SpaceX’s huge AI IPO
AI’s reality check has arrived
SpaceX’s huge AI IPO
SpaceX’s $60 billion Cursor takeover days after IPO
Inside the 24 hours that led the US to slap export controls on Anthropic
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SpaceX’s huge AI IPO
Americans are growing worried about what artificial intelligence portends for their futures. Eight in 10 Americans report concern over AI, compared with a third who report being excited, according to a recent Quinnipiac poll. More than half think it will do more harm than good in their daily lives. Seven out of 10 think it will reduce the number of available jobs. Skeptical though they may be, they are about to get more AI rammed down their throats and stuck into their pension plans and their investment portfolios, whether they want it or not – binding their futures ever more tightly to the frenzied, risky, multibillion-dollar dash by technology moguls to develop machines capable of mimicking human thought processes to take over cognitive tasks.
First up is this week’s massive $75bn initial public offering (IPO) for Elon Musk’s SpaceX, the largest ever, which at $135 a share will value the company at a cool $1.77tn, among the 10 largest companies in the world by market capitalization. While the company makes most of its money these days selling internet access, it largely needs the money to finance Musk’s vast AI ambitions, which include blasting datacenters into orbit.
The offering is just the first in a series: both Anthropic and OpenAI have already filed paperwork for their own IPOs later in the year, which will add two multitrillion-dollar artificial intelligence behemoths to the US’s main stock indices. Even investors who don’t care to buy their stock will end up owning a bunch, either in their 401(k) retirement plans or among their holdings of market index funds – supposedly safer investments for non-professional investors, built to reflect the entire market – which are forced to buy AI shares in proportion to their weighting in stock indices like the Nasdaq and the S&P. This may not happen right away, but it will happen. Musk has been lobbying for SpaceX to be quickly invited....
SpaceX’s $60 billion Cursor takeover days after IPO
Technically, SpaceX had 30 days following its record-shattering public debut to decide on a $60 billion takeover of the AI coding startup Cursor. In the end, all it took was two trading days. Early Tuesday, SpaceX formally agreed to buy Cursor in a deal that will entitle the startup’s investors to SpaceX stock. In doing so, Elon Musk is signaling his desire for SpaceX’s xAI to rapidly rebuild and catch up to rivals including Anthropic PBC and OpenAI that have capitalized on demand for artificial intelligence-powered coding tools in a way that his AI business hasn’t.
It’s a shortcoming that Musk has personally acknowledged and had been trying to remedy long before Tuesday’s announcement: xAI employees had already been working for weeks alongside Cursor staff ahead of the potential acquisition. Cursor employees were, in fact, at xAI’s offices and collaborating on projects as part of a preexisting partnership.
Cursor now has more than 3,000 customers paying at least $100,000 each for its software on an annualized basis. In late April, the company’s annualized revenue hit $3 billion, according to a person familiar with the matter, signaling that demand for the company’s AI coding software continues to grow.
Yet, Cursor has also faced heightened competition from the likes of Anthropic and OpenAI, which have made meaningful strides improving their own AI coding tools. Cursor supports a wide range of models, including those from OpenAI and Anthropic, but has also been working to develop its own technology. For Cursor, the tie-up with SpaceX provides it with ample computing resources necessary to build and support AI coding tools, thanks to the Musk-led firm’s considerable stockpile of chips....
Inside the 24 hours that led the US to slap export controls on Anthropic
The Trump administration’s decision to impose sweeping export controls on Anthropic followed a frantic 24-hour effort by senior officials to convince the company to voluntarily pull a newly released artificial intelligence model that officials believed posed security risks, according to two administration officials and a senior White House official, who like others in this story were granted anonymity because they were not authorized to discuss the episode.
The move, which followed multiple tense calls between Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei and administration officials, including Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent and White House Cyber Director Sean Cairncross, underscores how the White House is wrestling in real-time with regulating fast-moving and potentially dangerous AI models.
The administration’s imposition of export controls forced Anthropic to pull its new AI model, Fable, just days after it was released to the public. Anthropic had given assurances that it was safe but soon after its release, top administration officials developed fresh doubts that the AI’s guardrails were as secure as the company had suggested.
On Thursday, two days after the model’s public release, Amazon CEO Andy Jassy raised concerns to the White House about the ability to bypass the model’s guardrails, according to the two administration officials and the senior White House official. (Amazon, which is an investor in Anthropic, was responding to an administration request for feedback, said a person familiar with Amazon’s discussions.)
By Friday morning, the issue had reached the highest levels of the White House. Bessent, Cairncross, chief of staff Susie Wiles and other senior officials met to discuss the model and the administration’s response, according to the administration official and the senior White House official. Bessent joined remotely while traveling to Houston for a previously scheduled public event, one of them said. Following the meeting, the administration attempted to reach Amodei but was told he was unavailable because he was attending a wellness retreat, one of the administration officials and the senior White House official said. A spokesperson for Anthropic rejected the claim that he was at a wellness retreat, saying, “this is absolutely false.” A person close to Anthropic said Amodei was first requested around noon and was on the phone with senior officials within an hour and 15 minutes. While he was out of pocket, Anthropic offered other senior leaders in his place, the person said. When the administration finally reached Amodei, he participated in three calls with a combination of roughly half a dozen senior administration officials, including Cairncross, Bessent and Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick, according to the senior White House official and one of the administration officials.
Other senior White House staff and administration officials including Under Secretary of Commerce for Industry and Security Jeffrey Kessler, White House staff secretary Will Scharf, White House deputy chief of staff Richard Walters, and assistant to the president for policy Walker Barrett also participated in some of the calls, according to the senior White House official. During the calls, Amodei tried to clear up what he assumed was a misunderstanding. He pushed back on the administration’s concerns, defended the guardrails and argued that the type of bypass that occurred, which he believed to be specific, did not pose the same risk as a broader “jailbreak” that would allow it to be used without any of the guardrails put in place by Anthropic….