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Thanks for reading The Briefing, our nightly column where we break down the day’s news. If you like what you see, I encourage you to subscribe to our reporting here.
Greetings! And now for something completely different. In a break from artificial intelligence recruiting dramas, we’re looking today at the ancient world of television, through the prism of Warner Bros. Discovery. The Newhouse family, WBD’s second-biggest shareholder, revealed in a securities filing on Tuesday that it had sold half its stake in the company for $1.1 billion. Coming weeks after WBD said it would split in two, carving off its declining cable channel business from its HBO Max streaming service and film studio, the sale isn’t exactly a vote of confidence in WBD’s future. That’s a sign of the times, given Warner Bros.’ once-iconic status in Hollywood. What makes the Newhouse family's move notable is that they have long experience in the media industry. In addition to their shareholding in WBD, the family also owns the Conde Nast magazine empire, as well as newspapers and big stakes in cable firm Charter and the social media firm Reddit. The Newhouses attributed the sale, which cuts their stake in WBD to 4%, to “estate planning [and] its investment program,” which roughly translated means “we’re not going to tell you why we sold.” Still, it doesn’t take a genius to intuit what’s going on. WBD stock has been stagnant for three years, pretty much since the company was formed from the merger of Warner Media (once known as Time Warner) and Discovery. That deal was a mistake. WBD came out of it with a mountain of debt and heavy exposure to the shrinking cable channel business. Initial steps to improve its performance in streaming—like dropping HBO from the flagship streaming service’s name—did little to help and have been reversed. What happens next is hard to say but eventually both pieces of WBD will almost certainly get swallowed up again by other companies or private equity firms. Meanwhile, the Newhouses, who owned the stake as a result of their founding investment in the Discovery Channel made several decades ago, have better fish to fry. They’re the biggest shareholder in Reddit with a stake worth $6.4 billion, three times what their WBD stake was worth before the sale. Their stake in cable giant Charter Communications is worth another $8 billion. As Charter is merging with Cox to form an even stronger cable-broadband firm, that stake looks secure. All in all, you can’t blame the Newhouse family for heading for the WBD exits. And while they still own a decent chunk of the company, don’t be surprised if that’s not the case for long. Not that we’ll necessarily know. As their stake is now below the 5% threshold required for shareholders to disclose their trades, the Newhouses could quietly sell the rest of their WBD stake in the coming months with no public notice. Meanwhile, we should now be wondering who bought the 4% stake the Newhouses sold? When I finally got access to the new version of Amazon’s Alexa assistant on Monday, I found that it's gotten much more conversational thanks to an infusion of generative AI. But the new version of Alexa, dubbed Alexa+, also has a big problem: It makes stuff up! Take one of the main uses of Alexa+ that Amazon touted at a splashy media event with CEO Andy Jassy in February: making restaurant recommendations and reservations. When I asked Alexa to suggest some restaurants in New York that serve escargot, it recommended three places, including one called “L’Escargot” that serves “French cuisine with a focus on escargot.” Sounds great, except there’s no restaurant with that name in New York! And while the two other restaurants Alexa+ recommended were real, the addresses it gave for them were both more than a mile away from their actual locations. People are also supposed to use Alexa+ to find out what’s going on in the news, so I asked the voice assistant about developments in Jeff Bezos’ relationship with Donald Trump. Alexa informed me that the two have a “complex relationship” because Bezos congratulated Trump on his election victory in November 2024, then criticized him a few days later during an event at the Washington Post, saying Trump’s behavior “erodes our free speech norms.” That’s wrong—Bezos did criticize Trump at a Washington Post event, but that was way back in 2016, not 2024. When I asked Alexa to cite a source for the Bezos quote, it cited a Forbes article that does not exist. To be sure, Amazon says Alexa+ is still in “early access” and might make mistakes. After I told them about my experience, an Amazon spokesperson said the company has “processes for identifying and quickly fixing issues when we don’t get it right.” Even so, more than a decade after Amazon launched Alexa, it’s clear they still have a lot of work to do.—Theo Wayt • Design software firm Figma made its IPO filing public, a big step towards its public offering. The filing revealed that Figma’s revenue grew 48% in 2024 to $749 million and the company burned about $68 million in cash. • Anthropic’s revenue reached a pace of $4 billion annually, or $333 million per month, up almost four times from the start of the year, The Information reported Tuesday. • Grammarly announced on Tuesday that it acquired AI email assistant Superhuman, part of the startup’s effort to build a broad range of workplace software. • The Senate voted to drop a provision from President Trump’s signature tax and spending bill that would have blocked states from regulating AI, ending a controversial measure that several Silicon Valley leaders had been pushing for. • Surge AI, a competitor to data labeling firm Scale AI, has hired banks including J.P. Morgan to help it sell up to $1 billion in shares at a valuation of more than $15 billion, according to a person with knowledge of the deal. • Cloudflare, which manages web traffic and cybersecurity for around 20% of the internet, launched a new default setting that lets news outlets and other content providers block the web crawlers that AI firms use to scrape their data without permission. The Information Weekend covers what happens when Silicon Valley logs off—the trends and people shaping culture, technology and everything in between. Subscribe for free today. | 
