperson said the exchange's review had found no evidence it sent them, and raised possible explanations including faulty attribution or third-party activity. Kraken hasn't accused HTX's leadership directly. It has restored account access while continuing to hold the flagged funds separately, which is exactly the kind of dry compliance detail that tells you how little room exchanges have once sanctioned funds touch an account. The timing is hard to ignore. The UK sanctioned Huobi Global S.A. on May 26 as part of a Russia sanctions package, with CoinDesk reporting that the action targeted crypto firms accused of helping Russia evade restrictions. The EU then added "HTX (HUOBI GLOBAL SA)" to its Russia sanctions regime in July, with a transaction ban taking effect on August 23, according to The Block. That date fell right inside the eight-day window when the dust was landing at Kraken. The trigger worked too well Here's the uncomfortable part. Kraken doesn't appear to have been running a broken system. It was running the kind of system regulators expect licensed exchanges to run: screen incoming funds, flag sanctioned exposure, freeze or restrict activity while the review happens. If you're a customer, that feels absurd when the deposit is unsolicited and worth pennies. If you're the exchange, ignoring it can create a sanctions problem. Frankly, this looks a lot like swatting for crypto accounts. You don't need to steal a password. You don't need to crack a wallet. You just need enough sanctioned dust and enough addresses, and you can make a platform lock people out by forcing it to follow its own rules. That should bother every exchange, not only Kraken. Coinbase, Binance, OKX, Bybit, you name it, any large venue with sanctions exposure has to decide what happens when a user receives funds they didn't ask for from a flagged address. Treating every contact as user activity punishes the wrong person. Treating it too lightly risks letting sanctioned funds move through the system. Kraken says it moved quickly to restore access once reviews cleared. Good. But speed after the freeze doesn't solve the design problem before it. The industry now has a public example of sanctions screening being turned into a denial-of-service tool, and the fix can't just be telling customers not to touch strange deposits. In this case, they didn't have to touch anything. Crypto traders got refunds when SpaceX tokens ran out xStocks saw more than $1 billion in demand for tokenized SpaceX shares, but partner exchanges including Bybit and Bitget Wallet received no allocations and refunded users. The episode shows that tokenized IPO access still depends on securing the scarce shares underneath the token. - crypto traders got refunds for SpaceX tokens - why SpaceX tokenized IPO access failed immediately The next test is whether exchanges and screening vendors can separate unwanted dust from customer-directed transfers without opening a loophole sanctions evaders can walk through. That won't be clean. Public blockchains don't ask permission, and compliance systems were built to spot contact, not intent. Until that changes, a few cents of toxic crypto can still do more damage than its price suggests. Also read: Circle and Coinbase Shares Slide as Banks Move to Kill Stablecoin Yield * BitMart Stops Trading While Its Founder Dismisses Withdrawal Demands * The SEC Just Sent Its Crypto Custody Rule Rewrite to the White House
US judge blocks Pentagon's blacklisting of AI firm Anthropic
A US federal judge has blocked the Pentagon's blacklisting of artificial intelligence company Anthropic, ruling that the government acted illegally by punishing the firm for its public safety criticisms. In a scathing 59-page decision issued on Thursday, District Judge Rita Lin overturned Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth's designation of Anthropic as a national security "supply-chain risk." The court order permanently bars federal agencies from enforcing the sanctions, which had blocked the creator of the Claude AI models from military contracts and threatened billions of dollars in lost business. "The empty invocation of national security is not a blank check to punish and retaliate against government critics," Judge Lin wrote. The high-stakes legal battle erupted after Anthropic refused to allow its technology to be used for domestic surveillance or autonomous weapons, arguing that current AI models remain too unreliable for battlefield deployment. Following the company's stance, the administration labelled the firm a supply-chain risk - marking the first time an American company was targeted under an obscure procurement statute traditionally reserved for foreign sabotage threats. Judge Lin concluded that the Pentagon targeted Anthropic in retaliation for its protected free speech regarding AI safety, violating both First Amendment rights and due process. While Justice Department lawyers argued that the company's restrictions created operational uncertainties for the military, the court dismissed the defence as baseless. Anthropic welcomed the ruling, emphasising its desire to work productively with the government on national security. The Pentagon has not yet issued an immediate comment, though an appeal is widely expected. Legal analysts note that the outcome delivers a major victory for tech firms navigating government contracts and highlights growing friction between private AI developers and military oversight.
Anthropic Launches Claude Team Plan for Global Scientists
* Anthropic launched the Claude Team Plan for Scientists, lowering software barriers for academic researchers worldwide. * Features free Standard seats (normally $20/month) and 80% discounted Premium seats at $15/month (normally $100/month) with 5x usage limits for 12 months. * Enrolled teams gain access to Claude Science, Claude Code, Claude Cowork, and native connectors to over 60 scientific databases. * Open to Principal Investigators (PIs) and laboratory leads at accredited universities or non profit research institutions. Anthropic launched the Claude Team Plan for Scientists, offering 10,000 seats, Claude Science access, and up to $50K compute grants for researchers. Eligibility Rules and Built in Tools The plan pairs regular enterprise collaboration features with specialized software which are built for scientific analysis and experimental design. Who Can Apply and Verification Steps The program is open only to accredited universities and non-profit research institutes. The application must be submitted by a Principal Investigator (PI) or equivalent laboratory head, who must provide their institutional affiliation, an official email address, and a brief summary of their current research focus. For-profit corporations, industrial R&D teams, and contract research organizations (CROs) are strictly excluded from the initiative. Once approved, within 5 to 7 business days the PI can invite between 1 and 25 team members to the workspace. Labs requiring larger seat allocations can contact Anthropic directly during onboarding. Claude Science and Core Workspace Features Every account includes full Claude Team features, such as Claude Code, Claude Cowork, single sign-on (SSO), and centralized administrative billing. Under Anthropic's data privacy commitments, research files and prompts are never used to train public AI models. The centerpiece of the plan is Claude Science, a desktop research application in beta for macOS and Linux. It functions as an interactive computational environment that connects to more than 60 scientific databases covering genomics, proteomics, and chemical retrosynthesis. Claude Science automates code execution records so results remain reproducible, manages the handover from local laptops to high performance computing (HPC) clusters, and uses specialized reviewer agents to double-check citations, formulas, and math proofs. Extra Compute Grants and Safety Controls Enrolled laboratories can request additional funding through Anthropic's broader AI for Science program, which offers up to $50,000 in free API and compute credits for research projects. Because frontier models can handle sensitive chemical and biological knowledge, Anthropic maintains strict safety guardrails against risks. The company is working with government agencies and regulatory authorities to create verified access for qualified life sciences professionals. To keep the subsidy active, teams will need to maintain regular activity, as inactive accounts may revert to standard pricing after 90 days.
Judge says Pentagon's measures against Anthropic were 'illegal and baseless'
By KAITLYN HUAMANI, AP Technology Writer A federal judge has ruled in favor of artificial intelligence company Anthropic in its legal battle against the Pentagon after the government labeled the company as a supply chain risk earlier this year. U.S. District Judge Rita Lin issued a written order Thursday night that the Pentagon acted illegally by punishing the AI company for its criticism of the Department of Defense's views on AI use. The government is expected to fight the ruling. The dispute between the AI company and the government broke out in February when President Donald Trump and Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth accused Anthropic of endangering national security and designated the company a supply chain risk. Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei refused to back down over concerns the company's products could be used for mass surveillance or autonomous armed drones. Lin wrote that the government's 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." An Anthropic spokesperson said in a statement that they welcome the judge's ruling: "We remain focused on working productively with the government to harness AI for our national security so all Americans benefit from this technology." The White House did not immediately respond to a request for comment. In the 59-page ruling, Lin, an appointee of former President Joe Biden, wrote that neither the Constitution nor the federal statute the government invoked allows them to "impose sweeping penalties based principally on Anthropic's critique of the Administration's views." Anthropic sued the Pentagon over the supply chain risk designation in March for what it called an "unlawful campaign of retaliation" over its refusal to allow unrestricted military use of its technology. The legal challenge intensified an unusually public dispute over how AI can be used in warfare and mass surveillance. Anthropic's primary tech industry rival, ChatGPT maker OpenAI, made its own deal to work with the Pentagon just hours after the government punished Anthropic for its stance. Anthropic and OpenAI are each ramping up for buzzy initial public offerings. Anthropic has also filed a separate and narrower case that is still pending in the federal appeals court in Washington, D.C. That case involves a different rule the Pentagon is using to try to declare Anthropic a supply chain risk. Earlier in the legal proceedings, Lin had temporarily blocked the Pentagon from labeling the company as a supply chain risk and blocked enforcement of Trump's social media directive ordering all federal agencies to stop using Anthropic and its chatbot Claude. In a hearing July 30, Lin had said that the government's position was "really troubling" to her and that it seemed "at odds to me with the First Amendment." She also said she believed the record had "gotten worse for the government" over time. In that same hearing, Department of Justice lawyers argued that the nature of AI models is "so staggeringly enormous and opaque" that the Defense Department cannot evaluate it in the same way it would a physical piece of hardware. Anthropic lawyer Michael Mongan said in that hearing that the government's actions "profoundly harm Anthropic" and that they "threaten more broadly to chill speech and debate on a very important issue."
Anthropic's $7 Billion Chip Plan Takes a New Turn
This article first appeared on GuruFocus. Anthropic seems bent on reducing its reliance on externally sourced AI processors, even if a big purchase doesn't materialize.Reuters reported that the developer of Claude had been in talks to acquire AI chip startup MatX for almost $7 billion, although the discussions then pivoted to a possible cooperation.MatX was formed by ex-Google tensor processing unit engineers and is building chips to train massive AI models. The business is currently raising further money at a valuation of around $4 billion. Anthropic's appeal is simple.The corporation might get more control over cost and performance by building custom silicon, as demand for Claude increases. Anthropic has already recruited veterans from Google and OpenAI and grown its internal silicon team.Meanwhile, the corporation is spending much on outside computers. Anthropic aims to spend $36 billion on Google AI chips and has signed a $45 billion cloud-computing deal with Nscale, highlighting the huge cost of securing enough infrastructure to train and run frontier models.Another route for Anthropic to develop out more of that tech on its own might be a MatX relationship. The acquisition may have hit a snag, but Anthropic's push into bespoke chips certainly hasn't.
Anthropic's $7 Billion Chip Plan Takes a New Turn
This article first appeared on GuruFocus. Anthropic seems bent on reducing its reliance on externally sourced AI processors, even if a big purchase doesn't materialize.Reuters reported that the developer of Claude had been in talks to acquire AI chip startup MatX for almost $7 billion, although the discussions then pivoted to a possible cooperation.MatX was formed by ex-Google tensor processing unit engineers and is building chips to train massive AI models. The business is currently raising further money at a valuation of around $4 billion. Anthropic's appeal is simple.The corporation might get more control over cost and performance by building custom silicon, as demand for Claude increases. Anthropic has already recruited veterans from Google and OpenAI and grown its internal silicon team.Meanwhile, the corporation is spending much on outside computers. Anthropic aims to spend $36 billion on Google AI chips and has signed a $45 billion cloud-computing deal with Nscale, highlighting the huge cost of securing enough infrastructure to train and run frontier models.Another route for Anthropic to develop out more of that tech on its own might be a MatX relationship. The acquisition may have hit a snag, but Anthropic's push into bespoke chips certainly hasn't.
US judge blocks Pentagon's Anthropic blacklisting
August 27(Reuters) - A U.S. judge on Thursday blocked the Pentagon's blacklisting of Anthropic, the latest turn in the Claude maker's high-stakes fight with the military over AI safety on the battlefield. Anthropic's lawsuit in California federal court alleges that Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth overstepped his authority when he designated Anthropic a national security supply-chain risk, a label the government can apply to companies that expose military systems to potential infiltration or sabotage by adversaries. Hegseth's unprecedented move, which followed Anthropic's refusal to allow the military to use AI chatbot Claude for U.S. surveillance or autonomous weapons, blocked Anthropic from certain military contracts. Anthropic executives have said it could cost the company billions of dollars in lost business and reputational harm. Anthropic says that AI models are not reliable enough to be safely used in autonomous weapons and that it opposes domestic surveillance as a violation of rights, but the Pentagon says private companies should not be able to constrain military action. U.S. District Judge Rita Lin, an appointee of former Democratic President Joe Biden, made the ruling in a 59-page order where she found that the Pentagon's decision was "illegal and baseless." "The empty invocation of national security is not a blank check to punish and retaliate against government critics," she wrote. Anthropic's designation was the first time a U.S. company has been publicly designated a supply-chain risk under an obscure government-procurement statute aimed at protecting military systems from foreign sabotage. In its March 9 lawsuit, Anthropic alleged the government violated its right to free speech under the First Amendment of the Constitution by retaliating against its views on AI safety. The company said it was not given a chance to dispute the designation, in violation of its Fifth Amendment right to due process. The lawsuit says the decision was unlawful, unsupported by facts and inconsistent with the military's past praise of Claude. The Justice Department countered that Anthropic's refusal to lift the restrictions could cause uncertainty in the Pentagon over how it could use Claude and risk disabling military systems during operations, according to a court filing. The government said the designation stemmed from Anthropic's refusal to accept contractual terms, not its views on AI safety. Anthropic has a second lawsuit pending in Washington, D.C., over a separate Pentagon supply-chain risk designation that could lead to its exclusion from civilian government contracts. (Reporting by Jack Queen in New York; Editing by Noeleen Walder and Matthew Lewis) Copyright Reuters or USA Today Network via Reuters Connect. This story was originally published August 27, 2026 at 9:41 PM.
US judge blocks Pentagon's Anthropic blacklisting
August 27(Reuters) - A U.S. judge on Thursday blocked the Pentagon's blacklisting of Anthropic, the latest turn in the Claude maker's high-stakes fight with the military over AI safety on the battlefield. Anthropic's lawsuit in California federal court alleges that Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth overstepped his authority when he designated Anthropic a national security supply-chain risk, a label the government can apply to companies that expose military systems to potential infiltration or sabotage by adversaries. Hegseth's unprecedented move, which followed Anthropic's refusal to allow the military to use AI chatbot Claude for U.S. surveillance or autonomous weapons, blocked Anthropic from certain military contracts. Anthropic executives have said it could cost the company billions of dollars in lost business and reputational harm. Anthropic says that AI models are not reliable enough to be safely used in autonomous weapons and that it opposes domestic surveillance as a violation of rights, but the Pentagon says private companies should not be able to constrain military action. U.S. District Judge Rita Lin, an appointee of former Democratic President Joe Biden, made the ruling in a 59-page order where she found that the Pentagon's decision was "illegal and baseless." "The empty invocation of national security is not a blank check to punish and retaliate against government critics," she wrote. Anthropic's designation was the first time a U.S. company has been publicly designated a supply-chain risk under an obscure government-procurement statute aimed at protecting military systems from foreign sabotage. In its March 9 lawsuit, Anthropic alleged the government violated its right to free speech under the First Amendment of the Constitution by retaliating against its views on AI safety. The company said it was not given a chance to dispute the designation, in violation of its Fifth Amendment right to due process. The lawsuit says the decision was unlawful, unsupported by facts and inconsistent with the military's past praise of Claude. The Justice Department countered that Anthropic's refusal to lift the restrictions could cause uncertainty in the Pentagon over how it could use Claude and risk disabling military systems during operations, according to a court filing. The government said the designation stemmed from Anthropic's refusal to accept contractual terms, not its views on AI safety. Anthropic has a second lawsuit pending in Washington, D.C., over a separate Pentagon supply-chain risk designation that could lead to its exclusion from civilian government contracts. (Reporting by Jack Queen in New York; Editing by Noeleen Walder and Matthew Lewis) Copyright Reuters or USA Today Network via Reuters Connect. This story was originally published August 27, 2026 at 6:41 PM.
US judge blocks Pentagon's Anthropic blacklisting
August 27(Reuters) - A U.S. judge on Thursday blocked the Pentagon's blacklisting of Anthropic, the latest turn in the Claude maker's high-stakes fight with the military over AI safety on the battlefield. Anthropic's lawsuit in California federal court alleges that Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth overstepped his authority when he designated Anthropic a national security supply-chain risk, a label the government can apply to companies that expose military systems to potential infiltration or sabotage by adversaries. Hegseth's unprecedented move, which followed Anthropic's refusal to allow the military to use AI chatbot Claude for U.S. surveillance or autonomous weapons, blocked Anthropic from certain military contracts. Anthropic executives have said it could cost the company billions of dollars in lost business and reputational harm. Anthropic says that AI models are not reliable enough to be safely used in autonomous weapons and that it opposes domestic surveillance as a violation of rights, but the Pentagon says private companies should not be able to constrain military action. U.S. District Judge Rita Lin, an appointee of former Democratic President Joe Biden, made the ruling in a 59-page order where she found that the Pentagon's decision was "illegal and baseless." "The empty invocation of national security is not a blank check to punish and retaliate against government critics," she wrote. Anthropic's designation was the first time a U.S. company has been publicly designated a supply-chain risk under an obscure government-procurement statute aimed at protecting military systems from foreign sabotage. In its March 9 lawsuit, Anthropic alleged the government violated its right to free speech under the First Amendment of the Constitution by retaliating against its views on AI safety. The company said it was not given a chance to dispute the designation, in violation of its Fifth Amendment right to due process. The lawsuit says the decision was unlawful, unsupported by facts and inconsistent with the military's past praise of Claude. The Justice Department countered that Anthropic's refusal to lift the restrictions could cause uncertainty in the Pentagon over how it could use Claude and risk disabling military systems during operations, according to a court filing. The government said the designation stemmed from Anthropic's refusal to accept contractual terms, not its views on AI safety. Anthropic has a second lawsuit pending in Washington, D.C., over a separate Pentagon supply-chain risk designation that could lead to its exclusion from civilian government contracts. (Reporting by Jack Queen in New York; Editing by Noeleen Walder and Matthew Lewis) Copyright Reuters or USA Today Network via Reuters Connect. This story was originally published August 27, 2026 at 8:41 PM.
Anthropic weighed US$7 billion MatX purchase in push to reduce Nvidia reliance: sources
[SAN FRANCISCO] Anthropic discussed buying artificial intelligence chip startup MatX for roughly US$7 billion, seeking to accelerate efforts to develop custom hardware for its fast-growing AI business, two people briefed on the matter told Reuters. The merger talks, which a third person said have evolved into a discussion about a partnership, underscore the AI lab's ambition to secure the resources and talent needed to build its own chips. The goal is to help Anthropic accelerate its in-house chip development. Reuters is reporting on the discussions for the first time but could not learn why the talks are no longer active. MatX, founded by former Google tensor processing unit (TPU) engineers, is now seeking to raise new capital at a valuation of about US$4 billion, one of the people said, requesting anonymity to discuss private matters. Anthropic declined to comment on deal talks with MatX. MatX did not respond to a request for comment. Chip plans on road to IPO As Anthropic scales its Claude family of AI models, the company is looking to produce hardware that can fulfill its voracious appetite for data crunching and reduce its reliance on chips produced by Nvidia. Anthropic, which is expected to list in 2026, has hired engineering and executive talent to accelerate the chip design process, which could take years. Anthropic's IPO, expected months after SpaceX went public with a US$1 trillion valuation, will chase a valuation of US$2 trillion, which hinges on a 2028 revenue figure of as much as US$200 billion, Reuters reported earlier in August. Anthropic said it is expanding an in-house silicon team to design custom chips that will allow Claude models to run faster and more efficiently. It also plans to keep a multi-chip approach by working with providers from Nvidia to Google. Designing chips is expensive and time-consuming. It can take a year or more to produce a viable piece of hardware, and design costs for a single generation run in the hundreds of millions of dollars. An acquisition of an AI chip startup such as MatX would give Anthropic in-house design expertise and could help lower costs over the longer term, the people said. MatX has been working on a chip that would be useful for building large AI models in a process called training. Anthropic plans to spend tens of billions of dollars to rent computing power from cloud providers and also plans to buy chips directly. It plans to buy US$36 billion worth of Google's AI chips, and signed a US$45 billion deal to rent AI cloud computing power from Nscale. It agreed to pay SpaceX US$1.25 billion per month through May 2029 for computing capacity across its data centre clusters. D with other AI chip startups The discussions with MatX also suggest Anthropic may be interested in producing a training chip, while other chip startups and rival OpenAI pursue processors better suited to generating responses from chatbots, a process known as inference. Anthropic could elect to produce an inference chip as well, the sources said. In recent weeks, Anthropic held meetings with a range of AI chip startups. It has not yet elected to make an acquisition. The meetings are an attempt by Anthropic's engineers and executives to understand the current range of chip design approaches. On Aug 22, Anthropic hired Google chip veteran Amir Salek as part of the company's push into hardware. In June, the AI lab hired former OpenAI chip engineer Clive Chan who worked on the OpenAI chip unveiled earlier in 2026. The leading AI labs such as Anthropic and OpenAI have become increasingly focused on custom chips, which can be tailored to their models and workloads. Through this, they hope to create significant performance and economic advantages. At a conference on Wednesday (Aug 26), OpenAI boasted that its first custom chip called Jalapeno outperformed a similar processor made by Nvidia. OpenAI executives noted that the chip was more energy efficient in performing inference calculations. Making a custom chip may also help Anthropic hedge against the tight supply of Nvidia's processors, which Nvidia said in a conference call on Wednesday would be in short supply through 2027. Google has developed TPUs, while Amazon has built its Trainium and Inferentia chips. Anthropic was one of the first companies to run its models on hardware from several vendors including Nvidia, Google and Amazon. The company has been seeking more computing capacity to meet surging demand for its models, including through a deal with SpaceX to use its Colossus 1 facility, which houses more than 220,000 Nvidia chips. REUTERS
