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Jul 01, 2025
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A federal judge denied Apple’s motion to dismiss the Justice Department’s antitrust lawsuit against the iPhone maker, ruling that the government’s lawsuit had “sufficiently alleged indirect evidence” showing that Apple has monopoly power in the smartphone market. Among other things, Apple had argued that the smartphone market wasn’t properly defined by the government and that what the government called the “performance smartphone market”—high level smartphones including most iPhones—was “an invented definnition divorced from commercial reality.”
But the judge, Julian Xavier Neals in New Jersey, disagreed, finding that “the performance smartphone constitutes a ‘distinct submarket for antitrust purposes.’” The ruling is the latest legal loss for Apple, which recently was forced by another judge to allow app developers to tell customers about alternative ways of paying for transactions within the apps. But this case, filed in March of last year, has bigger implications. The DOJ alleges that Apple has a monopoly in the smartphone market. The government argues that Apple uses “contractual rules and restrictions” to make it hard for rivals to offer messaging services, smartwatches and digital wallets.
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Apple is in talks with artificial intelligence leaders Anthropic and OpenAI to boost Siri, Apple’s languishing AI assistant, according to Bloomberg. Apple was caught off guard with the release of OpenAI’s ChatGPT in late 2022 and has been trying to catch up. Last year, it promised an improved Siri capable of complex tasks inside apps, but the company has struggled to meet deadlines and has delayed its release. Partnering with an outside AI company like this would be a reversal of Apple’s strategy to date. Apple has been trying to build its own large-language models, the same type of AI powering ChatGPT and Anthropic’s Claude.
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Oracle said it had signed a cloud services deal with a customer that was expected to contribute more than $30 billion in annual revenue starting in fiscal 2028. That amount is more than Oracle’s $24.4 billion in cloud services revenue for fiscal 2025, which ended May 31. In a securities filing, Oracle quoted CEO Safa Catz telling colleagues that Oracle was “off to a strong start” in its new fiscal year, and had signed “multiple large cloud services agreements.” The company, while tiny in the cloud world compared with leaders such as Amazon Web Services, has been growing quickly by picking up business from OpenAI which needs more capacity than its main cloud firm, Microsoft, can supply. The $30 billion deal mentioned by Oracle is likely to be with OpenAI in Abilene, Texas. Oracle’s disclosure on Monday sent
its stock up nearly 5% to $220.47. The stock is up 32% so far this year, much more than the big tech names.
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Meta Platforms CEO Mark Zuckerberg on Monday announced its new artificial intelligence organization, Meta Superintelligence Labs, to its employees, according to an internal post reviewed by The Information. The organization includes Meta’s existing AI teams, including its Fundamental AI Research lab, as well as “a new lab focused on developing the next generation of our models,” Zuckerberg said in the post. Scale AI CEO Alexandr Wang has joined Meta as its Chief AI Officer and will partner with former GitHub CEO Nat Friedman to lead the organization. Friedman will lead Meta’s work on AI products and applied research. Meta earlier this month finalized a deal to invest $14.3 billion in Scale AI and is also expected to partially buy out Friedman’s venture capital fund with Safe Superintelligence CEO Daniel Gross. The company has aggressively pursued talent recently, with Zuckerberg on Monday announcing 11 hires from rival labs. Those recruits include OpenAI researchers Huiwen Chang and Ji Lin and Anthropic researcher Joel Pobar, according to the post. “I’m excited about the progress we have planned for Llama 4.1 and 4.2,” Zuckerberg said in the post. “In parallel, we’re going to start research on our next generation models to get to the frontier in the next year or so,” he added. A spokesperson for Meta declined to comment.
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Elon Musk’s xAI raised $5 billion of equity in addition to $5 billion in debt, according to Morgan Stanley, which advised on the debt transactions. “The combination of debt and equity reduces the overall cost of capital and substantially expands pools of capital available to xAI,” Morgan Stanley wrote in a post on X, which did not name any investors in the debt or equity. XAI raised $6 billion in December from investors including Andreessen Horowitz, BlackRock, Lightspeed Venture Partners and MGX to build AI data centers and improve Grok, its answer to
ChatGPT. The company then acquired Musk’s social-media company X in an all-stock transaction that valued the combined company at $113 billion. The debt included $3 billion of bonds with a 12.5% yield, a $1 billion fixed-rate term loan with a 12.5% interest rate and a $1 billion term loan priced at 7.25 percentage points over the benchmark rate carrying a discount of 96 cents on the dollar, said one person familiar with the fundraising.
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Microsoft sales chief Judson Althoff will take a two month sabbatical beginning in July, a spokesperson said on Monday, and plans to return in September. Althoff’s leave comes as Microsoft is preparing to announce thousands of layoffs that will impact its sales division this week. Those layoffs will be the second major round of cuts this year after Microsoft eliminated more than 6,000 roles in April. Microsoft, which has 228,000 employees, often restructures its business at the start of its fiscal year, in
July. The upcoming cuts are intended to reduce the number of salespeople that each customer interacts with as Microsoft aims to simplify its sales pitch and convince more firms to spend money on AI products, according to two people briefed on the plans.
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Temu has resumed buying Meta Platforms and Google ads in the U.S., several months after the Chinese bargain site | | | |
