Daniel Bach

As we mentioned on last night's podcast, the Pentagon has also given Anthropic a Friday deadline to relax its usage policies at risk of losing its defense contract.

Anthropic previously told the Defense Department its clawed tools couldn't be used for domestic surveillance or to run autonomous weapons.

And the fallout from Blue Owl's liquidation of $1.4 billion in assets last week has got some retail investors panicking about how safe private credit investments are.

The journal Spendumit covers private credit for us and says advisors are urging everyday investors to keep faith.

And that's it for What's News for this Wednesday morning.

Today's show was produced by Heidi Moyer.

Our supervising producer is Sondra Kilhoff.

And I'm Daniel Bach for The Wall Street Journal.

We'll be back tonight with a new show.

Until then, thanks for listening.

Here's your morning brief for Tuesday, February 3rd.

I'm Daniel Bach for The Wall Street Journal.

Elon Musk is merging SpaceX and XAI, forming a $1.25 trillion company.

The merger was confirmed in a memo by Musk posted by SpaceX, which brings together the mature rocket and satellite business with his AI startup that is facing steep competition.

Shares in Palantir Technologies surged overnight on the back of record fourth-quarter revenue.

The 70% jump in earnings was fueled by an increase in U.S.

government demand for its AI tools.

While that government connection is the company's primary growth engine, it's also a double-edged sword, as contracts with ICE draw criticism from lawmakers.

And on Capitol Hill, Republican House Speaker Mike Johnson says that he has the votes to end a partial government shutdown as soon as today, passing a bill that would fund the government for the rest of the fiscal year, but the Department of Homeland Security for just two weeks.

That short-term extension is designed to provide time for a bipartisan deal to be reached on stricter policies for immigration enforcement agents.