Ben Thompson

Andrew Sharp × Ben Thompson

Apple has acknowledged that looser App Store rules are weighing on its $100B+ services business, alongside a proposed 15% U.S. commission and Germany’s ATT ruling.Growth has shifted attention from zero-sum App Store fights, but restrictions on Replit-like services may constrain future AI app development.Germany’s ruling is favorable but four years late, while TikTok’s possible influence over AI data-center buildouts and premature AI regulation remain risks.

Andrew Sharp × Ben Thompson

Commerce’s directive suspended Fable 5 and Mythos access for foreign nationals, including inside Anthropic, while Claude was pulled from market entirely.Restrictions may buy weeks or months, maybe a year, but also delay defenders’ use of leading models to patch vulnerabilities.Anthropic’s claim that “we get to decide how this is used” intensified mistrust, leaving institutional authority and court review unresolved.

Andrew Sharp × Ben Thompson

The Anthropic–Pentagon rupture remains a volatile negotiation: a contract was canceled, a broader restriction was threatened but not implemented, and renewed talks followed Amodei’s leaked memo.Ben argues frontier AI could challenge the state’s monopoly on power, making property rights vulnerable, while Anthropic’s ethical stand may attract talent and users but still risks government backlash, surveillance disputes, and institutional instability.

Ben Thompson × Andrew Sharp

OpenAI’s deals with Oracle, Microsoft, Google, Amazon, and others may be making it systemically important enough to lower borrowing costs through a government backstop.Thompson argues an IPO and equity issuance would be more appropriate, while the unresolved test is whether serving $20-a-month plans is profitable before R&D as commitments reach $1.4 trillion.

Andrew Sharp × Ben Thompson

Judge Amit Mehta found Google’s nonexclusive default agreements foreclosed competition but preserved its payments, leaving Apple with more than $20 billion annually in “pure profit from Google for doing nothing.”The remedy gives challengers one-time index access without Google’s accumulated data or crawling capabilities, while AI may intensify the need to prevent Google from carrying its distribution advantage into Gemini.

Andrew Sharp × Ben Thompson

Google’s roughly $2.4 billion Windsurf talent deal, followed by Cognition’s purchase of the remainder, shows Big Tech can extract scarce people and technology without buying whole startups.The model improves acquirer economics but removes career insurance for ordinary employees, while Cloudflare’s crawler blockade seeks pay-per-crawl leverage that may nonetheless reinforce Google’s moat.

Andrew Sharp × Ben Thompson

Andrew Sharp leans toward fair-use treatment for LLM training when outputs are not infringing and present market harm is unproven, while Ben Thompson calls stronger plaintiffs’ cases “a fantasy” because unmade purchases cannot be observed at scale.Both hosts argue that copyright and antitrust cannot resolve the transfer of value from creators to AI companies without new legislation, while permission rules could burden compliant startups, reward piracy and entrench incumbents.

Andrew Sharp × Ben Thompson

Judge William Alsup’s Anthropic ruling treats training on purchased copyrighted books as fair use while allowing claims over pirated inputs, separating transformative use from unlawful acquisition.Liability focused on infringing outputs rather than ingestion could preserve competition, but requiring aggressive filters or costly compliance would structurally favor closed incumbents; lawful public training corpora remain a congressional catalyst.

Andrew Sharp × Ben Thompson

Apple’s iPhone user base anchors the App Store moat, while its 30% commission and anti-steering rules invite regulation.Apple’s roughly $20 billion to $25 billion in annual, pure-profit Google payments meet a first reported Safari search decline in two decades, sharpening AI substitution risk.Google’s commercial-query dominance and ad infrastructure may endure, while ChatGPT exposes higher education’s weak economics.

Andrew Sharp × Ben Thompson

Meta’s three eras—from Facebook’s social graph to monopoly-era control and TikTok-driven competition—make the FTC’s historical evidence and breakup remedy look temporally mismatched.The feed and Stories converted attention into an auction-based advertising engine, but perfect competition pressures sellers while regulation could trade platform dysfunction for scarcity, surveillance, and red tape.