Ray Blanco:

The Space Force Is Now Seeking To Buy up to $30 Billion in Rocket Launches

On Friday, military officials announced they were tripling the maximum value of one of the U.S. Space Force's National Security Space Launch (NSSL) contracts to $17 billion.

The expansion of the NSSL Phase 3 contract comes as the Pentagon signals rising demand for military satellite launches. The NSSL program is set up to allow Space Systems Command, which oversees the Space Force’s launch program, to select from a pool of launch providers for individual missions to deliver the military’s satellites to orbit.

The NSSL program has two parts. Lane 1 covers the Space Force’s more risk-tolerant missions. SpaceX, ULA, and Blue Origin joined Lane 1 in 2024. Rocket Lab, Stoke Space, and most recently, Relativity Space and Impulse Space were later added to the roster of companies competing to launch Lane 1 missions.

Lane 2 includes higher-priority strategic missions that can only launch on rockets that go through the military’s lengthy certification reviews. Only SpaceX’s Falcon 9 and Falcon Heavy, and United Launch Alliance’s Vulcan rocket are certified for Lane 2 missions.

With Friday’s announcement, the combined maximum value of Lane 1 and Lane 2 has reached more than $30 billion, and the number is likely to climb again.

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Davis Wilson:

Anthropic’s Landmark $1.5B Copyright Settlement Is Approved

Anthropic can start cutting checks to the authors and book publishers that sued the AI lab over copyright infringement. A federal judge gave final approval Monday of Anthropic’s landmark $1.5 billion settlement of a class action copyright lawsuit.

The payout will deliver $3,000 per work across an estimated 500,000 works, shared among authors and publishers. While the settlement is believed to be the largest in the history of U.S. copyright law, many authors don’t view it as a win.

Judge William Alsup of the U.S. District Court for the Northern District of California sided with Anthropic on the core issue, ruling that training an AI model on copyrighted text counts as fair use.

But the ruling didn’t excuse how Anthropic had partially built its training library from books it downloaded from pirate sites. Alsup said that piracy question could go to trial; Anthropic agreed to a settlement soon after to avoid a trial and potential damages.

While the final approval closes out this case, it doesn’t settle the legal question industrywide because Alsup’s ruling was a single district court decision, and Anthropic’s decision to settle means the case will never reach an appeals court to become binding precedent.

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Ari Goldschmidt:

OpenAI Appears to Be Missing Its Sales Goals by a Vast Margin

OpenAI wants you to believe that by 2030, it’ll be raking in $100 billion a year just from ads alone – even though it’s currently struggling to reach just $1 billion.

That massive gulf was observed in a new analysis from marketing consulting firm Emarketer, which found OpenAI is on pace to undershoot its own five-year ad revenue projections by a whopping 90%. In fact, Emarketer’s take is even more devastating than that: It estimates the entire addressable market for chatbot advertising – the maximum amount of money up for grabs overall – at $5.4 billion.

That figure isn’t just bad news for OpenAI, but for every giant tech company jockeying for a piece of the AI ad pie. In 2026, Emarketer projects that the combination of OpenAI, Microsoft, Google, and Amazon will bring in under $1 billion in ad revenue. For context, OpenAI had projected that its AI ad revenue alone would hit $2.5 billion by the end of this year.

If the top AI companies – which have burned over $1.6 trillion building AI so far – can’t even hit OpenAI’s meager projection for 2026, what hope do they have of hitting their projections four years from now?

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