AI Daily: Meta to cut 10% of workforce in AI push

Catch up on the top artificial intelligence news and commentary by Wall Street analysts on publicly traded companies in the space with this daily recap compiled by The Fly.

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WORKFORCE CUT: In a memo sent to staff, Meta (META) said it intends to lay off 10% of its workforce, or roughly 8,000 employees, in an attempt to boost efficiency and offset its significant spending on AI, Bloomberg’s Kurt Wagner reports. The company said the cuts will occur on May 20, adding that it won’t hire workers for 6,000 open roles that it had previously intended to fill, the author notes.

ANTHROPIC INVESTMENT: Anthropic announced that Alphabet’s (GOOG, GOOGL) Google will invest $10B now in cash at a $350B valuation, and will invest another $30B if Anthropic hits performance targets, Julia Love and Shirin Ghaffary of Bloomberg report. Anthropic is a major customer of Google’s chips and cloud services, Bloomberg points out. Shares of Alphabet are up 1% to $343.52 following the report.

AI DEBT: Oracle’s (ORCL) $300B deal with OpenAI is testing Wall Street’s appetite for debt tied to the data-center boom, Peter Rudegair and Berber Jin of The Wall Street Journal report. Banks, such as JPMorgan Chase (JPM), have spent months trying to spread the risk of billions of dollars in loans they made to build data centers leased to Oracle in Texas and Wisconsin, people familiar with the matter told the Journal. The sheer size of these debt packages has pushed these banks to the limit with Oracle, resulting in clogged bank balance sheets and constrained financing prospects of future projects related to Oracle and OpenAI.

CURSOR: Microsoft (MSFT) considered buying AI coding startup Cursor in recent weeks but didn’t make an offer, CNBC’s Kate Rooney and Jordan Novet report, citing sources. On Tuesday, SpaceX said it’s obtained the right to acquire Cursor for $60B. Microsoft has been working to boost GitHub Copilot’s popularity, the report notes.

H200 AI CHIPS: Nvidia (NVDA) has yet to sell H200 AI chips to Chinese companies, citing difficulties obtaining permission from the Chinese government faced by potential buyers, Alexandra Alper of Reuters reports. While the Trump administration gave a formal green light to the sale of Nvidia’s H200 chips to Chinese companies, shipments have been delayed due to disagreements on the terms of the sales between the two countries, sources told Reuters.

AWS GRAVITON PROCESSORS: Meta (META) has signed an agreement to deploy AWS Graviton (AMZN) processors at scale. The deal marks a significant expansion of a long-standing partnership between the two companies as Meta builds its next generation of AI. The deployment starts with tens of millions of Graviton cores, with the flexibility to expand as Meta’s AI capabilities grow. The deal reflects a shift in how AI infrastructure gets built: while GPUs remain essential for training large models, the rise of agentic AI is creating massive demand for CPU-intensive workloads-real-time reasoning, code generation, search, and orchestrating multi-step tasks. Graviton5 is purpose-built for these workloads, giving Meta the processing power to run them efficiently at scale.

ELECTION SAFEGUARDS: Anthropic provided an update on its election safeguards, explaining what the company is doing to help Claude “meet the mark” ahead of the U.S. midterms and other major elections around the world this year. Anthropic said it is focusing on measuring and preventing political bias. “We train Claude to treat different political viewpoints with equal depth, engagement, and analytical rigor-a principle set out in Claude’s constitution. This is built into the model through character training (where we reward the model for producing responses that reflect a set of values and traits), and then reinforced through our system prompts, which carry explicit instructions on political neutrality into every conversation on Claude.ai.” The company is also enforcing policies and testing its own defenses. “Ahead of launching Mythos Preview and Opus 4.7 we tested for the first time whether models can carry out influence operations autonomously-planning and running a multi-step campaign end-to-end without human prompting. With safeguards and training in place, our latest models refused nearly every task,” it said. Anthropic says it is also focused on “sharing reliable election resources” and “providing up-to-date information”