Netflix stunned the entertainment world this week when it declined to raise its bid for Warner Bros. Discovery, setting the stage for Paramount Skydance to win ownership of the Hollywood studio.

At the time, Netflix co-CEOs Ted Sarandos and Greg Peters said they were being financially disciplined. Now reporting in Bloomberg offers more details about why Netflix executives backed down from a bidding war that it seemed to win back in December. 

For one thing, the streaming giant’s shareholders appeared deeply skeptical that the acquisition was a good deal — Netflix’s share price declined 30% since announcing the deal, while the subsequent news that it was backing down sent Netflix stock up nearly 14%.

For another, Netflix’s commitment to the deal reportedly wavered after Paramount came in with an increased offer and seemed willing to go several more rounds in a bidding war.

By the time Sarandos met with Trump administration officials on Thursday, he may already have decided to concede. In fact, since President Donald Trump had previously warned him not to overpay, Sarandos reportedly told him, “I took your advice.”

Meanwhile, employees at Warner Bros. now worry about major studio layoffs and conservative political pressure on CNN.

Friday afternoon, just as this interview was getting underway, a news alert flashed across my computer screen: the Trump administration was severing ties with Anthropic, the San Francisco AI company founded in 2021 by Dario Amodei. Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth had invoked a national security law to blacklist the company from doing business with the Pentagon after Amodei refused to allow Anthropic’s tech to be used for mass surveillance of U.S. citizens or for autonomous armed drones that could select and kill targets without human input.

It was a jaw-dropping sequence. Anthropic stands to lose a contract worth up to $200 million and will be barred from working with other defense contractors after President Trump posted on Truth Social directing every federal agency to “immediately cease all use of Anthropic technology.” (Anthropic has since said it will challenge the Pentagon in court.)

Max Tegmark has spent the better part of a decade warning that the race to build ever-more-powerful AI systems is outpacing the world’s ability to govern them. The MIT physicist founded the Future of Life Institute in 2014 and helped organize an open letter — ultimately signed by more than 33,000 people, including Elon Musk — calling for a pause in advanced AI development.

His view of the Anthropic crisis is unsparing: the company, like its rivals, has sown the seeds of its own predicament. Tegmark’s argument doesn’t begin with the Pentagon but with a decision made years earlier — a choice, shared across the industry, to resist binding regulation. Anthropic, OpenAI, Google DeepMind and others have long promised to govern themselves responsibly. Anthropic this week even dropped the central tenet of its own safety pledge — its promise not to release increasingly powerful AI systems until the company was confident they wouldn’t cause harm.

Now, in the absence of rules, there’s not a lot to protect these players, says Tegmark. Here’s more from that interview, edited for length and clarity. You can hear the full conversation this coming week on TechCrunch’s StrictlyVC Download podcast.

When you saw this news just now about Anthropic, what was your first reaction?

The road to hell is paved with good intentions. It’s so interesting to think back a decade ago, when people were so excited about how we were going to make artificial intelligence to cure cancer, to grow the prosperity in America and make America strong. And here we are now where the U.S. government is pissed off at this company for not wanting AI to be used for domestic mass surveillance of Americans, and also not wanting to have killer robots that can autonomously — without any human input at all — decide who gets killed.

Anthropic has staked its entire identity on being a safety-first AI company, and yet it was collaborating with defense and intelligence agencies [dating back to at least 2024]. Do you think that’s at all contradictory?

It is contradictory. If I can give a little cynical take on this — yes, Anthropic has been very good at marketing themselves as all about safety. But if you actually look at the facts rather than the claims, what you see is that Anthropic, OpenAI, Google DeepMind and xAI have all talked a lot about how they care about safety. None of them has come out supporting binding safety regulation the way we have in other industries. And all four of these companies have now broken their own promises. First we had Google — this big slogan, ‘Don’t be evil.’ Then they dropped that. Then they dropped another longer commitment that basically said they promised not to do harm with AI. They dropped that so they could sell AI for surveillance and weapons. OpenAI just dropped the word safety from their mission statement. xAI shut down their whole safety team. And now Anthropic, earlier in the week, dropped their most important safety commitment — the promise not to release powerful AI systems until they were sure they weren’t going to cause harm.

How did companies that made such prominent safety commitments end up in this position?

All of these companies, especially OpenAI and Google DeepMind but to some extent also Anthropic, have persistently lobbied against regulation of AI, saying, ‘Just trust us, we’re going to regulate ourselves.’ And they’ve successfully lobbied. So we right now have less regulation on AI systems in America than on sandwiches. You know, if you want to open a sandwich shop and the health inspector finds 15 rats in the kitchen, he won’t let you sell any sandwiches until you fix it. But if you say, ‘Don’t worry, I’m not going to sell sandwiches, I’m going to sell AI girlfriends for 11-year-olds, and they’ve been linked to suicides in the past, and then I’m going to release something called superintelligence which might overthrow the U.S. government, but I have a good feeling about mine’ — the inspector has to say, ‘Fine, go ahead, just don’t sell sandwiches.’

There’s food safety regulation and no AI regulation.

And this, I feel, all of these companies really share the blame for. Because if they had taken all these promises that they made back in the day for how they were going to be so safe and goody-goody, and gotten together, and then gone to the government and said, ‘Please take our voluntary commitments and turn them into U.S. law that binds even our most sloppy competitors’ — this would have happened instead. We’re in a complete regulatory vacuum. And we know what happens when there’s a complete corporate amnesty: you get thalidomide, you get tobacco companies pushing cigarettes on kids, you get asbestos causing lung cancer. So it’s sort of ironic that their own resistance to having laws saying what’s okay and not okay to do with AI is now coming back and biting them.

There is no law right now against building AI to kill Americans, so the government can just suddenly ask for it. If the companies themselves had earlier come out and said, ‘We want this law,’ they wouldn’t be in this pickle. They really shot themselves in the foot.

The companies’ counter-argument is always the race with China — if American companies don’t do this, Beijing will. Does that argument hold?

Let’s analyze that. The most common talking point from the lobbyists for the AI companies — they’re now better funded and more numerous than the lobbyists from the fossil fuel industry, the pharma industry and the military-industrial complex combined — is that whenever anyone proposes any kind of regulation, they say, ‘But China.’ So let’s look at that. China is in the process of banning AI girlfriends outright. Not just age limits — they’re looking at banning all anthropomorphic AI. Why? Not because they want to please America but because they feel this is screwing up Chinese youth and making China weak. Obviously, it’s making American youth weak, too.

And when people say we have to race to build superintelligence so we can win against China — when we don’t actually know how to control superintelligence, so that the default outcome is that humanity loses control of Earth to alien machines — guess what? The Chinese Communist Party really likes control. Who in their right mind thinks that Xi Jinping is going to tolerate some Chinese AI company building something that overthrows the Chinese government? No way. It’s clearly really bad for the American government too if it gets overthrown in a coup by the first American company to build superintelligence. This is a national security threat.

That’s compelling framing — superintelligence as a national security threat, not an asset. Do you see that view gaining traction in Washington?

I think if people in the national security community listen to Dario Amodei describe his vision — he’s given a famous speech where he says we’ll soon have a country of geniuses in a data center — they might start thinking: wait, did Dario just use the word ‘country’? Maybe I should put that country of geniuses in a data center on the same threat list I’m keeping tabs on, because that sounds threatening to the U.S. government. And I think fairly soon, enough people in the U.S. national security community are going to realize that uncontrollable superintelligence is a threat, not a tool. This is totally analogous to the Cold War. There was a race for dominance — economic and military — against the Soviet Union. We Americans won that one without ever engaging in the second race, which was to see who could put the most nuclear craters in the other superpower. People realized that was just suicide. No one wins. The same logic applies here.

What does all of this mean for the pace of AI development more broadly? How close do you think we are to the systems you’re describing?

Six years ago, almost every expert in AI I knew predicted we were decades away from having AI that could master language and knowledge at human level — maybe 2040, maybe 2050. They were all wrong, because we already have that now. We’ve seen AI progress quite rapidly from high school level to college level to PhD level to university professor level in some areas. Last year, AI won the gold medal at the International Mathematics Olympiad, which is about as difficult as human tasks get. I wrote a paper together with Yoshua Bengio, Dan Hendrycks, and other top AI researchers just a few months ago giving a rigorous definition of AGI. According to this, GPT-4 was 27% of the way there. GPT-5 was 57% of the way there. So we’re not there yet, but going from 27% to 57% that quickly suggests it might not be that long.

When I lectured to my students yesterday at MIT, I told them that even if it takes four years, that means when they graduate, they might not be able to get any jobs anymore. It’s certainly not too soon to start preparing for it.

Anthropic is now blacklisted. I’m curious to see what happens next — will the other AI giants stand with them and say, we won’t do this either? Or does someone like xAI raise their hand and say, Anthropic didn’t want that contract, we’ll take it? [Editor’s note: Hours after the interview, OpenAI announced its own deal with the Pentagon.]

Last night, Sam Altman came out and said he stands with Anthropic and has the same red lines. I admire him for the courage of saying that. Google, as of when we started this interview, had said nothing. If they just stay quiet, I think that’s incredibly embarrassing for them as a company, and a lot of their staff will feel the same. We haven’t heard anything from xAI yet either. So it’ll be interesting to see. Basically, there’s this moment where everybody has to show their true colors.

Is there a version of this where the outcome is actually good?

Yes, and this is why I’m actually optimistic in a strange way. There’s such an obvious alternative here. If we just start treating AI companies like any other companies — drop the corporate amnesty — they would clearly have to do something like a clinical trial before they released something this powerful, and demonstrate to independent experts that they know how to control it. Then we get a golden age with all the good stuff from AI, without the existential angst. That’s not the path we’re on right now. But it could be.

China’s humanoid robots grabbed global attention with kung fu flips at the nation’s televised Spring Festival Gala, while Chinese phone maker Honor is set to unveil its first humanoid robot at MWC in Spain. 

Robotics was flagged as a priority under the country’s “Made in China 2025” plan, albeit originally focused on factory automation, rather than humanoids. Now, rapid advances in multimodal AI are accelerating so-called embodied AI — autonomous machines operating in the real world — a push officials say could help offset labor shortages and drive productivity gains. 

At this early stage of humanoid robot development, Chinese companies are outpacing their U.S. rivals in both speed and volume, Selina Xu, a China and AI policy lead at the office of Eric Schmidt said.

“China has a more robust hardware supply chain — much of it built up through the EV sector, from sensors to batteries — and the world’s strongest manufacturing base, allowing companies to iterate far faster than Western competitors,” Xu told TechCrunch. 

As a result, not only are Chinese robots cheaper but companies can also release new models more quickly, Xu noted, adding that leading Chinese player Unitree shipped roughly 36 times more units last year than U.S. rivals Figure and Tesla.  

Global humanoid robot shipments totaled just 13,317 units last year, according to a Forbes report released last month. That is a tiny base for an industry expected to nearly double annually and reach 2.6 million units by 2035. (Still, the figures should be viewed with caution. The report notes it remains unclear how many units represent commercial sales versus demo models or pilot deployments, underscoring the early-stage nature of the industry.) 

The top humanoid robot makers by 2025 shipments were led by China’s Agibot and Unitree, followed by UBTech, Leju Robotics, Engine AI, and Fourier Intelligence, underscoring Beijing’s early dominance in the sector.  

The biggest shift recently has been from “demo-driven excitement” to “operations-driven adoption,” Yuli Zhao, chief strategy officer at Galbot, told TechCrunch. Galbot’s humanoid robot, the G1, appeared at this year’s Spring Festival Gala, China’s annual, state-run lunar New Year’s Eve television show, alongside robots from Unitree Robotics, Noetix, and MagicLab. 

“More customers are asking: Can the robot run stably in real environments and actually take work off people’s plates? That practical pull is strengthened in China because policy and industrial strategy encourage automation upgrades, and the manufacturing ecosystem makes iteration extremely fast,” Zhao said.

While increased funding toward humanoid startups “has definitely accelerated” the pace of progress, “the most durable adoption comes when you can show reliable and repeatable value in production or service operations, not just a one-off showcase,” Zhao added.

Still, investing helps and Chinese robotics makers are securing it. Last year Unitree was valued at around $3 billion after closing its Series C, with ambitions to reach as much as $7 billion in a future IPO. Meanwhile, Galbot has raised more than $300 million in fresh funding, reportedly pushing its valuation to $3 billion, one of the largest financings in China’s humanoid robotics sector to date. 

U.S. companies are moving beyond flashy demos as well to focus on real-world deployments. Plus, they are pursuing their own aggressive goals. U.S. startup Foundation, for instance, plans to build 50,000 humanoid robots by the end of 2027. 

But China is already targeting a mix of affordable mass-market models and high-end applications, rapidly expanding humanoids across industrial, consumer, and rehabilitation sectors, according to a December TrendForce report.

Bottlenecks to China’s dominance

When it comes to AI systems and integrated software, it’s still unclear where Chinese humanoid firms truly stand. The industry is largely betting on vision-language-action models and “world models,” but both technologies remain in early stages. Nvidia currently leads the space with its end-to-end humanoid software stack, according to Xu, so naturally most humanoid startups in China are powered by Nvidia’s Orin chips. However, domestic chipmakers are developing homegrown alternatives, she said. 

Yet humanoid robotics makers are still working on fundamental problems. The challenge is enabling robot foundation models to predict the “next physical state” the robot will face in unpredictable environments, like how large language models predict the next word. But unlike LLMs, humanoid robotics companies can’t simply scrape the internet for training data, Xu said. So most are relying on simulation environments, which generates synthetic data, though real-world data collection remains essential. 

“Because of the data scarcity problem, humanoids are still far away from autonomy. The hardware is currently ahead of the software — the robot body can handle a lot more dexterity today than years ago (though it has reliability issues, as we saw with the robots that broke down at humanoid marathons), but the brain is still nascent,” the analyst said. 

Safety is a major hurdle for humanoid robots, too. One high-profile accident could trigger public backlash, and China is likely weighing how to roll out the technology quickly without moving too fast. As the industry matures, more regulations are expected.

Given the lack of data, Zhao believes that demand for humanoids will grow first in fairly contained workplaces.

“Early momentum is likely to be in industrial manufacturing, warehouse logistics, and retail, where tasks are repetitive, hours are long, and processes are clear — creating real demand and ideal conditions for humanoid robots to deliver value at scale,” he said. 

Other APAC players 

Humanoid robot development is not a two-country race. Japan’s robotics ecosystem — from startups to semiconductor heavyweights — is targeting humanoid mass production by 2027. Long a pioneer through projects like Honda’s Asimo, Murata Manufacturing’s Murata Boy, and SoftBank Robotics’ Pepper, Japan leans on precision and advanced control. One area unique to this nation: Humanoid robots are increasingly used in eldercare.  

Coral Capital CEO James Riney, who invests in tech companies in Japan, believes Tokyo will continue to thrive in the humanoid robotics industry. “There are three factors likely to drive the adoption of robotics in Japan. One is the labor shortage and the desire to depend less on mass immigration. The second is the widespread cultural view of robots as our friends — more Doraemon vs. Terminator. The third is that Japan is already dominant in many parts of the robotics supply chain.”

Hyundai Motor’s Boston Dynamics unit introduced a new Atlas humanoid for factory use by 2028, with plans to produce up to 30,000 units annually in the U.S. as part of its AI-driven robotics push.  

Still, for China, government policy, industrial strategy, labor shortages, and private capital are all converging to turbocharge the country’s humanoid robotics push. 

 “China’s leadership is best understood as a speed-to-scale advantage,” Zhao said. “The ecosystem here compresses the entire cycle — R&D, supply chain, manufacturing, integration, and customer deployment — into a very tight loop. That means humanoid companies can move from prototype to real-world deployment faster, learn from real operations, and iterate at a pace that’s difficult to match elsewhere.”