Main by morning: Anthropic wants to sue Pentagon, cuts to Oracle

Anthropic intends to challenge the US authorities' decision to deem the company a "supply chain risk," which effectively excludes its Claude models from defense contracts. Oracle is preparing to lay off thousands of employees to offset the cost of building data centers for AI workloads. On these and other topics - in our roundup of key events for the morning of March 6.

The head of Anthropic Dario Amodei confirmed that the U.S. authorities have classified the company as a "supply chain risk," which effectively excludes its technology from U.S. defense contracts, according to CNBC and Reuters. The company intends to challenge the decision in court. The conflict, despite the use of Claude technology during the U.S. operation in Iran, arose against the backdrop of Anthropic's disagreement with the Pentagon: the company demanded guarantees that its Claude models would not be used for fully autonomous weapons or mass domestic surveillance of citizens, while the military insisted on full access to the technology.

Anthropic is the first U.S. company to be labeled as a "supply chain risk" company, a designation previously given mostly to firms in U.S. competitors, such as China's Huawei. The restriction this label places on the company applies to projects for the Pentagon, but should not affect the company's civilian business; Microsoft, which plans to invest up to $5 billion in Anthropic, said its products could remain available to other customers.

Oracle plans to cut thousands of employees to cope with financial pressure due to the large-scale construction of data centers for AI, Bloomberg writes. The cuts may start as early as this month and will affect different divisions. Larry Ellison's company is aggressively expanding infrastructure for AI-intensive customers like OpenAI in an attempt to strengthen its cloud business and compete with Amazon and Microsoft.

Analysts estimate that a major investment in data centers could make Oracle's cash flow negative for several years - before starting to pay off around 2030. The company already plans to raise up to $50 billion through debt and equity markets, and is slowing hiring in its cloud division. Oracle shares are down more than 50% from their 2025 peak amid rising costs.

SoftBank is negotiating a loan of up to $40 billion to fund an investment in ChatGPT developer OpenAI, Bloomberg reports. We are talking about a bridge loan for about a year, which can be provided by several banks, including JPMorgan. Negotiations are ongoing and the terms of the deal could still change.

SoftBank CEO Masaesi Son is making a big bet on OpenAI: the company owned about 11% of the AI developer at the end of last year. OpenAI is preparing for an IPO that could value the company at around $1 trillion; in late February, the company reported raising $110 billion in investments from Amazon, Nvidia, and SoftBank.

European Commissioner for Trade Maroš Šefčovič said that he expects the US to comply with the terms of the trade agreement with the EU after the assurances received from the US side, writes Reuters. Earlier, US President Donald Trump signed an executive order imposing a 10% tariff on imports, which, according to US Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent, could rise to 15%, which could lead to higher duties on some European exports than last year's US-EU agreement provided for.

Against this background, the EU is strengthening trade cooperation with Canada, the agency notes. Ottawa, in turn, also seeks to reduce its dependence on the US and intends to double the volume of trade with other countries within ten years.

- Japan's broad Topix index was up 0.18 percent in March 6 trading, while the Nikkei 225 was up 0.4 percent.

- Hong Kong's Hang Seng index increased by 1.87%. Mainland China's CSI 300 index rose 0.28%.

- In South Korea, the Kospi index was down 0.52%, while the Kosdaq was up 3.27%.

- Australia's S&P/ASX 200 was down 1 percent.

- S&P 500 futures were up 0.18 percent, Nasdaq Composite futures were up 0.28 percent and Dow Jones Industrial Average exchange-traded contracts were up 0.21 percent.

This article was AI-translated and verified by a human editor