Morning Scan

Earnings season is doing its usual thing — rewarding growers and punishing anyone who slowed down — while AI infrastructure spending moves faster than coverage can keep up. A courtroom in San Francisco and several regulatory rulings are redrawing platform liability and broadband rules in the background.

80x — Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei's projected growth figure for the company this year, which explains why they just struck a deal to commandeer an entire supercomputer cluster. (New York Times)

Connected World

Snap Ends Its $400M Perplexity Deal

Revenue grew 12% to $1.53B, but killing a high-profile AI partnership on earnings day was not the confidence signal investors were looking for. (CNBC)

Samsung Hits $1 Trillion Valuation

The milestone is fueled in part by Apple chip diversification talks — either Samsung's gain or a measure of how anxious the supply chain has become. (MacRumors)

South Korea's Equity Market Overtakes Canada's

Samsung and SK Hynix have more than doubled YTD, dragging the entire Korean market to seventh-largest in the world and reshuffling its global standing. (Bloomberg)

Machines & Minds

Anthropic Signs Deal With SpaceX for All of Colossus 1

Access to 300 MW of compute from Elon Musk's own cluster, for a company actively suing Musk in federal court — the irony is doing heavy lifting here. (Axios)

Moonshot AI Raises ~$2B at $20B+ Valuation

The Kimi chatbot maker crossed $200M ARR in April, and Meituan is betting China's AI consumer layer is still wide open. (Bloomberg)

Google Shuts Down Project Mariner

The web-browsing AI agent gets the plug pulled just as the agentic AI category heats up everywhere else. (The Verge)

“Sources: the US and China are considering recurring talks on AI security risks, with Scott Bessent leading the US side; Trump and Xi Jinping meet next week.” — Wall Street Journal

Connected World

US Appeals Court Strikes Down FCC Anti-Discrimination Rule

The 2023 rule banning broadband access discrimination by income and race is gone, and FCC Chair Brendan Carr's welcoming statement leaves little doubt about what comes next. (Ars Technica)

Musk v. Altman: Halftime Report

Musk's team has mostly finished presenting its case, and the courtroom has mixed tech history with personal grievance throughout. (WIRED)

Meta Asks Judge to Overturn Social Media Addiction Verdict

Section 230 is the argument — if it works here, it resets liability exposure for platform harm cases broadly. (Reuters)

Pentagon's Mishandled Alibaba and Baidu Blacklisting

A Bloomberg deep dive into how internal contradictions in the Trump administration's China tech policy are creating real diplomatic friction. (Bloomberg)

Connected World

Nintendo Announces Star Fox 64 Remake for Switch 2

Fox McCloud's cameo in the Super Mario Galaxy Movie was apparently not a coincidence — the barrel roll is back, and a certain generation is very on board. (The Verge)