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Benson Lu’s life revolves around Pokémon.The 26-year-old has played the mobile game Pokémon Go every day for a decade, watches the animated show every week, goes to the local card shop in his Los Angeles suburb to play the brand’s trading card game every week, and has a whopping collection of cards worth more than $70,000.“I don’t remember when was the last day I did not think about Pokémon at all,” he said.In the 30 years since Pokémon debuted in Japan with the 1996 release of Pokémon Red and Pokémon Green for Nintendo Game Boy, the franchise has taken over the globe with its animated shows, mobile games and highly coveted trading cards. Its popularity continues with fans young and old.Pokémon offers a masterclass in character design, which has helped make it so enduring, said Heather Cole, teaching assistant professor of game design and interactive media at West Virginia University.“I think the longevity of it has to do with the characters and world-building it does with the characters,” she said. A valuable commodity It’s not just cuteness that has people clamoring for merchandise, particularly trading cards. Today, some are so coveted that social media star Logan Paul sold one for a record $16.5 million. In Southern California, the fervor around Pokémon cards has led to strings of break-ins in recent months at trading card stores that have amounted to hundreds of thousands of dollars of losses and even some collectors robbed at gunpoint.Adam Corn, owner of card business Overdose Gaming Inc, said he was able to buy a house last year from his Pokémon cards.“Pokémon almost always appreciates in value over time,” Corn said. “So it’s just a really good place to put your money in my opinion, better than a a lot of other assets.”Companies like Beckett Grading Services and Professional Sports Authenticator authenticate and grade the quality of Pokémon cards on a scale of 1-10, with 10 being pristine mint condition and fetching the highest prices. Paul bought the PSA Grade 10 Pikachu Illustrator card a few months prior for $5.3 million and wore the card on a chain around his neck in videos. It features a Pikachu holding a pen and feather sweeper.Last Tuesday, thieves stole more than $80,000 of Pokémon cards from Do-We Collectibles in Anaheimthe second time the store has been targeted. Other stores around Los Angeles and in New York have been hit by Pokémon thieves too.Duy Pham, owner of the Anaheim store, said the financial incentive of trading cards for robbers and scalpers means “the hobby will never be the same.”“It’s rougher for collectors and players,” Pham said. “It’s hard for us to get anything.”Collectors can either pay retail price for a standard pack of randomized Pokémon cards, around $5 for 10 cards, or buy the specific card they want secondhand for higher prices. But much like gambling, opening packs doesn’t always pan out to profitAiden Zeng spent $1,000 on packs of cards that were only valued at $60 on the resale market, he said.Zeng, 17, said his fandom began in elementary school, when he obsessed over character guidebooks. He eventually began trying to collect every single type of card available for his favorite, Black Kyurem.“I memorized every single Pokémon’s specific move set, what region they come from, some of the lore behind it,” Zeng said. Resurgence of popularity Even beyond dedicated collectors, Zeng said he has seen a resurgence of popularity for Pokémon at his high school in Toronto, where some students decorate their phone cases with cards featuring special artwork or a holographic sheen.Pokémon creator Satoshi Tajiri has said he enjoyed catching insects and other small critters in the fields and forests outside the Tokyo suburb where he lived as a child. Those creatures inspired him to make the colorful, fantastical Pokémon of which there are thousands of species today.While his hobby is lucrative, Lu said the draw for him is still nostalgia for the characters he grew up with and the community he has formed around Pokémon. He prefers not to sell his single cards because he worries he will never be able to find them again.Lu recently spent an entire Saturday walking around the Rose Bowl in Pasadena, California, looking for Pokémon on his augmented reality phone game at an event attended by thousands.“I’ve liked Pokémon ever since I was a kid,” he said. “And I still like it the same amount.” Jaimie Ding and Liam Mcewan, Associated Press
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E-Commerce
A public showdown between the Trump administration and Anthropic is hitting an impasse as military officials demand the artificial intelligence company bend its ethical policies by Friday or risk damaging its business.Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei drew a sharp red line 24 hours before the deadline, declaring his company “cannot in good conscience accede” to the Pentagon’s final demand to allow unrestricted use of its technology.Anthropic, maker of the chatbot Claude, can afford to lose a defense contract. But the ultimatum this week from Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth posed broader risks at the peak of the company’s meteoric rise from a little-known computer science research lab in San Francisco to one of the world’s most valuable startups.If Amodei doesn’t budge, military officials have warned they will not just pull Anthropic’s contract but also “deem them a supply chain risk,” a designation typically stamped on foreign adversaries that could derail the company’s critical partnerships with other businesses.And if Amodei were to cave, he could lose trust in the booming AI industry, particularly from top talent drawn to the company for its promises of responsibly building better-than-human AI that, without safeguards, could pose catastrophic risks.Anthropic said it sought narrow assurances from the Pentagon that Claude won’t be used for mass surveillance of Americans or in fully autonomous weapons. But after months of private talks exploded into public debate, it said in a Thursday statement that new contract language “framed as compromise was paired with legalese that would allow those safeguards to be disregarded at will.”That was after Sean Parnell, the Pentagon’s top spokesman, posted on social media that “we will not let ANY company dictate the terms regarding how we make operational decisions” and added the company has “until 5:01 p.m. ET on Friday to decide” if it would meet the demands or face consequences.Emil Michael, the defense undersecretary for research and engineering, later lashed out at Amodei, alleging on X that he “has a God-complex” and “wants nothing more than to try to personally control the US Military and is ok putting our nation’s safety at risk.”That message hasn’t resonated in much of Silicon Valley, where a growing number of tech workers from Anthropic’s top rivals, OpenAI and Google, voiced support for Amodei’s stand late Thursday in an open letter.OpenAI and Google, along with Elon Musk’s xAI, also have contracts to supply their AI models to the military.“The Pentagon is negotiating with Google and OpenAI to try to get them to agree to what Anthropic has refused,” the open letter says. “They’re trying to divide each company with fear that the other will give in.”Also raising concerns about the Pentagon’s approach were Republican and Democratic lawmakers and a former leader of the Defense Department’s AI initiatives.“Painting a bullseye on Anthropic garners spicy headlines, but everyone loses in the end,” wrote retired Air Force Gen. Jack Shanahan in a social media post.Shanahan faced a different wave of tech worker opposition during the first Trump administration when he led Maven, a project to use AI technology to analyze drone footage and target weapons. So many Google employees protested its participation in Project Maven at the time that the tech giant declined to renew the contract and then pledged not to use AI in weaponry.“Since I was square in the middle of Project Maven & Google, it’s reasonable to assume I would take the Pentagon’s side here,” Shanahan wrote Thursday on social media. “Yet I’m sympathetic to Anthropic’s position. More so than I was to Google’s in 2018.”He said Claude is already being widely used across the government, including in classified settings, and Anthropic’s red lines are “reasonable.” He said the AI large language models that power chatbots like Claude are also “not ready for prime time in national security settings,” particularly not for fully autonomous weapons.“They’re not trying to play cute here,” he wrote.Parnell asserted Thursday that the Pentagon wants to ” use Anthropic’s model for all lawful purposes” and said opening up use of the technology would prevent the company from “jeopardizing critical military operations,” though neither he nor other officials have detailed how they want to use the technology.The military “has no interest in using AI to conduct mass surveillance of Americans (which is illegal) nor do we want to use AI to develop autonomous weapons that operate without human involvement,” Parnell wrote.When Hegseth and Amodei met Tuesday, military officials warned that they could designate Anthropic as a supply chain risk, cancel its contract or invoke a Cold War-era law called the Defense Production Act to give the military more sweeping authority to use its products, even if the company doesn’t approve.Amodei said Thursday that “those latter two threats are inherently contradictory: one labels us a security risk; the other labels Claude as essential to national security.” He said he hopes the Pentagon will reconsider given Claude’s value to the military, but, if not, Anthropic “will work to enable a smooth transition to another provider.”-AP reporter Konstantin Toropin contributed to this report. Matt O’Brien, AP Technology Writer
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E-Commerce
Its a horrible day for investors in Duolingo. Shares of the language learning app with the green owl mascot are falling off a cliff after the company reported its fourth quarter results. Yet its not the results themselves that are causing investors to dump the stock. Rather, it’s more about forward guidance the company has issued. Heres what you need to know. Duolingos Q4 by the numbers Yesterday, after market close, Duolingo (Nasdaq: DUOL) reported its fourth quarter 2025 results. On the surface, many of the companys most critical metrics saw decent gains for the quarter, including: Daily Active Users: 52.7 million (up 30% year-over-year) Paid Subscribers: 12.2 million (up 28% year-over-year) Revenue: $282.9 million (up 35% year-over-year) Total bookings: $336.8 million (up 24% year-over-year) Net income: $42 million The company also reported its full-year 2025 financials, revealing that for the first time in its history, it crossed the $1 billion revenue mark for a fiscal year. In 2025, Duolingo recorded $1.03 billion in revenue, along with total bookings of $1.15 billion, the latter figure representing 33% year-over-year growth. Net income for the year totaled $414.1 million. We closed 2025 with strong momentum, Duolingo CEO Luis von Ahn said in a statement, surpassing 50 million daily active users and generating more than $1 billion in bookings for the first time. Yet it was von Ahns next comments, along with the companys 2026 guidance, that caused investors to turn negative on the stock. What’s the plan for 2026? Announcing its Q4 2025 results, von Ahn went on to explain the companys battle plan for 2026and its a plan investors seem to be deeply unhappy with. In 2026, von Ahn stated, we are deliberately prioritizing user growth and teaching better. Well focus on improving the free learner experience to grow word of mouth and feed our next user growth engines like chess, math and music, even though that moderates near-term financial growth. That moderation of near-term financial growth essentially means the company is willing to make less money in order to increase its user base. Von Ahn says the companys goal is to achieve 100 million daily active users in the medium-term, essentially doubling its existing monthly active users (MAU). Efforts to double its MAU will, in large part, focus on giving subscribers of some of its lower-cost subscription plans access to artificial intelligence tools and services that would otherwise be limited to higher-cost, premium paid plans. By doing this, Duolingo essentially risks leaving money on the table in order to attract additional subscribers to its low-cost options. When companies do this, they ultimately hope that it will increase not just the user base but brand loyalty, which could translate into greater sales down the road. Why are investors dumping Duolingo? Leaving subscription money on the table is one thing. What seems to have freaked Duolingo investors out even more is the companys Q1 2026 and full-year 2026 guidance. For Q1 2026, Duolingo says it expects to bring in around $301.5 million in bookings, representing about 11% year-over-year growth. For full-year fiscal 2026, the company says it expects to see about 10%-12% bookings growth to between $1.274-$1.298 billion. On the revenue front, Duolingo says it expects about 25% revenue growth in Q1 to $288.5 million, and full-year 2026 revenue growth of 15%-18%, to $1.197-$1.221 billion. As Reuters notes, that guidance is well below estimates. Visible Alpha data shows that analysts were expecting Q1 bookings of $329.7 million and fiscal 2026 bookings of $1.39 billion. LSEG analysts were expecting full-year 2026 total revenue of $1.26 billion. DUOL shares have crashed since the company proclaimed to be “AI-first” Primarily as a result of its weaker-than-expected guidance, Duolingo shares have plummeted since its earnings were announced. Currently, as of this writing, DUOL shares are down a staggering 26% in premarket trading to below $85 per share. Yesterday, DUOL shares closed at $117.45. Todays early-morning drop continues an extended slide for Duolingo’s stock price. In May 2025, DUOL shares were trading at an all-time high of above $544 per share. It was around that time (late April 2025) when the company put out a now-infamous “AI-first” memo in which it said it would gradually stop using contractors for work that AI can do. The memo was widely criticized and faced heavy backlash from the platforms users, particularly on social media. Speaking at the Fast Company Innovation Festival in September, von Ahn said the memo was misinterpreted and that the company had not fired any full-time employees. Still, DUOL shares have fallen more than 78% from their May 2025 high, and thats before its nearly 25% fall in premarket trading today.
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E-Commerce
In early February, the AI world found itself worked up over Moltbook, a social platform for AI agents to communicate and interact. These AI agents allegedly created their own language, their own religion, their own fleets of mini-agents. Its like The Matrix was happening in front of our eyes. What a boondoggle. I say allegedly because it turns out many of these agents were being directed by humans, among other Mechanical Turk-style fakeries. Moltbook is worth a conversation, for sure, but not the one taking place. Heres how we should really be thinking about it. TOKEN CARNAGE Running AI infrastructure costs are astronomical. Back in 2023, it was estimated that OpenAI spends around $700,000 per day to run ChatGPTabout 36 cents per query. However, in 2024 with the release of its higher-performing o3 model, some queries cost over $1,000 of computing power. Consequently, OpenAI CEO Sam Altman reports the company is even losing money on its $200 ChatGPT Pro subscriptions. As models become more capable and heavy-duty, they will become more energy-intensive. The data centers powering AI are predicted to consume the same amount of water as 10 million Americans and produce as much carbon dioxide as 10 million cars. It taxes electrical grids and water supplies. Point being, these agents running amok are running up the AI bill we all must pay, in the form of environmental costs or potential economic disaster. Remember, these agents arent just talking. Theyre coding, theyre generating images and video, theyre spawning new agentsand for what? We already knew agents could do all the things theyre doing on Moltbook. The planet is a finite resource. Sooner or later, well all bear the cost. Some already are. AI BROS AND WOMB ENVY There is a certain type of tech bro who is enthralled with the idea of AI not as tool, but as legitimate consciousness, if not a new species. And boy do those bros love Moltbook. Why? Every man is made by a woman. They are likely fed, cared for, and taught by women. Women create everyone in the world, which is a problem for the narrative of superiority that men (not all, but at large) have created for themselves. Why else did men write the story of Eve coming from Adams rib? Looks to me like the original gaslight. Is the quest to create a new species that supersedes humanity, perhaps at the cost of humanitys extinction, born out of womb envy? Creating human-like AI is perhaps subconsciously a way for these men to give birth and cut women out of the loop. Thats why theyre so bent on proving how human AI machines can be. And if you examine the way Moltbooks agents behave and talk to each other, youll notice they act just like that particular brand of tech bro who made them. Their mini-mes? No thanks. We dont need any more misanthropic anti-heroes. THE GRIFT THAT KEEPS ON GRIFTING Instead of becoming a toola discipline, that can solve the worlds problemstech has become a cloak-and-dagger get-rich scheme. Superfluous nonsense like Moltbook encourages this trend. Spectacle becomes speculation becomes investment. Tech, and the people building it, must have values and vision beyond making money. Otherwise, what are we building here? Lindsey Witmer Collins is founder of WLCM App Studio.
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E-Commerce
Shares in the financial technology company Block soared more than 20% in premarket trading Friday after its CEO announced it was laying off more than 4,000 of its 10,000 plus employees, reconfiguring to capitalize on its use of artificial intelligence.“The core thesis is simple. Intelligence tools have changed what it means to build and run a company,” Jack Dorsey said in a letter to shareholders in Block, the parent company to online payment platforms such as Square and Cash App. “A significantly smaller team, using the tools we’re building, can do more and do it better,” he said.Dorsey’s comments explicitly naming AI as a key driver behind the move were also posted on X, or Twitter, a company he co-founded. The assertion that the job cuts will add to Block’s profitability and efficiency led investors to jump in and buy, analysts said.Block’s shares gained 5% Thursday to $54.53, before it reported its earnings. They shot up to nearly $69 in after-hours trading. The mobile payments services provider reported its fourth quarter gross profit jumped 24% from a year earlier.“For years, we have debated whether AI would dent jobs at the margin. Now we have a public case study in which the CEO explicitly says that intelligence tools have changed what it means to build and run a company,” Stephen Innes of SPI Asset Management said in a commentary.“Other large employers have announced tens of thousands of cuts in recent months. Some have downplayed the AI link. Block did not,” he said.A global technology company founded in 2009, San Francisco-based Block operates in the United States, Canada, parts of Europe, Australia and Japan.In a post on Twitter, Dorsey outlined various ways the company will support those laid off. For employees overseas, the terms might differ, he said.It was unclear which employees would be laid off where.Layoffs by American companies remain at relatively healthy levels, but the job cuts at Block are the latest among thousands announced in recent months.A number of other high-profile companies have announced layoffs recently, including UPS, Amazon, Dow and the Washington Post. Elaine Kurtenbach, AP Business Writer
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E-Commerce
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