A TikTok booth is seen during the opening day of Gamescom in Cologne, Germany, on August 21, 2024. (Photo by Ying Tang/NurPhoto via Getty Images)

More people might get to see the US government’s secret TikTok evidence

The American public is still trying to understand what the Chinese company is doing that would relegate it to being banned.

Matt Phillips, Rani Molla

8/23/24 10:39AM

We know that whatever caused the US government to try and ban TikTok is supposed to be big and bad.

But besides the vague idea that the Chinese government could force ByteDance to manipulate its algorithm, the US government has offered few details behind remarkable Congressional push to pass, and President Biden’s decision to sign, a law requiring TikTok’s Beijing-based parent company ByteDance to sell the app, or face at total ban.

Now lawyers for the company — which is appealing the law — are asking that a so-called special master be appointed to evaluated classified evidence and the government’s need for secrecy.

The fight over who in the case gets to see what evidence — much of which will remain unavailable to the broader public — highlights the difficulty Americans have in understanding just what the U.S. government is so concerned about, when it comes to the popular app.

"We've seen a lot of really, I would say, a lot of really confusing messaging from members of Congress about why specifically they want to ban TikTok. Some are saying it's because of data collection, some are saying it's because of propaganda. Others others are saying it's just because TikTok is too addictive," Caitlin Chin-Rothmann, a fellow at the Center for Strategic and International Studies who studies strategic technologies, told Sherwood in April. “We haven't really gotten a really clear explanation from the government of what specifically they believe the risks are.”

Jon Keegan2h

Anthropic’s move to diversify from Nvidia chips may give it an edge against OpenAI

Anthropic has reportedly been upping its revenue forecasts, and appears to be catching up to market leader OpenAI.

Anthropic’s thriving API business is juicing its revenues, and it has made some strategic moves that are boosting its margins.

Unlike OpenAI’s all-Nvidia strategy, Anthropic has diversified to also use chips from Amazon and Google, according to a report from The Information.

The cheaper, more efficient chips may be part of the reason that Anthropic is projecting that it will be profitable in 2027.

The report also notes that OpenAI’s expensive $40 billion “backup” server build-out is part of its plan to eventually monetize hundreds of millions of nonpaying ChatGPT users, while Anthropic is generating 80% of its revenue from paid API access and isn’t spending as much to serve its much smaller base of free users.

Anthropic Projects Cost Advantage Over OpenAI

Unlike OpenAI’s all-Nvidia strategy, Anthropic has diversified to also use chips from Amazon and Google, according to a report from The Information.

The cheaper, more efficient chips may be part of the reason that Anthropic is projecting that it will be profitable in 2027.

Rani Molla5h

In hopes of teasing out more sales, Tesla is renting cars for $60 a day

After a record sales quarter, analysts expect Tesla sales to fall in the current quarter, as the end of the government’s $7,500 EV tax credit crimps electric vehicle sales in general.

Tesla has a plan: it’s now renting Teslas from select dealerships, starting in Southern California, for up to a week at a time, starting at $60 a day.

The company has thrown in freebie features like Supercharging and Full Self-Driving (Supervised), and is giving those who choose to buy a Tesla within a week of their rental experience a $250 credit.

Will that help keep Tesla sales from falling? (Analysts polled by FactSet forecast sales in the fourth quarter to be down 9% and the full year to fall 7%, compared to the same period a year earlier.) Probably not, but supposedly car sales don’t really matter anymore to Tesla anyway: Tesla has its sights set on owning a future without poverty or crime but with driverless robotaxis and robot surgeons.

Shares of Tesla were up 2.3% in premarket trading as broader markets rose. Through Friday’s close, they were up 13% for the year, slightly underperforming the S&P 500.

Tesla can’t sell its cars anymore so it is renting them now

The company has thrown in freebie features like Supercharging and Full Self-Driving (Supervised), and is giving those who choose to buy a Tesla within a week of their rental experience a $250 credit.

Shares of Tesla were up 2.3% in premarket trading as broader markets rose. Through Friday’s close, they were up 13% for the year, slightly underperforming the S&P 500.

Rani Molla11/7/25

Amazon expands low-price Haul section to 14 new markets as Amazon Bazaar app

Amazon is expanding its low-cost Amazon Haul experience to a new stand-alone app called Amazon Bazaar.

Amazon launched its Temu and Shein competitor a year ago as a US mobile storefront on its website and has since expanded to about a dozen markets. Consumers could purchase many items for under $10, as long as they were willing to stomach longer delivery times.

Now, thanks to success in those places, the programming is expanding to 14 new markets — Hong Kong, the Philippines, Taiwan, Kuwait, Qatar, Bahrain, Oman, Peru, Ecuador, Argentina, Costa Rica, the Dominican Republic, Jamaica, and Nigeria — with a new app and name: Amazon Bazaar.

“Both Amazon Haul and Amazon Bazaar deliver the same ultra low-price shopping experience, with different names chosen to better resonate with local language preferences and cultures,” the company said in a press release.

Amazon extends Haul’s ultra low-price shopping experience to 14 new destinations with new Amazon Bazaar app

Big Tech’s most important infrastructure is at the bottom of the sea

While data centers on land are getting all the attention, Big Tech’s vast network of undersea fiber-optic cables carry 99% of all international network traffic.

Jon Keegan11/7/25

After watching small drones reshape the battlefield in Ukraine, the US Army has announced plans to buy 1 million drones over the next two to three years, according to a report from Reuters.

The military threat of China’s dominance of the quadcopter-style drone industry is also driving the decision. But China’s control over much of the supply chain for drones, including rare earth magnets, sensors, and microcontrollers, will make it much harder for American drone manufacturers to catch up.