Good morning. There have been a few shows about the tech industry over the years. HBO’s comedy series, Silicon Valley, is at the top of the list of course, and last year’s Mountainhead movie took things into dark comedy territory.
The latest addition to the genre, AMC’s The Audacity, captures all the absurdities, egos, and jargon of the tech scene as deftly as its predecessors. But the show, created by Jonathan Glatzer, also captures something about the people that goes beyond caricature and that resonates at this particular moment.
Watching an advanced screening of the first episode of The Audacity in San Francisco last night, I recognized all the motivations, vulnerabilities, and blind spots of the people I’ve spent years covering as a journalist. They’re people trying to build products that work perfectly, that can do incredible things and that reshape society, but they’re not perfect people—that’s how Billy Magnussen, who plays one of the main characters, summed it up in a talk with former Twitter CEO Dick Costolo after the screening.
The show airs in mid-April and stars an all-star cast including Zach Galifianakis, Sarah Goldberg, Rob Corddry, and Simon Helberg. I can’t wait to watch the rest of the episodes.
Today’s tech news below.
Alexei Oreskovic
@lexnfx
alexei.oreskovic@fortune.com
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Anthropic's investors are not on the same page in Pentagon fight
The U.S. government’s designation of Anthropic as a “supply-chain risk” could have devastating consequences for the $380 billion company and its investors. Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei published a note late Thursday apologizing for his tone in a strident internal memo that had been leaked and saying that he still hopes to find a resolution with the Department of Defense.
How Anthropic's investors lobby Amodei behind the scenes—either pushing for conciliation or urging it to hold firm—could shape the outcome of the standoff. But when Fortune spoke with six people who have invested in Anthropic to get a sense of how this key constituency is feeling about the situation, we found that opinions were not very unified.
J.D. Russell, who runs the investment firm Alpha Funds, said he respected Anthropic’s positions on mass surveillance and autonomous weapons, but said that “you have to be realistic that adversaries to the U.S. are pursuing those capabilities with far fewer constraints.”
Jacques Tohme, managing partner of the firm Amerocap, put simply that he “did not agree” with the position the company had taken.
On the other hand, Patrick Hable, an investor who runs the firm 3 Comma Capital, said he believed the whole issue would be a “net positive” for the company. “Contracts lost but millions of supporters won,” he said. But he added that “Even if that would be a net negative, he [did] the right thing,” he said. The lack of consensus among Anthropic's backers is one more complexifier in this complex affair.—Jessica Mathews
OpenAI's New Model Takes on Anthropic
OpenAI's new flagship model is taking aim at the enterprise market—and at Anthropic. The company has released GPT-5.4, a new AI model that it says is the company's most capable system to date for professional use. It combines advanced reasoning, coding, and the ability to autonomously operate computers, turning up the heat in the competition for enterprise customers that has been Anthropic's stronghold.
Alongside the model launch, OpenAI is introducing ChatGPT for Excel and Google Sheets (in beta), a version of ChatGPT embedded directly in spreadsheets, along with new app integrations from FactSet, MSCI, Third Bridge, and Moody's, designed to let teams pull market, company, and internal data into a single workflow. The tools are aimed at customers like investment banks, asset managers, and other financial institutions looking to automate workflows—a move that mirrors Anthropic's Claude for Financial Services offering.
The new announcement could also spark a fresh wave of investor anxiety about the impact of AI on traditional financial data providers, many of whose stocks have already been affected by broader fears of AI-driven disruption to enterprise software. Earlier this year, the release of Anthropic's Cowork plug-ins triggered a broad selloff across SaaS stocks, as markets fretted that AI tools could make legacy software providers obsolete.—Beatrice Nolan
Pentagon commits $150M to maritime-tech VC fund
The Pentagon, which started making capital commitments to U.S. venture capital funds around three years ago, has begun making new allocations to funds that invest in “critical” technologies it deems important to national security.
Mare Liberum, a maritime-technology-focused venture fund, is one of the firms that the Pentagon is backing. The Department of Defense, via the Office of Strategic Capital and the Small Business Administration, committed $150 million to Mare Liberum in September 2025 Fortune has learned. The DOD appears to have made five other VC fund commitments since 2025, though Fortune was not able to learn the details of the investments.
Mare Liberum has backed five companies thus far, including Regent Craft, a seaglider startup, and Epirus, a counter-drone company. Under the Trump administration, the Department of Defense has become much more vocal about the importance of investment in defense technology.—JM
More tech
—Oracle plans big layoffs. Cloud capex is causing a cash crunch.
—Nvidia, AMD exports twist. Could foreign buyers be required to invest in U.S. AI infrastructure?
—New boss plugs new Xbox. Say hello to Project Helix.
—Netflix acquires AI tools startup InterPositive. I'm chilling Ben Affleck.
—Sweeney's muzzle. Epic Games CEO Tim Sweeney can't diss Google anymore.
—Amazon Web Services launches Connect Health. AI toys for docs.
