TheChek News Flow

It’s turning out to be a huge year for CarPlay, surprising many of us after years of middling updates. Among the host of new CarPlay features coming in iOS 26, there’s a key fix for what’s long been the most annoying Messages issue for me: the lack of tapbacks support.

CarPlay in iOS 26 adds support for Messages tapbacks

Ever since Apple unveiled the “next generation of CarPlay” in 2022, new updates for the standard CarPlay experience have been fairly underwhelming.

But things are starting to change, with CarPlay Ultra’s launch finally arriving and iOS 26 bringing a packed lineup of new CarPlay features.

One such feature is the kind of low-hanging fruit that serves as perfect evidence of CarPlay’s previous lack of attention from Apple.

Tapbacks are a core feature of the Messages app, and have been since they debuted almost a decade ago in iOS 10.

Yet until now, you could never send tapbacks over CarPlay.

This has proven especially annoying for me personally, as my typical Messages conversations almost always end with a tapback.

Using a thumbs up, heart, or laughing emoji has become extremely common for me. It’s a way to acknowledge the previous message but also intentionally not continue the conversation.

Now with iOS 26, tapbacks are finally supported in CarPlay’s Messages app.

The same simple convenience of tapbacks on the iPhone will be available inside the car too.

This isn’t the only Messages change: pinned conversations are now supported too.

These features join the variety of other iOS 26 upgrades coming to the Messages app on iPhone.

Here’s hoping Apple’s renewed CarPlay efforts are a sign that Apple won’t let similarly core app features, like tapbacks, go absent from the car for so long moving forward.

Are you excited for CarPlay to support tapbacks in Messages? Let us know in the comments.

The ultimate party drink is becoming more sophisticated

Chinese premier noted predictions that humans could live to 150 in this century

Vladimir Putin and China’s Xi Jinping discussed the potential for science to extend the lifespans of men of their age, with the Russian president even suggesting organ transports might allow them to live forever.

Russia’s president told a press conference in China on Wednesday that the leaders had talked about longevity in a conversation first inadvertently broadcast on a television audio feed.

“Modern means and methods of improving health, even various surgical [operations] involving organ replacement, allow humanity to hope that . . . life expectancy will increase significantly,” Putin said during a televised press briefing.

His comments came after small talk between Putin and Xi was caught by a mic and broadcast as they headed to the military parade in Beijing.

On the recording the voice of a Chinese-Russian interpreter is heard translating Xi as saying: “In the past, people rarely reached the age of 70; today, they say that at 70 you are still a child.”

A translator for Putin then says in Chinese that advances in biotechnology means that human organs could be continuously transplanted so that a person could “become younger” and “could even become immortal”.

Xi then replies that there are predictions that “in the current century, humans might live to 150”.

The accidental audio accompanied footage from state broadcaster CCTV showing Xi and Putin walking at the head of a group of leaders that included North Korean dictator Kim Jong Un, 41; Belarusian President Alexander Lukashenko, 71, and Kazakhstan’s leader, Kassym-Jomart Tokayev, 72.

Putin, whose fifth presidential term runs to 2030, could remain in office for a further six years under the constitutional changes he engineered.

Russian and international media have repeatedly reported on his obsession with longevity: he is said to rely on a personal team of doctors, to have access to a hospital designed primarily for him, and to favour alternative medicine.

One of Putin’s daughters, endocrinologist Maria Vorontsova, has been closely involved in a state genetics programme launched several years ago and overseen by Mikhail Kovalchuk, a longtime Putin ally.

Putin on Wednesday said changes in life expectancy would have profound implications around the world. “By 2050 there will be more people aged over 65 worldwide than five- and six-year-olds,” he said. “That will have social, political and economic consequences.”

Investors are growing impatient waiting for a wave of regional-bank mergers

An activist investor plans to launch a board fight at Comerica CMA -0.38%decrease; red down pointing triangle, intensifying pressure on the Texas-based regional bank to sell itself.

The campaign signals the growing impatience among investors for a long-awaited wave of consolidation among regional lenders, which are under pressure to merge in order to better compete with behemoths like JPMorgan Chase and Bank of America.

The details

Hedge fund HoldCo Asset Management has argued that Comerica should explore a sale after years of underperformance.

If Comerica doesn’t pursue a sale, HoldCo expects to nominate around five directors to the company’s 11-person board when the window opens, likely in December, according to people familiar with the matter. The investor’s plans are fluid and could change.

HoldCo, which invests in banks, in July revealed a 1.8% stake in Comerica now worth roughly $160 million.

Comerica has more than 350 branches throughout Texas, California, Michigan, Arizona and Florida and its market value is around $9 billion.

A spokesperson for Comerica said the company welcomes feedback from shareholders and is continually looking at opportunities to create value.

HoldCo said Comerica has mismanaged its interest rate exposure and cost structure and would be better off as part of a bigger bank. It is approaching a key regulatory threshold of $100 billion in assets, which comes with steep compliance costs.

Other top Comerica shareholders including Citadel and North Reef Capital Management have signaled similar concerns, people familiar with the matter said.

Separately, the bank has continued to struggle to deal with a botched technology upgrade in recent years, according to a person familiar with the matter.

Comerica shares have underperformed a broader index of bank peers in recent years, falling by nearly 30% over the last seven years when the broader index is up. Chief Executive Curtis Farmer took over in April 2019.

The context

Outspoken Wells Fargo analyst Mike Mayo has also publicly renewed his own pressure on Comerica. Around a decade ago, he led a push for Comerica to explore a sale. His team at Wells Fargo last week estimated a takeover price of $90 a share, a 25% to 30% premium.

“If you asked me a decade ago whether we’d be in the same situation, then I’d probably throw my hands up and say that’s crazy,” Mayo said. “It’s unbelievable.”

Shareholder activists typically shy away from highly regulated industries like banks, but the push by HoldCo could pave the way for more campaigns at lenders.

A flurry of regulatory changes under the Trump administration has many dealmakers and bank executives optimistic that mergers might finally pick up. So far, activity has been somewhat muted, partially due to turbulent markets and uncertainty from Trump’s tariff policies.

But some midsize banks have started to make moves. Pinnacle Financial Partners and Synovus Financial in July announced an all-stock merger valued at $8.6 billion. The two companies and Comerica all rank within the 50 largest U.S. banks.

The generative AI model maker initially set out to raise $5 billion but quickly blast through that because of investor demand

AI company Anthropic zipped through its new fundraising, collecting $13 billion in a Series F round at a $183 billion post-money valuation.

New investor Iconiq co-led the financing together with returning backers Fidelity Management & Research and Lightspeed Venture Partners.

A slew of other investment groups, many of them crossover firms that invest in private and public markets, filled out the rest of the syndicate. Anthropic also turned to Middle East capital, including from the Qatar Investment Authority, in this deal.

Anthropic’s valuation nearly tripled since March, when it was worth $61.5 billion.

The company began fundraising earlier this summer. It initially targeted raising $5 billion, but the round generated as much as $25 billion in investor demand, according to a person familiar with the situation.

The company said it would use the capital to meet demand from enterprises, continue safety research and pursue international expansion.

The round indicates a fever pitch of investor demand for top private developers of generative artificial intelligence models, as well as a need for capital at these companies as they face high computing infrastructure costs.

The entire round was made up of primary capital, with no secondary components.

Anthropic’s products include large language models that others use to build AI applications and an AI assistant called Claude, as well as a software development tool called Claude Code.

Anthropic said that its annualized run-rate revenue climbed to more than $5 billion, which is its August revenue times 12. That’s up from about a $1 billion run rate at the start of this year. It has more than 300,000 business customers and its number of large accounts has grown seven times in the past year, the company said.

Claude Code, which was fully launched in May, is generating $500 million in revenue run rate, Anthropic said.

Ron Nachum, co-founder of AI financial analysis startup Sapien, said his company is a big user of Anthropic’s models, especially for coding. “We find that Anthropic is phenomenal in the developer experience, with their models performing fast and being very strong at code generation,” Nachum said. He said Sapien easily changes which models it uses, depending on its needs and the quality of the models. In recent months the majority of the company’s spending has shifted to Anthropic, away from OpenAI and Google, he said.

Anthropic is now fourth among private companies by value globally, behind SpaceX, OpenAI, and ByteDance, according to research firm CB Insights.

Valuations of private-market highflyers are now exceeding historic IPO market caps. Just a handful of tech companies crossed $100 billion in market cap at IPO, on an inflation-adjusted basis, since 1980, according to research by Jay R. Ritter, a scholar at the Warrington College of Business at the University of Florida.

Many investors believe that the rate of growth of these companies justifies stratospheric valuations.

“As mobile and cloud demonstrated, large-scale platform shifts have the opportunity to create multitrillion-dollar [total addressable market] opportunities, as existing goods and services are disrupted and novel use cases manifest,” said Mary D’Onofrio, partner at Crosslink Capital, which invested in the Anthropic round. “AI is the shift that we are living through now, and I believe that Anthropic’s round echoes investor and market belief that the company is a market leader in this AI shift—one that can and will become a trillion-dollar company.”

Yet there are others that worry about the sustainability of such business models.

“Anthropic’s $13 billion Series F underscores how frontier [large language model] development has become one of the most capital-intensive endeavors in tech history, requiring infrastructure investments that match or exceed what only Google, Microsoft and Meta could previously afford,” said Jason Saltzman, head of insights at CB Insights.

Significant investors in this financing also included Altimeter, Baillie Gifford, affiliated funds of BlackRock, Blackstone, Coatue, D1 Capital Partners, General Atlantic, General Catalyst, GIC, Growth Equity at Goldman Sachs Alternatives, Insight Partners, Jane Street, Ontario Teachers’ Pension Plan, TPG, T. Rowe Price Associates, T. Rowe Price Investment Management, WCM Investment Management and XN.