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SpaceX and Amazon are tech dopplegangers worth $4.5 trillion -- and they're headed for a collision
A charismatic founder with near-obsessive conviction, a business that bleeds money, and a stock price based on a wildly optimistic valuation. In 1997, Jeff Bezos took Amazon public at a price of $18 per share at a $438 million valuation. The online bookseller's stock would then crater 90% after the dot-com bubble burst, before flourishing into a $2.6 trillion conglomerate that raked in $77.7 billion last year. Enter SpaceX in 2026. Founded by Elon Musk, the company lost $4.9 billion last year, and went public at $135 a share in June, with a valuation that quickly rose to a sky-high $2 trillion. The two mega-cap companies are primarily known for businesses that have little in common, with Amazon dominating the online retail business while SpaceX has become the world's leading rocket maker. But look a little closer, and the two companies have strikingly similar silhouettes which seem likely to bump up against each other ever more frequently as they compete on the public market stage. Perhaps more than any other tech companies out there today, Amazon and SpaceX are both conglomerates with broad collections of assets and businesses that each believe work together to create a more powerful whole. Both companies offer satellite-beamed high-speed internet access. They're both in the cloud computing and AI infrastructure business with expensive data centers. Chips? Amazon's Trainium and Graviton processors hit an annual revenue run rate above $20 billion in Q1, nearly doubling the $10 billion run rate from the previous quarter. SpaceX has a chip-manufacturing initiative called Terafab with a goal of producing one terawatt of compute hardware each year. Amazon and SpaceX each also have advertising platforms, with Amazon ginning up $68.6 billion in ad revenue last year while SpaceX's X platform -- the social media service formerly known as Twitter -- lived inside the AI segment that posted a $6.4 billion operating loss. If you squint, you can see them as doppelgängers with one big difference -- or to be more accurate, nearly 700 billion differences. Amazon hit $716.9 billion in revenue in 2025 and $80 billion in operating income compared to SpaceX's $18.7 billion of revenue and a $2.6 billion operating loss. Investors are focused on the opportunity ahead, of course. Amazon trades at roughly 3.6 times last year's sales and about 28 times forward earnings. SpaceX trades at about 97 times sales, and had a $4.9 billion net loss. "You're basically buying [SpaceX] at an Amazon valuation when it has one-twentieth the revenue of Amazon," said Jim Lebenthal, a veteran investor and chief markets strategist at Cerity Partners. "SpaceX is an incredibly cool company -- it's amazing, everything they're doing. I also think it's wildly overvalued right now." Looking at the rival companies piece by piece, you can see that in nearly every competitive line of business, Amazon is more profitable and growing. But it was also the company that took a nosedive that nobody wanted to own on the way down. Whether SpaceX can fill its shoes requires an extraordinary amount to go right, said Lebenthal. Here's a look at how the two multi-trillion tech conglomerates stack up. Satellites Starlink, SpaceX's high-speed satellite-based internet service, is the company's current golden child, with $11.4 billion in revenue last year. It counts United Airlines, Carnival, Maersk, and John Deere as customers, and grew 50% year over year, with $4.4 billion in operating income at a 39% margin. Starlink is SpaceX's only profitable segment and a sum-of-the parts analysis from investment bank Stifel last week valued it at $1.25 trillion, just more than half of SpaceX's $2.45 trillion enterprise value. But there's a caveat. FactSet projects SpaceX will need to raise roughly $250 billion in debt over the next four years to fund its growth, according to Lebenthal, so a lot is riding on Starlink's shoulders. Amazon is the runt in this match-up. While Starlink has 9,600 satellites deployed and still in orbit, Amazon's Leo has just started to really get into a groove with about 330 satellites, according to Stifel. But Amazon sees big potential in space. In April, Amazon agreed to acquire Globalstar for $11.6 billion with the goal of expanding Leo's satellite network. And the company recently unveiled enterprise-grade Leo Ultra, which it says is the fastest satellite-internet antenna ever built. Amazon also inkeddeals with Delta Airlines and Jet Blue to expand wi-fi access on hundreds of aircraft in 2028. Cloud and Compute Amazon essentially invented the cloud business, and the company has the clear advantage right now. Amazon Web Services (AWS) posted $128.7 billion in revenue in 2025, with $45.6 billion in operating income at a 35% margin. AWS picked up the pace in the first quarter, growing 28% to $37.6 billion in revenue. Anthropic uses Amazon Trainium 2 chips to train Claude, and Amazon CEO Andy Jassy told investors that AWS's AI revenue run rate topped $15 billion in Q1 2026 and is "ascending rapidly." SpaceX is moving fast though. The company already has Colossus I and II data centers, and has signed lease deals with Anthropic and Google. And the company says its ultimate goal is to send the AI buildout into orbit. In 2025, SpaceX's AI segment generated $3.2 billion in total revenue against a $6.4 billion operating loss and in the first quarter of 2026 it lost $2.5 billion on $818 million in revenue. Dan Niles, founder of Niles Investment Management said SpaceX's compute operation today is more at a level with $5 billion CoreWeave or Amsterdam-based Nebius rather than at the level of AWS. "I don't view them as similar companies at all," said Niles. Justin Menne, a portfolio manager at Harbor Capital, sees it in terms of visibility. Amazon has a contracted backlog of $364 billion and competitive inference chips, he said, while SpaceX has plans to build. "I think in order to believe that the total enterprise value makes sense here, you're inherently giving a lot of credibility to the management team, the engineering team, in order to actually execute," said Menne. The Musk factor Menne said he hadn't done any modeling on how much the Musk premium adds to SpaceX's valuation but the non-technical answer is, "a lot," he said. Lebenthal admires Musk's accomplishments but called him "a source of discomfort" for some value investors. "It's because he says outlandishly optimistic things," Lebenthal said, Musk projected $1 trillion in revenue at SpaceX by 2030, while Lebenthal noted estimated revenues are about $40 billion for 2026. "You can't just say that and $960 billion of incremental revenue is going to come to the table," he said. SpaceX is an innovation stock that really appeals to investors who are dreamers, he added, like Ark Invest's Cathie Wood. On SpaceX's first day of trading, Wood's Ark invested about half a billion in SpaceX, and has purchased more as the price has ebbed since its opening day. Amazon founder Jeff Bezos has a similar larger-than-life profile and reputation for entrepreneurial genius as Musk does. But Bezos transitioned from CEO to executive chairman in 2021 (he still reportedly has some involvement in important priorities like AI, but his day-to-day attention seems focused on Blue Origin, his space exploration company, and Prometheus, a new AI startup he cofounded). Harbor Capital's Menne said there is no equivalent key-man premium at Amazon because "the current value of the company is less reliant on the next five years of executing on something that doesn't already exist." That said, Niles said there's a clear alternative for investors drawn to Musk. The other public company where he serves as CEO, Tesla, has near-term initiatives that include robotics, autonomous fleets, and energy storage which "are likely to come to fruition before a colony on Mars," said Niles. Still, the Musk premium can't be discounted. "Elon has this talent for making money for investors, even if crazy projections don't play out," said Menne. The $28.5 trillion TAM SpaceX's prospectus claims a total addressable market of $28.5 trillion -- roughly the size of the U.S. GDP. Of that, $22.7 trillion is a third-party estimate of the entire global "digital economy." Value-minded Lebenthal noted that "it's earnings you want, not TAM." Menne said the enterprise AI portion "is really hard to underwrite because companies have only just started actually charging for a lot of these services in a way that's not gross-margin negative." Niles added that there's inherent competition in that stratospheric figure. "There are some really pretty good companies in that space," he said. "Maybe you can take all that share from Microsoft and others, but I think Microsoft is a pretty good company." SpaceX is targeting a $1.6 trillion market for connectivity and $26.5 trillion for AI. But Amazon Leo is also gunning for the former. Amazon's AWS generated $128.7 billion in cloud revenue last year, and hosts Anthropic and OpenAI while presiding over a $364 billion contracted backlog. Both can throw down gauntlets over the TAM, but Amazon can point to revenue of $716 billion last year to SpaceX's $18.7 billion. The post SpaceX and Amazon are tech dopplegangers worth $4.5 trillion -- and they're headed for a collision appeared first on Fortune.
Anthropic Expands in Manhattan, Part of an A.I. Boom in New York
Anthropic, the artificial intelligence company, plans to announce on Tuesday that it will lease a 16-story office building in Lower Manhattan as the company moves to double its work force in New York City to 1,000 people this year. The move into a renovated building at 330 Hudson Street in the Hudson Square neighborhood is part of a major expansion of A.I. companies in New York City. Anthropic, the company behind the chatbot Claude, said that its New York office was already its largest outside its San Francisco headquarters and that the new space had room for more than 1,700 desks. The move is expected to start this summer. Mayor Zohran Mamdani's administration praised the expansion, as did Gov. Kathy Hochul, who said in a statement that it would "cement New York City as a world-class technology hub." Artificial intelligence companies have been adding office space in New York City and going on a hiring spree, even as some elected officials have raised concerns about the technology and how it could displace white-collar workers. Thomas P. DiNapoli, the state comptroller, said recently that he was worried about the disruption A.I. could bring, warning that it could "damage the quality and productivity of a company's work force and, more broadly, add to the large-scale instability of the economy." OpenAI, whose ChatGPT chatbot started the A.I. boom in 2022, announced its move into the Puck Building, less than a mile from Anthropic's new office, in 2024. Harvey, an A.I. start-up for the legal industry, expanded its office at One Madison Avenue in Midtown Manhattan earlier this year. Anthropic's expansion is a further sign of the evolution of artificial intelligence as the technology matures and moves into the economic mainstream. Big A.I. companies are increasingly extending their focus beyond building new software models to pushing other industries to adopt the technology. And New York is home to some of the nation's largest technology customers in finance, health care, consulting, law, media and culture. "New York is a great place for an A.I. company to work and do business," said Mark Muro, a senior fellow at Brookings Metro, a division of the Brookings Institution. Mr. Muro was a co-author of a Brookings report last year that found New York to be a leader among U.S. metro areas in "A.I. readiness," a broad measurement of the capacity to both produce A.I. and adopt it. Chris Lehane, the chief global affairs officer for OpenAI, said in a statement that the company had 90,000 square feet of office space in New York City and would keep expanding. He said the city was a "global hub for A.I." because of its "A.I. talent density, inherent entrepreneurship and the policy leadership from its elected officials." Mr. Mamdani, a democratic socialist, has had a frosty relationship with business leaders over his calls to tax the rich, and has moved to win them over. He has also faced criticism for not yet releasing a detailed plan to address the city's slowing job growth. Jeanny Pak, the interim president of the city's Economic Development Corporation under Mr. Mamdani, said that Anthropic's move would "create hundreds of jobs for New Yorkers, strengthening equitable pathways to economic opportunities and reinforcing that companies continue to choose New York City." New York now has far more tech talent than in the past. Two decades ago, when a computer scientist at Google wanted to create an engineering team in New York, the Silicon Valley company's leaders were skeptical. They told him he could go ahead, but only if could find 15 "Google-worthy" software developers in the city. Today Google employs thousands of engineers in New York. A.I. companies are hiring at a time when young people in particular are having a hard time getting jobs. Anthropic's website has dozens of openings listed in New York. Many of them are in engineering and sales and on the company's legal and marketing teams. Julie Samuels, president of Tech:NYC, a nonprofit industry group, acknowledged that the most advanced A.I. software was still designed primarily in the Bay Area. "But when it comes to how to use the technology in practice, what works and what doesn't in business, they come here," she said. "That's where we are now." Still, many New Yorkers have concerns about A.I., particularly in the progressive circles Mr. Mamdani comes from. Some parents in the city are fighting the use of the technology in public schools. And the debate permeated a congressional primary campaign in Manhattan: Super PACs aligned with A.I. companies spent heavily both for and against one of the Democratic candidates, Alex Bores, who has sought to regulate the industry. (Mr. Bores lost the election last month to Micah Lasher, a fellow state assemblyman.) State lawmakers in New York recently approved a one-year moratorium on new large-scale data centers that power A.I., citing concerns about energy consumption and environmental effects. But Ms. Hochul, a moderate Democrat who is friendly with business leaders, has signaled that she might veto the legislation. Anthropic, which filed last month for an initial public offering, is planning to build a data center in upstate New York with a company called Fluidstack as part of a $50 billion investment in American data centers. A.I. companies have hired veterans of New York City government to help them navigate the city's thorny political landscape. Maxwell Young, a former adviser to Mayor Eric Adams, joined Anthropic in November as the head of policy communications. Peter Ragone, a top adviser to former Mayor Bill de Blasio and to Gov. Gavin Newsom of California, is working for OpenAI. Mark Levine, the city comptroller, released a report in May warning about the impact A.I. could have on jobs in New York City. He called on Mr. Mamdani to outline a vision for making sure that the city benefits from the industry's growth. "We should be the capital of applied A.I., and a more concerted strategy to make that happen is absolutely needed," Mr. Levine said in an interview. The post Anthropic Expands in Manhattan, Part of an A.I. Boom in New York appeared first on New York Times.
Elon Musk can't sell a single SpaceX share for a year -- and then all the locks crack open at once
Unless you've been on the moon, you know that Elon Musk's SpaceX just pulled off the biggest IPO of all time and raised about $86 billion in its public stock offering last month. The reusable rocket maker did it while selling only a tiny sliver -- between 4% and 5% -- of its stock. The other 95% -- which consists of about 12.5 billion shares -- is being kept behind bars in one of the most byzantine, complicated lock-up schedules in history. To level set, lock-up periods are standard fare following an IPO; founders, top executives, and early venture investors usually agree not to sell their shares for 180 days. The point, as IPO advisor Lise Buyer of Class V Group explains, is twofold. First, it forces the people who know the company best to hold through at least one earnings report, so they can't dump stock on the public right before a bad quarter. Second, it sends a soothing signal during what could otherwise be a volatile and tenuous time in the life of a newly public company. "It's a message to the new buyers that the people who know the company best still believe in it and are going to hang on," said Buyer. But when the lock-up expires, usually right after 180 days, a glut of stock typically hits the market and puts downward pressure on the stock price. During the past decade, underwriters have pushed buzzy tech companies into adopting more staggered or shortened release dates for insiders to sell their shares, some even contingent on earnings or stock-price increases to dampen the flow. Airbnb, DoorDash, Reddit, and Snowflake all either shortened the 180 days or staggered them. SpaceX, however, took the flexible lockup approach, wrapped it in a puzzle, strapped it to an enigma, and sent it to live in a colony on Mars. There are 15 dates for sales in the public markets, according to the company's filings. For anyone who isn't Musk or a large investor, they can sell their stock during the 180-day window as it unlocks in slices of 7% on various dates in August, September, and October and then two trading days after SpaceX's Q2 2026 earnings, which will be its first as a public company. There's another big tranche after its next earnings report, and then whatever is left can be sold at 180 days. There are also dates tied to other earnings releases, plus stock-price increases. Avery Marquez, who tracks IPOs and lock-up structures as director of investment strategies at Renaissance Capital, described just how much of an outlier this is: "This is one of the most complicated, if not the most complicated lock-up we've ever seen." Buyer said she's never seen such a large percentage of a company's stock unlock before 180 days are up. "This is outside the bounds of anything we've seen before," she said. "I would expect their transfer agent will be doing shots of tequila, because it's going to be a little hard to manage," she joked. Why build a lock-up schedule this complicated? Buyer and Marquez said it's designed to keep the billions of shares behind bars from flooding the market all at once. To do so "could be catastrophic to the share price if everybody wanted to sell," said Marquez. Hans Tung, managing partner at Notable Capital and an early SpaceX investor through a company that was acquired by the rocket maker, said the schedule reads as an attempt to let shareholders ease out rather than see everything sold at once. Some will keep holding the stock "because that's how they compound over a long period of time," while others who got in during the past five to 10 years will probably sell to show some liquidity, he said. "I think this series of steps is designed for most shareholders to sell a bit each time," said Tung, whose fund has a small stake in SpaceX and a much larger position in Anthropic, which is also provides compute to SpaceX. Tung said he doesn't have inside information, but he noted that Anthropic and OpenAI, given their size, could end up adopting lockups similar to SpaceX if they go public. "The amount of money involved is just very big. So some people need to have exits along the way," he said. This is designed so that it's done over tranches instead of a free-for-all with a six month lockup and thereafter, everybody just do whatever they want." There's is another reason that could keep investors holding the stock, rather than selling right away, added Tung. The public market listing is the start of a new phase for SpaceX. And Musk's xAI, which is part of SpaceX, is likely to acquire some companies. He pointed to Cursor, the AI coding startup that SpaceX inked a compute deal with prior to the IPO. Days after the listing, SpaceX exercised an option to buy Cursor for $60 billion in SpaceX stock. Now that SpaceX is public, Musk has a liquid currency to fund more deals like this, Tung said -- and "as he acquires more companies, it will be adding more value to the stock, so [investors] will hold on for even longer." SpaceX has had a stunning trajectory in its brief time in the public market. The stock, which priced at $135 in the IPO, opened up at $150 on its first day trading and surged all the way to $226 per share in the following days. While it has since given up some of those gains, the stock now trades at roughly $162, giving SpaceX a $2.61 trillion market cap. And then there's Musk There's a wildcard in the mix. Musk holds roughly 6.4 billion shares making up about 82% of the voting power at SpaceX between his Class A and Class B supervoting 10-shares-in-one stock. Musk can't sell for 366 days, and there are no early-release provisions at all. But then in one shot, everything unlocks at once. Musk's unusual lock-up structure presents investors with a case of extremes, giving the stock a ballast of stability for the first year, followed by the potential for a supernova event. While it's almost inconceivable that Musk would choose to sell all his shares at that point given the negative signal it would send and the resulting impact on the company, the risk factor can't be discounted. Musk's track record with his Tesla stock may provide some indication of what to expect. Musk has held onto his stake in the electric carmaker and borrowed against it, avoiding the capital gains tax hit he would face. He has sold Tesla stock only as a last resort. Jay Ritter, an IPO expert and University of Florida professor, said he wouldn't be surprised if Musk doesn't sell any SpaceX stock at all. "He doesn't have to worry where his next meal is coming from, and if he does, it's probably going to be a tiny fraction of the, what, 6 billion shares that he owns," said Ritter. Musk might even buy more of SpaceX's, Marquez speculated. "It's possible we could see him buy shares when these are released. People start selling them, and he buys them up," she said. "With Elon Musk, anything is possible." Tung doesn't expect Musk to jump in right away, but wouldn't rule out buybacks down the line. "I don't think he will buy immediately, but I think over the course of the next five to 10 years, he will buy some [stock] back when he feels it's the right thing to do," he said. "He is who he is, and he's been doing this for a long time. I don't see any reason why he would behave differently." Buyer, who also declined to guess at Musk's plans, said the same. "He has no use for the cash, and I'm sure he believes that the stock is undervalued," she said. "He might not sell a single share." Whether Musk's investors can do the same remains to be seen. The post Elon Musk can't sell a single SpaceX share for a year -- and then all the locks crack open at once appeared first on Fortune.
SpaceX's AI boom comes with a perk for Memphis residents: half-price for Starlink
* SpaceX is offering Memphis residents 50% off Starlink. * SpaceX's vice president of Starlink engineering framed the discount as a community give-back. * Community groups in Memphis have been protesting SpaceX's data center. SpaceX is offering Memphis-area residents a steep discount on Starlink internet as its AI ambitions continue to expand in the region. Customers with eligible addresses in the Memphis area can sign up for Starlink at half the standard monthly price, and both new and existing subscribers won't have to pay upfront for hardware, xAI Memphis said on X. The company linked the promotion to its growing AI infrastructure in the city, home to xAI's Colossus data center. "The unique capabilities of the Colossus datacenters could not be accomplished without the partnership and support from the local Memphis community." SpaceX's vice president of Starlink engineering, Michael Nicolls, wrote on X on Tuesday. "Happy to bring affordable and great @SpaceX @Starlink connectivity to our neighbors," Nicolls added. Elon Musk also promoted the offer on X, posting simply that Starlink would be available at "half price" for residents in the Memphis region. The promotion comes as xAI rapidly expands its presence in the area. Colossus, launched in 2024, has become one of the world's largest AI computing clusters, powering Grok training and supporting compute needs across Musk's companies. The campus has continued to grow, including an expansion into nearby Southaven, Mississippi. Meanwhile, the facility has also drawn scrutiny from local residents and environmental advocates. Community groups, including Memphis Community Against Pollution, have criticized the project's energy use and emissions. Business Insider previously reported that the data center relies on enough methane gas generation to power roughly 280,000 homes, and that local organizations have launched efforts to monitor air pollution and urge elected officials to take action. The Starlink offer automatically applies to eligible addresses, reducing the monthly subscription price by 50% while waiving hardware costs. SpaceX has not announced when the promotion will end and has not responded to a request for comment. Read the original article on Business Insider The post SpaceX's AI boom comes with a perk for Memphis residents: half-price for Starlink appeared first on Business Insider.
C.F.T.C. Begins Investigating Polymarket, a Test of a Key Regulator
A federal financial agency has begun investigating Polymarket, reigniting longstanding questions about whether a leading prediction market company tied to Donald Trump Jr. is operating within the law. The inquiry is a test of whether the Commodity Futures Trading Commission, a little-known but powerful regulator, will hold to account a company with connections to President Trump. A year ago, over the strong objections of its enforcement attorneys and under a different agency head, the C.F.T.C. killed a separate investigation into whether Polymarket was illegally serving U.S. customers. Two people familiar with the new investigation, who spoke on condition of anonymity to discuss a confidential matter, said it began earlier this year and was extensive in scope. Few other details have been made public. A Polymarket spokeswoman declined to comment on the inquiry, but said that the company was "committed to maintaining accurate, fair and transparent markets." The disclosure of the investigation comes as Michael S. Selig, who was sworn in as the C.F.T.C.'s chairman last December, is under growing pressure to show that the agency can police the exploding prediction market business. Republican and Democratic lawmakers have grilled Mr. Selig about whether the prediction markets are magnets for insider trading and a way of seeking ill-gotten gains. Mr. Selig has vowed that the C.F.T.C. will chase down abuses on the platforms, which now rake in billions of dollars in trades a month. So far, though, only individual traders have been charged with wrongdoing. Instead, the C.F.T.C. went out of its way last year to fulfill requests and applications from Polymarket and two other leading prediction market companies with ties to the Trump family's business empire. In May, the president said it was critical that prediction markets thrive. The C.F.T.C.'s latest inquiry, reported earlier by The Wall Street Journal, is its third into Polymarket in recent years. In 2022, the agency collected a $1.4 million fine from the company for operating in the United States without a license. The settlement banned the company from accepting U.S. customers. In the last year of the Biden administration, the agency began investigating whether Polymarket was violating that ban. The Justice Department also launched a criminal probe. In a November 2024 raid, F.B.I. agents seized the electronic devices of Shayne Coplan, the firm's founder and chief executive. The C.F.T.C. began retreating from its investigation soon after Mr. Trump was sworn in and Caroline D. Pham was appointed as the agency's acting chair in January 2025, according to multiple people familiar with the matter, who spoke on condition of anonymity to describe confidential discussions. Trump Administration: Live Updates Updated June 26, 2026, 5:44 p.m. ET As part of a campaign by Ms. Pham to narrow the agency's enforcement work, defense attorneys for companies facing investigation were invited last spring to try and convince the C.F.T.C. to either drop the inquiries or settle potential cases against them. Attorneys in the agency's enforcement division concluded that the investigation against Polymarket should move forward, the people said. Nonetheless, they said, Ms. Pham issued a directive forbidding the enforcement division from trying to collect more evidence by issuing new subpoenas. She then ended the inquiry. Ms. Pham did not respond to a request for comment. Last July, Polymarket announced that the C.F.T.C. and the Justice Department had dropped their investigations. That helped clear the way for Polymarket, through a subsidiary, to open a U.S. platform. Last August, Polymarket announced that it had landed financial backing from 1789 Capital, an investment firm partly owned by Donald Trump Jr., who was named as an unpaid adviser. A spokesman for Mr. Trump, the president's eldest son, has said he has no involvement with Polymarket's dealings with federal regulators. Last fall, Ms. Pham's office intervened to ensure that the agency acted on a request from Polymarket to broaden the ways it could accept bets. Two senior officials who raised questions about that request were subsequently put on administrative leave and placed under internal investigation for reasons described only in vague terms. Even though Polymarket has the C.F.T.C.'s blessing to operate in the United States, its new platform offers far fewer betting options than its international website, which is still supposed to wall off U.S. customers. Polymarket tells its customers that it bans the use of virtual private networks -- devices that disguise the location of the user. But evidence has continued to emerge that Polymarket customers use them anyway. And questions have persisted about the company's controls against insider trading. In April, federal prosecutors charged a member of the U.S. Special Forces with using confidential information to make more than $400,000 in betting on the top-secret operation to capture Nicolás Maduro, the president of Venezuela. The soldier had used a V.P.N. to place the bets, the indictment said. In May, a Google software engineer was charged with illegally using confidential information to pocket nearly $1.2 million through Polymarket bets. In a statement Friday, the company said that it strictly prohibits insider trading, and that it has made nearly 100 law enforcement referrals. The post C.F.T.C. Begins Investigating Polymarket, a Test of a Key Regulator appeared first on New York Times.
Anthropic Thinks Its Own Success Is Key to Making AI Safe
Anthropic has spent the last five years warning the world about how advanced artificial intelligence could enable mass destruction, destabilize society, and cause a litany of other grave harms. But simultaneously, it has become one of the most powerful forces pushing AI capabilities forward. The company is now among the top developers and distributors of cutting-edge AI models and courts customers like the US military. It was recently valued at almost $1 trillion. At first glance, Anthropic's stark messaging and its actions seem fundamentally at odds. But inside the company, many people don't see a contradiction. To understand why, you first have to understand that Anthropic operates based on two core beliefs. The first is that artificial intelligence is the most transformative technology in human history, and its arrival is inevitable. The only real question is whether it leads to catastrophe or extraordinary prosperity. The second is that Anthropic believes the world will be better off if it remains at the frontier of the AI race, according to several former employees who spoke to WIRED on the condition of anonymity. Internally, leaders and employees at the company often refer to themselves as the "good guys," meaning the ones being responsible stewards of AI technology, two of the sources said. The company sees accumulating power -- whether in the form of capital, compute, research talent, or political influence -- not as an end in itself, but as the price of fulfilling its mission: "to ensure the world safely makes the transition through transformative AI." Helen Toner, executive director of Georgetown's Center for Security and Emerging Technology and a former OpenAI board member, uses an analogy to describe Anthropic's worldview. She compares powerful AI to a forest filled with both magical treasures and dangerous monsters. All the villagers nearby are rushing in, lured by the treasure. In her telling, Anthropic wants to venture farther into the forest than anyone else while investing heavily in taming the monsters -- that is, capturing AI's benefits while containing its catastrophic risks. "What's distinctive about Anthropic is they're like, 'People are going in the forest anyway, we have to do it first.' This is very explicitly their strategy: build cutting-edge AI in order to be a serious player at the table who can talk about what cutting-edge AI systems should look like, what risks they pose, and pushing for reasonable safeguards," Toner tells me. "They're very straightforward about this. It's just a weird enough strategy that people have a hard time hearing it." Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei outlined this approach plainly in a conversation with his cofounders posted on the company's career page: "You have to find a way to actually be competitive, to actually lead the industry in some cases, and yet manage to do things safely," he says. "If you can do that, the gravitational pull you exert is so great." Anthropic was founded in 2021 by a group of former OpenAI employees who defected after losing faith in the ability of the company's leadership -- particularly CEO Sam Altman -- to safely bring transformational AI into the world. That sentiment still shapes the company today. Two of the former employees I spoke with say that, in internal discussions, Anthropic executives often describe Altman and OpenAI -- and, to a lesser extent, Meta and Elon Musk's xAI -- as cautionary examples that help define Anthropic's own sense of responsibility. In many regards, Anthropic is just like any other Silicon Valley company. Many startups market themselves as David fighting the outdated, entrenched Goliaths of the industries they want to disrupt. Google, Facebook, and Apple were all founded upon idealistic principles, which later became muddied or were abandoned altogether as they became richer, larger, and more influential. But former employees say that Anthropic is unusual in how intensely it believes in its mission, and how explicitly it tells employees that technological and commercial power are a means to achieve it. One former employee says that in job interviews, Anthropic stresses to applicants that it's not a typical company shaped by market forces: It's governed by a public benefit structure that allows it to prioritize the "long-term benefit of humanity" above profits. But the company sees achieving financial success and building the most powerful AI models as being in service of that goal -- a prerequisite to its obligation to lead the industry on safety. "None of us wanted to found a company, we just felt like it was our duty," Sam McCandlish, cofounder and chief architect of Anthropic, said in the same conversation on the company's career page. "We have to do this thing. This is the way we're gonna make things go better with AI." Anthropic declined to comment for this story. The Good Guy Problem Anthropic touts on its website that it's a "high-trust, low-ego organization," without much in the way of internal politics, a characterization former employees tell me is largely accurate. They say that compared to leaders at other AI labs, Anthropic employees generally have faith in Amodei to tell them the truth about the company's technological progress, its interactions with government officials, and views on geopolitics. But a diversity of thought can be good for accountability. Shazeda Ahmed, a postdoctoral scholar at UCLA who has studied the ideological origins of the AI safety movement, says that organizations like Anthropic tend to struggle with a lack of pluralism. Her research in this area has found that the AI safety movement -- which is rooted in subcultures like effective altruism, among other communities -- suffers from homogeneity of thought, and tends to lean towards self-governance. "You're not being challenged on these ideas when you surround yourself with other people who believe them," says Ahmed. "And when your metrics of success are, 'To what extent did I act upon these ideological beliefs?' they're not really thinking about, well, this can go wrong if we're not the right people to have this much power -- they don't always examine their own blind spots." One former employee I spoke to says there's a lively culture of internal debate at Anthropic, and critiques from staff will often provoke lengthy responses from leadership. But another former employee describes a grimmer picture, in which more candid criticism remained confined to private group chats and rarely evolved into direct challenges to Amodei's decisions. They described the company's regular all-hands meetings with Amodei, which they call Dario Vision Quests, as akin to "going to a sermon to hear a priest." One of biggest internal controversies at Anthropic happened in the fall of 2024, when it became the first AI lab to partner with Palantir to provide AI services to US intelligence and defense agencies. Some of the former employees I spoke to said that questions about the deal were raised internally, but those debates didn't result in changes to the company's policies. In a post on the online forum LessWrong at the time, Anthropic employee Evan Hubinger wrote that the company was "extremely forthright" about the Palantir deal with staff, and while there were probably some lines that shouldn't be crossed without careful consideration, it was overall a positive development. "If you take catastrophic risks from AI seriously, the U.S. government is an extremely important actor to engage with, and trying to just block the U.S. government out of using AI is not a viable strategy," he wrote. Less than two years later, the Pentagon has reportedly started using Claude to do things like identify strike targets in the Israel-Iran war. When asked in a recent interview with Bloomberg whether Anthropic's models were used in an attack on an Iranian elementary school that killed more than 120 people, Amodei said he did not know, but that it would have been an approved use of the company's technology so long as a human made the final call. It's a stark example of how Anthropic's vision for responsible AI might not always line up with that of the broader public. Anthropic's strong views about how Claude should and shouldn't be used have come up in other contexts as well. Earlier this month, Anthropic released a cutting-edge AI model, Claude Fable 5, with a uniquely unfriendly safeguard built in: If researchers tried to use it for frontier AI development, which would violate the company's terms of service, Anthropic would effectively secretly sabotage their work. The move was immediately criticized by researchers across the AI industry, and Anthropic walked it back a few days later, saying it would make the safeguard visible. In a statement at the time, Anthropic said it didn't get the balance right, and that its intention was to thwart US foreign adversaries. Power Struggles Amodei himself has publicly acknowledged the dangers of allowing too much power over AI to become concentrated in the hands of a few labs, including his own. "It is somewhat awkward to say this as the CEO of an AI company, but I think the next tier of risk is actually AI companies themselves," he wrote in an essay earlier this year. But the remedies he suggests -- that AI companies "be carefully watched" and perhaps make public commitments to "not take certain actions" -- would do little to fundamentally redistribute that power. In longer parts of the essay, Amodei contemplates the sheer magnitude of his own influence and the responsibility that comes with it. But he largely skirts framing those things in personal terms, instead positioning them as a species-wide problem: "Humanity is about to be handed almost unimaginable power, and it is deeply unclear whether our social, political, and technological systems possess the maturity to wield it," he writes. He goes on to say it's the responsibility of "those closest to the technology to simply tell the truth about the situation humanity is in, which I have always tried to do." A common criticism of Anthropic's position is that the company thinks it knows the "truth about the situation humanity is in" better than others. It sees AI as both extraordinarily powerful but ultimately governable, provided the right people lead its development. But the truth is that no one knows exactly how AI will change the world -- some people just get more say in it than others. This is an edition of Maxwell Zeff's Model Behavior newsletter. Read previous newsletters here. The post Anthropic Thinks Its Own Success Is Key to Making AI Safe appeared first on Wired.
A New York primary winner has a defiant message for OpenAI and Anthropic
* Micah Lasher won New York's 12th congressional district primary race among eight candidates. * Tech giants spent millions to influence the Manhattan race and sway AI regulation outcomes. * The Manhattan congressional seat became an AI-regulation showdown with two candidates at its center. The new Democratic nominee for a congressional seat in Manhattan had a strong message for the AI industry on Tuesday night. After defeating a crowded field of eight candidates in New York's 12th congressional district, Micah Lasher, who won by 39.1%, took aim at the tech giants and their allies who spent heavily to shape the outcome of the deep-blue seat. "I have some news for the two big AI companies who've taken such an unusual interest in who won this congressional seat," Lasher said at a rally at Jacob's Pickles, an NYC staple famous for elevating the pickle from a garnish to a main course, following his victory. "I won't be taking my cues from either of you when it comes to protecting our kids, our jobs." The swipe at AI companies didn't come out of nowhere. On the trail, Lasher cast himself as a skeptic of Silicon Valley's push for lighter-touch regulation, stating on his website that AI could "displace workers, exacerbate inequalities, and pose a threat to our environment and public safety." He has also raised concerns about the rapid expansion of AI data centers and the industry's growing energy demands. The race in Manhattan became an unlikely battleground in the fight over how Washington should regulate AI, illustrating a schism in Silicon Valley. Millions of dollars flowed into the contest, much of it aimed at either helping or hurting Assemblymember Alex Bores, a Democrat and former Palantir employee who backed stronger AI safeguards, as competing factions of the tech world backed different candidates and different visions for AI policy. Bores quit Palantir during Donald Trump's first term, citing concerns about the company's work on immigration enforcement. According to Federal Election Commission filings, Think Big, a super PAC opposed to additional AI regulations backed in part by leaders at OpenAI and Andreessen Horowitz, spent about $8 million to prevent Bores from winning. Meanwhile, tech giants backing more AI safety regulations, including the Jobs and Democracy PAC, supported by donors with ties to Anthropic and Adobe, spent more than $13 million to boost Bores' candidacy. The clash came as New York emerges as one of the more aggressive states in the country in regulating the AI industry, and as data centers have become a growing flash point. New York State lawmakers have advanced proposals that would temporarily halt the issuance of permits for large new data centers while officials study their impact on the electric grid, utility bills, water consumption, and climate goals. Lasher is a cosponsor of New York's Responsible AI Safety and Education Act, a proposal aimed at placing safeguards on advanced AI systems, which is the same legislation that made Bores a target for some AI industry groups. Anthropic, OpenAI, and the Lasher campaign did not immediately respond to requests for comment. Read the original article on Business Insider The post A New York primary winner has a defiant message for OpenAI and Anthropic appeared first on Business Insider.
Reid Hoffman says SpaceX is 'not an AI company' and xAI is a 'complete train wreck' -- and there's room for both OpenAI and Anthropic
The LinkedIn co-founder and investor in both Anthropic and OpenAI offers his most pointed public assessment yet of Elon Musk's AI ambitions -- and raises alarms about the government's handling of Anthropic's pulled models Reid Hoffman has watched the AI industry from virtually every vantage point -- as a founder, a lead investor and as a decade-long Microsoft board member. So when he calls SpaceX's AI strategy "buying your way into relevance" and describes xAI as "a complete train wreck," it's not a hot take from the sidelines, but a verdict from one of Silicon Valley's most respected voices. "SpaceX isn't an AI company," Hoffman said in a conversation with Rana el Kaliouby on her Pioneers of AI podcast. "XAI is, as Elon himself has described, it's a complete train wreck for its kind of building of foundational models and other kinds of things." He also noted that all of its founders have left and it's on its "third restart." The xAI co-founder exodus has been well-documented. By May 2026, all 11 of xAI's original co-founders had departed the company, a cascade that began in earnest in February when Tony Wu, described as one of the most operationally central co-founders, announced his resignation. Musk restructured xAI's teams in response, but the departures continued. The company's flagship Grok models have faced persistent criticism for lagging behind competitors from Anthropic and OpenAI in benchmark performance. The timing of Hoffman's remarks is pointed. SpaceX went public on June 12th, with AI central to its IPO narrative. Within days, the company announced it was acquiring Cursor, the AI coding tool. Hoffman's read: that's not proof of AI capability, but evidence of its absence. "You could almost think of it as the IAC of AI," he said, invoking the serial acquisitions roll-up strategy of Barry Diller's internet-era conglomerate. "Use the market cap to buy AI companies and try to buy your way into relevance." His assessment of SpaceX's core compute business was equally withering. The company has positioned revenue from leasing AI infrastructure -- including to Anthropic -- as validation of its AI credentials. "You're a premium-priced CoreWeave," Hoffman said. "I get it. Which is not an AI company." The Anthropic situation If Hoffman's SpaceX commentary was skeptical, his reaction to the U.S. government forcing Anthropic to pull its Fable and Mythos models from the market was something closer to alarmed. The directive, issued by the U.S. government on June 11th as an export control order, suspended all foreign national access to the two models. The trigger, according to reporting from Fortune, was Amazon CEO Andy Jassy raising the alarm about a discovered jailbreak in the Fable 5 model -- a vulnerability that Anthropic itself had been working to address. Cybersecurity experts widely criticized the government's response as disproportionate and poorly scoped. Hoffman lands in a similar place. "It doesn't look like there's anything that's a particular principled, here's-the-way-that-we're-navigating-through-things, apply-kind-of-a-rule-of-law-and-predictability," he said. "It's more like, 'Hey, we kind of had some contentious interactions with this company anyway, so we're going to hit them with a stick.'" And that doesn't come with any kind of principled explanation, he added. He called the approach "autocratic willy-nilly" and "very sub-optimum," while acknowledging there may be a legitimate cybersecurity basis. The asymmetry -- Anthropic penalized while OpenAI was not -- is what troubles him most. Notably, Anthropic itself had flagged security concerns about the models, a detail that el Kaliouby raised in the conversation. For a company preparing for what is expected to be one of the largest IPOs in history, unpredictable regulatory intervention creates a new category of investor risk -- one that the Fable/Mythos episode has now made concrete. Room for both -- but not for everyone Hoffman, who is an investor in both Anthropic and OpenAI, pushed back firmly on the narrative that the two companies are in a zero-sum race. "We tend to want to tell these stories as cage matches," he said, as in two companies enter and only one leaves, but "in fact," he claimed, "there's a lot of room for both of them to win incredibly. He sketched distinct competitive lanes: Anthropic strong in code and expanding into design and legal; OpenAI and ChatGPT functioning more like a consumer search front-end, with its Codex coding product "insufficiently talked about" given its strength. The one pointed question he raised: whether Cursor, just acquired by SpaceX, had already peaked. "Cursor seems to have had its bright star some number of months ago and seems to be fading over the horizon," he said. Cursor has faced mounting pressure since early 2026 as Claude Code and Codex have gained ground, with developers increasingly questioning whether a standalone coding IDE still commands a premium. But of course, Hoffman has a vested interest in arguing each of these positions. On the subject of a bubble, he offered a framework for understanding speculation in the markets. It's wrong to say all of the valuations are crazy, he said, but not some. "The trick is, which ones?" His anchor for the bullish case on OpenAI and Anthropic: If AI becomes as pervasive as electricity, these will be two of the primary utilities -- and the revenue model doesn't need to be fully visible today. Google's early theory of monetization, after all, was enterprise servers, and then came AdWords -- "the best business model invented in human history" thus far. Tell Gen Z to stop booing AI On the question of how young people should navigate an AI-saturated job market, Hoffman's advice was blunt and cut against a prevailing narrative. "I've been thinking about writing an essay on the kind of mistakes that are made by college graduates booing or otherwise dissing AI," he said. As if speaking to all of Gen Z, he added: "You guys have the opportunity to be generation AI -- where you come into the workforce saying, 'I know this a lot better than all of you. You should be hiring me in order to help you become AI native organizations and so forth.' And it should be an opportunity, not a threat." Goldman Sachs publishes a semi-regular AI tracker which found in April 2026 that AI was already erasing roughly 16,000 net U.S. jobs per month, and 11,000 as of earlier this month, with Gen Z bearing a disproportionate share of the impact as entry-level knowledge roles face the highest displacement risk. Separate research found graduate unemployment had risen from 3.6% in 2019 to 5.6% in 2026. By mid-2026, 35% of entry-level job postings required at least three years of experience, and 45% of companies were using automated rejection systems at early hiring stages. Hoffman's counter is that most of that pain is being misattributed. The entry-level slump, he argued, has more to do with other factors -- with "AI washing" doing much of the narrative work in the interim. "It's actually, in fact, because of global turbulence and businesses being unable to figure out how to invest and plan," he said. "It's because of basically over-hiring in the pandemic and the, hey, maybe remote work really does work. Oh, right. Remote work's pretty hard to make work." His prescription, drawn from his book Superagency, is an agency mindset: treat AI not as a threat to your career but as the instrument of it. "The AI is my tool, companion, car, et cetera, as I navigate things," he said. "The AI can do a whole bunch of amazing things itself but is not complete -- and humans can add in a lot of significant and important things." The Microsoft chapter closes Hoffman's departure from the Microsoft board -- he chose not to stand for reelection and remains on through year-end -- closes a chapter that included facilitating the LinkedIn acquisition ("one of the epic M&As of history"), steering the GitHub purchase, and helping broker trust between Microsoft and OpenAI in the early days of their partnership. He described the decision simply: he'd rather be a founder than a governance person. He and Satya Nadella, he noted, still talk strategy. "As a matter of fact, Satya and I were just on the phone today." What comes next is drug discovery. Manas AI, his company with co-founders Ujjwal and Sid, is generating small molecule proposals that their computational chemists are calling genuinely promising -- the trigger, Hoffman says, for his decision to go all-in. The pitch deck, he revealed, describes Manas as "an AI drug discovery factory for creating monopolies" -- legally permissible, he notes, because pharmaceutical IP functions as a sanctioned monopoly by design. For the man who helped build the LinkedIn and Microsoft era of tech, it may be the longest-horizon bet he's ever made. For this story, Fortune journalists used generative AI as a research tool. An editor verified the accuracy of the information before publishing.
