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AI Love you

Big Tech’s big AI love affair — in quotes

AI is the apple of tech’s eye.

8/8/25 10:27AM

Big Tech’s love affair with AI saw no signs of faltering during the latest earnings season. Combined, Amazon, Google, Meta, and Microsoft spent a record of nearly $90 billion on capex last quarter and have promised even bigger spending in the future.

To justify those mammoth expenses, their CEOs spent their earnings releases and calls extolling the virtues of AI and how it’s contributing to their top and bottom lines.

Here’s what they had to say.

Amazon CEO Andy Jassy
Mentions of “AI” on earnings call: 39

“Our AI progress across the board continues to improve our customer experiences, speed of innovation, operational efficiency, and business growth, and I’m excited for what lies ahead.”

Alphabet CEO Sundar Pichai
Mentions of “AI” on earnings call: 86

“Q2 was a standout quarter for us with robust growth across the company. As you saw at I/O, we are leading at the frontier of AI and shipping at an incredible pace. AI is positively impacting every part of the business, driving strong momentum.”

Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella
Mentions of “AI” on earnings call: 51

“It was a very strong close to what was a record fiscal year for us... The rate of innovation and the speed of diffusion is unlike anything we have seen. To that end, we are building the most comprehensive suite of AI products and tech stack at massive scale.”

Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg
Mentions of “AI” on earnings call: 72

“On advertising, the strong performance this quarter is largely thanks to AI unlocking greater efficiency and gains across our ad system... AI is significantly improving our ability to show people content that they’re going to find interesting and useful.”

Even Apple, which historically has lagged far behind its Big Tech peers in AI spending, committed to opening up its giant wallet for AI.

Apple CEO Tim Cook
Mentions of “AI” on earnings call: 26

“We see AI as one of the most profound technologies of our lifetime. We are embedding it across our devices and platforms and across the company. We are also significantly growing our investments.”

Chris Stokel-Walker

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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.

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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