After a few weeks in which Anthropic seemed to making huge strides, not least against its bigger rival OpenAI, it was hit this week by the Defense Department’s threat to force it to let it do anything it wants with its models or face losing a huge business with the feds. To his credit, Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei went to the mat.

Then Friday afternoon, Trump weighed in, calling Anthropic a “woke” company, for wanting to avoid illegal surveillance of U.S. citizens and, oh yeah, fully autonomous weapons systems, which we’ve all so been looking forward to. And he has ordered federal agencies to stop using it immediately and barring military contractors from using Anthropic’s models — which it’s hard to believe it can mandate given how widespread the use of Claude models is.

So, good luck with that. OpenAI CEO Sam Altman said he also won’t allow his models to be used for domestic surveillance. Google folks are agitating against it as well. And no, Elon Musk’s Grok won’t be an alternative. Since it appears OpenAI’s similar or identical restrictions have now been accepted by the DOD, it comes down to this: another fit of pique by Trump against a company and a CEO who won’t bow down to him. What a way to run the country.

Meantime, OpenAI is making headway in Anthropic’s enterprise stronghold, signing deals with four big consulting firms. Meantime, Anthropic is accusing Chinese AI model makers of stealing data from its Claude chatbot. Though today I’m willing to cut Anthropic a lot of slack, many have noted its claim is ironic given how much it took, before asking, from authors and creators on the internet (and of course it’s not alone in that behavior).

Investors continue to get pickier as what otherwise look like really good earnings results elicit skepticism and worry — and even tech gods such as Nvidia are getting hit.

Some companies such as Snowflake appear to holding up. Others, such as Workday, not so much — and even with a good quarter, Salesforce stock suffered from the fears.

Leave it to Michael Dell to escape the fallout. Dell Technologies served up an incredible quarter supplying all those AI factories, memory shortage be damned.

There’s a rising consensus that a real SaaSpocalypse seems unlikely in the near term, even as the damage to SaaS company stocks mounts — $1.6 trillion and counting — though the concern may be easing a bit. Citadel Securities, for one, refuted Citrini Research’s “scenario” about AI permeating the economy so fast that it could tank everything, most of all jobs and wages.

Indeed, more researchers are contending that AI’s impacts so far have been far less than assumed. And if obstacles to data center construction keep rising, the impact could be even slower. Whether that’s a good or bad thing depends on factors such as, say, whether you think you’ll have a job in a few years.

And yet for all that… the money keeps flying everywhere. OpenAI just announced a $110 billion raise at a $730 billion valuation, including up to $50 billion from Amazon. Meta did a $100 billion chip deal with AMD and reportedly will do a multibillion-dollar chip deal with Google too. And countless vertical AI companies keep getting sizable rounds.

In the broader tech and media world, David Ellison’s Paramount won the battle against Netflix for Warner Bros. Honestly, it seems like Netflix dodged a bullet here, getting about $3 billion to walk away and avoiding the need for tens of billions of debt for what is surely a fading asset. If Paramount manages to tank WBD like it has CBS, Netflix could swoop in later for the remains, at a much lower price. But for now, it’s more once-mainstream media down the right-wing rabbit hole, plus no doubt a lot of job cuts, something our family is not happy about.

Next week, theCUBE will be in Barcelona for the MWC, once known as Mobile World Congress. And there are still some significant earnings reports next week, among them Broadcom, MongoDB and CrowdStrike.

Here’s all the enterprise and emerging tech news and talk this week from SiliconANGLE, theCUBE Research and beyond:

AI and data: Anthropic’s multifront battles

Analysis and food for thought

Figma’s orchestration bet: Why MCP network effects redefine software defensibility

Citadel Securities refutes Citrini Research’s stock-tanking scenario suggesting potential economic disaster from AI

AI’ s “centaur phase” consumes Silicon Valley (per Axios)

A growing number of forecasters now say the economy’s dependence on AI was overstated.

AI data center buildout faces new obstacles on multiple fronts (per Axios)

AIs can’t stop recommending nuclear strikes in war game simulations (per New Scientist) Pete Hegseth needs to listen. But he won’t.

Sam Altman defends AI’s resource consumption and ridicules Musk’s plan to put data centers in space

Benedict Evans asks a tough question: How will OpenAI compete?

RingCentral: Agentic AI is happening now and it’s adding value

Policy

Anthropic slams Chinese AI firms for harvesting data from its Claude chatbot

Even as Anthropic moves deeper into enterprise, it hits a wall at DOD But at least the enterprise software linkups it announced interrupted the SaaSpocalypse, as software stocks started rising Tuesday (except Workday, whose earnings outlook didn’t impress). And on Friday, the hammer came down: Trump orders federal agencies to stop using Anthropic products

Money matters

OpenAI raises $110B at $730B valuation, expands AWS and Nvidia partnerships

IBM, DoorDash shares drop as tech selloff continues Partly thanks to this Substack post from the little-known research firm Citrini Research, though it offers a somewhat hopeful comment at the end that “the canary is still alive.”

AMD shares jump 8% on $100B+ AI chip deal with Meta

Google and Meta reportedly strike new, multibillion-dollar AI chip deal

OpenAI allies with 4 big consulting giants as the agentic enterprise battle heats up

Anthropic acquires AI startup Vercept to enhance Claude’s computer use features

Google brings robotics software company Intrinsic in-house to accelerate physical AI

Pure Storage to rebrand as Everpure, acquire data management startup 1touch

ProducerAI, a platform that enables music creation using generative AI, is joining Google Labs

AI accounting startup Basis secures $100M at $1.15B valuation as firms adopt agent-based workflows

Profound raises $96M at $1B valuation for AI discovery monitoring platform

Humand secures $66M to scale AI-powered operating system for frontline workers

SolveAI raises $50M to help employees build their own enterprise software

Rowspace lands $50M from Sequoia, Stripe for AI investment insights

Nimble raises $47M to scale agentic web search platform for enterprise AI

AI insurance brokerage Harper raises $47M

Letter AI, a revenue enablement platform for go-to-market teams, raises $40M in Series B funding

Flux nabs $37M to automate printed circuit board development with AI

Slang AI, maker of a “superhost” for restaurants, raises $36M Series B round

Koah raises $20.5M to scale its ‘Adsense for AI’ platform across apps

MedScout raises $10M to deploy AI agents to assist medtech commercial and marketing teams

Multitude Insights raises $10M to modernize intelligence sharing for law enforcement

New models and services

Vast Data expands AI Operating System with global control plane, zero-trust agent framework and deeper Nvidia integration and analysis of Vast’s event: Vast Forward keynote analysis from theCUBE: Rebuilding the operating system for the AI era

Google launches Nano Banana 2 model with speed, image quality improvements

Red Hat readies its metal-to-agent AI infrastructure stack for hybrid cloud deployments

ServiceNow debuts Autonomous Workforce, EmployeeWorks automation tools

Deloitte launches toolkit to help organizations move from AI experimentation to long-term value

Salesforce launches telco-specific AI agents to improve sales and customer retention

Gemini can now book an Uber or order a DoorDash meal on mobile phones

Amazon’s new AI video transformation tool optimizes live broadcasts for vertical screens in real time

Lightrun debuts real-time AI site reliability engineer for autonomous software remediation

Atlassian embeds agents into Jira and embraces MCP for third-party integrations

IBM taps Deepgram to add real-time speech to watsonx Orchestrate

Databricks streaming data ingestion service is now available

Axonis unveils decision intelligence offering to create a system of record for AI-driven decisions

Confluent Intelligence adds Streaming Agents into the mix to enable agent-to-agent collaboration

Physical AI data infrastructure startup Encord lands $60M to accelerate intelligent robot and drone development

Around the enterprise: More chip startups stalk Nvidia

Money matters

The tally on the SaaSpocalypse scare: $1.6 trillion in market cap

Chip startup MatX raises $500M to speed up large language models

SambaNova steps up its challenge to Nvidia with new chip, $350M funding and a powerful ally in Intel

Edge AI chip startup Axelera AI raises $250M+ funding round

Amazon to spend $12 billion in Louisiana on AI data centers

Revel raises $150M to help engineers test complex physical systems faster

Ubicquia raises $106M to expand AI-enabled infrastructure platform

D-Wave Quantum’s Q4 revenue rises 19%, missing estimates, but shares ticked up

Google X spinout Taara launches Taara Beam to deliver fiber-like speeds through the air

HPE expands AI-native networking and computing portfolio for service providers

Vouched launches Agent Checkpoint to bring transparency and control to AI agents

Harness announces general availability of software artifact registry for DevOps

Sauce Labs launches ‘programmable infrastructure’ for mobile testing with Real Device Access API

Cyber beat

Money matters

Arctic Wolf Networks acquires Sevco Security to expand exposure assessment capabilities

Data protection startup Gambit Security launches with $61M in funding

New services

Veeam launches Agent Commander to tackle AI risk and reverse agent mistakes

Druva launches Deep Analysis Agents to cut forensic investigations from days to minutes

Aikido Security unveils Infinite, an automated self-securing software solution

Versa rolls out Sovereign SASE-as-a-Service to keep data and control planes within national borders

Elsewhere in tech: Paramount trumps Netflix for Warner

Netflix backs out of Warner Bros. bidding war after Paramount raises offer

Alphabet’s Aalyria space networking spinoff nabs $100M

Finland’s IQM to become one of Europe’s first listed quantum companies at $1.8B valuation

From lab to revenue: Infleqtion’s quantum sensing strategy meets Nvidia’s GPU ecosystem

Driverless car firm Wayve bags £1.1B investment to help launch on UK roads

Electric trucking startup Harbinger acquires autonomous driving company Phantom AI

Viture raises $100M for its extended reality glasses

Comings and goings

Intel Foundry Services head Kevin O’Buckley left to become Qualcomm‘s EVP for global operations and supply chain.

Dileep George, most recently with Google DeepMind, has joined Astera to lead its neuro-inspired AGI effort This is one to watch, as the future (perhaps far future) of AI has to find more efficient ways to do its stuff.

Menlo Security elevated President Bill Robbins to CEO as ARR passes $140M.

Agentic AI revenue orchestration platform Agentive appointed former Google Cloud leader David Keene co-founder and chief revenue officer.

David Luan, head of Amazon’s AGI lab, posted that he’s leaving the company less than two years after joining through the acquisition of his startup Adept to “to cook up something new.”

OpenAI hires Meta AI researcher Ruoming Pang, who joined Meta from Apple (per The Information)

Arvind KC was appointed chief people officer at OpenAI.

Shakeup on application security firm Mend.io‘s executive row: Co-founder and President Azi Cohen is now CEO. Co-founder and former CEO Rami Sass is now GM of Mend AI. Alon Klomek joined as chief revenue officer. And Stephanie Broyles joined as chief marketing officer.

Enterprise generative AI platform Writer appointed Brian O’Reilly its first chief operating officer.

Network security and compliance assurance firm Titania hired Andrew Woodford from Darktrace as chief technology officer.

What’s next

Events

March 2-5: MWC mobile world congress, Barcelona: TheCUBE and theCUBE Research will be onsite with analysis and interviews.

March 10: AI Trust & Cyber Resiliency Summit: A virtual event from theCUBE Research.

Earnings

Monday, March 2: MongoDB, Asana

Tuesday, March 3: Box, CrowdStrike, GitLab

Wednesday, March 4: Broadcom, Okta, Rigetti

Thursday, March 5: Marvell,  Samsara

Image: SiliconANGLE/Reve