Transcript
A (0:04)
Welcome to the Tech Brew. Write home for Thursday, March 5, 2026. I'm Brian McCullough. Today is the long war between Google and Epic games finally over. OpenAI wants you to know its revenue numbers are also stellar. Maybe ChatGPT isn't so great at medical advice. Maybe the chip shortage isn't great for Nintendo specifically. And maybe the MacBook Nano isn't great for the Windows ecosystem generally. Here's what you missed today in the world of tech. Is this whole saga finally at an end? Google has announced an Android App Store program and lowered developer fees to resolve Epic's antitrust litigation and also comply with new rules in Europe and elsewhere. Quoting Bloomberg these announcements are not about just doing what's required, samir Samat, Google's vice president of product development, said in an interview with Bloomberg News. The moves go, quote, well beyond what is being required by legal changes in Europe and the uk, he said. Under the proposal, other companies can register with Google, pay a one time fee and offer an app store on Android. Samat said Google will also lower the fees it charges developers from a standard 30% to as low as 15 or 10% on recurring subscriptions. He said fee changes in the US, UK and EU are expected to go into effect by June, with changes in Australia, Korea and Japan before the end of 2026. Epic Games, which had been involved in a long running antitrust case with Google, said the new policies would eliminate the Fortnite makers concerns with the Android platform and resolve Litig in the us, uk, Australia and elsewhere. Anybody can launch a competitive app store now, epic Chief Executive Officer Tim Sweeney said in a joint interview with Samat. Alphabet doesn't offer standalone figures for how much revenue is attributable to its Android operating system or the Google Play Store. Documents from the US Litigation with Epic indicated the technology giant's App store brought in $14.66 billion in sales in 2020. Analysts had estimated that changes to its App Store required by new regulations and the litigation could result in a 1 billion dol loss in gross profit, end quote. Funny little addendum to that though. Quoting the Verge Epic CEO Tim Sweeney might be one of the most outspoken people in the history of the world. He fought two of the world's most valuable and powerful companies almost all the way to the U.S. supreme Court, insulting them again and again. Crooked, deceitful, insanely sneaky. Calling Android a fake open platform. Calling both companies gangster style businesses that will do anything they think they can get away with. Telling me how Google's Project Hug was an astonishingly corrupt effort at a massive scale. But Google has finally muzzled Tim Sweeney. It's right there in the binding term sheet for his settlement with Google. On March 3, he not only signed away Epic's rights to sue and disparage the company, he signed away his right to advocate for any further changes to Google's App Store policies. He can't criticize Google's App Store practices, in fact, he has to praise them. The contract states that Epic believes that the Google and Android platform with the changes in this term sheet are pro competitive and a model for App Store platform operations, and will make good faith efforts to advocate for the same. He may even have to appear in other courts around the world to defend this deal with Google. And Google gets to make sure his public statements are supportive of the deal from here on out. End quote. News you can use Google has expanded its Canvas workspace to everyone in the US Using Google Search's AI mode so they can get the latest info to organize plans, draft documents, and more. Quoting the Verge Google is bringing Canvas to everyone in the US using AI mode in search. The feature opens up a dedicated workspace within its AI powered search tool, allowing it to to use the latest information from Search to organize plans, develop tools and draft documents in a panel alongside your chat. Though Google initially launched Canvas inside its Gemini app as a way to create documents and code in real time, it later tested the feature in AI mode, but only for visualizing travel plans. Now you can use Canvas in AI mode for tasks related to creative writing and coding as well, giving you the ability to view an AI generated dashboard laying out information related to your prompt, or an interactive prototype of a tool you're developing. You can try out the feature by navigating to AI mode in search, selecting the plus button inside the chat window, and then choosing Canvas. From there, you can describe what you want to create, and Google will display the results in a panel on the right side of your screen. This feature is currently only available in English. OpenAI wants you to know I'm assuming this is a strategic leak after yesterday's anthropic numbers, that they hit $25 billion in annualized revenue by the end of February, up from $21.4 billion at the end of 2025. Quoting the information, that's a 17% increase from the $21.4 billion in annualized revenue the company was generating at the end of the year, according to the person and a second person with knowledge of the figures. OpenAI is still generating more revenue than its younger rival, Anthropic, though the difference between the arch rivals has been narrowing. Anthropic's annualized revenue recently topped $19 billion, up nearly three times from the end of last year and up 36% from just two weeks ago. OpenAI calculates annualized revenue by multiplying the last four weeks revenue by 12. If OpenAI calculated the metric based on revenue spikes just in the last week, OpenAI's annualized revenue would be roughly $30 billion, one of the people said. Anthropic's recent success in selling AI models that handle coding tasks has helped it quickly shrink its revenue gap with OpenAI. In 2025, OpenAI generated about three times more revenue than Anthropic. Now there is basically only a $5 billion gap between them. While ChatGPT contributes the vast majority of OpenAI revenue, the company expects an increasing portion of its revenue will come from business customers as well as new products such as advertising. OpenAI has been in talks with adtech firm the Trade Desk on a partnership that could expand its advertising clients. For instance, in Both companies blew past the revenue projections they shared with investors. The recent figures suggest they will do so again this year as businesses increase their spending on the technology, including for coding tasks. OpenAI recently hiked its revenue forecast for the next five years, with plans to generate as much as $284 billion in revenue by 2030. But it also raised its forecast for cash burn, predicting it would spend $665 billion in server related costs through the end of the decade. While both companies recently projected they would earn, each burned tens of billions of dollars over the next couple of years as they spend more to rent cloud servers and chips to develop their technology, the revenue growth surge could propel their respective initial public offerings as soon as this year. OpenAI recently selected law firms for its proposed IPO, the Information has reported. The number of ChatGPT users grew to about 920 million weekly active users by the end of February, according to the person. That's a gain of roughly 10 million from a few weeks earlier, though it's still short of its goal of getting 1 billion users by the end of 2025. The company's release last summer of ChatGPT 5, which generated complaints from some users over its colder personality than its predecessor, GPT4O, appeared to contribute to the growth slowdown. End quote.
