FT says Apple’s CEO could step down as soon as 2026, Bloomberg disagrees

Late Friday, the Financial Times reported that Apple CEO Tim Cook, a 65-year-old who’s led the company for nearly 15 years, could be stepping down as early as next year. On Saturday, Bloomberg’s Mark Gurman, whose Apple reporting is considered gospel by many, pooh-poohed that timeline, saying that while Apple is readying succession plans, “I don’t get the sense anything is imminent as the @FT is claiming.”

Both the FT and Bloomberg have reported that Apple’s hardware chief, John Ternus, is likely next in line.

The stock is down about 1% premarket, as investors contemplate what Apple, which recently posted a superlative Q4 earnings report, would be like without its longtime supply chain guru.

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Rani Molla

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What Amazon’s latest data center announcement says about AI right now

The first Amazon data centers in Louisiana will cost $12 billion and require a lot of preemptive defense.

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Jon Keegan6h

Anthropic says that a group of Chinese AI startups are “distilling” their models by setting up huge numbers of fake accounts for Claude AI. In a blog post, Anthropic said that it disrupted “industrial-scale” campaigns by Chinese AI labs DeepSeek, Moonshot, and MiniMax. The company said that the group had over 16 million exchanges with Claude, after setting up 24,000 “fraudulent” accounts. Anthropic said it is developing countermeasures to prevent such attacks in the future.

Jon Keegan8h

Report: OpenAI’s Stargate has been a chaotic mess

Just over a year ago, OpenAI CEO Sam Altman stood alongside President Trump, Oracle’s Larry Ellison, and SoftBank CEO Masayoshi Son to announce an ambitious $500 billion plan to build massive data centers in the US — Project Stargate.

While today an actual Stargate 1-gigawatt data center is certainly well under construction in Abilene, Texas, it turns out there wasn’t much of a plan in place at the time of the announcement, according to a new report from The Information.

The past year has been full of partner disputes, debt problems, and scuttled plans as the loosely defined project races to build the AI computing infrastructure that OpenAI is craving as competition heats up.

Per the report, OpenAI tried to build its own data centers as the project stalled, but lenders balked at funding the risky project. They eventually settled on the current plan, in which partner Oracle borrows the money and leases capacity back to OpenAI. OpenAI was still able to control the design of the facility.

The slow start for the project resulted in OpenAI missing its own goal of 10 gigawatts of AI computing capacity from Oracle and SoftBank by the end of 2025.

Inside OpenAI’s Scramble to Get Computing Power After Stargate Stalled

The slow start for the project resulted in OpenAI missing its own goal of 10 gigawatts of AI computing capacity from Oracle and SoftBank by the end of 2025.

Rani Molla10h

Ives says AI represents huge opportunity for cybersecurity firms as losses mount

Cybersecurity stocks continued to slide Monday, after Anthropic unveiled a new security feature for its AI model Friday. The company’s AI advancements have been wreaking havoc across software firms, and its latest foray appears to be doing the same to cybersecurity leaders, including CrowdStrike, Zscaler, and Cloudflare.

But similar to Dan Ives’ broader thesis on the software sell-off — which he has called “overblown,” arguing that the companies getting hit may ultimately become “core participants in the AI Revolution” — the Wedbush Securities analyst says AI is actually a positive for cybersecurity stocks.

“Anthropic going after this market with an initial tool validates our thesis that cyber security is the next frontier for the AI Revolution,” Ives wrote Monday morning, arguing that AI is elevating the risk environment — and the need for cybersecurity firms in the first place.

“AI will be a major tailwind to the cyber security sector over the coming years as protection of use cases, data, and endpoints expand markedly,” he said, adding that companies including CrowdStrike and Zscaler are well positioned to capitalize on the shift by incorporating AI into their strategies.

Rani Molla12h

Analysts slash Salesforce price targets ahead of Wednesday earnings, as narrative of AI eating its lunch persists

A number of analysts have significantly lowered their price targets for Salesforce, citing growing fears that AI workforce tools, including Anthropic’s Cowork, could threaten parts of its core business. According to reports, here are some of the recent cuts:

Morgan Stanley cut its price target nearly 30%, to $287 from $398.
Jefferies slashed its forecast 33%, to $250 from $375.
Barclays reduced its price target to $265 from $338.
Evercore ISI went to $260 from $340.
Last week, Citigroup also reduced its price target to $197 from $257.

Earlier this month, Wedbush Securities analyst Dan Ives offered a different view, adding Salesforce to his list of top 30 AI companies and calling the stock a “core participant” in the “AI revolution.” He described the recent software sell-off as “overblown.”

Shares of Salesforce, which reports earnings Wednesday, are down 30% year to date and 1% premarket today.

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