Weekly Intel - 2026-03-01

The boundary between tech company and geopolitical actor basically disappeared this week. Anthropic turns down military contracts and gets banned from government systems. OpenAI picks up those same contracts. A joint US-Israel strike on Iran. I’ve been covering tech for a while now, and the speed at which these companies are being pulled into national security decisions is something new.

AI & Geopolitics

OpenAI raises $110B on $730B pre-money valuation . Let that number sit for a second. $730 billion. Amazon, Nvidia, and SoftBank put up $110 billion in what’s one of the largest private funding rounds ever. This stopped being a research lab a while ago — this is infrastructure-scale capital. The partnerships with Amazon and Nvidia are the real story here. OpenAI is betting that whoever controls the compute layer controls the AI market.

Statement from Dario Amodei on discussions with the Department of War . Anthropic’s CEO revealed the company has been deeply involved with US defense and intelligence agencies — first AI company to deploy models on classified networks. But here’s where it gets interesting: they turned down significant revenue from Chinese firms to protect American interests. The question every AI company will have to answer soon: where do you draw the line between commercial opportunity and national security obligation?

President Trump bans Anthropic from government systems . And then this happened. Trump designated Anthropic a national security risk and ordered federal agencies to stop using their products — because Anthropic refused to allow their AI in military surveillance and autonomous weapons systems. Meanwhile, OpenAI picked up a Defense Department contract for classified networks. The message is pretty direct: if you want government money, you build what the government asks for. Your position on military AI applications now determines your access to contracts worth hundreds of millions.

Anthropic drops flagship safety pledge . On top of all that, Anthropic removed a key commitment from their Responsible Scaling Policy — the one that required guaranteed risk controls before training new models. Their chief science officer said continuing development was more valuable than maintaining that precautionary stance. For a company that built its reputation on being the careful one, that’s a notable move. I’m watching to see whether this is pragmatism or the beginning of a race to the bottom.

Geopolitics

The United States and Israel have launched a major attack on Iran . A joint US-Israel military operation killed Supreme Leader Khamenei and hit Iran’s missile program and military infrastructure. Iran has already launched retaliatory strikes. This will ripple through energy markets and supply chains for weeks, probably months. If you’re in any business that depends on global logistics or energy pricing, you’re already feeling this.

Markets & Antitrust

Stripe reportedly makes offer to acquire PayPal . PayPal’s shares jumped 7% on the news. The context matters here: PayPal has lost nearly a third of its market value in 2025, while Stripe’s valuation has climbed to $159 billion. This is still early-stage, but a Stripe-PayPal combination would create a payments behemoth. Worth watching.

Amazon accused of widespread price-fixing scheme . California’s Attorney General filed for an immediate injunction alleging Amazon forces vendors to raise prices on all online platforms — not just Amazon’s — to maintain its margins. The claim: either you raise prices on your competitor’s websites, or Amazon pulls your products entirely. If the AG’s case holds up, this could be the biggest antitrust action in e-commerce in years. The scope is the thing — we’re not talking about Amazon’s own marketplace pricing. The allegation is that Amazon is effectively setting prices across the entire e-commerce ecosystem.

AI Infrastructure

How will OpenAI compete? Ben Evans asks a good question here. OpenAI has massive ambitions around compute and infrastructure spending, but they don’t have the steady revenue streams that the big cloud providers have. AWS, Azure, and GCP can subsidize AI infrastructure with existing cloud revenue. OpenAI can’t. The revised spending target (down from $1.4 trillion to $600 billion by 2030) is more realistic, but it still assumes $280 billion in revenue by 2030, split between consumer and enterprise. That’s a lot of assumption.

Smartphone market forecast to decline 12.9% in 2026 . IDC is projecting the steepest decline and lowest volume in over a decade — 1.1 billion units, down from 1.26 billion. A memory shortage is the culprit, and it’s hitting Android manufacturers hardest. This is really a supply chain story more than a phone story. The same memory chips going into phones are the ones everyone needs for AI infrastructure, and there aren’t enough to go around.

That’s what I’m watching. What caught your attention this week?

-Eric