☕️ Apple in talks to settle DOJ case

Hi there, this is your daily ☕️ Techpresso.

In today's newsletter:

🍎 Apple in talks to settle DOJ case

☁️ Anthropic eyes $10B Meta compute deal

👀 AWS bug billed some customers billions

🚀 SpaceX may sell Pentagon AI computing

📱 US lifts TikTok ban on federal devices

Plus: 🎁 11 other news you might like, 🧰 4 tools, and 📚 4 papers.

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• Apple and the US Department of Justice are in talks to settle the government's 2024 antitrust lawsuit, which accused the company of running an illegal "smartphone monopoly," according to a Bloomberg report.
• The lawsuit targets five parts of the iPhone experience: super apps, cloud gaming, third-party messaging, smartwatches, and digital wallets, and Apple has made "multiple offers" this year to close the case, though no deal is guaranteed.
• Apple has already made changes to address some concerns, such as adding RCS to Messages, starting a Mini Apps Partner Program, and opening up the iPhone's NFC chip to outside developers.

• Meta is in talks to lease data center compute to Anthropic in a deal worth up to $10 billion over multiple years, according to the New York Times, though either side could still walk away.
• Anthropic pitched the arrangement in June, and Meta is still reviewing it, seeing a chance to monetize excess capacity that CEO Mark Zuckerberg said he might sell if the company's own AI demand slowed down.
• Anthropic has already signed a separate $45 billion deal and is hiring former Google executives to build its own data centers, while Meta wants to recoup its heavy spending on AI infrastructure.

• An Amazon Web Services glitch in the billing portal shocked some cloud customers on Friday with estimates claiming they owed millions or even billions of dollars for services they never actually used.
• Amazon said the trouble started late Thursday and traced it to its billing computation subsystem, but a rollback of a recent change failed to fix the problem, which was expected to drag on for several more hours.
• Screenshots posted on Reddit showed one customer facing a roughly $2.5 billion estimate for the month, with others ranging into the hundreds of millions, though Amazon confirmed the numbers don't reflect real usage or charges.

• SpaceX is in talks with the Pentagon to rent out its data-center space for running AI models, an arrangement that could cost the Department of Defense billions of dollars, though the discussions could still collapse.
• Musk has built up unused computing power in Memphis, with his AI startup xAI, now part of SpaceX, tapping only 11 percent of its total capacity, so selling the surplus could bring in badly needed money.
• SpaceX lost $5 billion last year while xAI burned through $6.4 billion, and the deal would extend Musk's ties to the military, which already gave him Space Force contracts worth $2.29 billion and $4.16 billion in May.

• The US Department of Justice has cleared federal employees to install TikTok on government devices, saying the app's current version no longer carries the national security risks that led to its 2022 ban.
• The change follows a deal finalized in January that created the TikTok US Data Security Joint Venture, majority-owned by American investors including Oracle, with ByteDance keeping just under a 20 percent stake.
• The Justice Department said the new venture runs independently of ByteDance and rebuilt the recommendation algorithm and cybersecurity setup, though individual agencies can still block TikTok for reasons like worker productivity.