Good morning. Colleague Jason Del Rey has a lovely item in the upcoming issue of Fortune magazine about robot-driven automation at the No. 2 company on the Fortune 500. It’s worth your time.
At Amazon, he reports, the rise of automation has been “complicated.” On the one hand, the ‘bots have “eliminated miles of daily walking” for some warehouse staff. On the other hand, the machines have raised the bar so high for workers who pick and stow items that it pushes them to their physical limits.
For a company that delivers 67,000 packages per hour in the U.S. alone, though, there’s a more existential consideration to make: “If automation boots too many people out of the workforce too quickly,” he writes, “the economic fallout from that could be even bigger than the gains from automation.” Touché.
Today’s tech news below. —Andrew Nusca
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Trump order creates 'Genesis Mission' AI initiative
U.S. President Trump’s long-rumored executive order about artificial intelligence is finally real.
Sort of!
The order, signed on Monday, establishes a government-wide effort to build “an integrated AI platform to harness Federal scientific datasets” to “train scientific foundation models and create AI agents to test new hypotheses, automate research workflows, and accelerate scientific breakthroughs.”
It’s called, simply, “Genesis Mission.” (It is not, notably, an order challenging states’ ability to regulate AI.)
The order directs Trump’s Energy Department and the National Laboratories to create “one cooperative system for research” encompassing the aforementioned datasets, plus supercomputers, foundation models, and robotic laboratories.
The goal, according to White House Office of Science and Technology Policy chief, Michael Kratsios, is to accelerate the rate of scientific breakthroughs.
“This is, I would argue, probably the largest marshaling of the federal government scientific apparatus since the Apollo Project,” he told Fox Business.
The clock is ticking. According to the order, Energy Secretary Chris Wright has 270 days to demonstrate “an initial operating capability” of the platform for at least one of the identified science-technology challenges. —AN
Anthropic launches Claude Opus 4.5
Anthropic, the DC Comics to OpenAI’s Marvel, has taken the wraps off its latest frontier AI model.
It’s called Claude Opus 4.5. The San Francisco company describes it as “intelligent, efficient, and the best model in the world for coding, agents, and computer use,” adding that it’s “meaningfully better at everyday tasks.”
(Everyday tasks in AI land, anyway. Your groceries and laundry will continue to wait.)
After a stretch where it seemed like every new AI model release outperformed its predecessors through raw brainpower (for lack of a better description!), the latest models seem to be one-upping their former selves through more sophistication in how they react to users.
Anthropic says Claude Opus 4.5 “handles ambiguity and reasons about tradeoffs without hand-holding.” Ars Technica adds that it’s “less prone to abruptly hard-stopping conversations because they have run too long.” It also appears to be better at the agentic tasks that organizations the world over hope will help them run their businesses more efficiently.
It’s also cheaper. The Opus 4.5 API will now run developers $5 (input) and $25 (output) per million tokens, down from $15 (input) and $75 (output). —AN
Revolut is now Europe’s most valuable startup
Revolut, the 10-year-old London fintech company, is now the most valuable private firm in Europe.
The company announced on Monday that it had completed a share sale at a $75 billion valuation—quite the premium on the $45 billion valuation it enjoyed last year.
Participants in the sale included Andreessen Horowitz, Coatue, Dragoneer, Fidelity, Franklin Templeton, Greenoaks, the Nvidia venture arm NVentures, and others.
The startup didn’t disclose how much it raised in the sale.
The new price tag puts Revolut well ahead of highly valued peers Checkout ($40 billion, payments, London), FNZ ($20 billion, fintech, London), Mistral ($14 billion, AI, Paris), Helsing ($14 billion, defense tech, Berlin), and Celonis ($13 billion, enterprise software, Munich).
Revolut has ambitious plans to take its digital banking services across the globe. Today, it has about 65 million customers who use it for checking and savings accounts, international money transfers, crypto and stock trading, and more; it hopes to super-size that figure to 100 million through its entry into “30 new markets in almost every major geography,” as Bloomberg puts it.
That’s not to say there isn’t unfinished business at home. CEO Nik Storonsky has made it clear that the company desires a full banking license in the U.K., even if regulators remain concerned about how its global ambitions will affect its risk management structure. —AN
More tech
—Amazon makes a $50 billion commitment to U.S. government AI and supercomputing infrastructure.
—OpenAI can’t use the word “cameo.” A court blocks the company from using a word that’s also the name of a popular video app.
—Google takes on Nvidia by reportedly pitching its home-grown AI chips to customers.
—India’s new labor law gives legal status to gig workers, but details about benefit eligibility remain unclear.
—Money is flowing out of U.S.-listed Bitcoin ETFs at near-record amounts.
—Apple lays off sales staff. A surprise (and rare) cut that’s not limited to one corner of the org.
—Spotify prices in the U.S. are going up beginning in Q1. The last hike came in July 2024.