Connect with us

Published

on

Just_super | E+ | Getty Images

Big technology companies are consuming as much data as possible to become winners in artificial intelligence — but that’s not necessarily what will define winners, according to the boss of software giant Appian.

Matt Calkins, CEO and co-founder of Appian, said that though internet giants like Microsoft, Amazon, and Google are spending billions on the tech, ensuring success in AI is “not just about money.”

“AI is not a place where money makes more money,” Calkins told CNBC in an interview at its London bureau on Tuesday.

Calkins was referring to the high-profile deals companies like Microsoft and Amazon are agreeing with ambitious and fast-growing foundational AI model makers, like OpenAI and Anthropic.

Microsoft has invested a total of $13 billion in OpenAI, a deal that entails Microsoft getting a stake in OpenAI and the latter adding its GPT language models to the Redmond, Washington-based technology giant’s Azure cloud computing platform.

Microsoft has struck a similar deal with Mistral, taking a 15 million euro ($16 million) stake in the French AI firm.

AI revolution being 'held up a little bit by fear,' Appian CEO says

In OpenAI’s case, Microsoft has a non-voting observer sitting on the firm’s board.

That happened after a shocking series of events last year that saw the CEO of OpenAI, Sam Altman, temporarily ousted, before later returning after hundreds of OpenAI employees threatened a coup to join Altman at Microsoft.

Separately, Amazon has invested a whopping $4 billion into U.S. AI firm Anthropic, which is behind the Claude AI system. Amazon holds a minority stake in Anthropic but no board seat.

Google, too, has committed billions of funding to Anthropic, agreeing last year to invest up to $2 billion.

Scrutiny from UK regulators

British regulators are assessing whether deals agreed by Microsoft and Amazon with foundation AI model startups may constitute effective mergers that could lead to a substantial reduction of competition.

Microsoft denies its deal with OpenAI and Mistral and hiring from Inflection constituted mergers. Amazon says its partnership with Anthropic constitutes a limited corporate investment, not a merger.

This is a market for the clever. The fact that you’ve got enough money to buy, or buy a piece of, Anthropic or Mistral or any of that, that’s impressive. But AI may not be a ‘winner take all’ market.

Matt Calkins

CEO, Appian

For Calkins, whether or not those deals qualify as mergers that threaten competition in AI, there will be room for innovators to thrive.

“If coalitions won the AI race, Google would have won by now,” he said, calling out the U.S. tech giant’s $500 million takeover of British AI lab DeepMind.

Global Music Artist will.i.am: Over-regulating AI will stop innovation

Far from it, Calkins argues — instead, he thinks Google lost out to Microsoft early on when it comes to generative AI, which threatens to upend the fabric of Google’s search business.

It follows a blunder that saw Google’s Gemini text-to-image generator produce inaccuracies in historical pictures that went viral online. Google paused image generation of people to refine the tool. CEO Sundar Pichai called the debacle “unacceptable,” according to an internal memo obtained by CNBC in February.

Google was not immediately available for comment and contacted by CNBC.

“This is a market for the clever,” Calkins said. “The fact that you’ve got enough money to buy, or buy a piece of, Anthropic or Mistral or any of that, that’s impressive. But AI may not be a ‘winner take all’ market.”

“There’s going to be different AI algorithms for different purposes, and they are going to be much more or less valuable, depending on whether and how you’ve loaded your own data into it,” he added.

Calkins said that the only way for AI systems to become truly clever and useful is by being capable of understanding what we want from them for use in our everyday lives.

“The best AI will be the AI you put your data into, not whoever bought the biggest stack,” he said.

Europe has ‘head start’ with regulation

Continue Reading

Technology

Palantir sues former employees, says Percepta AI CEO set out to ‘pillage’ top developers

Published

on

By

Palantir sues former employees, says Percepta AI CEO set out to 'pillage' top developers

Palantir Technologies CEO Alex Karp attends the Pennsylvania Energy and Innovation Summit on the campus of Carnegie Mellon University in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, July 15, 2025.

Andrew Caballero-reynolds | Afp | Getty Images

Palantir expanded its lawsuit against two former employees on Thursday to include the CEO of their new artificial intelligence startup, Percepta AI.

In the suit, Palantir alleged that Percepta CEO and co-founder Hirsh Jain, co-founder Radha Jain, and a third employee, Joanna Cohen, violated their non-solicitation agreements, hiring top talent to create a competitive business.

Palantir and Percepta didn’t immediately respond to CNBC’s request for comment.

The three defendants are accused of attempting to “poach” executives and developers from their former company and “plunder Palantir’s valuable intellectual property.”

Cohen and Radha Jain, who were named in the original lawsuit filed in October, were previously senior engineers at Palantir. Hirsh Jain, an executive responsible for the company’s healthcare portfolio, was added as another defendant in the latest complaint.

Palantir said the defendants were “entrusted” with the company’s “crown jewels,” including source code, customer workflows and proprietary customer engagement strategies.

The former employees “brazenly disregarded their contractual and legal commitments to Palantir and instead chose a path of deception and unjust competition,” the plaintiffs said in the document, which was filed in the U.S. District Court for the Southern District of New York.

Cohen and Radha Jain denied the initial allegations in a November filing, and agreed to stop working for Percepta during the proceedings.

The suit accused Hirsh Jain, who resigned from Palantir in August 2024, of an “aggressive campaign” to recruit other employees to join Percepta, and said the startup has already hired at least 10 former Palantir employees.

An alleged message written by Hirsh Jain in November 2024 read, “I’m down to pillage the best devs at palantir when they’re at their maximum richness.”

The complaint says Rhada Jain wrote another message saying, “God thinking about poaching is so fun.”

Palantir, which was co-founded by Peter Thiel, CEO Alex Karp and others, builds analytics software for companies and government agencies, including the U.S. military. The company’s stock price has soared more than tenfold since the end of 2023, lifting its market cap close to $450 billion.

Palantir also accused Cohen of sending herself highly confidential documents shortly after announcing her resignation from the company in March. Cohen allegedly took photos of sensitive information, the suit said, and downloaded the files onto her personal phone.

“At Percepta, they seek to succeed not through old-fashioned ingenuity and competition, but through outright theft and deceit,” Palantir said in the filing.

Among other things, Palantir is asking for the defendants to be forced to return any confidential information in their possession, and to avoid working at Percepta or venture backer General Catalyst for 12 months from the time of an order.

WATCH: AI stocks still a ‘table pounder opportunity’

'This is an arms race playing out,' says Wedbush’s Dan Ives on Nvidia

Continue Reading

Technology

Trump ‘sells out’ U.S. national security with Nvidia chip sales to China, Sen. Warren says

Published

on

By

Trump 'sells out' U.S. national security with Nvidia chip sales to China, Sen. Warren says

Sen. Elizabeth Warren, D-Mass., speaks during a Senate Banking, Housing and Urban Affairs Committee confirmation hearing on President Donald Trump’s nominees to lead the National Economic Council, Consumer Financial Protection Bureau and Federal Housing Finance Agency, on Capitol Hill in Washington, Feb. 27, 2025.

Annabelle Gordon | Reuters

President Donald Trump‘s decision to let Nvidia sell its advanced H200 artificial intelligence chips to China “sells out American national security,” Sen. Elizabeth Warren, D-Mass., said Thursday.

Warren also reiterated her call for Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang to testify before Congress about the agreement, along with Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick.

The senator’s fiery remarks on the Senate floor came three days after Trump announced on social media that the U.S. semiconductor giant Nvidia could sell the chips to “approved customers” in China, so long as the U.S. gets a 25% cut of the revenues.

The announcement drew concerns both from Democrats and some of Trump’s Republican allies, who have been vocal about protecting America’s hardware advantage over China in the race to AI superiority.

Warren, in Thursday’s remarks, urged Congress to pass bipartisan legislation that “reins in this administration” by imposing new chip export restrictions. Critics of the bill say it could undermine U.S. chipmakers’ competitiveness.

The Trump administration knows that China gaining access to the chips, which have previously been subject to export restrictions, “poses a serious threat to our technological leadership and national security,” Warren said on the Senate floor.

She noted that shortly before Trump announced his decision on the H200 chips on Monday, the Department of Justice touted a crackdown touted a crackdown on a “major China-linked AI tech smuggling network.”

Sen. Elizabeth Warren: Economy and Fed still have a lot of 'red flashing lights'

“So why did the President make this bad deal that sells out the American economy and sells out American national security?” she asked. “It’s simple: In the Trump administration, money talks.”

“Mr. Huang understands that in this administration, being able to cozy up to Donald Trump might be the most important corporate CEO skill of all,” Warren said.

She pointed to Huang attending a $1 million-per-plate dinner at Trump’s Florida home Mar-a-Lago, and Nvidia’s later donations to the president’s under-construction White House ballroom.

“Those are just the most obvious possible reasons to cut this deal,” Warren said, “and who knows what else Mr. Huang might have done behind closed doors to persuade President Trump and Secretary Lutnick into making this dangerous concession.”

CNBC has reached out to Nvidia for comment on the senator’s remarks.

Continue Reading

Technology

Musk says SpaceX report of 2026 IPO is ‘accurate’

Published

on

By

Musk says SpaceX report of 2026 IPO is 'accurate'

The Axiom-4 mission, with a SpaceX Dragon spacecraft and Falcon 9 rocket, lifts off from Launch Complex 39A at NASA’s Kennedy Space Center in Cape Canaveral, Florida, June 25, 2025.

Giorgio Viera | AFP | Getty Images

Elon Musk responded to the latest report that SpaceX is going public in 2026, calling it “accurate.”

The article from Ars Technica’s Eric Berger examined why this is the right time for Musk’s space venture to IPO, and said the rise of artificial intelligence and opportunities for data centers in space play an important role in the move.

“As usual, Eric is accurate,” Musk wrote on his social media platform X in response to Berger’s article.

Musk’s comment comes after multiple news outlets said that SpaceX was looking to go public in 2026, with The Information and Wall Street Journal both reporting last week on the likeliness of an IPO, as well as a new share sale valuing the company at about $800 billion.

Bloomberg said this week that the company was pursuing an IPO in 2026 and is looking to raise more than $30 billion.

Over the weekend, Musk said on X that reports of the $800 billion valuation were “not accurate” and addressed the amount his company gets from NASA.

“While I have great fondness for @NASA, they will constitute less than 5% of our revenue next year,” Musk wrote. “Commercial Starlink is by far our largest contributor to revenue. Some people have claimed that SpaceX gets ‘subsidized’ by NASA. This is absolutely false.”

SpaceX didn’t immediately respond to a request for comment.

Heading into 2026, SpaceX and Tesla CEO Musk look set to gain a powerful ally in the government’s space program.

Read more CNBC tech news

Jared Isaacman, who paid millions to lead two private spaceflights with SpaceX in 2021 and 2024, is likely to become the next NASA administrator and was voted through committee on Monday.

He now heads to a full Senate vote for confirmation.

SpaceX is a key contractor for NASA, but acting administrator Sean Duffy has criticized Musk’s space operation for being behind on the Artemis moon trip, which has seen several delays.

Musk lashed out at Duffy, accusing him on X of “trying to kill NASA!”

Duffy, who is the secretary of transportation, was handed the reins of the space program this summer by President Donald Trump, after he pulled Isaacman’s nomination following a clash with Musk.

Trump said at the time that Isaacman’s relationship with Musk represented a conflict of interest.

The renomination of Isaacman at the beginning of November signaled that the relationship between Trump and Musk was on the mend, and the Tesla CEO’s attendance at a White House dinner later that month solidified the return to camaraderie.

— CNBC’s Lora Kolodny contributed to this report.

WATCH: How SpaceX is fueling Elon Musk’s wealth surge

How SpaceX is fueling Elon Musk’s wealth surge

Continue Reading

Trending