tech

Rani Molla4/3/25

Despite being far more tariff-resistant, Tesla is falling harder than other carmakers

It’s auto tariffs day, and the one car company that seemingly should be doing well — Tesla — is doing worse than pretty much all of its peers.

The 25% tariffs on imported vehicles went into effect today, but their impact on major carmakers has been surprisingly muted, perhaps because a lot of the concern has been priced in over months of tariff bluster. Ford, General Motors, Honda, and Volkswagen are all trading down, but are doing better than the S&P 500, which is down 4% as of 10 a.m. ET.

It also may be because Canada and Mexico, where many cars sold in the US are produced, have so far escaped new “reciprocal tariffs” that are roiling the markets.

Tesla, which assembles its domestically sold vehicles in the US, avoids today’s tariffs (though it will be affected when the auto parts levies go into effect May 3). Yet it was recently down 5.5%.

Tesla, it seems, has other problems. Those include but are not limited to terrible delivery numbers released yesterday (Tesla bull Dan Ives called them a “disaster on every metric”). Tesla sold about 50,000 fewer vehicles in Q1 than analysts had expected or than it had sold the same quarter a year earlier. That’s the biggest ever year-over-year drop for the electric vehicle company, which has contended with weaker-than-expected sales in the US and abroad, thanks in part to the political machinations of its CEO, Elon Musk.

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Meta is supercharging its subscription businesses

The free-app giant never really cared about recurring revenue. Now, it’s launching paid plans for all sorts of stuff.

tech

FT: Anthropic staff helping the NSA use Mythos for offensive cyberattacks

Anthropic’s Mythos AI model was deemed too dangerous to release to the public, with the company citing its ability to orchestrate novel cyberattacks.

And that’s just what the National Security Agency is doing, with the help of Anthropic staff embedded at the agency, according to a report from the Financial Times.

Only a small number of companies and US allies have been given access to the advanced model, which means America’s adversaries have not had the chance to shore up their defenses against the AI model’s new offensive capabilities.

The arrangement is especially unusual as the Pentagon has deemed Anthropic’s AI a national security supply chain risk — effectively blacklisting it for defense work — in response to the company’s refusal to allow its technology to be used for any legal application, which could include autonomous killing or mass surveillance. Anthropic is currently suing the US government to fight the determination.

US National Security Agency using Anthropic’s Mythos for cyber attacks

US National Security Agency using Anthropic’s Mythos for cyber attacks

Only a small number of companies and US allies have been given access to the advanced model, which means America’s adversaries have not had the chance to shore up their defenses against the AI model’s new offensive capabilities.

The arrangement is especially unusual as the Pentagon has deemed Anthropic’s AI a national security supply chain risk — effectively blacklisting it for defense work — in response to the company’s refusal to allow its technology to be used for any legal application, which could include autonomous killing or mass surveillance. Anthropic is currently suing the US government to fight the determination.

tech

Longtime Tesla bear JPMorgan upgraded Tesla and raised its price target to $475 from $145

For more than a decade, JPMorgan was Wall Street’s most stubborn Tesla skeptic, anchored by auto analyst Ryan Brinkman’s strict focus on traditional car fundamentals and near-term delivery numbers.

But JPM recently handed coverage of the stock to a new analyst, Rajat Gupta, who is throwing that playbook out the window. In a note Friday, the firm upgraded Tesla to “neutral” from “underweight” and raised its price target 228% to $475 from $145. (The analyst consensus on FactSet is $403.) Instead of focusing on the company’s struggling vehicle business, the new analyst is orienting himself more toward Tesla’s idea of the future, now modeling Tesla’s physical AI and robotaxi fleets all the way out to the year 2040.

Here are the main reasons for the capitulation:

Looking past the car lot: Gupta argues that Tesla “is at the forefront of physical AI, entering uncharted TAMs” and therefore “deserves the benefit of the doubt to be valued on LT earnings potential” rather than near-term speed bumps.
Unmatched vertical integration: Tesla’s control over everything from battery cells to custom silicon gives it a massive moat. JPM notes this starting point advantage is “unmatched at an industrial level scale” and “still somewhat under-appreciated and misunderstood.”
The AWS flywheel effect: Deploying Optimus robots inside its own factories “should not only lower COGS for the base automotive business, but more importantly, help validate the product at an industrial scale.” Gupta called it “a classic flywheel effect, somewhat analogous to AWS and Kiva at AMZN.”

For Tesla bulls who have argued for years that this is an AI company and not a carmaker, JPM’s sudden $3.9 trillion valuation model is the ultimate validation.

skynet terminator

Anthropic ponders self-improving AI

Anthropic says Claude already writes 80% of its code. A new post asks what happens when the models can improve themselves — and whether anyone could stop them.

tech

Tom Jones & Millie Giles6/4/26

ChatGPT hit 1 billion users nearly twice as fast as TikTok did

It took Facebook and Instagram around eight years; it took YouTube just over six; even TikTok, which at the time felt like it was a global sensation almost as soon as it arrived, took more than half a decade.

Now, though, the mobile version of ChatGPT has positively left the biggest platforms (and all of your other favorite apps) in the dust, hitting 1 billion monthly active users in just three years, per new data from market intelligence firm Sensor Tower, as more users turn to OpenAI’s chatbot each month.

ChatGPT 1 billion users chart — Sherwood News

While rival Anthropic might be pulling ahead in terms of annualized recurring revenue, enterprise customer adoption, and valuation, the app version of Claude, a market-leading chatbot on several counts, has clocked only 56 million monthly active users in the quarter to date.

In fact, according to Abe Yousef, a senior insights analyst at Sensor Tower, ChatGPT’s monthly active user count for the quarter to date outweighs the figures for Claude, Gemini (472 million), Doubao (106 million), Dola (78 million), DeepSeek (68 million), Meta AI (61 million), Grok (50 million), Perplexity (44 million), and Copilot (31 million)... combined.

ChatGPT made a pretty big splash in the tech world when it landed toward the end of 2022, but there’s no question that the mobile versions — which launched on iOS in May 2023, then on Android a couple months later — helped to catapult the chatbot into the mainstream proper.

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