This Week in Tech (Week Ending Mar 13, 2026)
TL;DR - 🇮🇷 Iran; ⭐️Pentagon and AI; 🤝 M&A
Hey folks!
Happy Friday! 😎 Apologies for the skip last week - I started a new gig! So I was getting acclimated. Tech news below:
TL;DR -
🇮🇷 The US-Israel war with Iran has oil skyrocketing 25% and the markets rocky.
⭐️ The Pentagon and AI saga continues - An OpenAI exec quit in protest to OpenAI’s contract; Anthropic sued the Pentagon for its designation as a “supply chain risk” and then Microsoft got involved, filing a friend-of-the-court brief urging a federal court to temporarily block the Pentagon’s designation.
🤝 M&A: Meta acquired Moltbook to invest in AI agents; OpenAI acquired Promptfoo, an AI security startup; Zendesk acquired Forethought, a start-up that uses AI agents to automate customer service interactions.
👗Big money in discounted clothes: Quince hit a $10B valuation.
🌎 Macro (Economic) and Trends
🇮🇷The risks to the global economy are growing more serious as we entered the 2nd week of the US-Israel war with Iran. 🛢️Oil skyrocketed 25%+ (Drivers are paying an average of 20 percent more since the strikes on Iran began) and the odds of a US recession spiked to 38% on Polymarket. On Wednesday, Iran claimed responsibility for attacking a commercial ship in the Strait of Hormuz, the vital oil route that has been effectively closed off by the war in the Middle East.
Kalshi was sued by users for failing to pay $54 million to people who bet that Iranian Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei would leave office before March 1. The lawsuit is the latest wrinkle in the development of prediction markets, which have surged in popularity but face any number of questions over what they can allow on their sites and how they should operate.
👀 Jobs forecast: Just 9% of CEOs at large U.S. companies ($500+ million in revenue) plan to cut jobs due to AI this year. 55% expect to increase hiring in 2026 because of AI, while 36% expect no change.
🔬 Micro (Tech Companies)
🎶Live Nation won’t be forced to divest Ticketmaster - The DOJ and Live Nation agreed to a tentative settlement in Live Nation’s antitrust case.
💰YouTube pulled in $40.4 billion in ad revenue last year, which is more than Disney, NBC, Paramount, and Warner Bros. Discovery combined.
🚗Zoox plans to put its robotaxis on the Uber app in Vegas this year.
🌤️ Bluesky CEO Jay Graber steps down and will seek a replacement; Graber will stay on as Chief Innovation Officer.
Salesforce plans to sell between $20 billion and $25 billion in bonds as soon as this week, to help fund its recently-announced $50 billion stock buyback.
Amazon raised $37 billion in bonds in the U.S., to ramp up investments in AI. Amazon raised an additional $16.8 billion in Euro-denominated bonds in Europe. This comes just four months after Amazon raised $15 billion in bonds.
Layoffs: Atlassian laid off 10% of its workforce, around 1,600 people
🤖AI News
⭐️ Pentagon / Department of War
OpenAI’s hardware exec quit in response to the Pentagon deal that OpenAI took.
Anthropic sued the Pentagon, alleging its designation as a “supply chain risk” violates the AI company’s First Amendment rights and exceeds the government’s authority. Anthropic is asking courts to undo the risk designation, block its enforcement and require federal agencies to withdraw directives to drop the company.
Microsoft enters the chat: Microsoft filed a friend-of-the-court brief in Anthropic’s lawsuit against the Trump administration, urging a federal court to temporarily block the Pentagon’s designation of the A.I. company as a supply chain risk. Were they just doing it to be nice? Sure MSFT invested $5bn in Anthropic’s latest fundraising round but microsoft is one of the largest govt contractors in America - so it has alot more to lose from White House retaliation than any other company in Silicon Valley.
Google is quietly expanding its Pentagon work while Anthropic and OpenAI publicly spar over parameters for military use. Google is set to provide AI agents to the Pentagon’s 3-million-person workforce for unclassified work.
Anthropic launched Code Review in Claude Code, a multi-agent system that automatically analyzes AI-generated code, flags logic errors, and helps enterprise developers manage the growing volume of code produced with AI.
Anthropic is negotiating with a group including Blackstone — run by Steve Schwarzman, who’s close to President Trump — and Hellman & Friedman about creating a business to sell its Claude software to the firms’ portfolio companies.
Google rolled out new Gemini capabilities to Docs, Sheets, Slides, and Drive. The idea behind the new features is to make the apps more personal and capable to help users get things done faster, right within the platforms themselves.
Nvidia is planning to launch a platform for AI agents aimed at enterprise customers called NemoClaw.
Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang published a blog post describing AI as a “five-layer stack”: Energy → chips → infrastructure → models → applications.
🤝 Select M&A, Fundraises, IPO, Partnerships
M&A
OpenAI acquired Promptfoo, an AI security startup founded in 2024 to protect LLMs from online adversaries.
Zendesk acquired Forethought, a start-up that uses artificial intelligence agents to automate customer service interactions, for >$200m. It is Zendesk’s seventh and largest A.I. acquisition in the past two and a half years.
Meta acquired Moltbook, the AI agent social network that went viral because of fake posts. Meta said it hopes the integration of the Moltbook team into MSL “opens up new ways for AI agents to work for people and businesses.”
It’s no Warner Brothers but… Netflix will pay up to $600 million to acquire an AI moviemaking company founded by Ben Affleck
Google has officially wrapped up its acquisition of Israeli cybersecurity firm Wiz for $32 billion in all-cash, a full year after the companies announced the deal. This marks Google’s biggest acquisition in its history.
Fundraising
AMI Labs, the new venture cofounded by the Turing Price winner Yann LeCun, raised $1.03 billion at a $3.5bn pre-money valuation to build world models.
Quince hit a $10B valuation (‼️) with its latest $500M round. From the Information: DTC brands used to be all the rage - but since the heyday of the 2020s, brands like Allbirds and Rent the Runway are down over 98% from their 2021 IPOs. But Quince stands out - it already has significant revenue at a $2bn revenue run rate, and Quince gets that the new marketing rules are influencer marketing and word of mouth, not SEO and facebook marketing anymore.
Legora, an AI platform for lawyers, is now valued at $5.55 billion following a $550 million Series D.
Wonderful, an Israeli AI agent startup, has raised $150 million in a Series B funding round that values it at $2 billion, just four months after the company raised a $100 million Series A.
Partnerships
Thinking Machines Lab has signed a strategic partnership with Nvidia which includes the lab deploying at least one gigawatt of Nvidia’s Vera Rubin systems.
⚱️ Gold Panning - For those who reached the bottom
Sync music - This is music that exists to be paired — synced — with video, and it’s ubiquitous. An interesting little article about an obscure - but large - part of the music industry.
🩰🎭 Ballet and Opera social media having a moment - thanks to Timothee Chalamet’s comment heard round the world. ICYMI Chalamet ranked on ballet and opera, calling them “dying art forms”, and everybody had thoughts.
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