The best Stratechery content from the week of September 1, 2025, including the Google Patronage Network, Google and competition, and Cloudflare and the future of the Internet.
Andrew J. Hawkins / The Verge: Qualcomm debuts Snapdragon Ride Pilot, a hands-free driver assistance system that is launching with the BMW iX3 and has been validated for use in 60+ countries — The chipmaker's new ADAS system will debut with the BMW iX3 in 2026. … Qualcomm is joining forces with BMW on a new driver-assist system …
Mike Scarcella / Reuters: Two authors file a proposed class action lawsuit against Apple, alleging Apple knowingly used a dataset of pirated books to train its AI models — Technology giant Apple (AAPL.O) was accused by authors in a lawsuit on Friday of illegally using their copyrighted books to help train …
Jordan Novet / CNBC: AppLovin stock jumps 7%+ and Robinhood jumps 8%+ in extended trading after S&P Global said the two will join the S&P 500 index on September 22 — Shares of advertising technology company AppLovin and stock trading app Robinhood Markets jumped in extended trading on Friday after S&P Global …
Ari Levy / CNBC: US tech industry's eight companies valued at $1T+ gained a combined $420B in market cap this week, lifting their total value to $21T, led by a Google rally — From the courtroom to the boardroom, it was a big week for tech investors. — The resolution of Google's antitrust case led to sharp rallies for Alphabet and Apple.
Kalley Huang / The Information: At the White House dinner, Zuckerberg said Meta plans to spend “something like at least $600B” through 2028 on data centers and other infrastructure in the US — Meta Platforms plans to spend “something like at least $600 billion” through 2028 on data centers and other infrastructure …
Kevin Breuninger / CNBC: After the EU fined Google €2.95B, Trump threatens a trade probe, saying the Trump administration “will not allow these discriminatory actions to stand” — - CNBC Councils — Supply Chain Values — CNBC on Peacock — Join the CNBC Panel — Ad Choices — News Tips
George Hammond / Financial Times: In a letter to OpenAI, AGs of California and Delaware raise concerns about the deaths of some ChatGPT users and threaten to block OpenAI's planned restructuring — Attorneys-general of California and Delaware threaten to block tech group's planned restructuring
Bloomberg: Filing: Anthropic has agreed to pay $1.5B plus interest to resolve an authors' copyright lawsuit over the company's downloading of millions of pirated books — Anthropic PBC will pay at least $1.5 billion plus interest to resolve an authors' copyright lawsuit over the AI company's downloading …
Aisha Malik / TechCrunch: Roblox launches text-to-speech and speech-to-text APIs, and AI tools, including letting creators generate fully functional 3D objects from prompts, and more — Online gaming platform Roblox is launching a TikTok-like short-form video feed for sharing gameplay moments, the company unveiled on Friday at the Roblox Developers Conference.
David Baszucki / Roblox Corporate: Roblox increases its DevEx rate, letting creators earn 8.5% more when they convert their earned Robux into cash, says creators earned $1B+ over the past year — Unveiling first-of-its-kind AI, new powerful engine capabilities, creators earning 8.5% more, and our path to capturing 10% of all gaming content revenue
Cecilia D'Anastasio / Bloomberg: Roblox is testing Roblox Moments, a TikTok-like video app allowing users to share 30-second clips of gameplay, and makes the source code available to developers — Video-game giant makes announcement at its annual developers conference. — Roblox Corp. is testing a short-form video app similar …
Julie Bort / TechCrunch: Isotopes, co-founded by Scale AI's former CTO Arun Murthy to build an AI agent for enterprise business analytics, raised a $20M seed — Isotopes came out of stealth on Thursday with a healthy $20 million seed round. — It offers an AI agent to solve a problem that data analytics products …
Brian Barrett / Wired: At the White House dinner on Thursday night, Big Tech executives put on an uncanny display of fealty to Donald Trump by taking turns praising his leadership — At a White House dinner Thursday night, America's tech executives put on an uncanny display of fealty to Donald Trump.
Ivan Mehta / TechCrunch: OpenAI acqui-hires the team behind Alex Codes, a Y-Combinator-backed startup whose tool lets developers use AI models within Apple's development suite Xcode — Acqui-hires feel like they're here to stay: The team behind Alex, a popular tool that lets developers use AI models within Apple's development suite Xcode, is joining OpenAI.
Wall Street Journal: The EU fines Google €2.95B for abusing its dominance in digital ads, and says its preliminary stance is that Google must divest parts of its ad-tech business — Bloc's antitrust regulators say search giant may need to divest parts of its business — BRUSSELS—The European Union fined …
The Bureau of Labor Statistics released monthly jobs data, but after the firing… Tags: Bureau of Labor Statistics, New York Times, uncertainty
Jon Keegan of Beautiful Public Data highlights researchers who used lidar to estimate… Tags: Beautiful Public Data, Lidar, Los Angeles, wildfire
Loneliness is lucrative. Leonid Radvinsky, the secretive owner of OnlyFans, received a $700 million windfall last year, while the platform’s top tier of content creators — mostly women — earn millions annually. With $7.2 billion in annual gross revenue and just 46 employees, OnlyFans may be one of the most profitable companies on the planet. […] The post Lonely Fans appeared first on No Mercy / No Malice.
Recommending stories from Viola Zhou, Mina Tavakoli, Stephanie Krzywonos, Maggie Millner, and Joe Hagan.
"The Ritz-Carlton Yacht Collection threw the mother of all influencer trips, featuring Tom Brady, Leo DiCaprio, Martha Stewart, and a hundred or so other A-listers. Vanity Fair climbed aboard…"
In the U.S., when a publisher signs a licensing deal with an AI company, newsroom staffers don’t get a cut. Many newsrooms have licensed their content to OpenAI in bulk, for example. A staff reporter’s stories can be used as training data for the latest GPT model, or may surface in ChatGPT’s response to a...
I didn’t think it was possible, but it turns out I wasn’t generous enough to Advance Local. A few weeks back, we released our first monthly traffic rankings for U.S. local newspapers, and the big takeaway was the dominance of Advance Local, the chain that owns the dailies in Cleveland, Harrisburg, Newark, Syracuse, Birmingham, and...
An interview with Cloudflare founder and CEO Matthew Prince about founding Cloudflare from the bottoms up, and why now is the time to leverage the power that followed to enact pay-per-crawl.
Katherine Hamilton / Wall Street Journal: Docusign reports Q2 revenue up 9% YoY to $800.6M vs. $780.1M est., raises FY 2026 sales outlook, and forecasts Q3 revenue above est.; DOCU jumps 8%+ after hours — The electronic-signature company is attempting to win bigger customers for its new AI tool that summarizes and analyzes agreement documents
Josh Dzieza / The Verge: How Wikipedia became the factual foundation of the web and why it's under attack from Musk, conservative groups, the Trump administration, and other governments — WhenWhen armies invade, hurricanes form, or governments fall, a Wikipedia editor will typically update the relevant articles seconds after the news breaks.
Financial Times: An Anthropic executive says the company will stop selling AI services to majority Chinese-owned groups and to US adversaries, like Russia, Iran, and North Korea — Policy will also apply to US adversaries including Russia, Iran and North Korea — Anthropic will stop selling artificial …
Dina Bass / Bloomberg: Broadcom reports Q3 revenue up 22% YoY to $16B, vs. $15.8B est., AI revenue up 63% to $5.2B, vs. $5.11B est., and forecasts Q4 revenue above estimates — Broadcom Inc. Chief Executive Officer Hock Tan told investors that the chipmaker's artificial intelligence outlook will improve …
Bloomberg: Sources: StubHub and Netskope plan to start formally marketing their IPOs as soon as Monday; StubHub could raise $1B+, and Netskope is seeking to raise ~$1B — A pair of IPO hopefuls are adding to September's packed calendar, seizing the momentum from a string of well-received debuts as US equity markets near record highs.
The Information: Source: Nvidia agreed to rent 10,000 of its own AI chips from Lambda for $1.3B over four years, the latest example of Nvidia's circular financial arrangements — A small cloud provider for artificial intelligence that's preparing to go public has secured a major boost from its most important supplier: Nvidia.
Winston Cho / The Hollywood Reporter: WBD files a copyright suit against Midjourney, accusing the startup of using its content to train AI and letting users generate images of characters like Batman — The lawsuit against Midjourney was filed as a growing contingent of Hollywood steps into the fight over generative artificial intelligence.
Marina Temkin / TechCrunch: Augment, founded by Deliverr's Harish Abbott, raised an $85M Series A led by Redpoint to scale its AI assistant for logistics, five months after a $25M seed — Having built and sold e-commerce shipping startup Deliverr to Shopify for $2.1 billion in 2022, co-founder and CEO Harish Abbott knows the logistics industry well.
Ashley Capoot / CNBC: Bret Taylor's Sierra raised $350M at a $10B valuation, up from $4.5B in 2024, and says its AI customer service agents are being used by “hundreds of millions” — Bret Taylor's artificial intelligence startup Sierra has just joined an exclusive club: The company sports …
Bloomberg: OpenAI plans to launch a jobs platform in 2026 to match employers with candidates with AI skills, and a certification program for AI roles in the coming months — OpenAI plans to launch a new AI-powered jobs platform next year to help match employers with candidates who have artificial intelligence skills …
Reuters: ID.me, a digital ID service used by US agencies like the IRS, raised a $340M Series E led by Ribbit at a $2B+ valuation, bringing its total funding to $580M+ — ID.me said on Wednesday it had raised $340 million across its latest funding round, combined with a credit facility …
Keith Laing / Bloomberg: The Trump administration plans to ease rules for self driving cars by removing some requirements designed for human drivers, such as windshield wipers — The Trump administration is taking steps to make it easier for automakers to deploy-self driving cars by removing some requirements designed specifically …
Jay Peters / The Verge: Meta rolls out a tool that lets users attach up to 10,000 characters of text to Threads posts, building upon the 500-character text limit for posts — Blogging is back. … Meta is adding a new feature to let you add a bunch of extra text to Threads posts — no screenshots of text blocks required.
Fortune: DOJ charges ex-IRL CEO Abraham Shafi with securities and wire fraud for allegedly misleading investors about user growth, concealing personal expenses, and more — Authorities charged the ex-CEO of a former unicorn, buzzy social media startup IRL (which stands for “in real life") …
Dominic Preston / The Verge: Adobe plans to launch a free version of its Premiere video editor for iPhone later this month, with one-tap exporting to TikTok, YouTube Shorts, and Instagram — Adobe is bringing its video editor Premiere to iPhone, promising “pro-level” editing on the go for free.
For NYT’s the Upshot, Ethan Singer found the birth of pickleball courts in… Tags: courts, Ethan Singer, photography, pickleball, Upshot
This week is about helping people see data for what it is and avoiding poor choices. Tags: audience, context
NYPD arrested the wrong man, because facial recognition marked a match. Maria Cramer… Tags: ethics, facial recognition, New York Times, police, privacy
"Those of us who’ve been very unsafe as children, we seek out the unsafe. We seek out the lack of security, and if you have security, you blow it up."
"A visit to the dog show."
"In the early days of flight, airships were hailed as the future of war. Then disaster struck the USS Akron."
Google lost some battles but won the war in its search distribution case: the Google patronage network was deemed too important to undo.
Publishers and competitors have been calling to break up Google for decades. It’s too powerful, the argument goes, combining dominance in search, web browsing, ad selling, maps, email, video, mobile operating systems, and more. It uses its power in one segment to buttress others, stifling competition and taking too large a share of the economic...
Mike Evans knew something had to change. As the lead instructor for American Government 1101 at Georgia State University in 2021, Evans had watched his students over the years show up with fewer facts and more conspiracy theories. Gone were the days when students arrived on campus with dim memories of high school civics. Now...
Sarah Perez / TechCrunch: Roblox will expand age checks to all users of its communication tools by the end of 2025 using facial age estimation tech, ID verification, and parental consent — Amid lawsuits alleging child safety concerns, online gaming service Roblox announced on Wednesday that it's expanding …
Ashley Capoot / CNBC: C3.ai reports Q1 revenue down 19% YoY to $70.3M, and names long-time tech exec Stephen Ehikian as CEO, replacing Thomas Siebel; its stock falls 11%+ after hours — Shares of the enterprise artificial intelligence company C3 AI fell 14% in extended trading on Wednesday after it announced fiscal …