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As Big Tech chases enterprise AI, Meta and Apple double down on small businesses

Apple and Meta are playing to their strengths in small business.

3/25/26 10:39AM

While much of Silicon Valley is racing to build the best AI “coworker” for big corporations, Meta and Apple are betting the bigger opportunity lies elsewhere: small businesses.

Meta is launching a new companywide initiative aimed at helping entrepreneurs start and grow businesses using AI tools across Facebook, Instagram, and WhatsApp, Axios reported Wednesday. A day earlier, Apple unveiled Apple Business, a platform that bundles together tools for managing devices, employees, and customer interactions.

These moves seem different from the AI copilots coming out of Microsoft, Anthropic, and others. Those companies are focused on selling AI into enterprises, with tools that help employees write code, draft documents, and potentially replace some of their coworkers.

Meanwhile, Meta and Apple are leveraging their already strong base of small-business customers — Meta for communication tools and advertising revenue, and Apple through its devices, payments, and app ecosystem — to less flashy ends.

Meta is leaning into its strength as a distribution and marketing platform for small businesses, aiming to offer them AI tools to attract customers, create content, and manage interactions.

“In the AI era, it should be easier than ever for people to build new businesses,” CEO Mark Zuckerberg wrote in an internal memo. “We want to build the services that enable this.”

Unlike rivals pouring hundreds of billions into enterprise AI infrastructure, Meta doesn’t have a major enterprise software business to offset those costs.

Apple’s move is less explicitly about AI — and comes as it has struggled to match competitors’ momentum in the space — but similarly plays to its strengths. By consolidating business tools into a single platform, it’s positioning itself as the infrastructure layer for smaller companies operating within its ecosystem.

The AI race may be focused on the enterprise, but Meta and Apple are going after everyone else.

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Prediction markets have, predictably, been given a boost by the summer of sports

Major platforms like Kalshi and Polymarket have seen huge upticks in users of late, thanks in no small part to what’s felt like a recent sporting smorgasbord, with major competitions across hockey, basketball, and soccer soaking up fans’ time (and spending, clearly) at the outset of summer.

While gaming industry groups may not like it, there’s been a huge change in the methods people are using to put money on the big games, with everyone from fortunate NYC bar owners, to a far less fortunate Spanish supporter, turning to prediction markets to try and turn their sports know-how into cold, hard cash.

According to a new report from Adam Blacker for apptopia, that shift might have been even more seismic than imagined in the wake of the NBA and NHL finals and around the 2026 World Cup kicking off.

2026 World Cup Reverses Seasonal Lull for Sports Betting Apps

According to a new report from Adam Blacker for apptopia, that shift might have been even more seismic than imagined in the wake of the NBA and NHL finals and around the 2026 World Cup kicking off.

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Anthropic pulls Fable and Mythos access worldwide after Trump administration bars their use by foreign nationals

Only days after releasing two versions of its next-gen AI model, Anthropic has disabled them for users worldwide.

Anthropic says it received a Friday night order from the Trump administration to suspend access to the models for any foreign national (anywhere in the world) — a group that included some Anthropic employees. In response, the company turned off access to everyone.

Last week, the company released to the public its much-anticipated Claude Fable 5 model (and its restricted version Claude Mythos 5, which is still being tested with trusted partners). Anthropic said in a blog post announcing the action that officials cited national security concerns with the new models, while offering few specific details.

The post said that the government gave the company “verbal evidence of a potential narrow, non-universal jailbreak” of the public Fable 5 model. A jailbreak is a means by which users can evade restrictions built into the code to unlock prohibited functionality. Anthropic downplayed the significance of the attack, and said other major models, such as OpenAI’s GPT-5.5, could also be affected by the technique described.

Fears of these first Mythos-class models being misused are running high, after Anthropic warned the cybersecurity world in May that the advanced cyber capabilities of Mythos have rapidly discovered thousands of vulnerabilities in ubiquitous software, leading to the decision to restrict the full version of the model to a close group of trusted partners for testing.

This morning, Axios reported that Anthropic technical staff have flown to Washington to meet with White House officials to resolve the issue.

The Wall Street Journal is reporting that the Trump administration’s decision to take action against Anthropic was prompted by discussions that Amazon CEO Andy Jassy had with officials, including Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent. According to the report, Amazon researchers said they had been able to evade some of Fable 5’s security restrictions using specific prompts. Amazon is a major investor in Anthropic.

Anthropic is currently suing the US government to fight the Pentagon’s blacklisting of the company on national security grounds.

Statement on the US government directive to suspend access to Fable 5 and Mythos 5