The jury in a landmark lawsuit against social media companies ruled in favor of the plaintiffs, holding Meta (META) and YouTube (GOOG, GOOGL) liable for $3 million in damages on Wednesday. The trial will now move to the damages phase.

The jury in the case said that both Meta and YouTube knew the designs of their platforms were dangerous, that users wouldn’t realize the danger, and that the companies failed to warn of the danger when a reasonable platform would have.

What makes the Los Angeles case unique is that, rather than trying to persuade the jury that the content on Meta and YouTube was harmful, the plaintiff’s attorneys framed the case around the actual design of the social media platforms.

That allowed them to circumvent arguments related to Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act, which protects companies from liability for what their users post on their platforms.

Meta and YouTube disputed the claims during the trial, saying that they worked for years to improve the safety of their products.

Read more here.

Shares of Arm (ARM) rocketed more than 15% higher in early trading on Wednesday after the company unveiled its first production data center processor: the Arm AGI CPU (central processing unit).

Arm has traditionally licensed its intellectual property to other companies to develop their own chips, including Apple (AAPL) and Nvidia (NVDA), which uses Arm’s capabilities in its Grace and Vera CPUs.

Arm said it co-developed the AGI CPU with Meta (META), which is deploying them alongside its own custom chips inside its data centers.

Beyond Meta, Arm said it’s also working with Cerebras, Cloudflare (NET), F5 (FFIV), OpenAI (OPAI.PVT), Positron (POSC), Rebellions, SAP (SAP), and SK Telecom (SKM), which will use the chip for agentic AI applications, among others.

Despite Wall Street’s exuberance for Arm’s new chip, BofA Global Research analyst Vivek Arya pointed out in a note to investors that the company is far from the only CPU game in town.

“We highlight the CPU market is getting very crowded. Incumbents in both x86 and ARM have much wider breadths of portfolio and established software/ecosystem, catering to enterprise/telco customers,” he wrote.

Meta Platforms is expected to lay off “a few hundred people” on Wednesday, The Information reported Wednesday morning, citing two people familiar with the matter.

The outlet said layoffs were likely to hit its Reality Labs unit, sales, recruiting, and social media teams.

The report comes after Reuters said earlier this month Meta was exploring deep staff cuts that could result in 20% of the company being shown the door.

Late Tuesday, Meta also rejiggered stock incentive plans for a handful of its top executives, which could see them earn nine-figure payouts if the company’s market capitalization climbs above $9 trillion in the years ahead.

Read The Information’s full report here.

The biggest initial public offering on record could officially kick off its process this week.

The Information reported late Tuesday that SpaceX is preparing to file for its IPO with the SEC as soon as this week.

The rocket company led by Elon Musk is expected to raise up to $75 billion in its offering; the company was most recently valued at $1.25 trillion.

For years, Arm (ARM) has played a key role in the development of processors for everything from the iPhone to data center chips. But now the company is expanding its reach with the debut of its first production data center processor: the Arm AGI CPU (central processing unit).

Arm has traditionally licensed its intellectual property to other companies to develop their own chips, including Nvidia (NVDA), which uses Arm’s capabilities in its Grace and Vera CPUs.

Graphics processing units, or GPUs, have dominated data centers thanks to their ability to train and run AI models. But as running those models becomes a more common use case than training and as the industry transitions toward agentic applications — AI that can perform tasks on your behalf — CPUs are becoming more important.

That provides Arm with the opportunity to launch its own processor. The company isn’t just debuting a chip, though; it’s also unveiling a server rack to run them at scale.

And while X86-based chips like those from Intel (INTC) and Advanced Micro Devices (AMD) generally dominate data centers, Arm said its CPU delivers twice the performance per rack compared to those other platforms.

Read more here.

OpenAI is making a push to focus on its core business.

It appears a casualty of that push will be its video creation tool, Sora.

The Wall Street Journal reports:

It was only last December that Disney and OpenAI announced a deal allowing users to create videos using Disney IP. The deal also saw Disney make a $1 billion equity investment in OpenAI. The Information reported Tuesday that Disney won’t make this investment as a result of OpenAI’s Sora pivot.

That deal came a few months after OpenAI completed a share sale that valued the company at at $500 billion. The AI giant was valued at $730 billion in late February following a funding round that raised $110 billion.

The global smartphone market is set to take a hit in 2026, but Apple (AAPL) stands to benefit from the pain, according to a Morgan Stanley AlphaWise smartphone survey.

Global smartphone shipments will decline 13% year over year in 2026 and recover slightly to a 3% year-over-year improvement in 2027. That works out to 1.1 billion and 1.14 billion units, respectively.

Morgan Stanley (MS) previously expected shipments of 1.3 billion in 2026 and 1.31 billion in 2027.

The survey, which polled 2,000 participants over 18 in the US and China and about 1,500 in the UK and Germany, indicates that while upgrade rates are expected to improve in both the US and China next year, Apple is the only one of the major smartphone brands that is projected to see a positive, and improving, year-over-year net switching rate.

“Among prospective US smartphone upgraders, advanced features and upgrade eligibility are the two reasons where Apple leads peers,” Morgan Stanley analyst Erik Woodring wrote in an investor note.

“Among prospective China smartphone brand switchers, better overall device quality is the #1 reason why smartphone owners in China are switching to the iPhone,” he added.

Respondents were especially interested in Apple’s long-rumored foldable iPhone, which Bloomberg’s Mark Gurman says the company will launch later this fall, with 27% of current iPhone owners saying they had a strong interest in the phone.

Read more here.

There’s a bright spot in Tesla’s (TSLA) core auto sales, with a slight reversal of fortune in greater Europe.

According to the European Automobile Manufacturers’ Association (ACEA), Tesla electric vehicle registrations (a proxy for sales) in Europe rose to 17,664 units in February, an 11.8% gain compared to a year ago. In January, sales dipped 17%, the last month of a losing streak that had been ongoing since December 2024.

While this February saw a sales jump, it came against a weak February in 2025. Last year, Tesla’s European sales tumbled 27%.

Tesla’s recent losing streak occurred against the backdrop of rising EV sales in the greater Europe region. Total EV registrations in the region, which includes the UK and the European Free Trade Association, rose 15.8% in February, with overall registrations regardless of powertrain up only 1.7%.

While EV sales have slumped somewhat in the US, cheap EVs and hybrids are flourishing in the EU, especially from Chinese automakers like BYD and Li Auto, as buyers across the pond embrace Asian imports.

Read more here.

The race to make increasingly advanced AI agents is heating up thanks to the release of OpenClaw in November, and now Anthropic (ANTH.PVT) is joining the action.

The company announced its new capability for its Claude Cowork productivity tool and Claude Code coding feature, giving both the ability to do things like access different apps, point and click with your mouse, type, and browse the web and your files.

Anthropic is also careful to point out that it’s putting certain safeguards into place to prevent malicious actors from exploiting its advanced agentic abilities, a big fear with these kinds of agents.

High-powered AI features like Anthropic’s aren’t entirely new, but they gained increased traction with the debut of OpenClaw, which allows users to run custom AI agents on their desktop systems, giving the bots control over their data and programs.

Cybersecurity experts have raised alarms that OpenClaw could be a security nightmare, but companies like Nvidia (NVDA) and Cisco (CSCO) are jumping on board, releasing their own apps to put guardrails around the agents.

In February, an AI safety and alignment worker in Meta’s Superintelligence Lab posted on X that her own OpenClaw agent bulk deleted her email without her permission.

OpenClaw, the popular AI agent platform, is a massive hit among the techy set. Developed by Peter Steinberger, who has since joined OpenAI (OPAI.PVT), OpenClaw allows users to set up their own AI agent that can run on their computers, performing tasks ranging from checking email and replying to messages to managing system files.

And while those capabilities are impressive, they’re also a potential security nightmare. That’s because you’re giving an AI model the ability to control your computer.

And while that’s great when it works, it can lead to major issues, whether that’s permanently deleting important emails or entire programs from your system.

And that becomes an even bigger problem for companies testing OpenClaw on their enterprise devices.

To that end, Cisco (CSCO), on Monday, showed off a number of new security offerings designed to protect against rogue AI agents.

Read more here.

Apple (AAPL) on Monday said it will host its annual Worldwide Developers Conference (WWDC) on June 8 at its headquarters in Cupertino, Calif.

The company uses the yearly event to showcase the latest software updates to its iOS and macOS lines, among others. This year will be particularly important, as Apple is widely expected to provide more information about its planned AI overhaul of Siri, which has run into repeated delays, as well as deeper insights into its broader AI strategy.

The iPhone maker’s Apple Intelligence platform has fallen behind Google’s and Samsung’s offerings, driving Apple to enter into an agreement with Google to use that company’s Gemini AI models to power its own services.

Despite that, Apple posted record revenue in its most recent quarter on all-time high iPhone sales, showing that consumers aren’t penalizing Apple for its AI shortfalls.

CEO Tim Cook did, however, warn that the global memory shortage caused by the ongoing AI data center build-out will likely hurt Apple’s margins in the coming quarters.

The company’s stock price is down more than 7.7% year to date but up nearly 15% over the last 12 months.

Alphabet’s (GOOG, GOOGL) drone delivery company Wing will begin shipping products through the air to homes around San Francisco in the near future.

Reuters reports:

Read more here.

The New York Times’ Kevin Roose reports:

Earlier this week, one of our favorite tech substacks — The Pragmatic Engineer — which Roose quotes in his story, asked in a post whether AI agents were actually slowing down software development.

And agents, as Roose notes, are really the source of massive token usage, in some cases running around the clock to constantly iterate on some task.

“When it comes to AI agents and AI tooling, most of the discussion focuses on their potential boosts for efficiency, faster iteration, and the pushing out of more code, faster,” wrote Gergely Orosz, author of the Pragmatic Engineer.

“Last week, we took an inside look into how Uber is adopting AI, internally. The rideshare giant has built close to a dozen internal systems to deal with code generated by AI agents.

“However, when quantifying the impact of AI, the focus was on how much output has increased, and how devs who use more AI also generate more pull requests; these are the ‘power user’ devs who generate 52% more [pull requests] than devs who use AI less. There was no mention of product quality — at all!”

Social media sites shouldn’t be used by kids under 16, according to Pinterest (PINS) CEO Bill Ready.

In an essay published in TIME on Friday, the executive said the new ban on social media sites for users under 16 recently enacted in Australia sets a standard that should be applied more broadly around the world.

“As both a tech CEO and parent, I know legal compliance is not the same as safety,” Ready wrote.

“And I understand broad restrictions come with difficult tradeoffs. But social media, as it’s configured today, is not safe for young people under 16.”

Ready compares his proposal that social media use be more broadly restricted to other age-restricted activities, like drinking, driving, and smoking.

“Imperfect protection is better than none,” Ready added. “When we make excuses for not acting in the public’s best interest, tech CEOs sound like 20th-century tobacco executives who had to be shamed and sued into submission.”

In his essay, Ready links out to an op-ed published by Snap CEO Evan Spiegel in the Financial Times last month, who said of Australia’s ban, “I don’t believe cutting teens off from these relationships makes them safer or advances their wellbeing.”

US lawmakers have in recent years sought to advance legislation that would restrict social media use by users under 13, and some states have tightened rules for accounts.

Earlier this month, Apple announced its first-ever low-cost MacBook, the MacBook Neo.

The move appears to be bringing new users into its ecosystem.

In a post on X on Friday, Apple CEO Tim Cook said the company just had its best week ever for first-time Mac users.

Apple’s MacBook Neo went on sale on March 11 and starts at $599.