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Feb 27, 2026
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Supported by
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Friday is here! Anthropic CEO says the company won’t agree to the Pentagon's demands. Block will cut its workforce by 40% becuase of AI. Netflix drops out of bidding for Warner Bros. Discovery.
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Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei on Thursday said the company would refuse to allow Anthropic’s AI models to be used for mass domestic surveillance or fully autonomous weapons in violation of the company’s policies, one day before his company faces a deadline to agree to the Pentagon’s demands or potentially be forced to do so by law. In Amodei’s statement on Thursday, his first public statement directly addressing the negotiations, Amodei emphasized how Anthropic was the first AI model available on classified systems, and how Anthropic has worked extensively with the military. He said that the two
requirements he refused to budge on had not impeded military adoption thus far. In a tweet earlier Thursday, Pentagon spokesperson Sean Parnell said that the Pentagon had “no interest” in using AI for either of those use cases. If Anthropic does not agree to “all lawful uses” by Friday at 5:01 p.m. ET, “we will terminate our partnership with Anthropic and deem them a supply chain risk” for the Department of War, Parnell wrote. The Pentagon had previously also threatened to invoke the Defense Production Act to force Anthropic to drop its safeguards. “These threats do not change our position:
we cannot in good conscience accede to their request,” Amodei wrote.
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Block co-founder Jack Dorsey said his payments company plans to lay off 40% of its staff as it believes artificial intelligence tools can help a smaller workforce “do more and do it better.” In a letter to investors published Wednesday, Dorsey said Block plans to cut its 10,000-strong workforce to under 6,000 employees. “We believe Block will be significantly more valuable as a smaller, faster, intelligence-native company,” he said. Shares in Block, which operates payments brands Square and Cash App, are down roughly 80% from their peak in 2021. The stock rallied in extended hours trading on Wednesday.
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Netflix dropped out of the bidding for Warner Bros. Discovery, after the board of the entertainment firm concluded that Paramount Skydance’s takeover bid was “superior” to an existing deal it has with Netflix. WBD gave the streaming giant four business days to raise its offer or walk away. But in a statement issued later in the day, Netflix said it had “declined to raise its offer.” Given the price Netflix would have to offer to match Paramount, “the deal is no longer financially attractive.” Earlier in the day, WBD reported that its revenue fell 7% in the fourth quarter, while its earnings before interest, taxes, depreciation and amortization dropped 20%. The quarterly result showed that revenue from WBD’s cable channels business—its biggest unit but one that has been in decline—falling 12%
while Ebitda fell 27%. Meanwhile, revenue at WBD’s film studio fell 13%, due to a lack of new film releases. The streaming operation lifted revenue 5%, thanks to strong growth in ad revenue. WBD finished the quarter with 131.6 million streaming subscribers globally, up from 128 million in the third quarter. Paramount is offering to buy all of WBD but Netflix is offering to buy only the streaming operations and the studio.
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Anthropic is best known for selling its Claude AI models to app developers, but the company says it has seen a spike in usage of its consumer Claude chatbot, which competes with OpenAI’s ChatGPT. Daily signups to Anthropic’s Claude chatbot have tripled since November, the company told The Information exclusively. Meanwhile, paid subscribers of the chatbot have more than doubled since October while free users have grown by 60% in the last month, the company said. Anthropic declined to share more specifics on signup or user figures but said that growing usage of its Claude Code coding agent, which is available to paid chatbot subscribers, and Claude Cowork, its AI agent for automating other types white-collar tasks, was fueling the surge. Anthropic’s consumer chatbot likely trails ChatGPT, which has 910 million weekly active users, and Google’s Gemini, which has 750 million monthly active users, by a wide margin. Anthropic previously estimated that about 86% of its $4.5 billion or so in 2025 revenue was expected to come from sales of its models through its application programming interface, with about $600 million coming from chatbot
sales. But Anthropic has boosted efforts to grow the consumer business. Last month, the company hired Andrew Feldman, a former Instagram product leader, to lead consumer product efforts. Earlier this month, Anthropic ran Super Bowl commercials poking fun at OpenAI’s plan to introduce ads in ChatGPT, while saying ads wouldn’t be added to Claude.
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The Office of the Comptroller of the Currency, which is set to regulate stablecoin issuers such as Circle, Paxos and Stripe’s Bridge, proposed rules that would ban crypto platforms from passing along interest from stablecoin issuers to users who hold stablecoins. If the proposal holds up, it would be a big loss for the crypto industry, which is expected to push back. The proposal would tighten the ban on stablecoin yield under the Genius Act, the first crypto law passed last year under President Donald Trump. The act prevents stablecoin issuers from directly paying yield to users, but crypto
exchanges have been taking payments from issuers and paying the yield to users. The OCC said the close relationships between issuers and other parties would make it “highly likely” that the payments of yield by those parties or affiliates would be an attempt to evade the Genius Act’s prohibition on interest. The issue is a key sticking point in current negotiations of the crypto market structure bill. Banks are pushing to ban crypto exchanges from paying yields to users on their stablecoin holdings because of the risk bank customers would pull their deposits to buy stablecoins.
Platforms like Coinbase are seeking to preserve their ability to pay yield to stablecoin users. The OCC made the proposal as part of its rulemaking under the Genius Act. It is soliciting public comments on the proposed rules.
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