2026-06-20 02:43:36
For all the talk about how "hackquisitions" were circumventing the traditional guardrails around M&A, we seem to have overlooked something vital: for such deals to work, they have to actually, you know, work. And the early returns suggest that perhaps they're not really working out...
Inklings is a newsletter featuring links and commentary from M.G. Siegler on timely topics found around the web.
🐥 Amazon Chickens Out of OpenAI Movie – I was just wondering what was going on with Artificial given that filming wrapped months ago, but we hadn't yet seen a trailer. Well, now we may know why... The movie is suddenly homeless. Regardless of how anti-OpenAI and/or anti-Altman this movie is, it's obviously an awful look for Amazon to kill it. After it's done, no less. The message from all of the tech players playing in Hollywood has always been that it's about the art and that they wouldn't meddle in artistic decisions. I mean, I guess they're not here, technically, just opting not to distribute the movie after promising to do so. That's arguably worse. And it's especially worse seeing as it's the same company that paid $75M to make a documentary about the President's wife. To keep layering on: the Melania movie featured a disgraced director exiled from Hollywood, while Artificial has one of the hottest directors in the world. If all of that gave Amazon pause, it certainly didn't stop them. Once they saw a cut, they clearly thought it was better to cut ties here, rather than risk angering their AI partner in which they have a massive equity stake. Yes, those deals came about after the movie was greenlit, but my god, how shortsighted. Artificial will obviously find a new home – Amazon better hope the movie isn't any good. But I'm not sure how much it will matter in Hollywood with the Scarlet Letter of meddling now firmly affixed to Amazon's studios. What does, say, Denis Villeneuve think of this, one wonders... [Puck 🔒]
📺 Netflix as the New Cable TV Front-End – Their deal with France's TF1 (which I first wrote about a year ago when it was announced, noting that Netflix really is now TV) makes Netflix the hub for both services, blending recommendations, 'Continue Watching', etc. This is a far deeper integration than what Amazon and others are doing with their 'Channels' strategy and clearly seems to be the future of streaming in many countries (Amazon has similar deals in place around the world for Prime Video). And as YouTube TV continues to eat traditional cable's lunch, might we see other regional cable providers in the US hand over the keys to Netflix? Comcast, the largest, would presumably try to do it through Peacock? But Peacock remains a far smaller player. More interesting would be if YouTube tries to get into this game. There's probably too much conflict with YouTube TV, but it increasingly feels like Netflix and YouTube are on a collision course to be the main hub/UI of streaming. I mean, they already are in many ways, but with others' content – including perhaps Peacock and the like. This also takes Netflix deeper down the live content rabbit hole, of course – and advertising too, though it sounds like those details are still in progress. [THR]
👻 Snap Spins Off An AI Company – This almost reads like a reverse-"hackquisition" in a way. 'Dotmo' will take a team from and have a licensing agreement with Snap, in return, Snap will get a large equity stake in the stand-alone company. But they won't be investing at all – because this is about Snap saving money, after all – but Snap co-founder Bobby Murphy will be in a personal capacity. Spin-offs are nothing new, of course. But again, not investing but having a co-founder invest is an interesting hack. As I wrote earlier this week, it feels increasingly like Snap made the wrong bet on AR versus AI – yes, they were betting on both to some degree, but it was clearly the wrong mix. At the same time, now they don't have the capital or the mandate from Wall Street to invest in both going forward so... Dotmo will go it "alone". And presumably have no trouble raising more outside funding as an AI company. Perhaps at a large enough valuation, it can reverse-acquire Snap, Elon-style?[TechCrunch]
🐆 Kissing the Leopard's Ass Before He Eats Your Face – How shocking it must be for Zuckerberg and Bezos to learn that President Trump is mocking them behind their backs, showing off the private messages they send him to others to showcase them "kissing my ass". Ahead of the inauguration, as Zuck embarrassingly scrambled to showcase his new allegiance, I asked, "What's the world record for kissing ass? We're likely to find out." Trump clearly agrees! And can't stop telling everyone all about it. With Tim Cook too. Even more embarrassing for these guys: one of the people Trump likes to show these message too is Elon – his on-again/off-again PaidPal. "First-class groveling," was his quoted assessment as he must have laughed while Bezos tried to convince Trump to ditch SpaceX for Blue Origin for some contracts. That's the thing: given their business interests, what choice do these guys have but to grovel? If they don't, they get thrown into the doghouse. They undoubtedly could be less overt, but Trump loves the performative nature of such things. Hence, Cook's golden trinket. And you could probably argue that this humiliation has paid off, quite literally! But the real price was dignity, which they'll have to live with selling off. Which will look especially bad when all of them inevitably start to turn on Trump again as he becomes a lame duck. [Wired 🔒]
"When I told that story to George Lucas in 1977, when we were in Hawaii together getting ready for the release of Star Wars: A New Hope, he said, ‘I have something better than Bond. It’s called Indiana Smith,’ which is what it was called at the time. He told me the premise of the Indiana Jones series, and that’s how I got that job."
– Steven Spielberg, revealing how the Cubby Broccoli rejecting him on the notion of directing a James Bond film (twice) led to Raiders of the Lost Ark. I linked to this last week too, but the quotes are just amazing.
🎶 Listening to Fantastic Cat - So Glad You Made It
🍺 Enjoying a Stroud LOL Light Lager
🇬🇧 Sent from London, England
2026-06-19 23:19:07
The news that Noam Shazeer is (once again) leaving Google seems like a big deal. The news that he's joining OpenAI, which turned the transformer paper he helped write into a product that he couldn't launch (in his first stint) at Google seems like an even bigger deal. Bigger still may be the fact that he had rejoined to help the Gemini product take on ChatGPT, which was seemingly working, at least to some degree. But actually, the biggest deal has to be the actual deal that brought him back to Google. Because it wasn't even two years ago when Google paid $2.7B to bring Shazeer back.
And like that – poof – he's gone.
To be fair, there were others on the Character.ai team that Google seemingly wanted too. The non-exclusive licensing rights for Character? Probably less so. If anything, that aspect of the deal has ranged from a headache to a nightmare.1 But clearly it was a deal structure in such a way to get Shazeer back with an offer he couldn't refuse. And he didn't. Until he did. Again.
That deal structure, of course, was one of the early "hackquisitions" – a deal to bring on a company's key talent without acquiring the company itself. Because that clearly would have been messy from a regulatory perspective for any of Big Tech. If nothing else, such deals would be bogged down for months while they're scrutinized. A "hackquisition", by contrast, could be done almost instantly. Because they were structured to leave the actual company behind as a sort of hollowed-out husk. Not exactly a carcass because they weren't exactly dead but not fully alive either. A place to pick up the phone if the government calls. And to collect licensing fees.
And again, the deals were set up in ways so that those with power couldn't really say "no" – be it the founding team or investors. The employees left behind sometimes got screwed, but the "hackquiring" company often tried to do the right thing so as not to draw that eye and ire of Washington.
As such deals kept happening, Washington obviously started to look at these deals anyway. But the pace at which Washington moves have allowed them to continue unabated. Of course, something else now runs the risk of ending such deals: the fact that they don't seem to be working out. Let's look back at some of the big ones.
The first such "hackquisition" clearly drew inspiration from the deal Microsoft almost did with OpenAI employees (from Sam Altman on down) during "The Blip". Such a deal, had it happened, would have looked pretty wild now given that OpenAI is valued at $852B. And, of course, constantly clashing with their benefactor. Anyway, as a result of Altman and OpenAI getting back to work, Microsoft turned their gaze elsewhere – to the AI startup co-founded by their board member Reid Hoffman.
But that deal wasn't about bringing Hoffman on board beyond the board, it was seemingly all about bringing on Mustafa Suleyman, a co-founder of DeepMind who left after the Google acquisition and started Inflection with Hoffman, raising a ton of money (for the time) in the process. After failing to get any sort of early traction and undoubtedly needing to raise billions more to effectively compete, it was seemingly an easy call when Microsoft came calling with $650M.
Again, not for the company, but for Suleyman and his team (and for the investors, which, yes, also included Hoffman). Fast-forward to today, just over two years later and Microsoft is certainly more independent in AI. But they're not necessarily in a better place, as the many re-orgs and re-brandings of Copilot have showcased. Meanwhile, Suleyman himself was recently moved from spearheading that product and team to focusing on foundation models instead.
$650M is relatively small by today's AI standards, but it's not clear what Microsoft actually got out of it. The consumer version of Copilot made to look like Pi, Inflection's product, clearly hasn't worked. And the team is now led by someone else so...
A few months after the Inflection deal, that other Seattle-based tech company tried their hand at a "hackquisition". The deal for Adept was roughly half the size at $330M, but the idea was the same: get the co-founders on-board with Amazon's AI team. Most notably, David Luan was tasked with starting their "AGI Lab".
We're not even two years removed from that deal and yet 4 of the 5 Adept co-founders have already left Amazon. That includes Luan, who had previously worked at both Google and OpenAI, and left this Amazon past February. That team did launch one product, Nova Act, but it's not clear how useful that actually is to Amazon.
This deal, just a couple months later, was more under-the-radar than Adept, but may have actually been slightly larger. It has also been an even bigger headache, with a whistleblower saying that the left-behind Covariant company is just a "zombie" shadow company. Still, Amazon may have gotten some robots out of the deal even if the team seems to be pretty much gone.
We've been over this one.
The big one. While the nearly $15B deal technically structured a bit different than the other "hackquisitions" – namely in that Meta acquired a very specific 49% stake in Scale – the idea was still the same: bring AI talent on board to Meta, fast.
And specifically, Mark Zuckerberg zero'd in on Alexandr Wang as the guy who would reboot Meta's AI efforts, putting their Llama out to pasture, as it were. We all know what happened from here – mega offers led to mega chaos both around the entire AI ecosystem and within Meta itself. The latter is still playing out, with at least some believing that Wang's Scale culture and techniques are eating Meta alive from within.
At the same time, the new "Superintelligence" group has be able to build and ship their first models in record time. They're not yet frontier, but by all accounts they're good. So Zuckerberg, at least for now, has gotten the outputs he's wanted, though the inputs remain perhaps an issue. And Meta's stock has been hammered hard with investors still concerned about Meta's AI path going forward given the billions spent, with hundreds of billions more to come.
This is still more TBD – like the name of the sub-group Wang runs – but it's not trending particularly well if the moves really end up ripping Meta apart.
A strange deal even by "hackquisition" standards. Meta essentially bought the book of Nat Friedman's and Daniel Gross' fund so that they could bring those two on board to help with their AI efforts. But that also mean Gross would have to leave the AI startup where he was not only a co-founder, but the CEO: Safe Superintelligence. Ilya Sutskever did not seem happy about that, as you might imagine. Especially since Zuckerberg had tried to "hackquire" SSI, but Sutskever shot him down (though Meta did apparently invest).
Friedman's role has seemingly shifted a couple times with constant re-orgs and shuffles in the aforementioned chaotic Meta environment. Gross is now working on Meta's infrastructure build-out for AI.
This was a layered shitshow as OpenAI had originally agreed to acquire – as in actually acquire – Windsurf, then backed out (perhaps due to Microsoft). Google then stepped in to save the day – except the "hackquisition" nature of the deal led to a huge backlash because of the group being left behind, apparently without any sort of compensation. And so another AI startup, Cognition, stepped in to save the day from the already saved day. Fun times.
That brings us to today, while there have been a few other "hackquisitions", they're either too small or too new – most notably, NVIDIA's $20B mega deal to bring on board Groq talent, where yes, the IP license actually seems to matter – to know how well they'll play out. But it's pretty clear that the first crop didn't pan out as the "hackquirerers" would have hoped. At best, the situations are messy. At worst, they're shitshows – or really no-shows, with the talent now gone.
Shazeer is the biggest of those to date – again, in less than two years after a $2.7B deal. Can't wait to hear more about what happened there. But it could be as simple as these "hackquisitions" not aligning incentives very well...
1 And yes, there are reports that Shazeer was a headache for Google too internally in this second stint. ↩
2026-06-18 23:17:14
Snap's stock is down again today and it's now below an $8B market cap. Safe to say the market doesn't think Specs will ignite a turnaround. But they're also in a weird position where thanks to super-voting shares, the "normal" market mechanisms, don't really apply here. So is it crazy to think they should team up with PE and go private again?
Inklings is a newsletter featuring links and commentary from M.G. Siegler on timely topics found around the web.
🍎 “Unfortunately, price increases are unavoidable." – It has come to this. Apple, the company which prides themselves in price stability for consumers is being forced to raise prices due to the chip crunch. Tim Cook clearly knows what a shock to the system it will be – even a $100 raise here or there will undoubtedly dent sales, and if the iPhone price increase needs to be substantial, watch out. It's really pretty wild that this is one of Cook's last moves as CEO. The operations master who has priced Apple products to perfection (from a margin-perspective) has been sideswiped by the market. And it's coming at the worst possible time given that the new Siri AI functionality relies on more RAM, which means Apple has to boost it across their devices to ensure the features will work well – so they can't really just offer options with less memory. A real sort of changing of the guard moment, not just for Apple (John Ternus will have to be the one on stage in September unveiling the new iPhone pricing) but also for the industry, as it's now the various AI players, led by NVIDIA, that commands inventory more so than Apple. Rolfe Winkler has a nice, quick overview video for his scoop too. [WSJ 🔒]
⚔️ Epic's 'Team Open' Plea – When he's not busy battling Apple in (and out of) court, Tim Sweeney returns to his day job running Epic Games which, App Store issues aside, is... in a bit of a precarious place. Why? Roblox. Sweeney is clearly terrified that it's eating Fortnite and making the case that it's taking the whole industry with it. So he's calling on everyone else to link arms and fight for an "open" ecosystem – which sounds less like an "open" alliance and more like an anti-Roblox alliance. Only tangentially stated is his hope/belief that Epic will power all of this via their Unreal Engine and/or – more ideally – banding together with Fortnite directly. He obviously still wants to make the Metaverse – his Metaverse – happen, and he sees it slipping away. Help us, Josh D'Amaro, you're our only hope? That is, unless maybe Microsoft wants to shed Mojang to merge Minecraft into the effort? [GamesBeat]
🔨 Siri to the Studs – Why does the new Siri work now whereas previous attempts the past 15 years or so have not? They had to completely rebuild it from scratch. So said team lead Mike Rockwell at the smaller, more technical event following the WWDC keynote last week. He noted that while they quickly built a new version last year that was on top of the existing Siri, it was "sort of incremental", so they scrapped it and completely rebuilt it, which obviously took longer. In other words, it sounds like Apple went through the exact same exercise that Amazon did with Alexa. This could not be less surprising to me as I've written about this very topic numerous times – that Apple and Amazon were in particularly bad spots when the LLM revolution came because of their previous success with Siri and Alexa, respectively. While those original systems seem comically rudimentary by today's AI standards, they were breakthroughs at the time and as such, gained millions of users – users neither company wanted to just abandon. But whereas both clearly thought you could build a bridge between the two technologies, you really couldn't. Even Google keeps seeing endless edge cases break as they update 'Assistant' with Gemini. Anyway, good to see Apple took the harder, needed steps, though they probably should have known they'd need to do that a few years ago... [9to5Mac]
"This is a hundred-year flood. I’ve never seen anything like it in any area in over 40 years."
– Tim Cook, in his interview linked to above about Apple's need to raise prices due to memory chip shortages.
Below, members of The Inner Ring will find thoughts on:
• AirPods with Cameras Set for Late 2027
• OpenAI Poaches Google's Hackquired Talent
• SpaceX's "Cheap" $60B Deal
• Anthropic's Breach... of Trust
• Meta's Ongoing Turmoil
2026-06-18 00:22:29
Look, it's easy to dunk on Snap's new Specs.1 They're big and bulky, last for four hours, and cost $2,195. That said, there are obviously impressive bits too – namely in the fact that they don't require you to tether to a power brick (as the Vision Pro does) or a puck (as Meta's AR glasses have thus far). The main thing I'm worried about is that they're seemingly not ready to let anyone actually use them yet. Perhaps not a surprise given they're aiming to ship in the fall. But who on Earth would pre-order these at that price point without at least someone vouching for them? Snap may be popular with the youths, but they're not Apple when it comes to consumer hardware. Also, even Apple has had a hell of a time selling the Vision Pro.
To be fair, people have been trying the Specs for quite a while, but older versions that were a dev kit for this one. The impressions range from people impressed by aspects to those frustrated by many others. That, I suspect, will be roughly the same reaction to these consumer-oriented Specs. But again, it's just hard to see how you can justify the price point. Snap itself can because they have a business to run. And well, it hasn't been running so smoothly, at least from a stock perspective in recent years. The reality here is that they simply can't afford to sell these Specs at a massive loss, quite literally.
And while Evan Spiegel is quick to point out that the original Mac was also insanely expensive, and that the Vision Pro still is, again, Snap is not Apple. And again, the Vision Pro hasn't sold well! Neither did the Mac at first!
So why on Earth is Snap launching these now?
Well, for one thing, Spiegel said they would. He previously promised they were coming in 2026. Lest his product be tagged with the dreaded "vaporware" label, he's aiming to get them out the door before the end of the year – note the "Expected to ship starting Fall 2026" wording on their site.2 "Expected" is seemingly doing some work there...
For another thing, as mentioned, Snap is in a tricky spot as a company. While the core product, Snapchat, continues to hum along with their key demographic, life as a public company is hard. They've simply never been able to monetize as well as their main rival Meta and that, in turn, has given them even less leeway with Wall Street when it comes to far afield bets such as this one. Also, Wall Street has long hated Meta's bet on the Metaverse and clearly views this as analogous – though again, without the great profit engine to back it up.
Spiegel would say – and is saying – that Specs are simply an extension of what Snap has always been doing with Snapchat. That is, a "more human" approach to bring technology into your life. And that they've owned and perfected "AR" for years at this point, albeit on smartphones. Again, Specs aim to bring that further into the real world. Spiegel is good at selling his vision, he always has been, the problem comes when he actually puts on the product (more on that below).
But the real problem is the price point. Thinking through the strategy a year ago, I noted that it felt like sub-$1,000 was key – and the closer to $500, the better. Well, there goes that dream. You can blame tariffs or trade wars or actual wars or memory chip wars, the reality is that $2,195 is just not going to cut it. It's just hard to see anyone buying it, be it Wall Street all the way down to consumers.
That's harsh, but also just reality. At the same time, it is hard to see what other choice Snap has. Their attempt to make the Spec's business a separate subsidiary with other funding possibilities hasn't eased Wall Street concerns. Meanwhile, the aforementioned Meta and Apple continue work to come after the space. Those efforts seem further out with "smartglasses" (think: less AR and more AI) the focus for now.
Therein probably lies the answer. Snap probably should have doubled down on AI instead of AR. But hindsight is obviously 20/20 – even in Specs. One can almost envision a world in which Snap was a player in "human-centric AI" right now, an angle that everyone from Meta to Microsoft is trying to own as the backlash against AI continues to swell. Meta was able to pivot from their Metaverse bet, but it took billions upon billions of dollars. Snap simply doesn't have that luxury. Or time.
Because, again, Wall Street continues to punish the stock. To the point where at some point, one has to imagine Snap is an attractive takeover target. Thanks to founder-controlled shares, a hostile takeover seems unlikely if not impossible, but Spiegel still has a fiduciary responsibility to take any offers on the table seriously. Snap is currently an $8B company. That's like an AI seed round these days...
The better option may be for Spiegel and team to team up with some PE players to take Snap private again. The Dell playbook is what I'm imagining here. Back in 2013, the company was downtrodden when Michael Dell concocted the largest LBO ever at just under $25B. This allowed Dell to operate back under the covers of being a private company while they reworked the business.
It worked. Dell later went public again and is now valued at $260B. That's undoubtedly an unreasonable goal, but there's a lot of room between Snap's $8B market cap and Dell's $260B. Coincidentally, Snap's peak market cap five years ago was exactly half of Dell's right now: $130B. Sure, it was inflated as many such things were during the pandemic, but wow, that's quite a steep drop.
Anyway, back to the Specs themselves. In a certain light, from certain angles, they actually look pretty good. Granted I may be biased as someone who has worn thick black-rimmed glasses much of my life, but still... you could see them working. Then you see them on actual people, not in their marketing shots and they look... well, not great, Bob. Still entirely too thick and bulky.3 Like glasses that a caricature of a mobster in the 1970s might wear. Or someone who needs the thickest prescription lenses you can buy.
Again, with no puck for either battery or compute, this is not a surprise. But we're still clearly not at the point where we can ditch the puck yet. Four hours of battery life is okay... unless you actually need to wear the glasses to see.
So no, these aren't actually replacements for real glasses, which Meta Ray-Bans can be if you were so inclined. That doesn't mean they're useless, it just means it's still way too early to push ahead here with such specs for Specs.
Obviously how they do their core task, AR, will matter. But again, no one knows for sure yet because Snap isn't letting anyone know for sure yet. And again, the dev kits suggest some interesting elements, but it's early. Far more interesting may be the notion of using these as a secondary monitor for your computer, which Spiegel says is one of his core use cases. This is certainly a compelling use case for the Vision Pro too, but that device is so comically cumbersome to put on and start using that it's a non-starter for most. But a headset you simply slip on, with no cables required?...
But then it comes back to: would I pay $2,195 for that? I mean it's better than the Vision Pro's $3,499! But it's still way out of range for most consumers. Which Snap obviously has to know, I'm just not sure they had any other choice but to launch here and hope that some use case boosts them to the point where they can survive until a simpler, svelter, and cheaper version is ready. Can Snap make it long enough as a stand-alone entity to find out? The question simply must be asked, sadly.
1 Especially, it seems to me, on Threads, owned by Snap's main rival, which is interesting in a Twitter-under-Elon sort of way, though perhaps not unexpected in a self-selecting sort of way... ↩
2 I will say the virtual "try-on" element of the site is one of the best I've seen. It's so simple – though also oddly in black and white? ↩
3 I do appreciate Harry McCracken's note on the matter: "The new version is 40% lighter, has more than five times the claimed battery life, offers a wider field of view, and, though still decidedly chunky, no longer vaguely resembles a Cybertruck affixed to your face." ↩
2026-06-16 00:59:25
Today, a double-feature – a sort of one-two punch on the situation in which Anthropic currently finds themselves. How they might work their way out, and why they might not – because they might not want to...
Inklings is a newsletter featuring links and commentary from M.G. Siegler on timely topics found around the web.
💫 Satya Nadella's "Frontier Ecosystem" – Look, it's clearly easier to write a call-to-arms against frontier model domination when you don't currently control one of those leading frontier models. Though it's also awkward when you own 25%+ of a startup that does control one of those – and even more so when you're now spending billions of dollars to try to create one of those leading frontier models. That said, that doesn't mean Nadella is wrong in any of this – and many, increasingly, would hope he's right, I imagine! Beyond the models, it puts the premium on people, the true "orchestration layer" within a company that makes it what it is – not just an automated system. Yet questions remain about how many people are actually needed to build such companies versus the status quo – and what exactly their jobs will entail. The other elephant in Nadella's room here is that Microsoft obviously wants to be the platform on which this future is built. It's not a bad pitch, just completely conflicted, and a bit obtuse. But that makes it seem as if Nadella actually wrote it, which is a good thing. [SN Scratchpad]
🇬🇧 The UK Bans Social Media for Kids – While I'm generally not in favor of "nanny state" moves, I think overall this is the right, tough call. To me, it's less about taking something away from kids – which, they'll figure out a way to access anyway, as I would have when I was that age – and more about the signal it sends. And not even necessarily to the tech companies, more just to society. This ban, if implemented well – admittedly a big "if" – will act to switch the norm from all kids needing to be on social media to be "normal" to the opposite. It will hopefully relieve that pressure – performative and otherwise. I am torn about roping YouTube into this – on one hand, I get it given its scale and social dynamics, but on the other, for all the crap, it is also a wealth of interesting and useful content (not to mention entertainment, of course). I guess not banning YouTube Kids, is an okay work-around (though they'll probably need to re-brand it?), but still... I'm also really not sure about the gaming element of this. Again, I get it, but this slope is already awfully slippery. AI chatbots will have to be included at some point, right? This isn't the first such ban and won't be the last, but it happens to be where I live, raising young children so... we'll see how this goes. The "Big Techbacco" trend continues... [Reuters]
🦊 Fox Gets Their Own Streaming Box – The $22B deal for Roku will have all kinds of ramifications. While it is the most popular streaming box, the company actually makes most of its money from its ad businesses, which includes their streaming service. And Fox already has another one of those in Tubi (which they say they're not merging). Meanwhile, the "Switzerland" nature of the company – which, many forget, actually started as a skunkworks project inside Netflix way back when – has allowed their boxes to flourish. (Well that and the fact that they're cheap and easy-to-use – even as they've gotten increasingly spammy with ads in the UI.) If they're no longer Switzerland, will it change the way other competitors view them? Wall Street clearly hates this deal, with Fox's stock down over 15% today. But it's probably a smart deal if they can maintain the status quo, which is not certain. Beyond the FAST services, their "Howdy" low-price streaming service is intriguing too. Let's also remember that at the height of the pandemic streaming boom, Roku had a market cap of $65B. [WSJ 🔒]
🍿 Steven Spielberg: The Return – The past few weeks have been all about the youth movement, largely driven by YouTube, happening in real time at the box office. But this past weekend, Steven Spielberg came roaring back to life – incredibly, the man who created the summer blockbuster with Jaws hasn't had one in 24 years! The 79-year-old director learned some new tricks – TikTok, viral stunts, etc – but it was the olds who ultimately saved the Disclosure Day: 59% of the audience for the $44M opening were over 34 (which yes, qualifies as "old" for moviegoing). There's still a ways to go for profitability, as the movie cost just under $200M to make and market – it will need to make around $400M to break-even at the box office, so let's see how the second weekend holds – sadly, as expected, Masters of the Universe plunged almost 70% in its second weekend. Somehow, Obsession, in its 5th weekend, stayed at #2, which marks four straight weekends which were bigger than its actual opening. Wild. [NYT]
"He simply did not want to be conflated with Mark Zuckerberg anymore, that he has his problems with the guy. He doesn’t like kids coming up to him in airports with business cards that say 'I'm CEO, bitch' for him to sign."
– Aaron Sorkin on why Jesse Eisenberg didn't want to reprise his role as Mark Zuckerberg in The Social Reckoning, the sequel (at least spiritually) to the 2010 film he wrote, The Social Network.
I had been wondering why he passed – Sorkin noted that he tried for three straight days to get him to do it. Fair enough. And Jeremy Strong's vocal performance as Zuck seems like it will be one for the ages, even if, oddly Jeremy Allen White, who plays journalist Jeff Horwitz, actually looks more like Zuck.
Below, members of The Inner Ring will find thoughts on:
• SpaceX's Colossal Data Center Problem
• Inside Meta's "Gulag"
2026-06-15 17:55:27
Everyone knows the old proverb, "be careful what you wish for..." And while no one is sure of its exact origins, it has retained its power over perhaps centuries because while everyone knows it, many still fail to heed its warning time and time again. These past few days have brought the latest example: Anthropic.
The AI startup has been the loudest proponent of stricter controls over the broader technology, often equating it to nuclear weapons to drive the point home. Well, message received – even if garbled and mangled.
With the news late last week that the Trump administration would be putting in place export controls on Fable 5, Anthropic's latest model, the company is now once again scrambling to figure out a path forward. I say "again" because we're a mere three months from the last blow-up with the administration, which ended in the company being deemed a supply-chain risk. This new situation has nothing to do with that one, the administration is quick to say. But of course it does, even if indirectly. It's a dance between two sides that clearly don't like one another because they clearly don't see eye-to-eye on some crucial policies and ideals. This, in turn, seemingly gives the administration a decidedly quicker trigger finger when it comes to things such as this current situation.
And Anthropic is giving them every excuse in the world to do this because again, they're asking for it. Literally! Again, the endless calls for stronger controls and oversight, while perhaps noble in ways and prudent in others, are simply not a good way to impact policy. At best, you're going to be charged with fear-mongering. At worst, you're scaring away would-be customers.
Now, Anthropic may say that actually, these stances are engendering some level of trust with the customer base. The notion that they're perhaps the only ones telling the truth about AI and even willing to stand up to the government to prove it. Certainly, their recent surge in numbers plays to this narrative. But it's also far more nuanced than this. Because beyond the battles with the government, Anthropic's actions are also undermining such trust in other ways.
There's a growing sense that it's increasingly Anthropic's way or the highway. That applies to the administration and to partners and to customers. And that's perhaps okay when you're the scrappy underdog. But when you move into the position of power as the de-facto leader in AI, that's a problem. Potentially a big one.
As such, when the company complains that the export control around Fable is unwarranted, it has the decided ring of "regulation for thee, not for me." I'm not saying they don't have a point – in fact, based on everything I've read and heard, I think they do (more below)! But the point is that this misses the point because Anthropic is increasingly missing the point. The company does not operate in a perfect simulation, but rather in the real world. The very messy, very chaotic real world. The reality here, sadly, is that you must often bend to get your way. Because you have to work with others. Sometimes that involves bending to the point of breaking, the key is simply not to go over that line, obviously.
You would have thought Anthropic would have learned this lesson already. They were against taking money from certain entities in the Middle East until the reality of the world dictated that they had to in order to survive. The DoD situation was one the company seemed fine going to war over, until the realities of actual war dictated that they had to tone down the rhetoric and let cooler heads prevail.
But, well, they keep finding themselves in compromising situations! It's to the point where you almost have to wonder if Anthropic isn't actually angling for such outcomes. That is, while calling for regulation is one thing, forcing yourself to be regulated is, well, a more direct way to enact such regulation! Wait a minute.
What if this is what Anthropic wants?!
Again, it simply can't be discounted to zero at this point. There's a way to tell this story where what they're doing is actually forcing the government to act and to make an example of them for the greater good. Well, for Anthropic's version of the greater good, at least. "Regulate me, Daddy," and all that.
The problem with this narrative is that the administration doesn't seem eager or ready to regulate anyone else except for Anthropic. So yeah, that's a problem if that's your game of 3D chess. It turns the game into checkers, fast.
At some point last week, it seems like the Trump administration was alerted of a potential security problem with Fable. Multiple stories point to Amazon as the main whistleblower, though other reports have multiple entities raising such concerns. At least one report notes that Amazon flagged this to Anthropic first, and this is plausible because it sure seems like the actual issue here is that Anthropic doesn't believe this vulnerability is a big deal, while the administration does.
So it's entirely possible that Anthropic was made aware of this issue, but decided there was no immediate action needed because, in fact, the precautions they took to turn Mythos into Fable should take care of the concern raised. Further, it seems like the same vulnerability – a bypass, not a "universal jailbreak", per Anthropic – exists in other leading models and they clearly don't view it as an exploit that's going to lead to catastrophic harm. Again, this is Anthropic, the company quick to jump on any and all reasons to declare that some element of AI is going to cause potentially existential harm!
Anyway, again, the administration clearly believed otherwise. Or at least that's the cover they're conveying. It's certainly possible that someone convinced them of this, but it's also entirely possible that they're wrong. Regardless, the situation led to a phone call to Anthropic the outcome of which was... not great!
A lot of he said/she said (he sAId/she sAId) here. Clearly someone on the administration side leaked out that when they tried to get Dario Amodei on the phone, he was said to be out of office at a wellness retreat. The fact that Anthropic flat out denies this is amazing. It suggests that someone really wanted to make Anthropic look unserious in this situation. "Sorry, Dario couldn't be bothered to save the world because he was in a sound bath." That kind of thing.
I can't wait to hear the real background of this aspect – it does seem like he was stuck in something, was it a meeting about wellness, something about the model and/or safety, that was distorted, intentionally or not, into a "wellness retreat"?
Whatever Amodei was busy with, the fact that he was busy when the White House called is obviously not a great look. No matter what you think about the administration, it's the White House! You should probably have some level of respect for the institution and their concerns over safety. Even if you think they're misguided! You probably shouldn't leave them waiting for a – very specific – hour and fifteen minutes. Sure, others may have been tasked with managing the situation, but again, it's the White House. This is a CEO situation.
And then when the phone calls were finally connected, it sounds like that didn't go well either. To the point where Scott Bessent and perhaps Susie Wiles – notable as they were said to be two of the key drivers to cool down the previous DoD situation – are clearly being conveyed as annoyed/pissed off. Again, the reporting suggests that Amodei gave the administration the "this is no big deal" explanation and it sure seems like they didn't like that explanation too much! One can imagine they viewed this response as flippant.
Anthropic was given an hour and a half – 90 minutes! – just fifteen minutes longer than Amodei left them hanging on the phone, to pull Fable.
Anthropic ended up doing so after the White House took the drastic action of the export ban. This was not only a problem for other countries – including allies – looking to use the model, or its variations, like Mythos, continuing their security research, but also for American companies with non-US citizens working there. Including, Anthropic! So yeah, Anthropic had little choice but to pull the model.
It feels like this is all a bad game of telephone, both figuratively and literally.
It's still not entirely clear which side is "right" and there's undoubtedly nuance here. It sounds like most outside experts are siding with Anthropic right now, recognizing what the problem is and recognizing that the administration may not realize what the actual issue is. OpenAI is oddly – perhaps not so oddly – quiet here even though their own models may have the same issues. Ditto for Google, xAI, and everyone else. Many rushed to defend – or at least pretend to – Anthropic in the DoD situation, but there are a lot of crickets here. If nothing else, it showcases that Anthropic is perhaps burning more bridges than just those with the Trump administration.
At the same time, China got quickly thrown into the mix. Just as a bogeyman, or as a legitimate concern? Unclear. Anthropic, for what its worth, says China was never brought up as an actor of concern in all this...
And why on Earth is Andy Jassy, fresh off of a massive capital infusion from Amazon to Anthropic, in the middle of this? He can't be the actual whistleblower, right? Right?! Maybe he just happened to be on the phone with President Trump, or some other high-ranking official, when all this was going down? And when pushed for his thoughts, he just relayed what his researchers found? There are some great memes around this though, as you might imagine.
Again, this is all just some triangulation and guesswork to come to the Occam's razor of it all. It's likely a misunderstanding – on a few fronts. And it's undoubtedly exacerbated by the existing bad blood between Anthropic and the Trump administration. As such, Anthropic finds itself once again scrambling, not necessarily to fix Fable, but to convince the administration that they don't have to. Because they're right, you see. Oh, you don't?
This all points to that bigger issue: the complete and utter lack of trust between the two sides. Arguably the most important AI player in the world and the entity that runs the free world – and the country in which said AI player operates. That seems like a bad disconnect to have.
The good news for Anthropic is that the Trump administration won't be in power forever. The bad news for Anthropic is that they will be in power for another two and a half years. A lot can and will happen in that time – especially in AI.