People walk by an Apple store at the Westfield UTC shopping center in San Diego, California (Kevin Carter/Getty Images)

A single comment from an Apple exec about AI search is upending the tech pecking order

Eddy Cue’s testimony shows that Apple sees the shift to AI-powered search as inevitable.

5/7/25 11:45AM

Apple bigwig Eddy Cue’s comments Wednesday about potentially adding AI-powered search to his company’s Safari browser could be a massive blow for Google’s decades-long dominance in web searches. Investors ran for the hills, sending Google’s stock down 8.4% in recent trading, pulling the broader market down with it.

Cue, Apple’s senior vice president of services, said while testifying in the Department of Justice case against Google that Apple was “actively looking at” adding AI-powered search to its Safari browser. Cue said OpenAI, Perplexity, and Anthropic were possible options to add to Safari in the future, according to the report: “We will add them to the list — they probably won’t be the default.”

An 8% drawdown in Google stock reflects a staggering roughly $150 billion worth of market cap destroyed in a span of minutes. Shares of Apple were recently down 1.8%. The S&P 500 also dropped on the news, falling about 0.6% from peak to trough before recovering some ground to become barely green for the day as of 12:37 p.m. ET.

Another sign that AI may be making seismic changes to the web search industry: Bloomberg reports that Cue also said today that Apple saw in-browser searches fall for the first time in April, which he suspected was due to AI.

Court documents in 2024 revealed that Google paid Apple $20 billion in 2022 to be the default search engine in the Safari browser. That deal was ruled to be illegal last summer.

$20B

Paid to apple by Alphabet for search

It’s unclear whether a shift to AI search results would box Google out of Apple’s browser search, but to put the amount into context, Apple generated $394 billion of revenue in 2022, so a $20 billion payment would be the equivalent of about 5% of that total.

While Google’s search business generated $50.7 billion last quarter, it’s also investing heavily in AI. Alphabet CEO Sundar Pichai recently said he hopes to reach a deal with Apple to include the model on iPhones this year.

Cue’s comments appear to show that within Apple, execs see the shift to AI-powered search as inevitable.

Cue testified, “There’s enough money now, enough large players, that I don’t see how it doesn’t happen.”

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Max Knoblauch3h

Report: Amazon’s AI bots have been behind multiple AWS outages

Amazon’s AI tool Kiro, which launched in July and can code autonomously, was behind a 13-hour interruption to Amazon Web Services in December, according to reporting by the Financial Times.

The FT reports that the company’s AI tools have caused AWS service disruptions at least twice in recent months.

In the December outage, which Amazon called an “extremely limited event” that did not have an impact on customer-facing service, engineers allowed Kiro to make changes and the tool opted to “delete and recreate the environment.”

Amazon has a closely tracked internal target that 80% of its developers use AI to code once a week, employees told the FT. The company says the December incident was a “user access control issue” and not an issue with Kiro’s permissions.

AWS accounted for 57% of Amazon’s operating profit in 2025. In December, following a larger outage months earlier, AWS and Google announced a partnership to attempt to prevent massive network outages.

Amazon service was taken down by AI coding bot

$830B

Max Knoblauch2/19/26

OpenAI is finalizing commitments on a funding round that could climb beyond $100 billion at a valuation of $830 billion, according to a report from The Information.

Per The Information, SoftBank is expected to invest $30 billion into the ChatGPT maker, spread across the year in three installments of $10 billion. Up to $50 billion could come from Amazon and $30 billion from Nvidia (up from the $20 billion Bloomberg reported earlier this month). An additional investment in the low billions could come from Microsoft.

OpenAI was last valued at $500 billion following a fundraising round completed in October. Earlier this month, its rival Anthropic took in $30 billion from investors including Microsoft and Nvidia at a $380 billion valuation.

Max Knoblauch2/17/26

Tesla’s 45 Austin Robotaxis now have 14 crashes on the books since launching in June

Since launching in June 2025, Tesla’s 45 Austin Robotaxis have been involved in 14 crashes, per Electrek reporting citing National Highway Traffic Safety Administration data.

Electrek analysis found that the vehicles have traveled roughly 800,000 paid miles in that time period, amounting to a crash every 57,000 miles. According to the NHTSA, US drivers crash once every 500,000 miles on average.

The article says Tesla submitted five new crash reports in January of this year that happened in December and January. Electrek wrote:

“The new crashes include a collision with a fixed object at 17 mph while the vehicle was driving straight, a crash with a bus while the Tesla was stationary, a collision with a heavy truck at 4 mph, and two separate incidents where the Tesla backed into objects, one into a pole or tree at 1 mph and another into a fixed object at 2 mph.”

Tesla updated a previously reported crash that was originally filed as only having damaged property to include a passenger’s hospitalization.

Last month, Tesla shares climbed after CEO Elon Musk said in a post on X that the company’s Austin Robotaxis had begun operating without a safety monitor.

Tesla 'Robotaxi' adds 5 more crashes in Austin in a month — 4x worse than humans

The article says Tesla submitted five new crash reports in January of this year that happened in December and January. Electrek wrote:

“The new crashes include a collision with a fixed object at 17 mph while the vehicle was driving straight, a crash with a bus while the Tesla was stationary, a collision with a heavy truck at 4 mph, and two separate incidents where the Tesla backed into objects, one into a pole or tree at 1 mph and another into a fixed object at 2 mph.”

Tesla updated a previously reported crash that was originally filed as only having damaged property to include a passenger’s hospitalization.

Last month, Tesla shares climbed after CEO Elon Musk said in a post on X that the company’s Austin Robotaxis had begun operating without a safety monitor.

Jon Keegan2/13/26

Ahead of IPO, Anthropic adds veteran executive and former Trump administration official to board

Anthropic is moving to put the pieces in place for a successful IPO this year.

Today, the company announced that Chris Liddel would join its board of directors.

Liddel is an seasoned executive who previously served as CFO for Microsoft, GM, and International Paper.

Liddel also comes with experience in government, having served as the deputy White House chief of staff during the first Trump administration.

Ties to the Trump world could be helpful for Anthropic as it pushes to enter the public market. It’s reportedly not on the greatest terms with the current administration, as the startup has pushed back on using its Claude AI for surveillance applications.

Exclusive | Anthropic Adds New Board Member as It Eyes IPO

Liddel is an seasoned executive who previously served as CFO for Microsoft, GM, and International Paper.

Liddel also comes with experience in government, having served as the deputy White House chief of staff during the first Trump administration.

Rani Molla2/13/26

Meta is bringing back facial recognition for its smart glasses

Meta is reviving its highly controversial facial recognition efforts, with plans to incorporate the tech into its smart glasses as soon as this year, The New York Times reports.

In 2021, around the time Facebook rebranded as Meta, the company shut down the facial recognition software it had used to tag people in photos, saying it needed to “find the right balance.”

Now, according to an internal memo reviewed by the Times, Meta seems to feel that it’s at least found the right moment, noting that the fraught and crowded political climate could allow the feature to attract less scrutiny.

“We will launch during a dynamic political environment where many civil society groups that we would expect to attack us would have their resources focused on other concerns,” the document reads.

The tech, called “Name Tag” internally, would let smart glass wearers identify and surface information about people they see with the glasses by using Meta’s artificial intelligence assistant.

Meta Plans to Add Facial Recognition Technology to Its Smart Glasses

“We will launch during a dynamic political environment where many civil society groups that we would expect to attack us would have their resources focused on other concerns,” the document reads.

The tech, called “Name Tag” internally, would let smart glass wearers identify and surface information about people they see with the glasses by using Meta’s artificial intelligence assistant.

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