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Mar 09, 2026
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Welcome back! OpenAI's head of robotics resigns over the Pentagon deal. Microsoft, Google and Amazon keep selling Anthropic models to customers other than the Pentagon. SoftBank seeks a $40 billion loan to help fund new OpenAI investment.
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OpenAI’s robotics chief said Saturday that she was leaving OpenAI over its negotiations with the Department of Defense. “Surveillance of Americans without judicial oversight and lethal autonomy without human authorization are lines that deserved more deliberation than they got,” Caitlin Kalinowski wrote in a X post. Last week, OpenAI said it would strike a new deal with the Defense Department and comply with a request by Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth to make its AI available for any lawful use. The move occurred immediately after Anthropic had
refused to do the same deal, prompting the White House to blacklist it from federal agencies. The negotiations with the U.S. military have caused turmoil within both Anthropic and OpenAI, and OpenAI CEO Sam Altman has said that OpenAI should not have rushed its initial agreement with the Pentagon. Before joining OpenAI, Kalinowski was the head of augmented reality glasses hardware at Meta Platforms. She also serves on the board of Axon, which supplies tasers, body cameras and other hardware and software to the military and law enforcement agencies.
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Microsoft, Amazon and Google will keep selling Anthropic models—and other products powered by its models—to most customers after the Pentagon said it was designating Anthropic a supply chain risk, the companies said. The Pentagon’s letter to Anthropic, signed by Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth and dated March 3, states that the agency determined that Anthropic’s technology can’t be used by the Defense Department specifically, according to a copy of the letter reviewed by The Information. The letter does not say that other federal contractors need to sever ties with Anthropic, an idea Hegseth previously floated publicly. Anthropic said in a statement Thursday that it believes the supply chain risk designation is illegal and is preparing to challenge the Pentagon’s designation in court. Microsoft said Thursday that its lawyers determined that the Pentagon’s designation only barred Microsoft from including Anthropic products in its contracts with the Pentagon specifically, and that it wouldn’t need to sever all business ties with Anthropic. “Our lawyers have studied the designation and have concluded that Anthropic products, including Claude, can remain available to our customers—other than the Department of War—through platforms such as M365, GitHub, and Microsoft’s AI Foundry and that we can continue to work with Anthropic on non-defense related projects,” a Microsoft spokesperson said in a statement. Google said in a similar statement Friday that the Pentagon’s determination “does not preclude us from working with Anthropic on non-defense related projects, and their products remain
available through our platforms.” And Amazon said in a statement Friday that “AWS customers and partners can continue to use Claude for all their workloads not associated with the Department of War,” and that for Pentagon contracts the company is “supporting customers and partners as they transition to alternatives running on AWS.”
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SoftBank Group is working with four banks including JPMorgan Chase on a $40 billion loan to help fund its new investment in OpenAI, according to a person with knowledge of the discussions. The bridge loan would have a one-year tenor, according to the person, and be the largest U.S. dollar-denominated loan the Japanese company has ever taken out. Representatives for JPMorgan and SoftBank declined to comment. SoftBank said last month it planned to initially fund its new $30 billion investment in OpenAI through bridge loans and “other financing arrangements from major financial institutions.” The new investment is on top of $34.6 billion it’s already invested in the AI company. S&P Global changed its outlook for SoftBank’s credit rating to “negative”
following the investment decision, citing a drop in the creditworthiness of its holdings. Bloomberg first reported on the loan discussions.
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Top technology banker Niall Cannon is leaving Citi to join Morgan Stanley as a senior investment banker focusing on software, according to people familiar with the matter. Cannon was most recently a vice chairman of Citi’s global technology investment banking and also served as its global co-head of software investment banking. Spokespeople of Morgan Stanley and Citi declined to comment. The departure is a loss to Citi’s senior ranks. The investment banking arm of Citi has been aggressively hiring from rivals to boost its technology banking business. It hired two veteran tech bankers from JP Morgan, Drago Rajkovic and Pankaj Goel, late last year.
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Alphabet granted CEO Sundar Pichai new stock awards with a potential value of $686 million, the company said in a securities filing on Friday, citing his “strong performance” in the top job. It was the largest series of grants Pichai has received since he became CEO of Google in 2015. The Google parent grants Pichai big awards every three years. The last grant, in 2022, was worth as much as $336 million and in 2019 it granted him stock valued at up to $330 million. The latest grant includes several tranches of stock in Alphabet, with a potential value of $336 million, in addition to stock units in its self-driving car unit Waymo and drone delivery startup Wing worth up to $260 million and $90 million respectively. The new grants in Waymo and Wing potentially signal that Alphabet plans to spin those businesses
off in the future. In the filing, Alphabet said both businesses “have made strong progress under Mr Pichai’s supervision and show strong potential.”
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Kalshi was sued by users for failing to pay $54 million to people who bet that Iranian Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei would leave office before March 1, after he was killed during the U.S. and Israeli airstrikes last month. After Khamenei’s death, Kalshi said it couldn’t pay out any winnings because its guidelines include a death carveout provision, which would prevent traders from directly profiting from death. The suit claimed that the provision is a “fine-print mechanism designed to allow [Kalshi] to avoid paying consumers what they were owed,” according to a class-action lawsuit filed Thursday in the US District Court for the Central District of California. “Kalshi doesn’t allow markets directly tied to death,” said a company spokesperson. “Our rules were clear from the beginning, we never changed them, and we settled based on the rules.” The lawsuit is the latest wrinkle in the development of prediction markets, which have surged in popularity but face any number of questions over what they can allow on their sites and how they should operate.
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