McDonald's: The fast food giant is winning the tech war

7/27/23 8:00PM

Grimacing‍

‍McDonald’s investors were lovin’ it yesterday, after the company posted earnings that beat estimates across the board. The fast food giant reported Q2 net income of $2.3 billion, up 94% on last year, as well as global same-store sales that rose 11.7%.

The company partially credited “culturally relevant brand and marketing campaigns” — like its Grimace promotion that was an absurdist breakout hit with Gen Z on TikTok — for the increased sales figures. For McDonald’s, it seems that success in the online sphere is becoming as much a part of the business as flipping burgers and serving fries.

‍Appy meals

‍Indeed, the golden arches have perhaps never loomed larger in the digital landscape. Digital sales across the whole McDonald’s system (including franchised stores) exceeded $8 billion in the latest quarter, up 33% on the 2022 figure. That’s due in no small part to the mega success of the McDonald’s app, which was downloaded a staggering 127 million times worldwide last year — more than double the downloads that Uber Eats, the second most downloaded food & drink app, notched.

And the app, where users can score exclusive deals and build up loyalty points, is only extending its lead over competitors. According to Apptopia figures cited by the Wall Street Journal, the McDonald’s app had 18% more monthly active users in Q2 than it did last year. That's an impressive figure for an app that launched 8 years ago, but its even more striking when compared to the churn rate for major fast food competitors, like the Burger King and Wendy's apps, which have seen users and downloads tumble in the last year.

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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