Meta’s Unending AI Spending

Meta Platforms investors already had some big concerns about the company’s AI commitments heading into this week. They’re even bigger now.

The company on Wednesday said it plans to continue spending “aggressively” on AI and is creating a new class of nonvoting stock to pay for it. The following morning, Meta disclosed roughly $825 billion in future leases and noncancelable contracts. Investors sent its shares down nearly 8%.

What became clear was that the spend-a-palooza isn’t stopping anytime soon and any revenue gains from Muse, Meta’s new AI agent, won’t be big enough to offset the near-term costs of staying in the AI race.

That leaves Meta relying on its ad business to pay for its data-center build-out. And while the company brought in record revenue in the third quarter, it also reported negative free cash flow.

If anyone ends up netting out positive from this week, it’s potentially Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg: He negotiated terms that allow him to sell some of his new Meta shares to pay off a potential wealth tax bill without losing any of his voting power in the company. All he had to do was threaten to list his Palo Alto home for sale.

—Meghan is a San Francisco-based tech reporter who covers Meta.

I’ve spent a few years torture-testing fancy new electric vehicles on 1,000+ mile journeys to unlikely locations, from mountains to Montréal, to see if they’re suitable for the Great American Road Trip. And they were. So readers challenged me to do something trickier: take a more modest electric car on the least EV-friendly route I could find.

The iPhone Duo surprised me. After my first hour with it, I went from zero desire for a phone-tablet hybrid to picturing myself living with one. Now, after nearly a week of testing it, I realize I’m not ready for Duo, or maybe Duo isn’t ready for me.

The creators of PHP, a technology that powers as much as 70% of the world’s websites, disclosed a critical security issue that could be leveraged by hackers to take control of any system running its software. That would allow an attacker to steal information or launch a cyberattack on anyone visiting a hacked website.

AI can already write code and rewrite emails and summarize meetings and prove abstract math conjectures and figure out why your washing machine keeps making that strange beeping noise. But in Demis Hassabis’s mind, the whole point of intelligence is to do something with it.

Get In Line: Apple wanted a great launch of an innovative product to usher in its new CEO. But the iPhone Duo, and the supply chain making it, weren’t quite ready.

Disclosure Day: Anthropic is generating breakneck revenue growth but faces a long list of risks that include a narrow customer base and uncertain access to much-needed computing power as it prepares for a mega-IPO.

Flight Risk: Before he was arrested, the Saudi national accused of bugging an OpenAI conference room had allegedly been in touch with a member of the Saudi royal family about job opportunities in the kingdom.

Tax Advantage: With public sentiment toward tech souring, billionaires like Elon Musk and Michael Dell are bypassing traditional charities and funding Trump Accounts instead.

…when tech bosses demand you to be in the office from 8 a.m. to 8 p.m.—and available nights and weekends.

The Technology newsletter is a weekly digest of tech reviews, columns and headlines from Anne Steele and Wilson Rothman. Write to Wilson at wilson.rothman@wsj.com and Anne at anne.steele@wsj.com. Got a tip for us? Here’s how to submit.