Good morning. A refreshing bit of news out of China this morning, where JD.com founder Liu Qiangdong promised to protect the company’s 900,000 employees from AI and automation.
That may seem like a surprising stance for JD, China’s largest retailer by revenue and No. 44 on Fortune’s Global 500. But look more closely and it’s clear the Beijing-based company is not shying away from progress.
JD has fully committed to unmanned warehouses, drone delivery, self-driving vehicles, and more physical AI goodness. The difference? It vows to not fire any frontline worker replaced by machines. Instead, the company will retrain its employees via some 80 centers across China. (To do what, you ask? Maintain and service the automated systems, naturally.)
Before you think it’s purely altruistic, it’s worth noting that a Chinese court ruled in April that companies cannot terminate workers simply to replace them with AI. Add in China’s labor market instability and economic headwinds and you can see why the centrally run, unitary, one-party nation might want to consider the big picture when it comes to AI.
Today’s tech news follows. Have a wonderful weekend. —Andrew Nusca
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Anthropic is a $900 billion company now
It’s like Lamborghini outpacing Ferrari, Puma outselling Adidas, Activision usurping Atari: Anthropic, the highly valued San Francisco AI firm founded by OpenAI veterans, is—for now—worth more than the highly valued San Francisco AI firm they came from.
The Dario Amodei-led company announced on Thursday that it has raised $65 billion at a $900 billion valuation. That pushes its paper value ahead of OpenAI’s by just $48 billion.
It is a stunning ascent. Investors valued Anthropic at $380 billion only three months ago.
(How detached from the rest of the startup economy is the AI arms race, by the way? I used the word “just” next to “$48 billion.” Ahem.)
The new funds come from investors Greenoaks Capital, Sequoia Capital, Altimeter Capital, and Dragoneer Investment Group and bring Anthropic’s total raised to $130 billion. There are also new strategic investors from the chip camp: Samsung, Micron, and SK Hynix.
Anthropic’s latest funding round further demonstrates that its foundational commitment to commercial applications of its technology—writing code, discovering software bugs, and white-labeling enterprise chatbots around the globe—is paying off.
To that end, Anthropic used the occasion to unveil a new flagship AI model, Claude Opus 4.8. The company says it outperforms every AI model currently on the market in “vibe coding” and improves its standing in the hotly competitive area of mathematics.
But it’s a rather human aspect—honesty—that stands out. “Early testers report that Opus 4.8 is more likely to flag uncertainties about its work and less likely to make unsupported claims,” Anthropic writes. Cheers to that. —AN
Dell shares soar 39% after it reports an 88% revenue jump
Holy cow, Batman. Dell just had a day like no other.
The pioneering gadget purveyor led by its namesake Michael reported fiscal first quarter results on Thursday that included its fastest sales growth since it returned to the public markets in 2018.
Dell posted Q1 earnings per share of $4.86 on revenues of $43.8 billion. Wall Street analysts were looking for EPS of $2.94 on revenues of $35.4 billion.
That actual revenue figure is almost 88% higher than it was during the same period a year ago. Previous quarters since its 2018 IPO, which came after five years of Dell as a private company, never topped 39%.
So why the blowout quarter? Artificial intelligence, of course. Dell is selling servers with Nvidia chips faster than it can slap them together. AI server revenue increased 757%—that’s no typo—from one year ago to $16.1 billion. Everyone from enterprises to neoclouds to sovereign governments is buying.
Speaking of which: Earlier this week the Pentagon announced that Dell had won a five-year, $9.7 billion contract to supply Microsoft software and services to the U.S. military. That helps, too.
Dell forecasts Q2 earnings of $4.80 on revenues of $44.5 billion; Wall Street is looking for EPS of $2.98 on revenues of $35 billion. As for the full year forecast, Dell updated its AI revenue figure to $60 billion, up 20% from the previous projection, and total revenue to about $167 billion. To quote the old comic books: Pow! —AN
Waymo unveils the Ojai robotaxi
OK, so it’s no hot yoga class en route to a “spiritual vortex.” But Waymo’s new Ojai robotaxis promise a lifestyle upgrade where it matters most: the work commute.
The vehicles, built in partnership with Geely-owned Chinese electric automaker Zeekr, promise a more spacious cabin, a more robust accessibility feature set, and Waymo’s sixth-generation driving tech for riders in San Francisco, Phoenix, and Los Angeles.
Waymo says the Ojai—which to my eyes looks a bit like the Nissan NV200 you’ll see in yellow livery all over New York City—is its first purpose-built robotaxi. It shows. There are charging ports, cup holders, and three digital displays. The floor is flat and low for easier entry. There’s braille, screen-reader compatibility, and extra handles.
For the fleet operator, the vehicle is easier to clean and modular to maintain. The simpler, cheaper, more snow-friendly autonomous driving hardware is welcome, too.
It’s all part of the Alphabet-owned company’s attempt to stay ahead of its competition. With almost 4,000 vehicles on the road, Waymo is the undisputed king of robotaxis in the U.S., well ahead of Amazon’s Zoox and Tesla.
However, in the bigger pond that is the rest of the globe, Waymo is far from being the biggest fish. As the U.S. company angles to operate in Canada and tests vehicles in Japan and the U.K., it’s watching Chinese firms in particular—Baidu, Pony.ai, and WeRide—add new countries to their own launch plans.
Here’s the good news: It’s early days in the category. Most major markets haven’t yet given robotaxis the greenlight, which means it’s anyone’s ballga—er, spiritual vortex. —AN
More tech
—The EU may intervene in chip supply chains by, for example, forcing chipmakers to override contracts during shortages.
—TikTok’s new music industry strategy: Cut out the record labels!
—IBM commits $10 billion to quantum computing. Coming in 2029: A large-scale, fault-tolerant quantum computer.
—Amazon scraps AI usage leaderboard after human workers invent tasks to goose their scores.
—California sues 23andMe for allegedly failing to protect user data in a 2023 breach.
—Europe fines Temu €200 million for allegedly failing to sufficiently stop the sale of illegal products.
—Adversaries are targeting U.S. military personnel using leaky commercial location data.
