Good morning. My Fortune colleague Allie Garfinkle recently spent some time with Brian Schimpf, the engineer-turned-executive at the helm of Los Angeles-area defense tech darling Anduril.
Schimpf usually sits in the shadows compared to company cofounder Palmer Luckey (of Oculus VR fame). But the “self-identified Democrat who believes strongly in deterrence,” as Garfinkle puts it, is leading a semi-controversial company at the front of a wave of renewed tech interest in the federal government—a sort of Mr. Smith Goes to Washington, if Jimmy Stewart’s character was a hoodie-wearing Thiel Fellow who ran a drone startup.
Her profile of the Anduril CEO is well worth your time. So is joining us at Fortune Brainstorm Tech in Aspen in four weeks, where Schimpf is scheduled to speak.
Today’s tech news below. —Andrew Nusca
P.S. RIP Ted Turner, the “blunt and slightly impolitic” media mogul who was “impossible to ignore.”
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Trump’s AI policy team is on the cusp of implementing many Biden-era policies
When it comes to AI, the Trump administration has positioned itself as the opposite of the Biden White House, criticizing what Trump’s tech policy advisors saw as overly burdensome AI safety efforts and licensing regimes and embracing an anti-regulation approach.
But the Trump administration is about to engage in a head-spinning policy pirouette. Trump is reportedly considering an executive order that would create a government-industry working group to examine how frontier AI systems should be evaluated before release. And its Center for AI Standards and Innovation (CAISI)—the Trump administration’s renamed version of the Biden-era United States AI Safety Institute—just announced partnerships with Google, Microsoft, and xAI to evaluate some AI models before deployment.
In a television interview Wednesday morning, White House National Economic Council Director Kevin Hassett said a potential executive order would create “a clear road map” for how advanced AI systems should be evaluated before release—“so that they’re released to the wild after they’ve been proven safe, just like an FDA drug.”
The renewed push for evaluations is being framed less around AI ethics concerns and worry about existential dangers, which was a strong focus of the Biden administration, and more around immediate national security risks.
Still, much of the government’s evaluation effort depends on cooperation from the companies building the models.
“AI model vetting can motivate model makers to invest more in resilience, and it can help expose obvious weaknesses,” said Rob van der Veer, chief AI officer at the tech consultancy Software Improvement Group. “But AI models will remain fragile, no matter how much we test them.” —Sharon Goldman
ServiceNow tells Wall Street it’s going to double again
Bill McDermott has a habit of making promises that sound like boasts and then keeping them.
When he took the helm of ServiceNow in 2019, the company was doing $3.5 billion in annual subscription revenue. This year, it will finish at nearly $16 billion.
“We are printing a new ServiceNow every year,” he told reporters this week.
ServiceNow says it intends to double the company again by 2030, reaching more than $30 billion in subscription revenue.
What made analysts pay attention wasn’t the target itself, but the framing. CFO Gina Mastantuono noted that in 2021, the company set a five-year target of $15 billion in subscription revenue. It’s now on track to beat it by half a billion dollars.
The company’s pipeline supports the claim. ServiceNow currently holds $27.7 billion in remaining performance obligations—approximately double its annual revenue—a metric McDermott cited on television Tuesday as evidence the company is “growing faster than any other enterprise software company at scale in the world. Ever.”
The company’s most closely watched line item is the trajectory of Now Assist, ServiceNow’s AI product line. The company crossed $600 million in Now Assist annual contract value in 2025—more than doubling year-over-year—and entered Q1 2026 at $750 million. This week, ServiceNow raised its full-year AI ACV target from $1 billion to $1.5 billion—more support for its argument that AI doesn’t compress its revenue, but compounds it. —Nick Lichtenberg
Strauss Zelnick is staking $1.5 billion on the biggest game launch of the decade
After 15 years churning out hit titles like Grand Theft Auto, Red Dead Redemption, and NBA 2k, Strauss Zelnick knows what makes a hit—even if he doesn’t play video games himself.
Zelnick, who has been CEO of Take-Two Interactive Software since 2011, has helped skyrocket the company’s stock price from about $12 per share when he took charge to $216 per share as of Tuesday’s close. He also quintupled the company’s net revenue during his tenure, to $5.6 billion for fiscal 2025.
Zelnick is now preparing for potentially the biggest game launch of the decade as Take-Two prepares to release Grand Theft Auto VI this fall amid broad economic uncertainty.
It doesn’t help that the competition in games has exploded over the past decade or so. Some 19,000 games were released in 2023 for consoles and PC, compared to just under 2,000 in 2014, according to data from Bain & Company.
And let’s be honest: Expectations for any new Grand Theft Auto title are high. The series’ previous installment, Grand Theft Auto V, racked up $1 billion worth of sales in three days in 2013—the fastest any entertainment release has ever reached that milestone—and has persisted as the bestselling in the U.S.
There’s little doubt that GTA VI has been pricey to develop, as Zelnick himself has acknowledged. It has also experienced delays. The title was originally scheduled to launch in the fall of 2025, and then in May 2026. It is now scheduled for release on Nov. 19.
But the game development process is a marathon, not a sprint. “It’s sort of like when I was in college. I never pulled an all-nighter because I was good about doing my homework,” Zelnick recently told Business Insider. “You do your homework, you don’t pull an all-nighter.” —Marco Quiroz-Gutierrez
More tech
—SpaceX and Anthropic do a deal. Colossus 1 supercomputer access and “multiple gigawatts of orbital AI compute capacity.”
—Musk v. Altman: Mira Murati testifies that Sam Altman lied to her and undermined her ability to do her job.
—Snap shares drop 4% as the company’s Q1 revenue of $1.53 billion meets analyst expectations.
—FanDuel CEO exits after five years. Amy Howe is succeeded by President Christian Genetski.
—Arm shares jump 10% after the SoftBank-owned chip company estimates that CPU demand for AGI will drive $2 billion in sales over the next two years.
—Google’s quiet AI install. Four gigabytes of Gemini Nano on your computer, thanks to Chrome.
—DoorDash shares rise 11%. The company’s Q1 revenue misses estimates but its Q2 forecast for “gross order value” is stronger than expected.
—DeepSeek fundraises at a $50 billion valuation. The Chinese AI startup reportedly reconsiders outside funding.
AI Playbook: Keeping up with AI's rapid evolution
AI is becoming an even more useful—and dangerous—tool as it gets smarter. Fortune AI Editor Jeremy Kahn breaks down best practices for deploying AI agents, how to protect your data from AI-powered cyberattacks, and just how smart AI can really get. Watch the playbook.
