What's up: Oracle shares tumble, Adobe announces ChatGPT integration, U.S. investors pour money into Chinese AI. 

Good morning. It’s no great surprise that ChatGPT topped Apple’s annual chart of most downloaded free apps, released Wednesday. The questions now are what will OpenAI do with the app’s massive and growing base of users and how will that reshape markets?  Corporate leaders should consider the implications for their own businesses as companies from Walmart to Intuit and now Adobe set up shop within ChatGPT.

It’s worth stepping back and considering just how quickly this is happening. ChatGPT’s iOS app was released in May 2023. That was less than three years ago, even though it may feel more like 30. For some, it’s increasingly difficult to recall a time when such Chatbots didn’t exist, given how deeply they have become a part of daily life for so many people. The creation of new habits and routines focused on ChatGPT and other chatbots is going to accelerate in the coming year, with implications for many, if not most, businesses.

The app landscape was very different this time last year. As TechCrunch notes, “ChatGPT made it to No. 4 last year, but the top spot was taken by Chinese shopping app Temu.”

ChatGPT dominates the consumer chatbot space. “Google Gemini was the only other chatbot app to make the list, coming in at number 10,” MacRumors points out.

ChatGPT is more than an app or a tool. It’s an ecosystem, or at least headed in that direction. As the Wall Street Journal reported yesterday, Adobe is adding three of its apps to OpenAI’s ChatGPT, as the software company races to keep up with the growing number of companies that are integrating with the chatbot. Adobe Photoshop, Adobe Express and Adobe Acrobat will be directly available on ChatGPT, allowing users to ask the chatbot to edit photos, create designs or edit PDFs using Adobe.

Walmart said in October it is forming a partnership with OpenAI to let shoppers buy its products directly within ChatGPT, a signal that “online shopping is going to become a different experience from the retail websites we are used to,” the Wall Street Journal reported. And it’s an indication of where industries and markets across much of the economy are headed. Expect that process to accelerate in 2026.

Do you expect chatbots to alter the markets where your company operates? Use the links at the end of this newsletter and let us know.

Oracle shares fell more than 11% in after-hours trading after revenue and operating income for the most recent financial quarter fell slightly short of analysts’ expectations. The result that is unlikely to quiet concerns over the company’s ability to capitalize on the AI industry’s demand for computing capacity, WSJ reports. Oracle’s stock has fallen more than 30% since early September.

The company reported quarterly revenue of $16.1 billion, up 14% from a year earlier, with overall cloud revenue growing by 34%. Its adjusted operating income of $6.7 billion represented a 10% increase. Its cloud infrastructure revenue, reflecting its business from artificial-intelligence companies, was $4.1 billion, slightly lower than analyst expectations.

WSJ's Dan Gallagher writes that Oracle's fate has never before hinged so closely on just one company: OpenAI. 

A lot has happened in the three months since the world learned of Oracle’s deal to provide $300 billion worth of AI computing services to OpenAI.

OpenAI’s aggressive growth expectations backing those deals look even more ambitious after Google last month launched its powerful Gemini 3 model, which outperforms the latest ChatGPT on benchmark tests and has compelled OpenAI’s leadership to proclaim a “code red” within the company.

U.S. investors are plowing money into Chinese companies involved in AI, despite growing competition between Washington and Beijing over the technology, WSJ reports.

Investors are driving up the share prices of Chinese tech companies developing AI models and adding cash to exchange-traded funds tracking the broader tech sector in China. Venture-capital firms based in China are raising U.S. dollar-denominated funds to deploy in AI investments, and U.S. endowments that shunned China for years are weighing a return, according to fund managers.

The momentum comes as U.S. lawmakers, citing national security, are calling for tighter curbs on American capital flowing to China. U.S.-China geopolitics have historically dulled investor appetite for private Chinese companies, but public market U.S. investors face no limitations in buying public shares of Chinese companies involved in AI.

Shares of internet giant Alibaba, listed in Hong Kong and New York, are up more than 80% this year to a four-year high.

“China is such a huge market,” said Jialong Shi, head of China internet equity research at Japanese bank Nomura. “We are going to see increasing fund inflow from the U.S. investors.”

At the same time, DeepSeek, the popular Chinese AI startup, has been developing its next major model using several thousand Nvidia’s state-of-the-art Blackwell chips which the U.S. has forbidden from being exported to China, according to six people with knowledge of the matter, The Information reports.

Another consideration: China now has the biggest power grid the world has ever seen. The U.S.-China “electron gap,” as OpenAI now calls it, has become a major preoccupation for American tech leaders. Microsoft Chief Executive Satya Nadella has said his company is worried it won’t have enough power to run the enormous number of chips it is buying. Some companies want Washington to do more to cut red tape or provide financial support to modernize America’s power grid.

Adobe is the latest in a string of companies that have integrated with ChatGPT, as businesses look to get in front of the chatbot’s more than 800 million users, WSJ reports. 

The company said it is adding three of its apps, Adobe Photoshop, Adobe Express and Adobe Acrobat, to ChatGPT, as it races to keep up with the growing number of companies that are integrating with the chatbot. ChatGPT users will now be able to ask the chatbot to edit photos, create designs or edit PDFs using Adobe.

OpenAI launched ChatGPT’s app-integration ecosystem in October, and Adobe’s competitors Canva and Figma were part of the initial slate of companies included. Other companies included the travel agencies Booking.com and Expedia, the music platform Spotify and the housing marketplace Zillow.

Adobe is working to increase its AI offerings, and its annual recurring revenue from AI exceeded $250 million in the third quarter. Still, investors want to see more revenue coming out of its AI efforts, and the stock has fallen about 23% this year.

The U.S. Justice Department charged a Ukrainian woman with hacking water plants and food production facilities, and accused the Russian government of directly supporting cyberattacks on U.S. and global critical infrastructure, WSJ reports. “While these attacks may be relatively unsophisticated, they pose real risk to our water systems, food supply and energy sectors,” said Brett Leatherman, assistant director of the cyber division at the FBI. 

Meta’s Mark Zuckerberg, months into building one of the priciest teams in technology history, is getting personally involved in day-to-day work and pivoting the company’s focus to an AI model it can make money off of, Bloomberg reports. One new model, codenamed Avocado, is expected to debut sometime next spring, and may be launched as a “closed” model.

Anthropic’s Model Context Protocol began as a passion project of two Anthropic employees. Now, as Anthropic dedicates it to the Linux Foundation, it is likely to now supercharge a critical method for building a scaled out, usable ecosystem of AI agents, the Verge reports.

Bobyard, an AI startup for landscaping, raised a $35 million Series A round led by Joe Lonsdale's venture firm 8VC at a $170 million valuation, including the new capital, WSJ reports. Lonsdale said he hopes it will lower construction costs, a key challenge in the U.S.

Match Group said Hinge founder Justin McLeod is stepping down as chief executive of the unit to launch Overtone, an AI-driven dating app in the early stages of development, WSJ reports. 

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Fed Chair Jerome Powell pushed through a rate cut Wednesday over the broadest reservations of his nearly eight-year tenure, and in doing so, implicitly delivered a pointed message to President Trump and his own successor: Cutting rates is harder than it looks. (WSJ)

Powell also pointed on Wednesday to a job-market risk that economists have been worried about for months: Official statistics could be drastically overstating recent hiring. (WSJ)

The Trump administration in recent weeks has handed its European counterparts