Microsoft is breaking out its Teams collaboration tool from its broader Office suite on a global scale. The split comes just 6 months after it unbundled the product in the EU and Switzerland — presumably to avoid future antitrust fines for tying products together, which in the past decade have cost Microsoft more than €2.2 billion ($2.4bn).
The entire genre of software that Teams now dominates barely existed 15 years ago. Instant messaging systems and good ol' email were, and in some cases still are, the backbone of office life, until Slack — an internal tool built at a startup called Glitch — started gaining traction. An acronym for “Searchable Log of All Conversation and Knowledge", Slack (which was acquired by Salesforce in July 2021) re-imagined work communications, centering conversations around topics in channels. Voice and video call features were added in 2016 — just a few months before its fiercest rival, Teams, was launched.
Slack infamously took out a full-page ad in the New York Times, “welcoming” the competition from Teams with some “friendly advice”. That playful tone quickly turned serious when Teams was added to the Office 365 product in 2017 for free, a move that supercharged its distribution to hundreds of millions of users in a few short years — much to the chagrin of its rival, with Slack filing a complaint against the tech giant to the European Commission in 2020.
If you’ve ever felt victimized by Slack or Teams notifications calling you back to your work laptop, you do at least now have alternatives, with countless collaboration tools to opt for, including offerings from Google, Zoom… and even Facebook.
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White House said to oppose Anthropic’s plan to expand Mythos access to more companies
Anthropic is ready to invite a wider group of companies to gain access to Claude Mythos, the company’s powerful next-generation AI chatbot.
The tightly controlled model has been deemed something of a security risk by Anthropic itself, due to its ability to find thousands of software vulnerabilities and potentially be used for sophisticated cyberattacks.
About 50 companies have been given access to test the capabilities of the new model, and Anthropic wanted to expand that to 120, according to a report from The Wall Street Journal.
The Trump administration is blocking the move out of concerns that the new technology could fall into the wrong hands, per the report.
Yesterday, Bloomberg reported that Anthropic was in talks to raise money with a $900 billion valuation — higher than its archrival in the AI chatbot world, OpenAI, which was recently valued at $852 billion.
About 50 companies have been given access to test the capabilities of the new model, and Anthropic wanted to expand that to 120, according to a report from The Wall Street Journal.
The Trump administration is blocking the move out of concerns that the new technology could fall into the wrong hands, per the report.
Yesterday, Bloomberg reported that Anthropic was in talks to raise money with a $900 billion valuation — higher than its archrival in the AI chatbot world, OpenAI, which was recently valued at $852 billion.
Alphabet, Amazon, Microsoft, and Meta plan to spend more than $700 billion on capex this year
Big Tech’s big capital spending continues to surge even higher than the companies had previously expected.
Alphabet raised its 2026 capex outlook to between $180 billion and $190 billion, up from $175 billion to $185 billion. Meta increased its 2026 forecast to $125 billion to $145 billion, up from $115 billion to $135 billion. Microsoft, meanwhile, said it’s planning on spending $190 billion this calendar year, about $55 billion more than the FactSet analyst consensus. Amazon, the lone outlier, didn’t boost its capex forecast, keeping it at a cool $200 billion.
Combined, Alphabet, Amazon, Microsoft, and Meta plan to spend more than $700 billion on capex in 2026, nearly double what they spent last year and $100 billion more than they’d expected just last quarter, as they continue to build out the AI infrastructure to support their AI futures.
Microsoft’s capex outlay this year would be enough to buy every outstanding share of Disney
CFO Amy Hood said on last night’s earnings call that the company will spend $190 billion on capex in 2026.
