TheChek News Flow

Judge concurs with jury's ruling that the statute of limitations on Musk's claims had expired

Jurors rejected Elon Musk’s claims against OpenAI, delivering a major victory to CEO Sam Altman in Silicon Valley’s biggest grudge match.

Judge Yvonne Gonzalez Rogers agreed with the jury’s decision on Monday that Musk waited too long to bring his lawsuit. The decision came after just two hours of deliberation following three weeks of testimony and legal arguments.

Musk, who co-founded OpenAI with Altman and President Greg Brockman in 2015, had accused them of violating a charitable trust and unjustly enriching themselves when they transformed the AI lab from a charity into a largely for-profit company. He accused Microsoft, an early backer, of aiding and abetting the breach of charitable trust.

The nine-member jury and Judge Gonzalez Rogers were persuaded by OpenAI’s lawyers’ arguments that Musk already knew—or could have found out—about the actions he claims were unjust by the time he posted on X in 2020 that “OpenAI is essentially captured by Microsoft.”

The ruling is a defeat for Musk, who also competes with OpenAI through the xAI unit of his SpaceX company, which is currently preparing an IPO. But the case has given Musk a forum to draw attention to criticisms of Altman and OpenAI that he has made for years on X.

Musk’s next moves remain unclear. Two people close to Musk were dismissive of the verdict, saying OpenAI was expected to win and that Musk lost nothing by trying.

Musk’s lawyer, Steven Molo, said on Monday following the jury’s decision that “our intention is to appeal.” He pointed out that the jury did not decide whether a breach occurred, and the appeals court can decide whether the jury received proper instructions about the statute of limitations.

Lawyers for Musk are asking the court to allow them to pursue the appeal before resolving separate antitrust claims by Musk against OpenAI and Microsoft, which the court early on had delayed to a later trial to prioritize the charitable trust and unjust enrichment claims. OpenAI also has made counterclaims against Musk that the judge had previously stayed for later as well.

Musk alleges that OpenAI and Microsoft have used their shared market influence to restrain trade and have attempted to monopolize the AI industry—something those companies have denied. Judge Gonzalez Rogers on Monday cast doubt on those antitrust claims, saying that the law aims to protect competition and “there is a lot of competition” in the AI industry. “I thought that if there was anything that had legs, it was this half of the case,” she said, referring to the now resolved claims of breach of charitable trust and unjust enrichment.

Monday’s decision reduces significant uncertainties that have clouded OpenAI’s future as it grapples with intensifying competition and prepares for an IPO that could come as soon as this year.

Musk had been asking the court to compel OpenAI to unwind a restructuring last year that paved the way for the possible IPO, transfer of billions of dollars from its for-profit arm to its nonprofit and remove Altman from the nonprofit’s board.

Musk’s lawyers had argued that the extent of OpenAI’s wrongdoing only became clear to Musk by degrees, and it was Microsoft’s deal to invest $10 billion in OpenAI in 2023 that constituted the main breach of charitable trust. That deal departed from earlier ones by taking on more investment and allowing the caps on investors’ potential returns to increase by 20% per year, the lawyers argued.

Bill Savitt, OpenAI’s outside counsel, said that although the verdict was based on the statute of limitations, “it’s not a technical decision, it’s a substantive one.” He said it confirms that the case “was a hypocritical attempt to sabotage a competitor and to overcome a long history of very bad predictions about what OpenAI has been and will become.”

A Microsoft spokesperson welcomed the verdict and said it remains “committed to our work with OpenAI to advance and scale AI for people and organizations around the world.”

Anthropic announced Monday it has acquired Stainless, a startup founded by former Stripe engineer Alex Rattray whose software is widely used by rival AI labs, including OpenAI and Google.

Anthropic didn’t disclose terms of the deal. However, The Information reported last week that the company was in talks to acquire Stainless, which is backed by Sequoia Capital and Andreessen Horowitz, for more than $300 million.

The acquisition will take a key infrastructure supplier out of the hands of Anthropic’s competitors. The company told TechCrunch it will wind down all hosted Stainless products, including its SDK generator. An Anthropic spokesperson said Stainless customers will still own the SDKs they’ve generated to date and have full rights to modify and extend them however they wish.

The New York-based startup, founded in 2022, rose to prominence in the emerging AI industry for automating the creation and maintenance of software development kits, or SDKs — the libraries developers use to interact with APIs.

Rattray developed software that could take API specifications and turn them into production-ready SDKs across multiple programming languages, including Python, TypeScript, Kotlin, Go, and Java. It became a popular tool because the platform automatically updates the SDKs as APIs change and eliminated the time-consuming process of manually maintaining them.

The technology is particularly valuable to companies like Anthropic, OpenAI, Google, Replicate, Runway, and Cloudflare that are building AI agents that can connect to external software and complete tasks on behalf of users. Stainless’s SDK tools are an easy way to build and maintain those connections — but going forward, the tools will only be available to Anthropic, not its competitors.

According to Anthropic, Stainless software has powered the generation of every official Anthropic SDK since the earliest days of its API.

“I started Stainless because SDKs deserve as much care as the APIs they wrap,” Rattray said in a press release posted Monday. “Anthropic was one of the first teams to bet on this with us. We have been watching what developers have built on Claude over the last few years, which made bringing our teams together an easy decision. The team gets to keep doing the work we love, on the platform where it matters most.”

US president says the UAE, Saudi Arabia and Qatar requested that Washington suspend operation

Donald Trump said that he suspended a military attack on Iran that was scheduled for Tuesday at the request of US allies in the Middle East, claiming that “serious negotiations were now” taking place with Tehran.

The US president posted on Truth Social that the leaders of Qatar, Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates had asked that Washington suspend a planned operation “which was scheduled for tomorrow”.

Trump added that “in their opinion, as Great Leaders and Allies, a Deal will be made, which will be very acceptable to the United States of America”. He wrote that the deal would include “NO NUCLEAR WEAPONS FOR IRAN!”

It is the latest sign that the fragile ceasefire that Iran and the US have observed since early April is coming under strain as Tehran and Washington struggle to find a mutually acceptable agreement to end the conflict.

Trump added that he had instructed the US military to be “prepared to go forward with a full, large scale assault of Iran, on a moment’s notice in the event that an acceptable Deal is not reached”.

Negotiations with Iran have stalled over disagreements about Tehran’s nuclear programme and the Strait of Hormuz, a strategic chokepoint which has been largely closed to traffic.

Trump has given contradictory signals about whether he intended to resume military operations against Iran. He had warned Tehran on Sunday that they had “better get moving, FAST, or there won’t be anything left of them”.

The US president was expected to meet with his senior national security advisers on Tuesday to discuss options for resuming the war, Axios reported.

Oil fell slightly on Monday afternoon in New York with Brent crude, the international benchmark, slipping by 2.4 per cent to $109.44 per barrel.

The UAE said on Sunday that a drone strike triggered a fire near its Barakah nuclear power plant, adding that the drone had entered its airspace from a “western border direction”. Iran has repeatedly struck the UAE since the ceasefire with the US came into effect.

Saudi Arabia also reported on Sunday that three drones entered its airspace from Iraq, which is home to Iranian-aligned proxies.

Riyadh conducted strikes against Iran after they were attacked during the early phases of the conflict, according to people briefed on the matter. The UAE was also reported to have launched attacks against the Islamic republic.

Iran’s semi-official news agency Tasnim, which is close to the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps, reported on Monday that Iranian defences were activated on Qeshm Island, across the Strait of Hormuz, after they detected the presence of drones.

The AI boom requires an enormous amount of new power plants, chips and data centers. But it also requires something that’s less visible: new financial plumbing that makes it possible to lend against this costly hardware.

Miami fintech startup Barkr is one of the firms building the pipes, specifically for valuing AI chips being used as loan collateral, and has already attracted the attention of Nvidia. I recently met its CEO and co-founder, Thomas Galbraith, while moderating a panel in San Francisco about how lenders are underwriting the AI infrastructure build-out.

Galbraith sits in a very specific part of the complicated web of asset-backed financing.

His firm provides insurance-backed valuations of hard assets, like cars, art work and commercial equipment, which now includes AI chips. Barkr doesn’t lend the money itself, but gives lenders a number they can trust—and take to the bank.

This work takes backbone: If Barkr gets the price wrong and a borrower defaults, it pays the difference.

Founded in 2023, Barkr got its start calculating the value of assets such as collectible cars and private jets so that lenders could better price their loans. About six months ago, a lender came to Galbraith with a new challenge. “We‘re going to start lending against GPUs,” he recalled them saying. “And we can’t find anyone who can price them, let alone provide a guarantee on the price.”

While Nvidia graphics processing units have emerged as a new asset class over the past few years, asset-backed financings for the chips are not yet ubiquitous. That’s because lenders and borrowers often disagree on the residual value of the GPUs, and there’s no independent party that can iron out the discrepancy. That means the terms of GPU-backed financing aren’t favorable compared to deals involving traditional assets.

Asset-backed lending has always involved two risks: borrowers‘ ability to pay, and whether an asset’s value will hold up. Lenders have spent decades getting good at underwriting borrowers. Underwriting assets, particularly novel ones like GPUs, remains genuinely hard. Ask five firms to value the same GPU cluster and you will get five different answers, Galbraith said.

Barkr has customized several AI models to value assets being used as loan collateral, then wraps the valuation in a contractual guarantee backed by Munich Re and other insurers. For a lender, that changes the calculus entirely, he said. A trusted price means less risk for the lender and a lower interest rate for the buyer.

In the past six months, Barkr has aided transactions involving about $200 million worth of GPUs deals, and it expects to handle another $300 million in GPU deals before the end of the year. (That’s a relatively small number compared to Nvidia’s sales, and most GPUs are bought by world’s biggest companies, largely using their balance sheets.)

For comparison, three years ago, investment firm Upper90 gave cloud provider Crusoe $200 million in debt, which was backed by 20,000 GPUs. Similar deals have happened since but have not proliferated.

Making GPUs Boring

Barkr, which has 14 employees and raised $3.5 million in venture capital, treats a GPU cluster the way an appraiser treats commercial equipment, by asking what another firm would pay for the hardware if a borrower defaulted on their payments.

“We make them boring assets,” he said. “When you're looking at the insurance sector and how they think about assets and how they think about risk, the more uniform, the more boring, the more steady that it looks, the easier it is for the insurance industry to adopt.”

While the prices AI developers pay to rent GPUs can be volatile (and are currently going up), GPU resale prices are a lot more stable, he says.

GPUs depreciate, but they do so in a predictable way, which is what insurers and lenders want to see, he said. Barkr has found that Nvidia H100 chips, which came out in 2023 for around $30,000, are reselling for around $25,000 to $30,000 apiece, below a peak of more than $40,000.

Galbraith has been obsessed with valuation problems since the early 2000s, when he worked at a global insurance company analyzing the value of art and other luxury items for high-net-worth clients. The firm's very name is a nod to that obsession. It’s a reference to Bob Barker, the late host of The Price is Right, a gameshow where contestants guess the retail price of consumer goods.

Nvidia's Quiet Endorsement

After our event panel, Galbraith drove to Santa Clara for a meeting at Nvidia's headquarters. There, he said he met with Nico Caprez, vice president of AI infrastructure, and others on the Nvidia startups investment team.

Nvidia appears to understand that making its chips easier to finance is a huge opportunity. Nvidia employees have already introduced Galbraith to lenders who want to back GPU deals, he said.

Nvidia has two reasons to care. First, it wants an independent third party validating that GPUs hold their value longer than some skeptics believe. Second, it wants to see the capital markets open up so that companies beyond the investment-grade hyperscalers can access large amounts of GPUs at similar borrowing terms.

“We're solving a very specific problem that they are also very aware of,” Galbraith said of Nvidia.

Streamlining effectiveness evaluations à la Operation Warp Speed would unlock trillions in economic value.

With the Food and Drug Administration undergoing management changes, the huge amount of time and bureaucracy involved in ensuring that medical products are safe and effective has come into focus. Cutting a year off the FDA’s decade-long approval process would generate about $10 trillion in economic value, according to a new study from Unleash Prosperity of which I am a co-author. The enormous cost of delays should motivate the administration and Congress to re-evaluate the FDA’s practices more generally, as that could yield a deregulatory effort of unprecedented value.

Delays due to the FDA bureaucracy are relevant to the change in the agency’s leaders, as these pages have discussed, particularly for the roughly 10,000 rare diseases affecting about 30 million Americans. The FDA seems to have been staffed by regulators opposed to the industry and thereby the patients it helps.

Because of FDA delays, patients don’t have access to products they are willing to use, and future patients won’t benefit from innovations the agency makes prohibitively costly to pursue. In our analysis, we find that speeding up development by one to six years for FDA-approved medical products (small-molecule drugs, biologics and medical devices) would unlock between $10 trillion and $49 trillion in economic value.

This finding, using standard economic methods, mainly results from the value of what consumers gain beyond what they are paying for these products. If you are willing to pay $100 to brush your teeth for a year but a toothbrush costs $5, the multiple of consumer gains above price is 20. A substantial base of economic evidence puts this multiple around 15 for medical products, which had aggregated U.S. net sales of about $676 billion in 2024. Multiply these sales by 15 and you get into multiple trillions, as in our study. This suggests a massive gain from deregulating FDA approval.

Unlike other consumer-protection agencies, the FDA not only ensures the safety of products but also serves as the sole arbiter of product quality. This occurs through effectiveness trials that provide evidence on how well medical products work for an imaginary average patient, as opposed to real heterogeneous patients who differ in their assessments of the risks and rewards. This one-size-fits-all clearance applies to products already proven safe. Unfortunately, consumers and patient groups are often loud critics when it comes to these consumer-protection procedures.

The FDA could unleash trillions in value by taking six steps to shorten effectiveness assessments, akin to the methods of Operation Warp Speed during Covid-19. First, it could improve disease-specific guidance on the use of externally controlled trials and synthetic control arms. Second, it could extend the use of concurrent reviews, now limited to oncology products, to judge products for all serious and life-threatening conditions.

Third, the FDA and the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services could jointly publish a coordinated evidence framework to speed up market access. Fourth, the FDA could speed up premarket effectiveness approval through better incentives for manufacturers to report evidence of their products’ efficacy after market launch. Fifth, the FDA could rely more on artificial intelligence for approvals and postmarket assessments. Sixth, existing “right to try” regulations could be strengthened to enable more-widespread use.

The FDA should still ensure the safety of products before they go to market. The accelerated effectiveness assessments would still be complemented by existing postmarket product liability and false-advertising regulations. Most important, effectiveness would be enhanced by private-sector competition, the most valuable form of consumer protection.

The private sector already produces evidence to assess quality for off-label uses of drugs, which don’t require separate FDA approval. Under current procedures, once a product is cleared for safety, the FDA can take up to a decade to establish effectiveness for one particular use of a drug. But it then allows the private sector to judge effectiveness for subsequent off-label uses. That raises a question: Why wait 10 years in the first place?

The deregulation of medical-product approval would improve America’s standing as a medical innovator relative to China, which has a faster and cheaper approval process. China is currently 50% to 70% faster than all competitors and trials there are 50% to 60% cheaper than in the U.S. Consequently, China is growing rapidly in market share of global trial volume.

When installing new leaders at the FDA, the president should look to his own success in cutting permitting delays in infrastructure and real-estate development. In addition, Congress should streamline statutes that demand painfully long effectiveness enforcement by the FDA. Even modest improvements in the FDA’s approval process could yield gains measurable in trillions of dollars. After all, few assets compare to health.

Cédric Charbit is part of new team of executives at parent company Kering as it seeks to revive growth

Saint Laurent’s chief executive has said luxury groups must work harder to win back aspirational shoppers, as the French fashion house bets on menswear and China to revive growth for its struggling parent company Kering.

“We haven’t been good enough at retaining clients, we should do better,” Cédric Charbit said at the FT’s Business of Luxury summit in Puglia, Italy.

Charbit said that while the brand was very attentive to its wealthiest clients, others had fallen through the cracks and that more effort should be made to retain them. He added that Saint Laurent wanted to expand into underdeveloped categories such as menswear as well as preserve the brand’s desirability.

The comments come at a difficult moment for Saint Laurent and Kering, which have been hit by a prolonged slowdown in the global luxury market amid inflation and weaker consumer confidence. Kering has been under particular pressure as demand for Gucci, its largest brand, has slumped sharply, increasing scrutiny on the group’s ability to reignite growth across its portfolio.

While Saint Laurent has held up better than some rivals, sales have also weakened, underscoring the challenge of attracting younger and more aspirational shoppers without diluting the exclusivity on which luxury brands depend.

“The industry’s growth has been extraordinary but not sustainable,” Charbit said. “As we move forward, we will expand product categories, not only because the world is changing but it’s what the brand is about.”

Charbit took over as Saint Laurent chief in January 2025, succeeding Francesca Bellettini, who led the brand for more than a decade before moving into a senior role at Kering.

His appointment came as the French luxury group sought to refresh its leadership ranks. Last year, Kering also recruited former Renault boss Luca de Meo as chief executive in a high-profile bet that the turnaround specialist could help to revive growth at the struggling luxury conglomerate.

“Luca describes himself as brutal. I see him as direct and decisive,” Charbit said. “The luxury industry needs more of that.”

US group becomes largest shareholder in German company amid consolidation across food delivery sector

Uber has become Delivery Hero’s largest shareholder and left the door open to a full takeover of the company against a backdrop of consolidation in the food delivery industry.

The San Francisco-based group said on Monday that it had increased its stake in Delivery Hero and now held 19.5 per cent of the shares, in addition to 5.6 per cent in options. In a regulatory filing, Uber added that it had no current plans to seek control of Delivery Hero.

The move signals potential further consolidation in the global food delivery sector following DoorDash’s £2.9bn takeover of Deliveroo and the €4.1bn acquisition of Just Eat Takeaway by Prosus last year. 

Uber’s position will give it a blocking minority in the German food delivery group — whose brands include Glovo, Foodpanda and Talabat — meaning it will have influence over capital increases, acquisitions and changes to the company’s constitutional documents. 

Uber had previously held a roughly 7 per cent stake, after it acquired €270mn worth of shares in April from Prosus, which was previously Delivery Hero’s largest shareholder but has been reducing its holding to comply with EU antitrust requirements linked to its takeover of Just Eat.

Uber described the deal as “opportunistic” at the time, while Prosus’s chief executive Fabricio Bloisi previously told the FT that Europe was at risk of becoming “irrelevant in terms of technology” due to the bloc’s antitrust rules.

Uber said in disclosures that it had “no intent to acquire 30 per cent or more of the [Delivery Hero’s] voting rights”, which would trigger an obligation to make a takeover offer. But it left open the possibility of increasing or reducing its stake over time.

Uber is already expanding its food delivery reach in Europe after announcing it would enter seven new markets this year. The company’s Uber Eats app will go head to head with DoorDash-owned Wolt for dominance in markets including Finland and Norway.

The increase in Uber’s stake comes just a week after Delivery Hero’s founder and chief executive Niklas Östberg said he would leave the company by March next year. 

Östberg’s planned exit comes after years of shareholder pressure for change at the group, which has seen its share price drop about 70 per cent over the past five years as a pandemic-era surge in the stock unwound. Shares in Delivery Hero rose 5.6 per cent on Monday, taking their gains to more than 50 per cent this month. Uber’s share price was flat on Monday afternoon in New York.

In March, activist investor Aspex Management, which holds a 14.55 per cent stake in Delivery Hero, called on the company’s supervisory board to exit several markets and replace Östberg, arguing that the group should streamline operations and accelerate asset sales.

Scion of billionaire Arnault family who own LVMH is attempting a reboot alongside designer Jonathan Anderson

Dior chief executive Delphine Arnault has said the brand is reassessing its approach to pricing on some products as the luxury industry attempts to win back customers put off by precipitous rises.

Arnault is overseeing a period of renewal at Dior, which is the second-largest brand by sales at the LVMH group controlled by her family. She appointed star creative director Jonathan Anderson last year to help revitalise its image and counter falling sales amid an industry-wide slowdown.

Anderson presented his sixth collection for Dior — and his first cruise show — in Los Angeles last week. 

“We are working a lot on the leather offer and we’re very cautious about the prices,” Arnault said at the FT’s Business of Luxury conference in Puglia on Monday. “We can’t really increase the price of a product without increasing the perception of the quality and the product. It’s important to work on that.”

She noted that Dior had not increased prices on its Lady Dior bag since 2023, except for two currencies that had devalued. Anderson’s first designs for the house were rushed into boutiques on January 2 this year — including several lower-priced product offerings — to demonstrate the brand’s new strategy and look.

Price rises at brands including Dior, Louis Vuitton and Chanel in recent years have caused a backlash among some shoppers. Some luxury products are up to 1.7 times more expensive than they were in 2019 according to consultancy Bain, a factor that has caused middle-class shoppers to leave the industry in droves and even deterred some wealthier buyers.

Speaking alongside Arnault, Anderson noted that some luxury brands and shoppers had lost sight of the value of human touch in the high-fashion supply chain.

Dior, like other major luxury houses, has had suppliers caught up in a string of labour abuse scandals in Italy that have made the sector the subject of a Milanese prosecutor’s probe.

Italian officials closed the probe into Dior last year “without establishing any infringement” after the company agreed to remedies.

“The thing we have really struggled with in luxury today is what is the value of talented people making something — we don’t think about the hourly rate of the person embroidering the dress that might take up to three months,” says Anderson. “We have such a visceral reaction to luxury now . . . but if we don’t keep doing the embroidery, and we don’t keep having a couture atelier, then it will vanish.” 

Anderson added he had underestimated the media scrutiny he would come under after he moved from his previous role at LVMH-owned Loewe and running his own namesake label, despite being warned by Arnault that there would be a shift.

“I became a meme,” he said referring to a photo of him smoking by the Seine in the run-up to his womenswear debut last autumn that went viral.

“I have only been there for a year, the product has only been in stores for four or five months,” he said. “But the internet world wants you to turn the business around and create a perfect collection tomorrow. Things need time. A designer needs time.” 

Arnault said that Dior was her father’s favourite fashion house as it was the first he acquired in 1985.

Offer has drawn pushback from German lender and Chancellor Friedrich Merz

Commerzbank has formally rejected UniCredit’s roughly €39bn takeover offer as too low, urging shareholders not to tender their shares to the Italian lender.

In a statement on Monday, Commerzbank’s management and supervisory boards said UniCredit had failed to offer an “adequate premium” and lacked a “coherent and credible strategic plan” for combining the two banks.

The German lender said its standalone strategy would deliver greater long-term value for shareholders.

The rejection escalates the battle over Germany’s second-largest listed bank, which has previously criticised UniCredit over what it called “hostile tactics” by the Milan-based lender. UniCredit already owns a 26.77 per cent stake and holds a further 12.1 per cent through derivatives.

German Chancellor Friedrich Merz has said Europe needs large lenders but that his government is opposed to “aggressive” methods in takeover battles.

The Italian bank is offering 0.485 UniCredit shares for each Commerzbank share, valuing the target at about €38.7bn based on Monday’s share prices, below Commerzbank’s market capitalisation of roughly €41.5bn.

UniCredit’s all-share offer remains open until June 16, although the bank has said the deal is unlikely to close before 2027 pending regulatory approvals.