Tech stocks continued to be pressured on Friday after a sell-off in social media stocks and chip stocks sent the tech-heavy Nasdaq Composite (^IXIC) index into a correction.

On Wednesday, a Los Angeles jury found Alphabet’s (GOOG, GOOGL) YouTube and Meta (META) liable for harm done to a young user. The jurors ordered the companies to pay the lead plaintiff $3 million in compensatory damages in the first-of-its-kind case.

Meanwhile, investors continue to evaluate Nvidia’s AI offerings after the company unveiled new AI chips and an agentic AI platform at its developer conference last week.

On Tuesday, Arm (ARM) announced its own entrance into the AI chip market with a new data center chip and server rack, sending the stock more than 12% higher in extended trading.

In other tech news, Anthropic and Elon Musk’s SpaceX are nearing their IPOs, memory chip stocks fell after Google researchers unveiled a tool that lowers memory intensity, and Apple (AAPL) CEO Tim Cook said the company is seeing strong enthusiasm for its new, low-cost MacBook.

Read more about today's market action.

Last week was a brutal one for tech stocks, as the Nasdaq Composite (^IXIC) index entered correction territory and the “Magnificent Seven” megacap stocks collectively erased more than $850 billion in market capitalization.

But the tech wreck may be sending “oversold” signals, some Wall Street strategists say, as compressed valuations make the sector more attractive to investors.

Bloomberg reports:

Read more here.

Meta (META) stock fell more than 4% on Friday, as Wall Street continued to grapple with the company’s loss in a landmark social media lawsuit on Wednesday.

A Los Angeles jury found Meta and YouTube parent Google (GOOG, GOOGL) negligent for failing to protect young users on their platforms. That sent shares of the companies tumbling on Thursday, with declines as much as 8% on the day.

The suit, which revolved around whether the companies designed their apps to keep young users hooked and if they knew doing so was dangerous, is seen as a potential bellwether for a raft of similar suits that schools, states, and parents have filed against the firms.

Shares of other social media platforms like Reddit (RDDT) and Snap (SNAP) were also trading lower on Friday in response to the ruling, falling more than 5% and 3%, respectively.

Read more here.

Anthropic (ANTH.PVT) inadvertently leaked details about its latest model release, Fortune reported, after an error with its content management system made private data public on parts of its website.

The data included information about an invite-only CEO retreat and product announcements. But the biggest scoop centered on Anthropic’s upcoming model, called Claude Mythos.

In the documents, the company described the model as its most capable yet, with significant improvements in “reasoning, coding, and cybersecurity.” Anthopic confirmed that it is testing the new model but downplayed some of the other information released.

Cybersecurity stocks took a hit on the news due to fears that Anthropic’s powerful new model could allow actors to exploit vulnerabilities in software faster than companies can patch them.

This wasn’t the first time Anthropic has warned that frontier AI models could heighten cybersecurity risks.

Shares of Palo Alto Networks (PANW) dropped 6% on Friday, while CrowdStrike (CRWD) fell 5% and Fortinet (FTNT) slid by more than 3%. Year to date, the iShares Expanded-Tech Software ETF (IGV) is down 27%.

Sony’s (SONY) PlayStation 5 is getting yet another price increase. The digital edition, which doesn’t include a disc drive, now starts at $599. The standard version, with a built-in disc drive, now costs $649, while the PS5 Pro will cost you a whopping $899.

The PS5 debuted in 2020 at just $399 for the digital edition and $499 for the standard version. Sony debuted the more powerful PS5 Pro in Nov. 2024 at $699.

Friday’s announcement is just the latest price hike for Sony’s prized console.

The company released second-generation “Slim” versions of the PS5 in Oct. 2023, inceasing the price of the digital edition to $450, while leaving the standard “Slim” eidition at $499.

In August, Sony instituted a $50 price increase across its consoles, with the digital edition climbing to $499, the standard to $549, and the more powerful Pro to $749.

Sony isn’t the only video game giant impacted by the tariffs and memory shortage. Microsoft (MSFT) has also raised prices on its Xbox line of consoles, while Nintendo (NTDOY) has raised the price of its first-generation Switch, which it launched in 2007, but not the newer Switch 2.

Read more here.

A federal judge stopped the US government from labeling Anthropic (ANTH.PVT) as a “supply chain risk” on Thursday, giving the AI startup an early win in its legal battle with the Defense Department.

US District Judge Rita Lin of the U.S. District Court for the Northern District of California said Anthropic could continue its contracts with the government for now, arguing that Anthropic was punished for its criticism of the contract in the press and calling the branding of a US company as an adversary “Orwellian.”

The judge stated that the move by the government would cripple Anthropic by stripping it of billions of dollars in federal contracts and subcontracts as well as cutting it off from having any commercial relationship with any company that might want to do business with the Department of Defense.

However, the decision was not final, and the case is ongoing.

Anthropic’s Claude model was effectively banned earlier this month after a public dispute between the Department of Defense and Anthropic. Anthropic sought to impose limits on how its models could be used under its approximately $200 million contract, but negotiations broke down, and the Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth designated the company as posing national security concerns.

Anthropic (ANTH.PVT) is considering filing its initial public offering (IPO) as early as the fourth quarter of this year, according to a report by The Information.

The move would put the AI heavyweight up against SpaceX (SPAX.PVT) as one of the largest IPOs of the year, and could give Anthropic a headstart on OpenAI (OPAI.PVT), which is also angling to go public, CNBC previously reported.

It would amount to a monster showdown among AI companies, with Anthropic’s enterprise-focused Claude going up against OpenAI’s popular ChatGPT and SpaceX’s xAI and its Grok AI models.

The Information notes that Anthropic’s plans could change, and the appetite for any IPOs could slowdown if the war in Iran drags on and drives inflation higher.

How the AI companies contend with shareholder demands given their prodigious spending plans will make for interesting theater.

Read the full report here.

Tech stocks were deeply red on Thursday as risk-off sentiment took hold. Among the “Magnificent Seven” names, the lone exception in the green was Apple (see Dan Howley’s blog below).

Still, every Magnificent Seven stock is down double-digit percentages from its 52-week high, my other colleague Brian Sozzi reports.

He writes:

Read more here.

Apple (AAPL) is looking to improve its AI fortunes by adding more AI capabilities to its Siri voice assistant.

According to Bloomberg, the move will see Apple open up Siri to additional AI model companies, including potentially Google’s Gemini and Anthropic’s Claude. Apple already allows users to access ChatGPT via Siri, though it’s not a smooth experience.

Apple is expected to announce the changes at its annual Worldwide Developers Conference in June. The company is widely expected to offer up a number of major AI updates as it works to flip the narrative that it’s a laggard in the space compared to rivals Google and Samsung.

Apple previously signed an agreement with Google that will see the iPhone maker license Google’s AI models to power some of its AI features, following delays to its own models.

Despite falling behind in the AI smartphone race, Apple saw both record iPhone sales and record overall revenue in its most recent quarter.

Meta (META) stock fell more than 7% on Thursday, a day after a Los Angeles jury found on Wednesday that the company, and YouTube-parent Google (GOOG, GOOGL), were negligent in protecting young users on their platforms.

The landmark suit — which revolved around whether the companies designed their apps to keep young users hooked and if they knew doing so was dangerous — is seen as a potential bellwether for a raft of similar suits that schools, states, and parents have filed against the firms.

Meta and Google both said they plan to appeal the results, and any final outcome could take months. Meta is also facing another lawsuit filed by state attorneys general in 2023, in which the states made similar arguments to the Los Angeles case.

Shares of other social media platforms like Reddit and Snap were trading lower on Thursday in response to the ruling, falling more than 10% and 11%, respectively.

Shares of Google’s parent company, Alphabet, were down closer to 2%.

Read more here.

OpenClaw is an AI agent platform developed by Peter Steinberger in November 2025, designed to give AI models the ability to do things in the real world. Steinberger originally called it Clawdbot, a take on Anthropic’s own Claude AI model, but changed its name to Moltbot before ultimately landing on OpenClaw.

For a platform that’s just a few months old and has had three names, OpenClaw has quickly skyrocketed in popularity among AI boosters, developers, and enthusiasts.

In February, OpenAI (OPAI.PVT) snatched up Steinberger, hiring him to help develop the company’s personal agents. Nvidia (NVDA) had Steinberger on its GTC pre-show panel on March 16, and the popular lobster-claw logo is turning up as some not-so-stylish headgear fans wear at tech meetups around the world.

If you’re not up on the artificial intelligence race, though, everything you’ve just read might as well be in a different language. If you find yourself asking what the hype is all about, or what in the world I’m talking about, I’ve got you covered.

Read more here

Memory stocks sank early Thursday, the latest development in what’s been an interesting week for the AI trade.

Bloomberg attributed a sell-off in memory names like SK Hynix, Micron (MU), SanDisk (SNDK), and Western Digital (WDC) to research published by Google earlier this week that appeared to lower demand requirements for AI models.

Google researchers unveiled a tool called TurboQuant, “a compression algorithm that optimally addresses the challenge of memory overhead in vector quantization.”

When you interact with an LLM, part of that response — in some cases, most or all of it — is coming from a memory cache that houses previous interactions with the model. In other words, every interaction with an LLM does not start from zero.

TurboQuant is aimed at lowering the memory intensity of storing these responses. A shortage of memory chips has been one of the key bottlenecks in AI development flagged by the industry over the last few months.

Thursday’s decline in memory stocks also cools off one of the hottest AI trades this year and is the latest pocket of stock market weakness tagged to new technological advances in AI.

Software stocks have also continued their sell-off this week, with this decline attributed both to new agentic tools released by Amazon and advances from Anthropic that will allow Claude to complete a wider range of tasks on a user’s computer.

Snap (SNAP) stock fell on Thursday morning after EU regulators opened an investigation into the social media platform Snapchat, warning that it wasn’t doing enough to prevent child grooming and illegal goods sales.

The EU is looking into whether Snapchat violated the Digital Services Act, which requires large platforms to manage illegal and harmful content or face fines of up to 6% of global annual sales.

"From grooming and exposure to illegal ‌products to account settings that ⁠undermine minors' safety, Snapchat appears to have overlooked that the Digital Services Act demands high safety standards for all ⁠users," EU tech chief Henna Virkkunen said in a statement, according to Reuters.

Snapchat said it was cooperating with the Commission and that it continuously meets the Digital Services Act’s standards.

Read more here from Reuters.

OpenAI is focusing on focusing.

And the latest move from the company to pare its side projects will see its planned erotic chatbot paused indefinitely, according to The Financial Times.

The FT reports that OpenAI had already delayed the model “amid internal discussions over whether to scrap the model entirely, according to multiple people familiar.”

Earlier this week, OpenAI shut down Sora, its AI video creation app as the company continues to streamline its focus following its most recent funding round — which valued the startup at $840 billion — and ahead of an IPO that could come later this year.

Read the full report here.

The jury in a landmark lawsuit against social media companies ruled in favor of the plaintiffs, holding Meta (META) and YouTube (GOOG, GOOGL) liable for $3 million in damages on Wednesday. The trial will now move to the damages phase.

The jury in the case said that both Meta and YouTube knew the designs of their platforms were dangerous, that users wouldn't realize the danger, and that the companies failed to warn of the danger when a reasonable platform would have.

What makes the Los Angeles case unique is that, rather than trying to persuade the jury that the content on Meta and YouTube was harmful, the plaintiff's attorneys framed the case around the actual design of the social media platforms.

That allowed them to circumvent arguments related to Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act, which protects companies from liability for what their users post on their platforms.

Meta and YouTube disputed the claims during the trial, saying that they worked for years to improve the safety of their products.

Read more here.

Shares of Arm (ARM) rocketed more than 15% higher in early trading on Wednesday after the company unveiled its first production data center processor: the Arm AGI CPU (central processing unit).

Arm has traditionally licensed its intellectual property to other companies to develop their own chips, including Apple (AAPL) and Nvidia (NVDA), which uses Arm’s capabilities in its Grace and Vera CPUs.

Arm said it co-developed the AGI CPU with Meta (META), which is deploying them alongside its own custom chips inside its data centers.

Beyond Meta, Arm said it’s also working with Cerebras, Cloudflare (NET), F5 (FFIV), OpenAI (OPAI.PVT), Positron (POSC), Rebellions, SAP (SAP), and SK Telecom (SKM), which will use the chip for agentic AI applications, among others.

Despite Wall Street’s exuberance for Arm’s new chip, BofA Global Research analyst Vivek Arya pointed out in a note to investors that the company is far from the only CPU game in town.

“We highlight the CPU market is getting very crowded. Incumbents in both x86 and ARM have much wider breadths of portfolio and established software/ecosystem, catering to enterprise/telco customers,” he wrote.

Meta Platforms is expected to lay off “a few hundred people” on Wednesday, The Information reported Wednesday morning, citing two people familiar with the matter.

The outlet said layoffs were likely to hit its Reality Labs unit, sales, recruiting, and social media teams.

The report comes after Reuters said earlier this month Meta was exploring deep staff cuts that could result in 20% of the company being shown the door.

Late Tuesday, Meta also rejiggered stock incentive plans for a handful of its top executives, which could see them earn nine-figure payouts if the company’s market capitalization climbs above $9 trillion in the years ahead.

Read The Information’s full report here.

The biggest initial public offering on record could officially kick off its process this week.

The Information reported late Tuesday that SpaceX is preparing to file for its IPO with the SEC as soon as this week.

The rocket company led by Elon Musk is expected to raise up to $75 billion in its offering; the company was most recently valued at $1.25 trillion.

For years, Arm (ARM) has played a key role in the development of processors for everything from the iPhone to data center chips. But now the company is expanding its reach with the debut of its first production data center processor: the Arm AGI CPU (central processing unit).

Arm has traditionally licensed its intellectual property to other companies to develop their own chips, including Nvidia (NVDA), which uses Arm’s capabilities in its Grace and Vera CPUs.

Graphics processing units, or GPUs, have dominated data centers thanks to their ability to train and run AI models. But as running those models becomes a more common use case than training and as the industry transitions toward agentic applications — AI that can perform tasks on your behalf — CPUs are becoming more important.

That provides Arm with the opportunity to launch its own processor. The company isn’t just debuting a chip, though; it’s also unveiling a server rack to run them at scale.

And while X86-based chips like those from Intel (INTC) and Advanced Micro Devices (AMD) generally dominate data centers, Arm said its CPU delivers twice the performance per rack compared to those other platforms.

Read more here.

OpenAI is making a push to focus on its core business.

It appears a casualty of that push will be its video creation tool, Sora.

The Wall Street Journal reports:

It was only last December that Disney and OpenAI announced a deal allowing users to create videos using Disney IP. The deal also saw Disney make a $1 billion equity investment in OpenAI. The Information reported Tuesday that Disney won’t make this investment as a result of OpenAI’s Sora pivot.

That deal came a few months after OpenAI completed a share sale that valued the company at at $500 billion. The AI giant was valued at $730 billion in late February following a funding round that raised $110 billion.

The global smartphone market is set to take a hit in 2026, but Apple (AAPL) stands to benefit from the pain, according to a Morgan Stanley AlphaWise smartphone survey.

Global smartphone shipments will decline 13% year over year in 2026 and recover slightly to a 3% year-over-year improvement in 2027. That works out to 1.1 billion and 1.14 billion units, respectively.

Morgan Stanley (MS) previously expected shipments of 1.3 billion in 2026 and 1.31 billion in 2027.

The survey, which polled 2,000 participants over 18 in the US and China and about 1,500 in the UK and Germany, indicates that while upgrade rates are expected to improve in both the US and China next year, Apple is the only one of the major smartphone brands that is projected to see a positive, and improving, year-over-year net switching rate.

“Among prospective US smartphone upgraders, advanced features and upgrade eligibility are the two reasons where Apple leads peers,” Morgan Stanley analyst Erik Woodring wrote in an investor note.

“Among prospective China smartphone brand switchers, better overall device quality is the #1 reason why smartphone owners in China are switching to the iPhone,” he added.

Respondents were especially interested in Apple’s long-rumored foldable iPhone, which Bloomberg’s Mark Gurman says the company will launch later this fall, with 27% of current iPhone owners saying they had a strong interest in the phone.

Read more here.