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A judge blocked the Pentagon from blacklisting Anthropic, calling the retaliation illegal. OpenAI, Anthropic and 100+ companies warned the AI cyberattack window is closing, Apple TV got pricier again, Stripe walked from PayPal, and a16z raised $1.1B for hardware.

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A US judge blocks the Pentagon from blacklisting Anthropic, ruling that its designation as a supply-chain risk was "illegal and baseless" (Reuters)

Judge Rita Lin finds the administration violated Anthropic's First Amendment rights, acting in "unlawful retaliation" for its criticism, and orders the blacklisting guidance rescinded (The Wall Street Journal)

OpenAI, Anthropic, AWS, Microsoft, and 100+ companies warn there is "a limited window" to prepare for AI-enabled cyberattacks and call for "collective action" (Axios)

The open letter asks AI labs to hand their best models to hospitals and infrastructure providers and governments to coordinate and fund cyberdefense; signatories include Google, CrowdStrike, Visa, and Mastercard (The New York Times)

Apple TV raises prices in the US, with the monthly price up by $2 to $14.99, its fourth increase in four years; the individual Apple One tier rises $2 to $21.95 (Variety)

Sources: Advent and Stripe are no longer pursuing a deal to acquire PayPal; the group offered to pay $60.50/share in July, valuing PayPal at $53B (Bloomberg)

a16z creates a $1.1B Machine Age fund focusing on hardware to "open the throttle and accelerate the physical buildout of AI" (TechCrunch)

Anthropic details Model Hardware Standard, a framework governing how AI agents interact with microscopes, liquid handlers, quantum hardware, and robot arms, going to trusted partners first (Wired)

Longreads

Home batteries are suddenly cheap and everywhere. Here's why. (TechCrunch)

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Nvidia posted $96B in quarterly revenue and guided to 70% growth next year, then agreed to buy Hugging Face for $12.9B. Trump weighed sweeping chip tariffs, cybersecurity stocks ripped on AI threats, and Instinct raised at $2.5B.

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Nvidia reports Q2 revenue up 106% YoY to $96.22B, above $92.17B est., Data Center revenue up 117% to $89B, above $85.08B est., and net income up 126% to $59.7B (Nvidia)

Nvidia guides to ~70% revenue growth next fiscal year, well above the 45% analysts expected, sending shares up as much as 7.6%, though margins will bottom at 71%-72% on memory costs (Bloomberg)

Source: Nvidia has agreed to acquire Hugging Face for $12.9B; the AI repository has had several potential suitors among its investors, including Salesforce (The Information)

Sources: the Trump administration is weighing sweeping new tariffs on chips and other products like laptops and consoles, despite warnings from tech companies (Politico)

Cybersecurity stocks surge, with Okta up 20%+ and CrowdStrike up 15%+, after earnings showed that AI adoption is driving attacks and spending on security tools (CNBC)

AI assistant Instinct is raising a $250M Series B co-led by Index and Benchmark at a $2.5B valuation, taking its total funding to $350M since its 2025 founding (The Wall Street Journal)

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Meta agreed to pay up to $16.68B to settle state claims it hooked kids on Facebook and Instagram, with teen time limits attached. Z.ai unmasked Ox Alpha, Amazon killed Mechanical Turk, and Reuters detailed Zuckerberg's aborted AI-native purge.

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Filing: Meta agrees to pay up to $16.68B to settle US states' claims that it designed Facebook and Instagram to addict children, misled consumers, and more (Reuters)

The deal ends the bellwether Oakland federal trial where four states sought roughly $200B; Meta pays ~$12B upfront and $5B more only if Snap, TikTok, and YouTube also settle (The New York Times)

The remedies include age assurance with linked-account checks, push notifications disabled during school hours, productive pauses at 60 and 90 minutes, and no cosmetic filters or likes for teens (The Verge)

Z.ai confirms Ox Alpha is a new iteration of its GLM series and says it will release the weights for it tonight; Ox Alpha topped OpenRouter's leaderboard (Bloomberg)

AWS says it plans to shut down Mechanical Turk on September 30, "following an assessment"; the service, launched in 2005, outsourced tasks to 500K+ humans (CNBC)

Investigation: Meta explored slashing many teams by ~60% to become "AI native", but pulled back after staff revolted and data showed AI agents were ineffective (Reuters)

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Apple refreshed the Mac Studio with M5 Max and M5 Ultra and gave the Mac mini M6 silicon, at higher prices. OpenAI's Jalapeño chip beat Nvidia on efficiency, Perplexity went fully local, WhatsApp toughened logins, and Uber livestreamed teen rides.

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Apple updates the Mac Studio with M5 Max and M5 Ultra, with up to 4.3x faster AI performance, faster graphics, and up to 512GB of unified memory for $2,499+ (Apple Newsroom)

Apple unveils a Mac mini with M6 and M5 Pro, with up to 4x faster AI performance and 2x faster graphics, for $899+ and $1,699+, with preorders today and shipping September 22 (The Verge)

Apple's M6 is its first 2nm chip with a 12-core CPU and GPU, while the M5 Ultra fuses two dual-die M5 Max chips into a 36-core CPU, 80-core GPU "most powerful chip ever" (The Verge)

OpenAI says its Jalapeño chip delivered 1.5x-1.9x more AI work per watt and 1.7x-3.6x lower latency than Nvidia chips across GPT-OSS, DeepSeek R1, Kimi K2.5 1T (The Verge)

WhatsApp upgrades its two-step verification, letting users replace the six-digit PIN with a longer alphanumeric password, and adds support for multiple passkeys (TechCrunch)

Perplexity launches Portable Computer, a local AI agent platform running fully on-device with zero token costs, starting with Nvidia DGX Spark and RTX Linux PCs (VentureBeat)

Uber launches an optional safety feature allowing parents or guardians to watch a livestream of their teen's ride via the driver's front-facing phone camera (Bloomberg)

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Hugging Face explored a sale at $13B+, keeping the AI M&A wave rolling. Trump scolded towns that reject data centers while Abbott said the industry dug its own grave, Fable 5 spending plateaued, and Apple cut 200+ jobs.

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Sources: Hugging Face is exploring a sale that could value it at $13B+, up from $4.5B in 2023, and has been working with a bank to evaluate bidders' interest (Business Insider)

Delangue has said Hugging Face is close to profitability and barely touched its 2023 round, and it turned down a $500M Nvidia investment at a $7B valuation earlier this year (TechCrunch)

President Trump says communities that oppose data centers are "making a mistake" as they create "tremendous amounts of jobs and money", amid bipartisan backlash (Axios)

Texas Gov. Greg Abbott says data center companies "dug their own grave" and deserve the backlash, after ordering an audit that has stalled roughly 1,800 projects (Fortune)

Ramp data: Fable 5, launched in June, has plateaued at ~11% of spending on Anthropic tools, as companies shift to cheaper models; Opus 5 surpassed Fable 5 (Financial Times)

Nvidia plans to use its $6B licensing deal with Poolside to build one of the world's most powerful open-weight models, to compete with DeepSeek and Kimi K3 (The Wall Street Journal)

Sources: Apple is cutting 200+ jobs, including ~100 positions from the Vision Pro unit and another 100 from the Siri team, as it focuses on new devices and AI (Bloomberg)

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