The Warfighting at Home

Top News

• POTUS praises Palantir: The AI-powered defense contractor — led by very public and outspoken CEO Alex Karp — has experienced a bit of a stock dip recently, along with just about every other software company on the planet. On Friday, Palantir fanboy and US President Donald Trump responded on his Truth Social platform, posting “Palantir Technologies (PLTR) has proven to have great war fighting capabilities and equipment. Just ask our enemies!!!” On his Substack, famed investor Michael Burry — the guy Christian Bale plays in “The Big Short” — confirmed that he’s maintaining his short position on PLTR, despite the President’s enthusiasm. He’s argued that the stock, which hit a peak of near $200 a share in 2025, is “wildly overvalued.”

• CoreWeave gets into the Claude business: Anthropic and the former T500 cloud computing concern — they went public in 2025 — signed a multi-year agreement that will find CoreWeave’s data centers powering Claude models. No specific numbers were released but Bloomberg reports this is a “multi-billion dollar contract.” It also means CoreWeave now provides infrastructure and support services for four of the largest AI model makers: Anthropic, OpenAI, Google, and Meta. If there is one thing we have learned over the last few weeks, it’s that a whole lot of people want to build things with Claude, and Anthropic needs all the compute they can get their hands on. So the timing here makes total sense.

• YouTube hikes the Premium price: YouTube raised subscription prices for both YouTube Premium and YouTube Music in the US. The Premium individual plan is jumping from $13.99 to $15.99 per month; family plans are rising from $22.99 to $26.99 monthly. Owners Google explained that the price hike “allows us to maintain the features our members value most,” like ad-free viewing, picture-in-picture mode, and higher video quality. As of March 2025, YouTube claimed 125 million subscribers across both the Music and Premium packages.

TWiST 500

Wired co-signed our inclusion of Germany’s Black Forest Labs in the T500 this week with a splashy profile. They’re the creators of the FLUX family of text-to-image models, which currently rank among the most popular options on platforms like Higgsfield. On major benchmark tests, FLUX models rank just below the frontier offerings from OpenAI and Google.

This isn’t entirely surprising, as Black Forest’s three co-founders — Robin Rombach, Andreas Blattman, and Patrick Esser — were part of the team behind Stability AI and Stable Diffusion, one of the original landmark text-to-image offerings that helped set the tone for the entire industry. Black Forest’s work deals with “latent diffusion,” a process that allows them to generate extremely detailed images while using just a fraction of the compute of rivals like Google’s Veo3 or Nano Banana.

They’re Germany’s #1 most valuable AI company, after closing a $300 million Series B late last year at a $3.25 billion valuation. Meta also locked in a significant multi-year contract with Black Forest, valued at $140 million, just last year. Other customers include Adobe, Canva, Netflix, and xAI.

Blattman also tells Wired that Black Forest is expanding soon into the world of physical AI as well. They’re in talks with hardware companies to provide models for robots, smart glasses, and other physical devices. – Lon

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This Week in Startups

E2273: Anthropic’s Mythos is so dangerous… you’re NOT ALLOWED to use it! Jason and Alex explore the potential for Project Glasswing, and whether this modern-day Manhattan Project can keep us safe from the cyberthreats to come, along with guest AI expert and Neurometric CEO Rob May. Plus we’re checking out Death By Clawd — the website that tells you how long your startup has to live before it’s Claude-shotted — along with creator, Gyani aka “The G-Man.”

E2272: It’s an OpenClaw all-expert panel on TWiST, with three of our favorite developers and vibecoders: Ryan Carson, Alex Finn, and Yazin Alirhayim. They’re talking about Anthropic cutting off Claude subscriptions from OpenClaw, checking out Google’s Gemma 4 release, and demoing their latest projects: ClawChief, Agent Henry, and Sidecast.

E2271: AI “holding company” Feltsense asked their swarm of founder agents to recreate every startup from Y Combinator’s Winter ‘26 cohort. We’re checking out the results with founder Marik Hazan and asking… is this viral-ready approach TOO aggressive? PLUS a live demo of Boardy from founder Andrew D’Souza and Jason’s thoughts on Steve Jobs’ legacy on the 50th anniversary of Apple Computers.

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