← Tech Brew Ride Home
Tech Brew Ride Home
The Biggest Tech IPO Since Uber
00:20:07
OpenAI is weighing legal action against Apple over a Siri integration it says fell far short. Cerebras opened at $350 in the largest US tech IPO since Uber. Mythos helped researchers crack macOS security, Anthropic restores OpenClaw access with Agent SDK credits, and 71% of Americans oppose local data centers.
Loading summary
Transcript3 lines
- [00:00]
A
Study and play come together on a Windows 11 PC and for a limited time, college students get the best of both worlds. Get the Unreal college Deal Everything you need to study and play with select Windows 11 PCs. Eligible students get a year of Microsoft 365 Premium and a year of Xbox Game Pass ultimate with a custom color Xbox wireless controller. Learn more@windows.com studentoffer while supplies last ends June 30th terms at aka mscollegepc.
- [00:35]
B
Welcome to the tech brew. Write Home for Thursday, May 14, 2026 I'm Brian McCullough. Today OpenAI is weighing legal action against Apple. Cerebras gave us the largest US tech IPO since Uber mythos helped researchers crack macOS security, Anthraffic restores OpenClaw access with agent SDK credits and 71% of Americans oppose local data centers. Here's what you missed today in the world of tech. Turn your market hunches into trades with liquid. Liquid lets you go long or short on commodities, stocks or private markets right from your phone with up to 100x leverage. That means a ten dollar position can give you up to $1,000 in market exposure and you don't have to work around market hours or weekends. With liquid, you get one platform for every market open 24. Seven more than $3 billion has already been traded on liquid. Check them out at Liquid Trade Techbrew and sign up with referral code Techbrew for a $25 deposit match. Terms apply. Mark Gurman says that OpenAI is weighing legal action against Apple after expectations that ChatGPT's Siri integration would generate billions of dollars in revenue fell short for them, quoting Bloomberg. Apple's two year old partnership with OpenAI has become strained, according to people familiar with the matter, with the AI startup failing to see the expected benefits from the deal and now preparing possible legal action. OpenAI lawyers are actively working with an outside legal firm on a range of options that could be formally executed in the near future, said the people, who asked not to be identified because the deliberations are private. That could include sending the iPhone maker a notice alleging breach of contract without necessarily filing a full lawsuit at the outset, according to the people. OpenAI enlisted the outside firm in recent days to help with the situation. OpenAI believed that the company's partnership, which wove ChatGPT into Apple software, would coax more users into subscribing to the Chatbot. It also expected deeper integration across more Apple apps and prime placement within the Siri assistant. Instead, Apple's use of OpenAI technology across its operating systems remains limited and features can be hard to find. We have done everything from a product perspective, said an OpenAI executive who asked not to be identified. They have not, and worse, they haven't even made an honest effort. Apple has had its own concerns about OpenAI, including whether the company does enough to protect user privacy. And a recent push by the startup to make devices, an effort overseen by former Apple executives, has rankled the iPhone maker. Any legal move by OpenAI likely wouldn't come until after the conclusion of its trial with Elon Musk, according to the people. No final decisions have been made, and OpenAI still hopes to resolve its issues with Apple outside of court. Apple customers are overwhelmingly more likely to turn to the standalone GPT app rather than accessing OpenAI's technology through Siri and other Apple services, according to user studies conducted by the AI startup that were described by the people with knowledge of the matter. The way Apple designed the integration means that users often need to specifically invoke the word chatgpt when speaking or typing a command into Siri in order to get results from OpenAI. Responses are also more constrained than those available through OpenAI's standalone app they appear in a small window with limited information. Moreover, OpenAI executives believe Apple hasn't sufficiently promoted the integration across the iPhone, iPad and Mac ecosystems. OpenAI initially believed that the deal could generate billions of dollars per year in subscriptions, something that hasn't come close to happening. And it now believes the Apple implementation has hurt OpenAI's brand with customers. When we heard about this opportunity, it sounded amazing being able to acquire a giant number of customers and have distribution in such a big mobile ecosystem, said the OpenAI executive at the time. Though Apple was unwilling to share exactly what the would be, the person said. They basically said OpenAI needs to take a leap of faith and trust us, the executive said, adding that the deal ended up being a failure for the startup. End quote. Again, Mythos continues to not be marketing hype as far as I can tell. Quoting the journal Security researchers say they have discovered a new way of circumventing Apple's state of the art security technology, using techniques they discovered while testing an early version of Anthropology software in April. The researchers with Calif, a Palo Alto based security research company, say the software they wrote links together two bugs and a handful of techniques to corrupt the Mac's memory and then gain access to parts of the device that should be inaccessible. It's what's known as a privilege escalation exploit and if it were chained together with other attacks, it could be used by a hacker to seize control of the computer. The technique is noteworthy because Apple has put so much effort into locking down macOS, said Mikhail Zieleski, a security researcher who formerly worked at Google and who reviewed the Caliph research but wasn't involved in the testing. Apple, which is deploying and testing Frontier AI models to test and patch vulnerabilities, is reviewing the Caliph report to validate its findings. Security is our top priority, and we take reports of potential vulnerabilities very seriously, a company spokeswoman said. The bug finding capabilities of the latest AI models from companies such as Anthropic and OpenAI have improved enough in recent months that many cybersecurity experts are now warning of Bugmageddon, an unprecedented rash of security vulnerability discoveries that could cause headaches for the technology staffers who must patch them and also represent an unprecedented cybersecurity risk. Last September, Apple said it leveraged its hardware and operating system expertise into a technology called Memory Integrity Enforcement, which it described as the culmination of an unprecedented design and engineering effort spanning half a decade. With Claude building the code that exploited the two macOS bugs took five days, Caliph said. The attack couldn't have been pulled off by Mythos alone and leveraged the very human cybersecurity expertise of some of Caliph's hackers, said Tai Duong, the company's chief executive. That is because Mythos excels at reproducing previously undocumented attacks. We haven't seen cases where it comes up with new attack techniques, he said. This is kind of a new thing. While some of the hype around Mythos is overblown, Zaleski said it is possible to use the latest tools for meaningful vulnerability research and code auditing. Researchers with the company were so excited about their discovery that they drove down from Palo Alto in person on Tuesday to Apple's Cupertino headquarters to present their 55 page report describing the bugs it exploited. They plan to release details of their attack once Apple has patched the underlying issues. The bugs will likely be fixed pretty quickly, duong said. End quote. Maybe I should have led with this one because it is the largest tech IPO in the US since Uber in 2019. Quoting CNBC Cerebra Systems soared in its NASDAQ debut on Thursday, opening at $350 a share after selling shares at $185 a share, well above the company's expected range that values the chipmaker at over $100 billion. The company sold 30 million shares in its offering late Wednesday, raising 5.55 billion, the largest IPO for a U.S. tech company since Uber's Deb. If underwriters exercise their options to buy 4.5 million additional shares, total proceeds could reach 6.38 billion. Cerebras, based in Silicon Valley, is benefiting from the artificial intelligence boom, which has lifted wide swathes of the semiconductor space in recent months. With Intel, Advanced Micro Devices and Micron all notching triple digit gains this year. The VanEck Semiconductor ETF has jumped 58% so far in 2026. Cerebras is the biggest pure play AI IPO to hit Wall street and and the first notable tech offering in months as the market has struggled to rebound from the downturn that began in 2022 when inflation began soaring. But investors could be in for a wave of historic IPOs with a focus on AI. Elon Musk's SpaceX, which merged with AI company Xai in February, is gearing up for a share sale, and model developers OpenAI and Anthropic could hit the market later this year. Revenue at cerebras jumped 76% last year, to $510 million. The company generated net income of $88 million, swinging from 481.6 million a year earlier. Cerebras most formidable competitor in hardware is Nvidia, the world's most valuable company. Cerebras claims speed and price advantages over graphics processing units from Nvidia due to architecture differences. In December, Nvidia paid $20 billion for assets from startup Grok, whose chips more closely resemble Cerebras, and months later announced plans for Grok based products. The IPO process for Cerebras has been long and winding. In September 2024, the company filed to go public but withdrew its submission a little over a after its prospectus was heavily scrutinized, largely due to a heavy reliance on a single customer in the United Arab emirates. Microsoft backed G42 cerebras refiled to go public in April. In its refreshed prospectus, the company said 24% of revenue last year came from G42, down from 85% in 2024. However, Mohammed bin Syed, University of Artificial intelligence in the UAE, accounted for 62% of revenue last year. There's some whales out there, there' big customers, cerebra CEO Andrew Feldman told CNBC in an interview on Thursday. That is one of the characteristics of this market. Feldman, who co founded the company in 2016, holds about 5% of voting power in the company and a stake worth close to $2 billion at the IPO price. Fidelity controls about 11%, while venture firm Benchmark has 9%. Cerebras has started shifting its focus away from selling hardware systems and more toward providing a cloud service based on its chips. That means it's going up against cloud providers such as Google and Microsoft, which are both listed as competitors with Oracle and Core Weave. Cerebras is working to diversify, announcing a Cloud deal with OpenAI in January worth more than $20 billion that expires in 2028. In March, Cloud infrastructure leader Amazon Web Services said it would set up Cerebras chips in its data centers so developers can quickly run AI models, providing another avenue to reach new customers. End quote. Sure, AI is everywhere, but that doesn't mean enterprise value is a given. In a recent survey, PwC found the amount of CEOs who reported revenue gains or cost reductions from AI is nearly equal to the amount who say they're still stuck. So what's causing the issues? PwC boiled it down to clarity Leaders aren't clear about what's hype, what's reality, or where AI can actually create measurable impact. To help change that, PwC is offering their AI expertise and data. They explore how to tune out noise around AI and get clarity on what successful adoption looks like. Learn from the experts by heading to pwc.com US Brewai that's pwc.com US BrewAI. When you're locked into a conversation, you're probably not taking the best notes, and that's normal. It's hard to listen closely and write everything down at the same time, so turn on plaudnote Pro instead. Plod Note Pro is a small AI powered device that records conversations and turns them into clean, structured summaries automatically. It's built for people who spend a lot of time in conversations, interviews or calls and don't want to lose any important info. Instead of scrambling to type, you just press a button and stay focused. Plaude handles transcription, summaries and key takeaways. It's also built with privacy in mind with enterprise grade compliance like SoC2, HIPAA and GD. Get started at Plaud AI TBRH that's P L A U D A I TBRH use code TBRH for 10% off all Plod devices Remember when Anthropic started limiting people from using OpenClaw? Well, Anthropic has unveiled Claude Agent SDK credits for paid plans, which will allow users to allocate for programic use of third party agents like OpenClaw starting June 15, quoting VentureBeat Good news OpenClaw fans, you can once again use your Claude AI subscription to power the hit open source autonomous AI agentic harness. But there's a big catch with how it's being enacted. A few hours ago, Anthropic announced via its official Developer Communications account on X that it is changing its Claude paid subscription tiers, introducing a new subcategory of Agent SDK credits for all paid subscribers, which they can now allocate specifically for programmatic uses, including external third party agents such as os. The move is a major reversal from the Anthropic policy introduced in early April that expressly prohibited its AI subscriptions from being used to power these kind of non anthropic agents and harnesses after Anthropic said they caused capacity and service issues. The problem was that some CLAUDE subscribers were paying $20 to $200 per month under Anthropic's Claude Pro and Max subscriptions, but consuming hundreds, even thousands of dollars of tokens above those prices through their openclaw and similar autonomous agents. This was an unsustainable position for ANTH Finances and its limited compute infrastructure for inferencing the models to end users. To be clear, even when it enacted the old prohibition against openclaw and similar agents last month, Anthropic never fully cut off the capability for CLAUDE to be used in openclaw. Rather, it redirected users to pay through the company's application programming interface, which is billed by usage price per million tokens rather than a flat monthly rate as the subscriptions offer, or pay for extra usage credits atop their subscriptions. Now Anthropic is giving Claude subscribers another way to use their subscription bill to pay for third party agents. However, the restoration comes with a significant catch. Programmatic usage is no longer subsidized by the general subscription pool, but is instead restricted to a fixed, non rollover monthly credit, also worth $20 $200 depending on your Claude plan and billed at the API rates. In other words, if you don't end up using these new Agent SDK credits, they simply expire at the end of the month. And if you do use them all up, you cannot dip general subscription usage limits to cover any additional usage, you need to buy extra usage credits instead. End quote. AT and T T Mobile and Verizon have signed an agreement in principle to form a joint venture that aims to finally end wireless dead zones in the US but without giving us many details. Quoting the Verge, AT&T T Mobile and Verizon have agreed to work together under a new joint venture that aims to end wireless dead zones in the the partnership was announced today as an agreement in principle, but if finalized, would see the three carrier companies pooling their ground based spectrum resources together to increase coverage in rural areas. The goal is to create the best and most diverse ecosystem for wireless and satellite products and services, though details on how this will actually be achieved are fairly vague. There's mention of the venture developing a unified technical standard for customers and satellite network operators and investing in satellite based direct to device or D2D technologies to address coverage gaps and improve connectivity. In its press release, AT and T says that existing carrier satellite agreements will remain in place under this proposed joint venture. Our goal is to make staying connected simple no matter where you are on a rural highway, in a national park, on a boat or during an emergency, AT&T CEO John Stankey said in a statement. By joining with other carriers, we're bringing our combined expertise to accelerate our customers access to reliable and always on coverage everywhere. The joint venture is still subject to closing conditions and negotiations between AT and T, T Mobile and Verizon. If this does go ahead, however, the outcome will theoretically be good for everyone. Customers should get access to stronger, more reliable connectivity in areas that struggled with mobile service, and satellite services can more easily serve folks in areas that traditional cell networks can't cover. End. Finally today, according to a Gallup poll, 71% of Americans oppose local AI data center construction, citing water and electricity issues, with opposition higher among Democrats than Republicans, though it's still pretty high across the board. Quoting the Post, the poll conducted this spring and released Wednesday, found that seven out of 10Americans said they would oppose a data center being built near them, including nearly half who say they strongly oppose the projects. Opposition is so intense, the poll found that more Americans would rather live near a nuclear power plant than a data center, which are designed to fuel demand for artificial intelligence. The findings are likely to intensify debates taking place throughout the United States over where data centers should be built. Those discussions are creating new strains for state and local officials as they try to balance public attitudes against business leaders push to build more of them to spur economic development and increase tax revenue. Overcoming this opposition stands as a major hurdle in the expansion of AI computing, Gallup said in its polling memo. The intensity of opposition means that proposed data centers are likely to spur grassroots activism from local residents as well as legal challenges. The poll found that both Republicans and Democrats are uncomfortable living near a data center, but opposition is especially intense among Democrats. 56% of Democrats strongly oppose a data center in their community, compared with 39% of Republicans who strongly oppose. Nearly half of independents said they were strongly opposed to the projects as well. End quote. Nothing more for you today. Talk to you tomorrow.
- [18:38]
C
The Wired newsroom is known for award winning reporting on how technology shapes our world. On WIRED's Uncanny Valley, we take that curiosity even further. Each week, journalists from Wired break down the biggest stories in tech while speaking directly with the people, building, challenging and reshaping the future. Future? Is the AI boom sustainable? How do you protect your privacy in an age of constant surveillance? Uncanny Valley tackles the questions driving today's tech debates and lighting up your group chats. Listen to new episodes every Thursday. Wherever you get your podcasts.