Good morning. Fortune is launching a snappy new video daily show called, appropriately, Fortune Daily.
It’s hosted by my colleague Ellie Austin, the editorial director of our Most Powerful Women franchise, and it will run the gamut—market news, leadership takeaways, and (of course!) tech stories. Expect to see familiar faces, including some of the Fortune tech journalists who write the items in this newsletter.
If you’re keen (and you should be, Ellie’s great), smash that YouTube subscribe button. The show launches Monday.
Have a wonderful weekend. —Andrew Nusca
P.S. Did you register for Fortune Brainstorm AI, Dec 7-8 in San Francisco yet? Just checkin’.
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Tim Cook signs off on his final Apple earnings call
In his final earnings call as CEO, Tim Cook said he has never been more optimistic about the opportunities ahead for Apple.
But Cook’s confidence in the future stood in contrast to the picture that he and other executives painted of the current business conditions.
“We’re seeing some very significant constraints currently, with limited flexibility in the supply chain,” said Cook, who has led the company for 15 years and will pass the CEO baton to John Ternus in September. “There’s a quarter where we’re going to be scrambling on the supply side,” he acknowledged at another point.
The supply crunch is making it more difficult for Apple to obtain the advanced processors it needs for its phones and computers. And that translates into lower revenue.
Sales of the iPhone, which accounts for roughly half of Apple’s business, will grow at a “mid-teens” percentage rate in the current quarter, Apple said, forecasting a significant deceleration from the 22% growth the iPhone business posted in the recently ended quarter.
Total revenue in the current quarter will grow between 9% and 10% year-over-year, which was below the 12% rate expected by analysts.
Shares of Apple fell as much as 8% following the earnings results.
Apple has been one of the best performers among Big Tech stocks this year, with its shares up 23% in 2026. Though Apple has been late to the AI game, investors have come to appreciate that the company is not locked in the arms race that has swelled capital expenditures at Meta, Google, Microsoft, and Amazon. —Alexei Oreskovic
Amazon will spend $220 billion this year—and still won’t have enough capacity to meet demand
Amazon’s stock price jumped more than 9% in after-hours trading on Thursday after the retail-and-AI giant reported second-quarter results buoyed by its Amazon Web Services cloud business, which is racing faster ahead than it has in more than four years.
The cloud unit posted $42.2 billion in revenue in Q2, up 37% from $30.9 billion a year ago, marking AWS’s fastest growth in 18 quarters.
AWS added more than $4.6 billion in revenue quarter over quarter, and AWS operating income hit $16.6 billion, up 64% from $10.2 billion a year ago, on a 39.4% margin, up from 32.9% in the same period a year ago.
AWS’s backlog—customer agreements representing future revenue—grew to $496 billion.
“AWS is now a $169 billion dollar annualized revenue run rate business,” Amazon CEO Andy Jassy said during an earnings call, “which, for perspective, would place it 24th on the Fortune 500 list if it was a standalone company.”
Jassy also told investors that Amazon now expects to spend $220 billion in capital expenditures in 2026, up from its prior estimate of $200 billion, due to higher memory costs.
Even at the elevated level, however, Jassy said Amazon still won’t “have enough capacity to meet all the demand we have in 2026. And I believe this dynamic will also be true in 2027 too.”
Undergirding much of the growth? AWS, which “is booming,” Jassy said. —Amanda Gerut
Anthropic AI models gained unauthorized access to real systems during testing
Anthropic said Thursday that three of its Claude AI models—Opus 4.7, Mythos 5, and an internal research test model—successfully breached the real-world systems of several organizations during cybersecurity testing.
The news comes mere days after rival OpenAI revealed that an autonomous AI agent had broken out of its sandbox to engage in a multi-day intrusion of the AI community platform Hugging Face.
“Operating under the false belief that all accessible entities were intended to be in-scope for the exercise, Claude compromised the impacted organizations’ infrastructure using basic techniques, such as exploiting weak passwords and unauthenticated endpoints,” the San Francisco company wrote in a blog post. “It did not find or exploit any complex vulnerabilities, and in each case, Claude continued working to complete only the specific capture-the-flag task its evaluation had assigned.”
The three incidents came about in part because the models’ testing environments were supposed to be isolated from an internet connection, and were not. They occurred as part of more than 140,000 test runs.
“In some cases, our older model continued its attack even after getting evidence it was running on the open internet; our latest model stopped once it recognized it was on the internet,” Anthropic wrote. “In none of these situations did Claude exfiltrate itself or deliberately attempt to escape its test environment.”
The disclosure only serves to stoke fears that AI systems require stronger controls by both their providers as well as third parties. Policymakers across the globe—in China, the EU, and the U.S. alike—are moving quickly to establish new processes to test and review models with the hope that it will help prevent ever-powerful AI systems from (even accidentally) malicious behavior. —AN
More tech
—Tesla is reportedly preparing to separate its China unit ahead of a possible SpaceX merger.
—Chip stock rally! AMD, Arm, Intel, Lam Research, Micron, and Sandisk all close up big as customer capex continues to rise.
—LinkedIn adds a method to report AI slop. Keep your engagement bait, thinkfluencer.
—Sony raises its full-year profit forecast by 8% because it secured enough memory chip supply for the year.
—DeepSeek reportedly wants to build a 1 gigawatt data center in Inner Mongolia.
—Coinbase shares fall 5%. Q2 revenue sinks 19% from the same period last year, missing estimates.
—Dozens of cyberattacks against Minnesota water utilities have been linked to Iran.
—Roblox shares drop 13%. Q2 bookings just miss estimates, but the forecast for Q3 bookings and revenue isn’t much better.
—Reddit shares stumble 11%, even as Q2 revenue and Q3 revenue forecast top estimates, on continued fears of an AI-driven referral doomsday scenario.
