Mike Isaac

Unfortunately, as is so often the case, no one looks particularly good coming out of this.

The New York Times Mike Isaac wrote, "Not lost on me that the two labs asking the public to trust them as stewards of responsible AI leadership at existential stakes are having a slap fight on Twitter about who gets credit over a math problem." Like I said, this could've been a whole main episode, but since we're a little compressed on time, let's quickly rip through a couple of other stories before we get to our main, which is all about all sorts of new models that we haven't had a chance to talk about yet.

First up, speaking about Anthropic, there is a new class action lawsuit against the company filed on behalf of Claude Max subscribers with the claim that Anthropic used deceptive marketing and opaque fine print to underserve customers.

In particular, the lawsuit claims that the $100 a month 5X plan and the $200 a month 20X plan don't actually deliver five and 20 times the usage of a $20 a month pro plan.

And so I'm very curious to see how he walks that line.

And then I think the other thing that I'll say just up top is like, Cook gets all this attention and praise for being the operator that he was and the sort of numbers guy and the just-in-time manufacturing all that stuff and that's all true, but he's also like behind the scenes a pretty ruthless guy like the the thing that I always come back to is that sort of reporting from Mike Isaac in his book about uber where Tim Cook pulled Travis Kalanick in to a meeting and you know, back in the mid 2010s and was like, you guys are breaking all these rules that we need you to abide by or else we're going to boot you off the app store.

And he really for a long time, I think behind the scenes has wielded Apple's power as a marketplace and as an app store provider to to sort of make things happen or stop other things from happening.

I do think we saw that soft in in his last few years, like there were Think it arguably clearer violations of Apple's Terms of Service when X you know sort of went in some of the directions that X went in under Elon Musk and that never really You know there was a moment in time a year or two ago where like Musk showed up at Cupertino And they they clearly met on campus, but it was not you know I don't think it was reported as being the same kind of tense standoff that we saw with Travis Kalanick and years ago.

The department argued developing AI was critical to national security and that training AI systems sufficiently transformed the written works into new material allowed under copyright law.

Karen Wise and Mike Isaac report for The New York Times.

New York Mayor Zoran Mamdani, D, yesterday unveiled restrictions on AI in schools.

Mamdani established a one-year moratorium on student-facing AI for kids in 2K through 8th grade, which will impact 600,000 students.

But when they are spending more money than they are making, it hurts a little bit more.

Mike Isaac's been reporting on this.

He says, Meta is going full bore with pushing other companies to add the same restrictions it will add to its apps as part of the settlement.

Meta plans to run this copy as a full-page print advertisement in the Washington Post, the Los Angeles Times, and the New York Times tomorrow morning.

No.

So Meta is, uh, according to Mike Isaac, my colleague at The Times, Meta is preparing to release an, uh, a full-page ad, an open letter in the m- the country's major newspapers, uh, this week, uh- Calling for TikTok and YouTube to, quote, "Join us in supporting teens."

[laughs]

[laughs] Says, uh, basically, you know, we- a- all platforms should empower parents and support teens in these ways because we know that when teens are restricted on one app, they simply move to another.

Meta has fought restrictions like this tooth and nail for the better part of the past decade, and so to see them kind of agree to this and capitulate in some ways really is telling of how they felt their case was going.

My colleague Mike Isaac covers Silicon Valley for The Times.

He says one thing that's notable about the new settlement is that in it, Meta is trying to make sure that other social media companies also have to pay penalties and make changes to their products.

Under the deal, Meta says it will pay more and impose stricter time limits on kids using its platforms if companies like Snap, TikTok, and YouTube also settle similar lawsuits that states have brought against them.

I think another fascinating element to the business side of this is that Meta, it seems that their PR strategy is to spin this as, hey, we're just trying to look out for our users.

We're trying to look out for kids because the New York Times, Mike Isaac is reporting that Meta is going to run a full page ad in the Washington Post, LA Times and New York Times.

And it's going to be an open letter to TikTok and YouTube to quote, join us in supporting teens.

And this report is saying, you know, we reached an agreement to make all these changes to support teens.