Technology

1. AI metrics
2. Benchmark’s lesson on China
3. House probes China ties
4. Mark Cuban’s AI dilemma

Musk v. Altman in court, and AI tools are making maintaining online anonymity increasingly difficult.

An Oakland jury has begun the process of deciding who’s less popular, Elon Musk or Sam Altman. (Or is there some way for both sides to lose?) While Silicon Valley’s trial of the century is billed as being about nonprofit governance, make no mistake: This is all about putting two of the most controversial men in the world on public trial and letting the lawyers have at it. From the initial disagreement to the coverage of the case, this is about emotion.

Musk’s lawyers tried to tell the story of a philanthropist whose charity was stolen and turned into a cash machine. OpenAI’s attorneys painted Altman and co-founder Greg Brockman as humble startup founders who labored to build OpenAI while Musk was largely absent. Then, they said the techno-king pulled his funding and hung them out to dry.

The tales make for great theater, but it’s ultimately just that. There is no important precedent to be decided here. It’s not like there’s an epidemic of startups launching as nonprofits with secret plans to become trillion-dollar companies. And even if the jury comes out against OpenAI, a judge is unlikely to shut down a company that has massive economic impact and is of strategic national interest.

It almost feels like ancient Rome — but in reverse. Instead of Gladiators fighting for our entertainment, the emperors are shadowboxing before an angry populace. So, sit back and enjoy the show.

Is revenue the wrong way to value AI?

Last week, I got called out for a column where I said Anthropic was winning in enterprise over OpenAI, at least based purely on revenue.

Jordan Wilson, who hosts the Everyday AI podcast, called that line “a very SV/Twitter bubble take, not yet backed by real data.” He has a point. It feels like AI is everywhere, but we’re still at an early stage in the race. Traditional financial metrics like revenue and profit don’t tell you much about who wins in the long run. Moreover, OpenAI and Anthropic may end up having very different business models. Anthropic may be more of an enterprise software company and OpenAI a hybrid enterprise-consumer company now, but even that could change. Many of the most important metrics aren’t public.

What I’d like to know is: How many tokens is each company generating on a daily basis? How many of those tokens are monetized and what is the average price per token? What percentage of compute capacity is being utilized at any given time, and for what purpose? Is it training, inference, internal experiments, research?

If you’re OpenAI or Anthropic, you want to get as many people using your product as possible today so that you’ll have as many customers as possible down the road. One way to do that is to offer lower prices, forgoing some revenue today for more in the future.

— Reed Albergotti

Manus-Meta breakup could spell trouble for AI startups

When I scooped last year the Treasury investigation into Benchmark’s investment in Manus AI, a startup founded in China that moved to Singapore and then got acquired by Meta for $2 billion, I thought the biggest issue was US scrutiny.

Turns out it was China, which this week tried to put a fork in the blockbuster acquisition. It’s unclear exactly how the deal gets unwound, but it’s not really about Manus. It’s about the future Manuses.

The party is clearly over for AI startups out of China that have been flocking to Singapore. Without that workaround, VC funds with investments in Chinese companies are losing one of their best exit opportunities, creating a cap on investor returns. Sure, some companies might exit, but the ones with the most traction will be limited.

It’s also a reminder of how distinct the Chinese and American tech markets are today — and the divergence is only widening.

The question for the US government is how to use this situation to its advantage, rather than closing off further from the rest of the world. Reframing the move as a recruitment play could create an even bigger talent funnel, telling the smartest entrepreneurs in China that the US is the one place where you can innovate without fear.

— Reed Albergotti

House committees probe Anysphere, Airbnb over Chinese AI

Two Republican-led House committees are probing Airbnb and Anysphere, the maker of AI coding platform Cursor, over their use of Chinese AI models, according to documents viewed by Semafor.

The House Homeland Security Committee and House China Select Committee jointly sent letters to the company CEOs on Wednesday, requesting information on their use of AI models made by Chinese companies, the decisions behind their model choice, and communications with Chinese model providers, according to the letters.

Lawmakers’ concerns revolve around the national security risks of sharing wide swaths of data and information with AI companies in China, which often provide cheaper, open-source tools compared with their American counterparts, Rachyl Jones reports. Last month, Anysphere released an AI model called Composer 2 that it says can perform comparably to top models from OpenAI and Anthropic at a fraction of the cost. It later disclosed it was built on Kimi, a model out of Beijing’s Moonshot AI.

Meanwhile, to build a customer service agent it launched last year, Airbnb used Alibaba’s Qwen, which CEO Brian Chesky called “fast and cheap.” Anysphere and Airbnb did not immediately respond to a request for comment.

Mark Cuban on the ‘AI dilemma’

Mark Cuban has left Shark Tank, gave up control of the Dallas Mavericks, and poured more than $100 million into his prescription-drug startup Cost Plus Drugs. But, like everyone else, he says his biggest challenge right now is AI.

“You are facing the ultimate innovator’s AI dilemma,” he said on the latest episode of Semafor’s Compound Interest. AI will disrupt businesses and reduce workforces, and as a CEO, you have to “to basically tear down your company and reinvent it as AI-native,” knowing that it could impact the business and, crucially, shareholders.

“My guess is you’re going to see shareholder lawsuits for two types,” he added. “One, for those companies who did reinvent themselves to be AI native and their stock prices dropped. And two, for those companies who didn’t do it and they got disintermediated or replaced and their stock prices dropped. That’s a real catch-22.”

Cuban says he’s using robotics to reduce the space and time it takes to manufacture generic drugs; last year, his company partnered with HHS and DARPA on a public-private partnership to deploy its AI-driven approach at hospitals and other points of care. But not all companies will have the capability or the “guts” to pivot to AI, he said.

Most CEOs have not woken up to the fact that technology is as important as their balance sheet, IBM Chairman and CEO Arvind Krishna says in the latest episode of The CEO Signal. The first technologist to lead the company in its 115-year history unpacks how he approaches high-stakes decision-making in moments of rapid technological change — including the initially controversial acquisition of Red Hat that he thinks landed him his current role.

Krishna makes the case for why CEOs need to place bold bets, even when the payoff won’t be quick. And he cautions his fellow CEOs not to wait to start working out what quantum computing will mean for their companies. “You’d better start thinking about it now,” he says.

AI tools can identify the writing of almost anyone with a sizable online presence, rendering much online anonymity impossible. The tech writer Kelsey Piper had Claude Opus 4.7 read unpublished 150-word snippets of her writing; it successfully named her as the author each time. Semafor’s Tom Chivers replicated the finding with a segment of his 2019 book. Other models were less successful, and Claude could not identify people who lacked published real-name writing, but that may change soon. “If you leave a detailed anonymous review on Glassdoor after leaving your job,” Piper argued, soon companies will be able “to paste that text into an AI and learn exactly who wrote it… your anonymity isn’t long for the world.”