Tech
Microsoft and a16z set aside differences, join hands in plea against AI regulation
Two of the biggest forces in two deeply intertwined tech ecosystems — large incumbents and startups — have taken a break from counting their money to jointly plead that the government cease and desist from even pondering regulations that might affect their financial interests, or as they like to call it, innovation.
“Our two companies might not agree on everything, but this is not about our differences,” writes this group of vastly disparate perspectives and interests: Founding a16z partners Marc Andreessen and Ben Horowitz, and Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella and President/Chief Legal Officer Brad Smith. A truly intersectional assemblage, representing both big business and big money.
But it’s the little guys they’re supposedly looking out for. That is, all the companies that would have been affected by the latest attempt at regulatory overreach: SB 1047.
Imagine being charged for improper open model disclosure! a16z general partner Anjney Midha called it a “regressive tax” on startups and “blatant regulatory capture” by the Big Tech companies that could, unlike Midha and his impoverished colleagues, afford the lawyers necessary to comply.
Except that was all disinformation promulgated by Andreessen Horowitz and the other moneyed interests that might actually have been affected as backers of billion-dollar enterprises. In fact, small models and startups would have been only trivially affected because the proposed law specifically protected them.
It’s odd that the very type of purposeful cutout for “Little Tech” that Horowitz and Andreessen routinely champion was distorted and minimized by the lobbying campaign they and others ran against SB 1047. (The architect of that bill, California State Senator Scott Wiener, talked about this whole thing recently at Disrupt.)
That bill had its problems, but its opposition vastly overstated the cost of compliance and failed to meaningfully support claims that it would chill or burden startups.
It’s part of the established playbook that Big Tech — which Andreessen and Horowitz are closely aligned with, despite their posturing — runs at the state level where it can win (as with SB 1047), meanwhile asking for federal solutions that it knows will never come, or which will have no teeth due to partisan bickering and congressional ineptitude on technical issues.
This newly posted joint statement about “policy opportunity” is the latter part of the play: After torpedoing SB 1047, they can say they only did so with an eye to supporting a federal policy. No matter that we are still waiting on the federal privacy law that tech companies have pushed for a decade while fighting state bills.
And what policies do they support? “A variety of responsible market-based approaches.” In other words: hands off our money, Uncle Sam.
Regulations should have “a science and standards-based approach that recognizes regulatory frameworks that focus on the application and misuse of technology,” and should “focus on the risk of bad actors misusing AI,” write the powerful VCs and Microsoft execs. What is meant by this is we shouldn’t have proactive regulation but instead reactive punishments when unregulated products are used by criminals for criminal purposes.
This approach worked great for that whole FTX situation, so I can see why they espouse it.
“Regulation should be implemented only if its benefits outweigh its costs,” they also write. It would take thousands of words to unpack all the ways that this idea, expressed in this context, is hilarious. But basically, what they are suggesting is that the fox be brought in on the henhouse planning committee.
Regulators should “permit developers and startups the flexibility to choose which AI models to use wherever they are building solutions and not tilt the playing field to advantage any one platform,” they collectively add. The implication is that there is some sort of plan to require permission to use one model or another. Since that’s not the case, this is a straw man.
Here’s a big one that I have to just quote in its entirety:
The right to learn: copyright law is designed to promote the progress of science and useful arts by extending protections to publishers and authors to encourage them to bring new works and knowledge to the public, but not at the expense of the public’s right to learn from these works. Copyright law should not be co-opted to imply that machines should be prevented from using data — the foundation of AI — to learn in the same way as people. Knowledge and unprotected facts, regardless of whether contained in protected subject matter, should remain free and accessible.
To be clear, the explicit assertion here is that software, run by billion-dollar corporations, has the “right” to access any data because it should be able to learn from it “in the same way as people.”
First off, no. These systems are not like people; they produce data that mimics human output in their training data. They are complex statistical projection software with a natural language interface. They have no more “right” to any document or fact than Excel.
Second, this idea that “facts” — by which they mean “intellectual property” — are the only thing these systems are interested in and that some kind of fact-hoarding cabal is working to prevent them is an engineered narrative we have seen before. Perplexity has invoked the “facts belong to everyone” argument in its public response to being sued for alleged systematic content theft, and its CEO Aravind Srinivas repeated the fallacy to me onstage at Disrupt, as if Perplexity is being sued over knowing trivia like the distance from the Earth to the moon.
While this is not the place to embark on a full accounting of this particular straw man argument, let me simply point out that while facts are indeed free agents, the way they are created — say, through original reporting and scientific research — involves real costs. That is why the copyright and patent systems exist: not to prevent intellectual property from being shared and used widely, but to incentivize its creation by ensuring that they can be assigned real value.
Copyright law is far from perfect and is probably abused as much as it is used. But it is not being “co-opted to imply that machines should be prevented from using data.” It is being applied to ensure that bad actors do not circumvent the systems of value that we have built around intellectual property.
That is quite clearly the ask: let the systems we own and run and profit from freely use the valuable output of others without compensation. To be fair, that part is “in the same way as humans,” because it is humans who design, direct, and deploy these systems, and those humans don’t want to pay for anything they don’t have to and don’t want regulations to change that.
There are plenty of other recommendations in this little policy document, which are no doubt given greater detail in the versions they’ve sent directly to lawmakers and regulators through official lobbying channels.
Some ideas are undoubtedly good, if also a little self-serving: “fund digital literacy programs that help people understand how to use AI tools to create and access information.” Good! Of course, the authors are heavily invested in those tools. Support “Open Data Commons—pools of accessible data that would be managed in the public’s interest.” Great! “Examine its procurement practices to enable more startups to sell technology to the government.” Awesome!
But these more general, positive recommendations are the kind of thing you see every year from industry: invest in public resources and speed up government processes. These palatable but inconsequential suggestions are just a vehicle for the more important ones that I outlined above.
Ben Horowitz, Brad Smith, Marc Andreessen, and Satya Nadella want the government to back off regulating this lucrative new development, let industry decide which regulations are worth the trade-off, and nullify copyright in a way that more or less acts as a general pardon for illegal or unethical practices that many suspect enabled the rapid rise of AI. Those are the policies that matter to them, whether kids get digital literacy or not.
Tech
SaaS in, SaaS out: Here’s what’s driving the SaaSpocalypse
One day not long ago, a founder texted his investor with an update: he was replacing his entire customer service team with Claude Code, an AI tool that can write and deploy software on its own. To Lex Zhao, an investor at One Way Ventures, the message indicated something bigger — the moment when companies like Salesforce stopped being the automatic default.
“The barriers to entry for creating software are so low now thanks to coding agents, that the build versus buy decision is shifting toward build in so many cases,” Zhao told TechCrunch.
The build versus buy shift is only part of the problem. The whole idea of using AI agents instead of people to perform work throws into question the SaaS business model itself. SaaS companies currently price their software per seat — meaning by how many employees log in to use it. “SaaS has long been regarded as one of the most attractive business models due to its highly predictable recurring revenue, immense scalability, and 70-90% gross margins,” Abdul Abdirahman, an investor at the venture firm F-Prime, told TechCrunch.
When one, or a handful, of AI agents can do that work — when employees simply ask their AI of choice to pull the data from the system — that per-seat model starts to break down.
The rapid pace of AI development also means that new tools, like Claude Code or OpenAI’s Codex, can replicate not just the core functions of SaaS products but also the add-on tools a SaaS vendor would sell to grow revenue from existing customers.
On top of that, customers now have the ultimate contract negotiation tool in their pockets: If they don’t like a SaaS vendor’s prices, they can, more easily than ever before, build their own alternative. “Even if they do not take the build route, this creates downward pressure on contracts that SaaS vendors can secure during renewals,” Abdirahman continued.
We saw this as early as late 2024, when Klarna announced that it had ditched Salesforce’s flagship CRM product in favor of its own homegrown AI system. The realization that a growing number of other companies can do the same is spooking public markets, where the stock prices of SaaS giants like Salesforce and Workday have been sliding. In early February, an investor sell-off wiped nearly $1 trillion in market value from software and services stocks, followed by another billion later in the month.
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Experts are calling it the SaaSpocalypse, with one analyst dubbing it FOBO investing — or fear of becoming obsolete.
Yet the venture investors TechCrunch spoke with believe such fears are only temporary. “This isn’t the death of SaaS,” Aaron Holiday, a managing partner at 645 Ventures, told TechCrunch. Rather, it’s the beginning of an old snake shedding its skin, he said.
Move fast, break SaaS
The public market pattern is best illustrated through Anthropic’s recent product launches. The company released Claude Code for cybersecurity, and related stocks dropped. It released legal tools in Claude Cowork AI, and the stock price of the iShares Expanded Tech-Software Sector ETF — a basket of publicly traded software companies that includes firms like LegalZoom and RELX — also dropped.
In some ways, this was expected, as SaaS companies had long been overvalued, investors said. It also doesn’t help that these companies did the bulk of their growing during the zero-interest-rate era, which has since ended. The cost of doing business rises when the cost of borrowing money increases.
Public market investors typically price SaaS companies by estimating future revenue. But there is no telling whether in one year or five years anyone will be using SaaS products to the extent they once did. That’s why every time a new advanced AI tool launches, SaaS stocks feel a tremor.
“This may be the first time in history that the terminal value of software is being fundamentally questioned, materially reshaping how SaaS companies are underwritten going forward,” Abdirahman said.
That’s because slapping AI features on top of existing SaaS products may not be enough. A horde of AI-native startups is rising at a record pace, having completely redefined what it means to be a software company.
Software is now easier and cheaper to build, meaning it’s easier to replicate, Yoni Rechtman, a partner at Slow Ventures, told TechCrunch.
That’s good news for the next generation of startups, but bad news for the incumbents that spent years building their tech stacks.
On the other hand, the market also lacks enough time and evidence to show that whatever new business model emerges the SaaS’s wake will be worthwhile. AI companies are sometimes pricing their models based on consumption, meaning customers pay based on how much AI they use, measured in tokens (which each model provider defines slightly differently).
Others are working on “outcome-based pricing,” where fees are charged based on how well the AI actually works. This, ironically, is the current approach of former Salesforce CEO Bret Taylor’s AI startup, Sierra, a quasi-Salesforce competitor that offers customer service agents.
The approach appears, so far, appears to be working. In November, Sierra hit $100 million in annual recurring revenue in less than two years.
There was once also the idea that cloud-based software like SaaS sells would never depreciate and that it could last for decades. This is still true in some ways compared to what came before — on-premises software, which companies had to install and maintain on their own servers.
But being in the cloud doesn’t protect SaaS vendors from an entirely new technology rising to compete: AI.
Investors are rightfully nervous as AI-native companies pop up, adapt, adopt, and build technology much faster than a traditional SaaS company can move. SaaS companies are, after all, themselves the incumbents, having replaced old-school on-premises vendors in the last era of disruption.
This SaaSpocalypse calls to mind that Taylor Swift lyric about what happens when “someone else lights up the room” because “people love an ingénue.”
“The most important thing to understand about the SaaS pullback is that it is simultaneously a real structural shift and potentially a market overreaction,” Abdirahman said, adding that investors typically “sell first and ask questions later.”
SaaS IPOs are on hold
Public-market SaaS companies aren’t the only ones feeling a chill from investors.
A Crunchbase report released Wednesday showed that, though the IPO market seems to be thawing for some sectors, there haven’t been — and aren’t expected to be — any venture-backed SaaS filings on the horizon.
Holiday said this may be because there is a lot of pressure on large, private, late-stage SaaS companies like Canva and Rippling given the persnickety IPO window, high expectations driven by AI advancements, and the unsteady stock price of already public SaaS companies.
Some of these companies, including mid-size SaaS companies, have even struggled to raise extension rounds in the private market, Holiday said, over the same fears public investors have.
“Nobody wants to be subjected to the volatility of public markets when sentiment can send companies into downward tailspins,” Rechtman said, adding he expects to see companies like these to stay private for much longer.
Meanwhile, the public market waits to get a good look at the finances of the first AI-native companies hoping to IPO. The scuttlebutt says that both OpenAI and Anthropic are contemplating IPOs, maybe even later this year.
The most likely outcome is something that weaves the old and the new together, as tech disruptions always have.
Holiday said most of the new features companies are toying with these days “won’t stick” and that enterprises will always need software that meets compliance regulations, supports audits, manages workflow, and offers durability.
“Durable shareholder value isn’t built on hype,” he continued. “It’s built on fundamentals, retention, margins, real budgets, and defensibility.”
Tech
Anthropic’s Claude rises to No. 1 in the App Store following Pentagon dispute
Anthropic’s chatbot Claude seems to have benefited from the attention around the company’s fraught negotiations with the Pentagon.
As first reported by CNBC, Claude has been rising to the top of the free app rankings in Apple’s US App Store. On Saturday evening, it overtook OpenAI’s ChatGPT to claim the number one spot, a position that it still held on Sunday morning.
According to data from SensorTower, Claude was just outside the top 100 at the end of January, and has spent most of February somewhere in the top 20. It’s climbed rapidly in the past few days, from sixth on Wednesday, to fourth on Thursday, then first on Saturday.
A company spokesperson said that daily signups have broken the all-time record every day this week, free users have increased more than 60% since January, and paid subscribers have more than doubled this year.
After Anthropic attempted to negotiate for safeguards preventing the Department of Defense from using its AI models for mass domestic surveillance or fully autonomous weapons, President Donald Trump directed federal agencies to stop using all Anthropic products and Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth said he’s designating the company a supply-chain threat.
OpenAI subsequently announced its own agreement with the Pentagon, which CEO Sam Altman claimed includes safeguards related to domestic surveillance and autonomous weapons.
This post was first published on February 28, 2026. It has been updated to reflect Anthropic reaching No. 1, and to include growth numbers from the company.
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Tech
Honor launches its new slim foldable Magic V6 with a 6,600 mAh battery
Honor launched its new foldable, the Honor Magic V6, with a massive 6,600 mAh battery and a new sturdy hinge ahead of the Mobile World Congress (MWC) in Barcelona.
The Chinese company has been obsessed with proving that it makes the thinnest foldables. This year’s version is 4mm thick when unfolded and 8.75 mm thick when folded. Compared to last year’s Magic V5, which was 4.1 mm thick when unfolded and 8.8 mm thick when folded. We are talking very thin shavings here, but that helps the company make those claims.
The battery is possibly one of the most impressive parts of the phone. The Honor Magic V6 has a 6,600 mAh battery, up from 5,820 mAh last year. Using Honor’s SuperCharge tech, the phone can charge at 80W through a wired connection, and at 66W wirelessly.
What’s more, Honor also showed a new Silicon-carbon battery tech with 32% silicon density that could push foldable phone battery over 7,000 mAh.
The new device has a 7.95-inch main AMOLED display with 2352 x 2172 pixel resolution and a 6.52-inch cover display with 2420 x 1080 pixel resolution. Both screens support LTPO 2.0, which means they can switch to variable refresh rates between 1-120Hz for different use cases for better content legibility and power saving.
The company said that it has worked on a new Super Steel Hinge with a tensile strength of 2,800 MPa, which would make for sturdy long-term usage. It also said that it has reduced the crease depth by 44%, making the display look smooth. Honor noted that the Magic V6 has a new anti-reflective coating for the external screen with a reflectivity rating of 1.5%.
The phone is powered by Qualcomm’s Snapdragon 8 Elite Gen 5 processor, has 16GB RAM, and 512GB of storage. The Magic V6 has three rear cameras: a 50-megapixel main camera with f/1.6 aperture, a 64-megapixel telephoto camera with f/2.5 aperture, and a 50-megapixel ultrawide camera with f/2.2 aperture. On the front, there are dual 20-megapixel cameras with an f/2.2 aperture.
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Honor is taking efforts to make the device have file and notification sharing compatibility with Apple devices. For instance, with Honor Magic V6, you can set up a two-way notification sync with an iPhone. Plus, the device also has settings to display notifications on the Apple Watch. The foldable has the ability share files with Macs with one tap, and it can act as an extended display as well.
Honor didn’t specify pricing for the device, but said that the Magic V6 will be released in select international markets in the second half of the year.
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