Apple once considered replacing Google as its default search engine in private browsing mode on its products in favor of DuckDuckGo, according to recently unsealed testimony by the rival search CEO.
“Our take was that they were actually really interested in this,” DuckDuckGo CEO Gabriel Weinberg said, according to a transcript viewed by CNBC of the testimony in federal court last month. “The people we were talking to were generally DuckDuckGo users themselves interested in privacy.”
Weinberg, testifying as part of the Department of Justice’s antitrust case against Google, said DuckDuckGo and Apple had about 20 meetings and phone calls over the course of the negotiations, which lasted from about 2016 through 2019. Throughout that period, Weinberg said Apple’s contract with Google to be the default search engine on its Safari browser “was often the elephant in the room.”
The government is trying to prove that Google’s exclusive contracts with phone and browser makers unfairly locked out rivals from the general search market by depriving them of distribution. Google has denied that its actions violated antitrust law.
DuckDuckGo, which is privately held, makes a privacy-focused search engine that competes directly with Google, as well as other privacy products that seek to limit how websites can track consumers across the internet.
DuckDuckGo first got a response from Apple about its idea to become the default search engine in private browsing in 2016, Weinberg said. DuckDuckGo claims its search engine greatly reduces the amount of tracking that is still possible in other search engines, even while on private browsing mode.
In 2017, DuckDuckGo was able to secure a meeting with Craig Federighi, a senior vice president, at Apple’s headquarters in Cupertino, California to discuss its proposal. DuckDuckGo presented Apple executives with data about what Apple users expect from private browsing mode, which Weinberg said he’d thought “was pretty compelling.”
Weinberg’s team said they could “make DuckDuckGo the best search option on Apple devices for Apple users by integrating their content into search modules” including Apple News, Maps, Music and TV.
Weinberg said he left the meeting with the impression that “it went very well.”
“I’ve pitched lots of things to Apple over the years,” Weinberg testified. “If there’s no interest, their move is basically silence.”
DuckDuckGo executives returned to Cupertino the following summer for another meeting and presented visuals of how the product would look once its search engine was integrated into Apple services.
Weinberg said his “impression was that they were really serious” about the idea “potentially for the next year’s release.” He said that Adler asked them “to come back basically as soon as possible to brainstorm what privacy integrations could look like.”
Separate recently unsealed testimony from Apple’s side tells a somewhat different story.
John Giannandrea, Apple’s senior vice president of machine learning and artificial intelligence and a former Google executive, joined the company in 2018. He testified that he wasn’t aware of Apple considering the search default switch.
Still, he went on to describe discussions with other Apple executives about the potential drawbacks of such a proposal. Giannandrea worried DuckDuckGo’s “marketing about privacy is somewhat incongruent with the details,” since he thought the company would have to share some user information with Microsoft due to its arrangement to receive search information from Bing.
DuckDuckGo says in its privacy policy that it prevents “our hosting and content providers from creating a history of your searches and browsing.”
In September 2018, DuckDuckGo returned to Apple headquarters to discuss integration, Weinberg testified. Apple “expressed they were really considering this for the 2019 release,” and Weinberg then realized they still had some lingering concerns. In particular, Apple realized it need to figure out how to resolve issues tied to its Google contract, Weinberg testified.
Sometime after the 2018 holidays, DuckDuckGo received documentation from Apple showing what its revenue share would be if it were the default. DuckDuckGO estimated its market share “would increase multiple times over” just by becoming the default in private browsing mode.
By the summer of 2019, DuckDuckGo began to understand the partnership would not happen. Apple didn’t announce the integration during its Worldwide Developers Conference in June. Four months later, following a meeting, Weinberg’s takeaway was that the deal was “dead.”
DuckDuckGo had also pitched Samsung, Mozilla and Opera on being the default option in their private browsing modes, but was not able to reach a deal with any of them. The company eventually stopped pursuing this model because it concluded “That each of these companies’ Google contract was the key thing preventing us from getting a deal done with them.”
Chegg seen at the New York Stock Exchange on Feb. 13, 2025.
Danielle DeVries | CNBC
Chegg on Monday filed suit in federal district court against Google, claiming that artificial intelligence summaries of search results have hurt the online education company’s traffic and revenue.
The legal move come nearly two years after former CEO Dan Rosensweig said students engaging with OpenAI’s ChatGPT assistant were cutting into Chegg’s new customer growth.
Chegg is worth less than $200 million, and in after-hours trading Monday, the stock was trading just above $1 per share. Chegg has engaged Goldman Sachs and will look at strategic options, including getting acquired and going private, President and CEO Nathan Schultz told analysts on a Monday earnings call.
Chegg reported a $6.1 million net loss on $143.5 million in fourth-quarter revenue, a 24% decline year over year, according to a statement. Analysts polled by LSEG had expected $142.1 million in revenue. Management called for first-quarter revenue between $114 million and $116 million, but analysts had been targeting $138.1 million. The stock was down 23% in extended trading.
Google forces companies like Chegg to “supply our proprietary content in order to be included in Google’s search function,” said Schultz, adding that the search company uses its monopoly power, “reaping the financial benefits of Chegg’s content without having to spend a dime.”
Despite the suit, Chegg has its own AI strategy. It has drawn on Meta’s open-source Llama, as well as models from privately held Anthropic and Mistral, Schultz said. Chegg has also partnered with OpenAI, which the education company views as a competitor, alongside Google. The company reported that 3.6 million students had subscriptions in the fourth quarter, down 21%. Subscriptions include access to AI-powered learning assistance. Chegg also rents and sells textbooks.
AI Overviews, as Google’s artificial intelligence summaries are called, are available in the company’s search engine in over 100 countries, with more than 1 billion users, the company said in October. They show up above links to other pages in search results.
A Google spokesperson told CNBC that the company will defend itself against Chegg’s suit.
“Every day, Google sends billions of clicks to sites across the web, and AI Overviews send traffic to a greater diversity of sites,” the Google spokesperson said.
Chegg claimed that Google drew on Chegg’s collection of 135 million questions and answers on a variety of subjects in its model training data sets.
After training its models, Google can generate content that competes with information that publishers have on offer in search results, Chegg argued in its complaint. The online learning company included a screenshot of a Google AI Overview that borrows details from Chegg’s website but does not attribute the information. However, the relevant Chegg page does show up lower down in search results.
Chegg cited a federal judge’s ruling last August that Googleholds a monopoly in the search market. The decision came after the Department of Justice in 2020 filed its landmark case, alleging that Google controlled the general search market by creating strong barriers to entry and a feedback loop that sustained its dominance.
Hims & Hers Health shares plunged 18% in extended trading on Monday after investors looked past better-than-expected revenue and earnings and focused instead on the disappointing gross margin.
Here’s how the company did, compared to analysts’ consensus estimates from LSEG:
Earnings per share: 11 cents vs. 10 cents expected
Revenue: $481 million vs. $470 millionexpected
Revenue at the telehealth company increased 95% in the fourth quarter from $246.6 million during the same period last year, according to a release.
However, the company’s gross margin, or the profit left after accounting for the cost of goods sold, was 77%, while analysts polled by StreetAccount were expecting 78.4%.
It is the second big stock drop for Hims & Hers in a matter of days. The shares tumbled 26% on Friday after the U.S. Food and Drug Administration announced that the shortage of semaglutide injection products has been resolved.
In May, Hims & Hers started prescribing compounded semaglutide, the active ingredient in Novo Nordisk‘s blockbuster GLP-1 medications Ozempic and Wegovy. The company was a breakout star within the digital health sector in 2024, in part because of the success of its popular new weight loss offering.
The company said its GLP-1 offering generated more than $225 million in revenue in 2024. The stock climbed about 200% for the year.
Compounded drugs are custom-made alternatives to brand-name drugs designed to meet a specific patient’s needs, and compounders are allowed to produce them when brand-name treatments are in shortage. The FDA said Friday that it will start taking action against compounders for violations in the next 60 to 90 days.
Hims & Hers said on the earnings call that as a result, compounded semaglutide will likely not be offered on the platform after the first quarter.
“We will have to start notifying customers in the coming month or two that they will need to start looking for alternative options on the commercial dosing,” Hims & Hers CEO Andrew Dudum said on the call. “I would suspect, just being very direct, that a lot of those patients will try to go into the open market and try to secure a branded option in some form factor.”
Some patients might still be able to access compounded semaglutide if it is clinically necessary, the company added.
The company’s weight loss offerings will primarily be composed of its oral medications and the generic medication liraglutide, which it plans to introduce on its platform this year. Excluding contributions from compounded semaglutide, Hims & Hers said it expects it weight loss offering will generate at least $725 million in revenue in 2025.
Hims & Hers also offers treatments for skin care, mental health, sexual health and hair care.
Revenue for non-GLP-1 products increased 43% to $1.2 billion for the full year, “meeting our previous 2025 revenue target a year early,” Chief Financial Officer Yemi Okupe said in a release.
“The success we are experiencing is a direct reflection of our improving ability to democratize access to high quality, personalized care across each of our specialties,” Okupe said.
Net income climbed to $26.01 million, or 11 cents per share, from $1.25 million, or 1 cent per share, a year prior. The company reported adjusted earnings of $54.1 million, meeting analysts’ estimates, according to StreetAccount.
For the first quarter, Hims & Hers expects to report revenue of $520 million to $540 million, while analysts were expecting $497 million. Adjusted earnings will be between $55 million and $65 million for the period, the company said.
Hims & Hers will host its quarterly call with investors at 5:00 p.m. ET.
— CNBC’s Brandon Gomez contributed to this report.
As the clean energy economy expands, finding the minerals and metals that power it becomes increasingly critical. The answer might lie with artificial intelligence.
Electric cars, solar panels and hydrogen fuel cells all have one thing in common: the need for precious metals.
Historically, that’s required going through the arduous process of finding the metals and then getting them out of the ground. But new technologies from a slew of companies might be changing the game.
Kobold Metals, VerAI and a startup called Earth AI are in a race to get the metals to market as soon as possible. Earth AI combines AI-powered mineral discovery software with proprietary drilling technology. Its data goes back 50 years.
“We train our AI to learn from failures and successes of decades of hundreds of geologists that explored in the past to make much better predictions for where to look for metals in the future,” said Roman Teslyuk, CEO of Earth AI.
When the system finds what it thinks are metal deposits, Earth AI can drill down to verify it in just a tennis ball-sized hole. Teslyuk said that using this mining process takes half the cost and a fraction of the amount of time that was previously required. Individual annual mine revenues can range from $50 million to $3 billion, according to Mining Data Online.
“We drill down to 2,000 feet and grab a sample of rock that has never seen light, and the metals in that rock, they can build hundreds of millions of electric cars,” Teslyuk said. “They can turn our grid renewable. This rock can get us off hydrocarbons.”
Earth AI doesn’t explore around existing mines, but finds new areas and then sells that information to mining companies.
“The market for these minerals is massive,” said Jamie Lee, managing partner at Tamarack Global, an investor in Earth AI. “The way that they have approached this really caught our attention because there’s a there is a significant moat in their business model and the way that they’ve trained their large language model.”
Other investors include Y Combinator, Cantos Ventures, Scrum Ventures, Alpaca, Sparkwave Capital and Overmatch. The company has raised a total of $38 million.
Earth AI explores on its own, as well as with partners to find deposits faster. The company recently discovered one of the largest verified deposits of palladium in Australia using AI as part of a joint venture with Legacy Minerals.
CNBC Producer Lisa Rizzolo contributed to this piece.