Can telecommunications companies leverage artificial intelligence to become, at long last, more than dumb pipes? Or, as so often has happened, will they get left behind in the coming platform shift?

Maybe third or 15th time’s the charm, and they certainly tried to make their case at this week’s MWC in Barcelona, with help from a variety of tech providers. SiliconANGLE and theCUBE had all the coverage. For a deeper dive, check out Dave Vellante’s and John Furrier’s Breaking Analysis on telcos’ prospects for a once-in-a-generation infrastructure reset as AI factories move to the network edge. And Intellyx’s Jason Bloomberg provided a roundup of the most important innovations he saw.

The battle between Anthropic and the Pentagon (really, our childish president) continues, even if CEO Dario Amodei says talks are ongoing, and the federal Anthropic ban somehow has started. OpenAI CEO Sam Altman spied an opening and clumsily tried to take advantage of it. So far, the whole mess sure hasn’t hurt Anthropic, whose annual revenue run rate has risen from $9 billion at the end of 2025 to $20 billion today — an unbelievable ramp.

After leading the AI boom thanks to its early embrace of OpenAI, Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella faces a lot of challenges amid new developments and strong competition. TheCUBE Research’s Dave Vellante and George Gilbert dig in.

The SaaSpocalypse doomsayers probably need to calm down, as earnings from software-as-a-service companies such as Box and Asana were fine, as were those from cybersecurity companies CrowdStrike and Okta. Broadcom and Marvell did well too, thanks to AI chips of all kinds staying in high demand. MongoDB, however, tanked — so any hint of a light outlook still stings, even the Iran not-war is attracting more investor attention now.

AI is threatening jobs in more ways than just replacing functions. Oracle is reportedly about to lay off thousands of workers mostly to free up cash for its massive AI buildout.

Next week Oracle, HPE, UiPath, Adobe and a few others report earnings.

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

AI and data: The war on Anthropic

Analysis and food for thought

Breaking Analysis: Satya’s sacrifice: Why agents threaten Office and how Microsoft responds

The infrastructure bottleneck: Why enterprise AI needs a ‘hyperspeed’ pivot

Anthropic launches tool to monitor jobs lost to AI systems

I worked for Block. Its AI job cuts aren’t what they seem (per the New York Times)

Breaking: CEO of an app to cheat on everything cheated 🙄

Policy

Drama at the Pentagon:

Anthropic says it’s in ‘productive’ discussions with Pentagon about Claude but still plans to sue on ban 

OpenAI revises Pentagon contract to address surveillance concerns But TechDirt’s Mike Masnick is rightly skeptical: OpenAI’s ‘Red Lines’ Are Written In The NSA’s Dictionary—Where Words Mean What The NSA Wants Them To Mean

Google responds to lawsuit alleging Gemini coached a man to kill himself It’s surprising how dumb AI can be, until you realize it’s all based on random stuff from the internet. This needs to be fixed. Hey, maybe AI can help us fix AI.

Money matters

Anthropic nears $20B annual revenue run rate amid Pentagon feud (per Bloomberg) “Up from $9 billion at the end of 2025 and roughly $14 billion a few weeks ago.” 🤯

Databricks CEO Ali Ghodsi finally revealed some concrete financials, likely a signal of a not-too-distant IPO: Audited fourth-quarter GAAP revenue was $1.29 billion and annual revenue run rate was more than $5.4 billion as of Jan. 30.

SoftBank seeks record loan of up to $40B for OpenAI stake (per Bloomberg) That’s after Nvidia downsized its OpenAI investment. Why does AI financing increasingly make me think of jenga?

JetStream Security, Guild.ai and WorkOS land fresh funding amid growing agentic AI infrastructure push

Agentic e-commerce startup ZyG gets $58M to help solo inventors compete with the biggest global brands

Unleash raises $35M to rein in AI-driven software risk

Data quality automation startup Validio raises $30M

Evervault raises $25M to scale its ‘secure-by-default’ approach to payment data encryption

New models and services

OpenAI launches GPT-5.4 with computer vision, tool use enhancements

OpenAI makes ChatGPT feel less ‘cringe’ with GPT-5.3 Instant update

Google launches speedy Gemini 3.1 Flash-Lite model in preview

Microsoft open-sources multimodal reasoning model with 15B parameters

Anthropic makes switching from competitors easier with new transfer memory tool

Closing the AI execution gap: Dialpad releases production-ready AI agents

Krisp launches listener-side, real-time accent conversion 

How Quill Meetings built an agentic ‘chief of AI staff’ that takes private meeting notes

Agentic business intelligence startup WisdomAI shifts from insights to action

Corvic Labs launched to standardize testing and governance for AI agents

Teramind launches agentic AI visibility and policy platform for AI tools

Around the enterprise: Telco’s AI dreams

Special coverage from MWC Barcelona

Breaking Analysis: Telcos’ last chance: Why the edge becomes hyperconverged

AI reshapes network economics as telcos face a make-or-break moment

Uncovering innovation amidst the noise of MWC

Telecom’s lofty AI ambitions hinge on breaking open proprietary radio networks

AI infrastructure’s $5T buildout may still be underestimated, Cisco president warns

Telcos bet on sovereign AI factories to unlock edge monetization

Intel unveils cutting-edge Xeon 6+ CPUs with 288 cores, targeting AI-ready networks

Google’s newest AI agents bring telcos a step closer to autonomous network operations

Analysis: How Salesforce aims to help telcos grow revenue with Agentforce for Communications

Telco transformation is coming — but people, not AI, will decide which enterprises win the race

Ahead of MWC Barcelona, Nvidia bets AI-native platforms will carry telecom into 6G

Money matters

Amazon to invest $21B more in Spain with focus on data centers

Nvidia invests $4B in co-packaged optics suppliers Lumentum, Coherent

Co-packaged optics startup Ayar Labs raises $500M round backed by Nvidia, AMD

Senior-care tech startup Sage raises $65M for platform that monitors resident activity in care facilities

Akave raises $6.65M for compute-agnostic, egress-free cloud storage

Tess AI raises $5M to expand enterprise agent orchestration platform

Exclusive: American Express partners with and invests in AI operations startup Traversal

Tangled announces $4.5M round to build GitHub alternative built on Bluesky’s AT protocol

Earnings

Report: Nvidia is working on a top-secret AI inference chip that could debut next month

AWS introduces Amazon Connect Health with AI agents to reduce administrative burden in healthcare

Exclusive: LucidLink enables collaboration directly on object storage

TransUnion unveils AI agent to accelerate financial analytics workflows

Behavioral health software startup Ease Health launches with $41M

Rambus targets AI memory bottlenecks with new HBM4E controller IP

Alkira launches partner program to boost services revenue and AI infrastructure wins

Policy

Big tech companies sign Trump’s voluntary pledge to protect Americans from rising electricity costs

Cyber beat

Money matters

Reclaim Security, ArmorCode raise funding to automate exposure management

Cybersecurity startup Cylake launches with $45M to build AI-native data sovereignty platform

Fig Security launches with $38M to map and validate SecOps detection and response flows

Attack & response

Cloudflare warns AI and SaaS integrations are fueling industrial-scale cybercrime

Google Threat Intelligence Group warns enterprise systems increasingly targeted by zero-day exploits

Zenity warns of inherent security risks in agentic browsers after Perplexity Comet findings

AI memory gold rush sparks high-speed bot assault on DDR5 inventory

New services

Cato Networks unveils Dynamic Prevention to stop stealthy, long-running cyberattacks

Uptycs and SAP team up to bring verifiable AI analysts to enterprise cybersecurity operations

DeepKeep launches AI agent attack surface scanner to map enterprise risk

Checkr launches Identity Verification to combat AI-driven hiring fraud

Elsewhere in tech

Humanoid robot maker Neura Robotics reportedly raising $1.2B in funding

New York Stock Exchange owner values crypto exchange OKX at $25B in new partnership

Hardware testing startup Nominal raises $80M at $1B valuation

Pico introduces next-gen VR OS 6 and teases 2026 flagship headset ‘Project Swan’

Comings and goings

Oracle plans thousands of job cuts in face of AI cash crunch (per Bloomberg)

Intel Chair Frank D. Yeary to retire, new chair is Dr. Craig H. Barratt (no, not the former CEO Craig Barrett).

Cloud data warehouse optimization firm Keebo named former Device42 Chief Revenue Officer Eric Shoemaker CEO.

Observability firm New Relic appointed former Proofpoint Chief Technology Officer for Engineering Michael Frendo its CTO.

Matthew Hull, Nvidia’s former global AI vice president, left to become Google’s AI infrastructure go-to-market vice president (per CRN).

Former AWS GM Ian Colle joined AI infrastructure and high-performance computing firm Penguin Solutions as SVP and chief product officer.

Work management platform Asana promoted Aziz Megji to chief financial officer.

Cybersecurity firm Trellix appointed Alex Au Yeung chief product officer and Zach Nelson chief human resources officer.

Alibaba’s Qwen AI model tech lead Junyang Lin said he’s stepping down down after major open-source AI push.

The Pentagon tapped former DOGE official and white supremacist supporter Gavin Kliger to lead its AI efforts. That should go well.

What’s next

Events

March 16-19: Nvidia GTC, San Jose: SiliconANGLE and theCUBE will be onsite with stories, interviews and analysis at what has become one of the premier AI conferences of the year.

Earnings

Monday, March 9: HPE

Tuesday, March 10: Oracle, Domo

Wednesday, March 11: UiPath

Thursday, March 12: Rubrik, Adobe, SentinelOne, PagerDuty

Image: SiliconANGLE/Reve