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Jul 02, 2025
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Happy Wednesday! Anthropic's revenue hits a pace of $4 billion. Senate votes to remove AI provision from Trump's tax bill. The Federal Trade Commission has opened a review of SoftBank's acquisition of chip firm Ampere.
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Anthropic’s revenue reached a pace of $4 billion annually, or $333 million per month, up almost four times from the start of the year, The Information reported Tuesday. At the same time, competition with other startups offering AI to help engineers code faster is intensifying. Anysphere, the maker of Cursor, an artificial intelligence-powered coding app, has hired two leaders of Anthropic’s competing coding product, Claude Code, according to one of the leaders. The move is notable because
Cursor relies on AI from Anthropic to power its app and is one of Anthropic’s biggest customers. Cursor co-founder Sualeh Asif said in a statement that Anthropic is one of the company’s “closest partners” and the company is “excited to deepen our work with Anthropic.”
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The Senate has voted to drop a provision from President Trump’s signature tax and spending bill that would have blocked states from regulating AI, ending a controversial measure that several Silicon Valley leaders had been pushing for. The provision was initially designed to prevent states from regulating AI for the next decade. Several Republicans opposed the plan, including Josh Hawley of Missouri and Marsha Blackburn of Tennessee. As of early Monday, the provision looked set to move forward, after Blackburn agreed to reduce the time frame on the ban to five years. However, after considerable backlash, she reversed course, and senators voted 99-1 early Tuesday to strip the provision from the bill entirely. Silicon Valley companies that had supported the measure included Meta Platforms, Microsoft and Anduril.
Inside the administration, tech advisors Michael Kratsios and David Sacks were also in favor.
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The Federal Trade Commission has opened an in-depth review of SoftBank’s acquisition of Santa Clara-based chip designer Ampere Computing, Bloomberg reported on Tuesday. The FTC made what is known as a “second request for information,” signaling the start of a lengthy probe that could delay the closing of the deal, which SoftBank initially projected would happen in the latter half of the year. SoftBank in March said it agreed to pay $6.5 billion in cash to buy Ampere, which makes energy-efficient chips based on designs from Arm—a chip firm SoftBank owns. The FTC blocked SoftBank’s 2020 plan to sell Arm to Nvidia. Spokespeople for the FTC, SoftBank and Ampere declined to comment on the Bloomberg report.
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Meta Platforms’ efforts to recruit OpenAI researchers with high compensation offers are “somewhat distasteful,” OpenAI CEO Sam Altman said in a Slack message to the company Monday night, Wired reported. The Slack message came after Meta revealed the lineup of its new AI division, which includes at least nine researchers recently recruited from OpenAI. But Altman said Meta “didn’t get their top people and had to go quite far down their list” of prospects at OpenAI. OpenAI is reassessing how it handles compensation for its research organization, he said, echoing a memo research chief Mark Chen sent over the weekend. Altman also said OpenAI is more committed to developing powerful AI technology than Meta. “Long after Meta has moved on to their next flavor of the week, or defending their social moat, we will be here” focusing on AI, he said, adding that “missionaries will beat mercenaries.”
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Amazon now has over one million robots in its warehouses, nearly as many human workers as the e-commerce giant employees in the facilities, The Wall Street Journal reported. Robots now contribute to about 75% of Amazon’s deliveries around the world, according to the report. That automation has increased the productivity of each of Amazon’s workers, allowing the average warehouse worker to handle 3,870 packages per year—up more than 20 times from 2015. Meanwhile, the average number of workers in each facility has fallen to about 670, the lowest number in the past 16 years, said the report. Amazon also announced DeepFleet, an AI model to coordinate the movements of its various robots. The company has been a leader in robotic automation for warehouse logistics for years, since it paid $775 million to purchase Kiva
Systems in 2012, which developed robots to ferry packages using barcodes on warehouse floors.
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Design software firm Figma said revenue rose 46% in the first three months of the year, to $228 million, and it tripled its operating income to $40 million, according to a securities filing for a planned public offering. It generated a gross profit margin of 91%, ranking it among the highest margins for enterprise software companies. The financial report also showed the steep costs of an employee stock sale arranged after its planned $20 billion-valuation sale to Adobe Systems fell apart in late 2023. Figma said revenue rose 48% last year to $749 million last year but it lost $877 million in operating income after it gave some employees and early backers a chance to sell their shares last May at a valuation of $12.5 billion. It recorded nearly $950 million in stock-based compensation expense costs last year, the majority of which related to the tender offer. Excluding stock-based compensation expenses altogether, Figma would have generated around $70 million in operating income last year. The 15-year-old company, which has raised money from venture capital firms including Index Ventures and Greylock Partners, warned in its filing that the costs associated with developing generative artificial intelligence tools for its customers,
specifically for AI inference and model training, could hurt its margins in the long-term. Figma’s chief executive officer, Dylan Field, has 75.3% of the company’s voting power largely through his ownership of the company’s Class B shares, which grant holders 15 votes per share. The filing showed it also owned $70 million of bitcoin through an exchange-traded fund.
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