Good morning, Anthropic’s week went from bad to worse, Intel is making a $14.2 billion bet that AI will fuel its comeback, and Oracle just laid off 18% of its workforce by email to pay for data centers. Here’s what happened 👇
1. Anthropic Accidentally Takes Down Thousands of GitHub Repos in Leak Cleanup
Anthropic’s response to its Claude Code source leak made things worse. The company filed a DMCA takedown notice with GitHub to remove repositories containing the leaked code, but the notice was executed against roughly 8,100 repositories, including legitimate forks of Anthropic’s own publicly released Claude Code repo. Developers whose unrelated code got blocked were furious. Anthropic’s head of Claude Code, Boris Cherny, called it an accident: the targeted repo was part of a fork network connected to their own public repo, so the takedown “reached more repositories than intended.” Anthropic retracted the notice for everything except the original leak and 96 forks, and GitHub restored access. But the damage to Anthropic’s reputation compounds at the worst time, as the company reportedly plans an IPO.
Why it matters: First you accidentally leak 512,000 lines of source code. Then you accidentally take down 8,000 repos trying to clean it up. For a company preparing to go public, execution matters, and this is two unforced errors in 48 hours.
2. Intel Spends $14.2 Billion to Buy Back Its Ireland Chip Factory
Intel is buying back the 49% stake it sold to Apollo Global Management in its Ireland manufacturing facility for $14.2 billion, taking full ownership of the plant. Apollo had paid $11.2 billion for that stake in 2024 when Intel was struggling financially. Since then, Intel changed CEOs, cut jobs aggressively, and received billions from Nvidia and the U.S. government. The turnaround is being driven by rising demand for Intel’s processors in AI data centers, specifically for inference: the process by which AI tools like ChatGPT respond to queries. Intel shares rose more than 10% on the news. The deal will be funded with cash and about $6.5 billion in new debt.
Why it matters: Intel sat out the first three years of the AI boom. This buyback signals the company believes it’s finally caught up enough to invest aggressively. If AI inference demand keeps growing, Intel’s bet could pay off. If it doesn’t, they just took on $6.5 billion in debt for a factory they already owned two years ago.
3. Oracle Lays Off 30,000 Workers to Fund AI Data Centers
Oracle has begun cutting up to 30,000 employees, roughly 18% of its 162,000-person workforce, to free up cash for its massive AI infrastructure buildout. Workers across the US, India, Canada, and Mexico were notified via 6 AM termination emails. The cuts span sales, engineering, and security roles. TD Cowen analysts estimated in January that layoffs of this scale could free up $8-10 billion in cash flow. Oracle has been raising tens of billions in debt to build AI data centers, and carries $553 billion in contracted but unrecognized revenue, much of it tied to a $300 billion deal with OpenAI. Despite all that, the stock is down 25% this year as investors worry about the company’s debt load and competitive position.
Why it matters: Oracle is making the starkest trade-off in the AI era: cut nearly one in five employees to pay for the machines that replace them. If the AI infrastructure bet pays off, the math works. If it doesn’t, 30,000 people lost their jobs for a buildout that never generated returns.
Quick Hits
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Swiss Finance Minister sues over Grok’s misogynistic “roasts.” Karin Keller-Sutter filed a criminal complaint after an X user prompted Grok to generate vulgar content about her, asking prosecutors to investigate whether X also bears responsibility. Swiss defamation law carries up to three years in prison. Source: Ars Technica
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Penguin Random House sues OpenAI in Munich after ChatGPT generated text and images “virtually indistinguishable” from a popular German children’s book series about Coconut the Dragon, including a cover, blurb, and self-publishing instructions. Source: The Verge
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Baidu’s robotaxis froze in traffic in China, creating road chaos as the autonomous vehicles stopped responding and couldn’t be manually overridden. Source: The Verge
That’s it for today. The theme is consequences. Anthropic learns that cleaning up a leak can be worse than the leak itself. Intel bets $14.2 billion that its comeback is real. And Oracle shows what happens when the AI buildout bill comes due: 30,000 people get a 6 AM email.
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