Anthropic Signs Half-Price Deal with California as Friction with Federal Government Deepens
Anthropic and California Governor Newsom have announced a deal that lets the state government use Claude at half the regular price. While Anthropic deepens its relationship with California, the company is reportedly experiencing friction with the federal government.
The move points to a new model of partnerships between AI companies and state governments. If state-level AI adoption accelerates, it could become a template for AI use in public services. That said, the fact that federal and state AI policies do not always align is likely to complicate how things unfold.
Amazon Is "Distilling" Anthropic Models to Cut Costs Ahead of Shift to Token-Based Billing
Amazon engineers have reportedly been distilling Anthropic's models into smaller versions optimized for their own use. The move appears to be a response to Anthropic's planned switch next year from compute-time-based billing to token-throughput-based pricing, which could sharply increase costs.
Amazon is already a major investor in Anthropic, but the structure in which it relies on external models to make up for the shortcomings of its in-house models is beginning to change. Distillation is a technically sensible way to cut costs, but it is unclear how the licensing arrangements with Anthropic are being handled.
Taiwanese Authorities Raid Super Micro Offices as NVIDIA Chip Smuggling Probe Expands
Super Micro Computer's Taiwan office was raided by local authorities. The investigation is expanding over suspicions that NVIDIA chips were smuggled into China using the company's servers. According to people involved in the investigation, six residences and three affiliated companies were searched simultaneously. The company's stock fell as much as 9.2%.
Taiwan's Keelung District Prosecutors Office has issued a statement, underscoring the seriousness of the matter. If server-mediated chip transfers are being used as a workaround for US export controls, the case poses a major challenge for oversight of the hardware supply chain.
Uber and Waymo End Robotaxi Partnership in Phoenix
Uber announced that it is ending its robotaxi partnership with Alphabet's Waymo in Phoenix. The two companies have a complex relationship as both partners and competitors, and this decision marks the latest shift in that relationship.
Phoenix was the first city where Waymo offered paid autonomous taxi rides through its own app (in 2020). After partnering with Uber in 2023, Waymo's vehicles were also made available through the Uber app, but that arrangement is now coming to an end. Uber reportedly plans to announce a new partner.
In the autonomous driving space, the balance of power between platform operators and technology developers is in flux. The key question going forward is whether Waymo will focus on direct service through its own app or seek out new partners.
Washington Lobbyists Move to Cut Ties with Alibaba and Tencent
Influential Washington lobbying firms are terminating their contracts with Chinese tech companies such as Alibaba and Tencent one after another. Under a new law taking effect Tuesday, the Department of Defense will be barred from doing business with any company that works with lobbyists who represent companies the Pentagon has designated as "aiding the Chinese military."
In effect, lobbyists are being forced to choose between representing Chinese companies or representing the US defense industry. The measure significantly restricts the ability of Chinese tech companies to wield influence in Washington, and it shows that the US-China divide in AI is advancing at the institutional level.
Claude Models Now Generally Available on Azure with NVIDIA GB300
Anthropic's Claude models are now generally available (GA) on Microsoft Azure running on NVIDIA GB300 Blackwell Ultra GPUs. For Azure-native companies, this provides a new infrastructure option for building autonomous AI agents.
By combining the GB300 NVL72 system with Quantum-X800 InfiniBand networking, companies can reportedly build more powerful agentic systems. NVIDIA is also working with Anthropic to integrate NVIDIA's tools into the Anthropic stack.
As enterprise AI infrastructure options continue to expand, the balance between inference performance and cost efficiency is likely to become the key to competition.
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