Alphabet is reportedly eyeing its biggest acquisition in history

A deal for cybersecurity specialists Wiz could set the tech giant back ~$23 billion

7/15/24 11:30AM

Wiz bid

Google’s parent company Alphabet is looking to lock down a $23 billion deal for cybersecurity software startup Wiz, according to a new report from the Wall Street Journal. The potential acquisition, which would be the largest in the company’s history, comes just a few weeks after Alphabet walked away from deal talks with marketing software company HubSpot, which has a market cap of $24 billion.

Wiz, which bills itself as the #1 cloud security platform and counts 40% of Fortune 100 companies as users, recently raised $1 billion at a $12 billion valuation in May, as it looked to expand ahead of a rumored IPO. Just over 2 months later, however, the company looks likely to become another property in Alphabet’s ever-expanding empire, at nearly twice its previous valuation.

GOOG gang

If the deal goes through, Wiz would join a long list of acquisitions made by the tech giant: according to Crunchbase, Google has bought 264 businesses through the years, the most of any of its big tech peers. While the vast majority of those will be relative unknowns to the general public, some have become household names.

Alphabet’s $1.65 billion acquisition of YouTube back in 2006, for example, now looks like a master stroke, with the video-sharing platform bringing in $8.1 billion in ad revenue in the first quarter of 2024 alone. Conversely, Motorola Mobility, the company’s biggest acquisition to date, fared a lot worse under the Alphabet umbrella — Google’s parent got rid of the phone-maker for $2.9 billion just ~2 years after acquiring it for $12.5 billion, in a “gargantuan mistake that only Google could afford to make”, according to Time.

It’s impossible to say where we’ll place the $23 billion Wiz deal on the YouTube-to-Motorola scale in a decade’s time, but with two deals in completely different industries — both with $20 billion+ price tags — discussed in the last few months, Alphabet’s clearly ready to get something major done.

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While gaming industry groups may not like it, there’s been a huge change in the methods people are using to put money on the big games, with everyone from fortunate NYC bar owners, to a far less fortunate Spanish supporter, turning to prediction markets to try and turn their sports know-how into cold, hard cash.

According to a new report from Adam Blacker for apptopia, that shift might have been even more seismic than imagined in the wake of the NBA and NHL finals and around the 2026 World Cup kicking off.

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Anthropic pulls Fable and Mythos access worldwide after Trump administration bars their use by foreign nationals

Only days after releasing two versions of its next-gen AI model, Anthropic has disabled them for users worldwide.

Anthropic says it received a Friday night order from the Trump administration to suspend access to the models for any foreign national (anywhere in the world) — a group that included some Anthropic employees. In response, the company turned off access to everyone.

Last week, the company released to the public its much-anticipated Claude Fable 5 model (and its restricted version Claude Mythos 5, which is still being tested with trusted partners). Anthropic said in a blog post announcing the action that officials cited national security concerns with the new models, while offering few specific details.

The post said that the government gave the company “verbal evidence of a potential narrow, non-universal jailbreak” of the public Fable 5 model. A jailbreak is a means by which users can evade restrictions built into the code to unlock prohibited functionality. Anthropic downplayed the significance of the attack, and said other major models, such as OpenAI’s GPT-5.5, could also be affected by the technique described.

Fears of these first Mythos-class models being misused are running high, after Anthropic warned the cybersecurity world in May that the advanced cyber capabilities of Mythos have rapidly discovered thousands of vulnerabilities in ubiquitous software, leading to the decision to restrict the full version of the model to a close group of trusted partners for testing.

This morning, Axios reported that Anthropic technical staff have flown to Washington to meet with White House officials to resolve the issue.

The Wall Street Journal is reporting that the Trump administration’s decision to take action against Anthropic was prompted by discussions that Amazon CEO Andy Jassy had with officials, including Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent. According to the report, Amazon researchers said they had been able to evade some of Fable 5’s security restrictions using specific prompts. Amazon is a major investor in Anthropic.

Anthropic is currently suing the US government to fight the Pentagon’s blacklisting of the company on national security grounds.

Statement on the US government directive to suspend access to Fable 5 and Mythos 5