Anthropic in a blog post said Claude will remain ad free and its users won't see sponsored links adjacent to conversations. The move highlights how Anthropic and OpenAI are carving out different strategies with the former focused on business usage.

"We want our users to trust Claude to help them keep thinking—about their work, their challenges, and their ideas.

Our experience of using the internet has made it easy to assume that advertising on the products we use is inevitable. But open a notebook, pick up a well-crafted tool, or stand in front of a clean chalkboard, and there are no ads in sight.

We think Claude should work the same way."

 

Uber's fourth quarter non-GAAP earnings of 71 cents a share missed estimates by 9 cents. However, revenue of $14.37 billion, up 20% from a year ago, topped estimates. The company ended the year with more than 200 million monthly users. Dara Khosrowshahi, CEO of Uber, said in prepared remarks: "As a result of our focus on cross-platform engagement, 40% of Uber customers are now using multiple products, driving frequency higher and building long-term loyalty."

The company also addressed autonomous vehicles concerns and impact on Uber. 

Texas Instruments said it will buy Silicon Labs for $231 a share, or $7.5 billion. TI will pay all cash. TI's plan is to leverage Silicon Labs embedded wireless portfolio and become an leading IoT player. 

Qualtrics said it has named Jason Maynard CEO. Maynard joins Qualtrics from Oracle where he was EVP of Revenue Operations. He joined Oracle via the 2016 acquisition of NetSuite. Maynard's mandate is to accelerate growth, drive product clarity and position Qualtrics as an AI-driven experience intelligence layer. 

Constellation Research analyst Chirag Mehta outlines India's strategy for AI and building an ecosystem. "This strategy is clear: make India a base for global compute, deepen the build ecosystem behind it, and let the partner economy scale on top. The question is not intent. The question is execution," said Mehta. 

Enterprise software vendors are bonkers for forward deployed engineers as the model to deliver value. Palantir, which pioneered the FDE model, is on the AI version. On Palantir's earnings call, CTO Shyam Sankar said Palantir's AI FDE is developing well. Palantir has created an AI agent FDE. "AI FDE continues to delight. AI FDE is now capable of powering complex SAP ERP migrations from ECC to S/4, years of work now done in as little as 2 weeks. And we are generalizing AI FDE's capabilities to do this for a broader and broader set of problems at our customers," said Sankar.

SpaceX acquires xAI in move aimed at accelerating space-base AI data centers. We assume the negotiation went well between Elon Musk and himself. Elon Musk said in a SpaceX post that the goal of the xAI merger is to "form the most ambitious, vertically-integrated innovation engine on (and off) Earth, with AI, rockets, space-based internet, direct-to-mobile device communications and the world’s foremost real-time information and free speech platform." 

OpenText said it will sell Vertica to Rocket Software for $150 million in cash to reduce debt. OpenText said it is selling off non-core assets to improve its balance sheet and focus its efforts. Vertica contributed $80 million in annual revenue to OpenText. In January, OpenText sold its eDocs business to NetDocuments Software for $163 million. 

Anthropic released a paper on disempowerment usage in AI by analyzing Claude conversations. 
The paper examines beliefs, values and actions in a dataset of 1.5 million Claude.ai conversations. Disempowerment, where a user's autonomous judgment is fundamentally compromised, occurs in roughly 1 in 1,000 to 1 in 10,000 conversations. Although that's rare, there's a large number of people affected. If you were to lump in all usage across models, the number of humans affected swells. here's what disempowerment looks like in practice. 

Ninety percent of private equity firms and 80% of corporations see mergers and acquisitions picking up in 2026, according to Deloitte.

Bain found in a survey of 1,000 global executives and employees that 88% of leaders are confident that their reorganizations will work. Only 36% of employees agree. Just a data nugget to keep in mind amid the layoff announcements.

Here are a few interesting reads from this weekend. 

• How OpenAI built its in-house data agent. Interesting look at bespoke agent applied to internal use cases. Short version: It’s a lot of work and architecture and probably a small army of forward deployed engineers.
• Anthropic on how coding assistants affect skill development. “On average, participants in the AI group finished about two minutes faster, although the difference was not statistically significant. There was, however, a significant difference in test scores: the AI group averaged 50% on the quiz, compared to 67% in the hand-coding group—or the equivalent of nearly two letter grades (Cohen's d=0.738, p=0.01). The largest gap in scores between the two groups was on debugging questions, suggesting that the ability to understand when code is incorrect and why it fails may be a particular area of concern if AI impedes coding development.”
• Carbuzz on how Tech Mahindra built a better Jeep than Jeep. The license and iterate approach and how Tech Mahindra kept Jeep’s spirt more than Stellantis, which turned Jeep into a luxury-priced vehicle that’s recalled every 15 minutes. But I digress. 
• ArsTechnica on Moltbook, a Reddit-ish network where AI agents riff. Moltbook has received a lot of discussion and tech press. I’m debating whether I should put this in the critical thinking or critical ignoring category.