People walk by an Apple store at the Westfield UTC shopping center in San Diego, California (Kevin Carter/Getty Images)

A single comment from an Apple exec about AI search is upending the tech pecking order

Eddy Cue’s testimony shows that Apple sees the shift to AI-powered search as inevitable.

5/7/25 12:45PM

Apple bigwig Eddy Cue’s comments Wednesday about potentially adding AI-powered search to his company’s Safari browser could be a massive blow for Google’s decades-long dominance in web searches. Investors ran for the hills, sending Google’s stock down 8.4% in recent trading, pulling the broader market down with it.

Cue, Apple’s senior vice president of services, said while testifying in the Department of Justice case against Google that Apple was “actively looking at” adding AI-powered search to its Safari browser. Cue said OpenAI, Perplexity, and Anthropic were possible options to add to Safari in the future, according to the report: “We will add them to the list — they probably won’t be the default.”

An 8% drawdown in Google stock reflects a staggering roughly $150 billion worth of market cap destroyed in a span of minutes. Shares of Apple were recently down 1.8%. The S&P 500 also dropped on the news, falling about 0.6% from peak to trough before recovering some ground to become barely green for the day as of 12:37 p.m. ET.

Another sign that AI may be making seismic changes to the web search industry: Bloomberg reports that Cue also said today that Apple saw in-browser searches fall for the first time in April, which he suspected was due to AI.

Court documents in 2024 revealed that Google paid Apple $20 billion in 2022 to be the default search engine in the Safari browser. That deal was ruled to be illegal last summer.

$20B

Paid to apple by Alphabet for search

It’s unclear whether a shift to AI search results would box Google out of Apple’s browser search, but to put the amount into context, Apple generated $394 billion of revenue in 2022, so a $20 billion payment would be the equivalent of about 5% of that total.

While Google’s search business generated $50.7 billion last quarter, it’s also investing heavily in AI. Alphabet CEO Sundar Pichai recently said he hopes to reach a deal with Apple to include the model on iPhones this year.

Cue’s comments appear to show that within Apple, execs see the shift to AI-powered search as inevitable.

Cue testified, “There’s enough money now, enough large players, that I don’t see how it doesn’t happen.”

South by Southwest Conference and Festivals

Gold Tesla Cybercabs are piling up, but they’re not picking up passengers yet

Low-volume production started in April. Now people are noticing them more and more in the wild.

Rani Molla6/15/26

Millie Giles

TAKING ACCOUNTS

6/15/26

Britain announces social media ban for under-16s starting early 2027

The UK government plans to use the same model for the restrictions as Australia — but how successful has that case study been so far?

UK Prime Minister Announces Under-16s Social Media Ban

Jon Keegan6/15/26

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

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

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

Rani Molla6/15/26

Tesla used skewed data in push for European FSD approval, Reuters finds

Tesla has used highly questionable safety stats in an effort to win over European regulators and rekindle sales in the region, according to a Reuters investigation.

Tesla reportedly pitched regulators in Sweden and the Netherlands with claims that its Full Self-Driving (FSD) tech is over 7x safer than human drivers. However, independent researchers told Reuters that the stats are misleading because Tesla compares airbag-deployment crashes involving FSD-equipped vehicles with much broader US crash statistics, while also benchmarking newer Teslas against the entire US vehicle fleet, which is significantly older on average.

Despite the flawed metrics, the Dutch regulator approved FSD in April, saying its decision was based on its own “tests, analyses and verifications,” and Tesla is now pushing for EU-wide clearance. A version of FSD is currently available in five European markets.

Exclusive: Tesla presented misleading ‘Full Self-Driving’ safety data to European regulators

Rani Molla6/12/26

Report: Microsoft weighs Xbox spin-off amid major overhaul

Microsoft is reportedly considering spinning out or restructuring its struggling Xbox unit, per The Information. While new Xbox CEO Asha Sharma, who took over in February, is preparing for layoffs, she’s simultaneously planning to boost investment in its biggest franchises like “Halo,” “Fallout,” and “Minecraft.”

The latest potential shake-up comes as the gaming division battles major headwinds, following a massive 33% plunge in Q3 console sales and a recent move to slash Game Pass prices while removing new “Call of Duty” titles.