President Trump on Tuesday pardoned Ross Ulbricht, the creator of the infamous dark web exchange Silk Road, which was best known as a once-thriving online marketplace for illegal drugs.
Trump announced the news in a Truth Social post, saying the pardon was in honor of Ulbricht’s mother and the Libertarian movement.
In 2015, a federal judge sentenced Ulbricht to life in prison for operating Silk Road under the pseudonym “Dread Pirate Roberts.” But last May, while on the 2024 campaign trail, Trump promised to commute Ulbricht’s life sentence while speaking to the Libertarian National Convention.
Ulbricht started Silk Road as a Libertarian experiment, and the party has been lobbying to exonerate Ulbricht of his crimes for years now. Within the Libertarian Party, many viewed Ulbricht’s life sentence as a symbol of government overreach.
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Fintech giant Stripe is laying off 300 people, according to a leaked memo reported on Tuesday by Business Insider.
The affected employees are “largely in product, engineering, and operations roles,” the memo said. Despite the layoffs, Chief People Officer Rob McIntosh said that Stripe intends to still grow its headcount by 17% “to land at about 10,000” by the end of the year. Doing the math, that means Stripe has about 8,550 employees currently.
McIntosh said the cuts are happening because it “became clear there were several team-level changes needed” to ensure Stripe had “the right people in the right roles and locations to execute against” its plans.
In November 2022, Stripe announced that it was laying off 14% of its workers, impacting around 1,120 of its then 8,000-person workforce.
The company has long been expected to go public but has instead continued to raise funds and conduct tender offers to provide liquidity to employees. It was valued at $70 billion as of last July.
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Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei says that the company plans to release a “two-way” voice mode for its chatbot, Claude, as well as a memory feature that lets Claude remember more about users and past conversations.
Speaking to The Wall Street Journal at the World Economic Forum at Davos, Amodei also revealed that Anthropic expects to release “smarter” AI models in the coming months, and that the company has been “overwhelmed” by the “surge in demand” in the last year.
“The surge in demand we’ve seen over the last year, and particularly in the last three months, has overwhelmed our ability to provide the needed compute,” Amodei said.
Anthropic is racing to keep pace with its chief AI rival, OpenAI, in an extremely capital-intensive sector. Despite having raised $13.7 billion in capital to date, Anthropic reportedly lost billions of dollars last year. Anthropic is said to be in talks to raise another ~$2 billion at a $60 billion valuation.
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French AI lab, Mistral, is working toward an initial public offering, co-founder and CEO Arthur Mensch said Tuesday in an interview with Bloomberg at the World Economic Forum in Davos.
Mistral is “not for sale,” Mensch said, adding that the company plans to open an office in Singapore to focus on the Asia-Pacific region and is growing in Europe and the U.S. “Of course, [an IPO is] the plan.”
Mistral, which Mensch launched in 2023 alongside former researchers from Google’s DeepMind and Meta, is often described as Europe’s answer to U.S. incumbents like OpenAI. The lab releases AI models and services that compete with offerings from OpenAI and others, including a ChatGPT-like platform called Le Chat.
Mistral has raised around $1.14 billion in capital to date from investors including Andreessen Horowitz, General Catalyst, and Lightspeed Venture Partners. The company was reportedly last valued at around $6 billion.
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President Donald Trump has signed an executive order aimed at restoring TikTok service in the U.S.
The order instructs relevant government agencies to “pursue a resolution” that “protects national security” while “saving [TikTok.]” Via the order, Trump is instructing the U.S. Attorney General not to take any action for 75 days to enforce the Protecting Americans from Foreign Adversary Controlled Applications Act (PAFACA), the act that effectively banned TikTok in the U.S. on Sunday, January 19.
“During this period, the Department of Justice shall take no action to enforce the Act or impose any penalties against any entity for any noncompliance with the Act,” the executive order reads. “Even after the expiration of the above-specified period, the Department of Justice shall not take any action to enforce the Act […]”
Trump’s move comes on the heels of a U.S. Supreme Court decision to uphold the PAFACA, which passed with bipartisan Congressional support during former President Joe Biden’s term.
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During his first day in office, President Donald Trump revoked a 2023 executive order signed by former President Joe Biden that sought to reduce the potential risks AI poses to consumers, workers, and national security.
Biden’s executive order directed the Commerce Department’s National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) to author guidance that helps companies identify — and correct for — flaws in models, including biases. The executive order also required developers of AI systems to share the results of safety tests with the U.S. government before they were released to the public.
Critics allied with Trump argued that the executive order’s reporting requirements were onerous and effectively forced companies to disclose their trade secrets. During his campaign, Trump promised policies that would “support AI development rooted in free speech and human flourishing” — but declined to go into detail.
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