The Tesla light show on December 29, 2025, in Nanning, Guangxi Zhuang Autonomous Region of China (VCG/Getty Images)

Tesla deliveries drop for second straight year; stock on pace to match longest losing streak ever

BYD outsold Tesla in battery electric vehicles for the first time in 2025.

1/2/26 9:07AM

Tesla Q4 deliveries fell 16% to 418,227 vehicles, falling short of estimates, while its full-year numbers dropped 8.5% to 1,636,129, marking the electric vehicle company’s second annual sales decline in a row.

Shares of the company fell 2.8% in afternoon trading, putting the stock on pace for its seventh straight day in the red. The stock has dropped 11% over that time. The last time Tesla slipped for seven straight sessions, its longest losings streak on record, was April 2024.

Meanwhile, Chinese competitor BYD saw its 2025 battery electric vehicle sales increase 28% to 2.3 million, overtaking Tesla for the first time on a calendar year basis.

After a record third quarter, in which the sunsetting $7,500 federal EV tax credit pulled forward demand, Tesla’s lower numbers represent a disappointing aftermath, wherein its cars and electric vehicles generally have effectively become more expensive, reducing demand. At the same time, CEO Elon Musk has been deemphasizing Tesla’s EV business, focusing the future of the company instead on autonomy, AI, and robots.

Ahead of the results, Tesla released its own compilation of analyst estimates that pegged the Q4 numbers at about 423,000 and full-year deliveries at 1.6 million. The move was widely seen as a way to lower investor expectations for the quarter, since other consensus estimates by Bloomberg and FactSet were notably higher. Tesla also released lower-cost, stripped-down versions of its Model Y and Model 3, whose new prices are still more than older versions with the federal tax credit.

On the company’s last earnings call, Musk said Tesla is so confident in the future success of its Full Self-Driving technology that it planned to increase vehicle production “as fast as we reasonably can,” potentially reaching a 3 million annualized production rate within two years.

For now, Tesla has not reached its goal of removing safety drivers from its Austin Robotaxi vehicles, and demand for its vehicles is not there.

Chris Stokel-Walker

Bot bias

6/17/26

Companies are getting AI chatbots to smear their competitors

The race to influence AI chatbots is leading to some companies to adopt shady competitive tactics.

Tom Jones6/17/26

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.

South by Southwest Conference and Festivals

Gold Tesla Cybercabs are piling up, but they’re not picking up passengers yet

Low-volume production started in April. Now people are noticing them more and more in the wild.

Rani Molla6/15/26

Millie Giles

TAKING ACCOUNTS

6/15/26

Britain announces social media ban for under-16s starting early 2027

The UK government plans to use the same model for the restrictions as Australia — but how successful has that case study been so far?

UK Prime Minister Announces Under-16s Social Media Ban

Jon Keegan6/15/26

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