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|  |  | Monday, September 15, 2025 | | Sponsored by |  |  | | Berke Bayur/Anadolu via Getty Images | Good morning, Quartz readers! | | HERE'S WHAT YOU NEED TO KNOW | Consumers are back worrying about the U.S. economy. The stalling labor market has sentiment retreating back toward April-May lows,
dropping nearly three index points so far this month. | The latest iPhones have started shipping — for the most part. While plenty of people ordered their devices, the Pro Max slipped into
delayed delivery windows, while the ultrathin “Air” got tripped up in China. | Boeing defense workers continue their strike. The workers, who have been on strike since the start of August, said the company’s offer didn’t include a “sufficient” signing bonus or a raise in 401K benefits. | Albania has a new anticorruption minister. It’s AI. Diella, the chatbot charged with running the country's public procurement in an effort to lower corruption by officials, doesn't have any use for cash or power. | | | | A MESSAGE FROM ROSETTA STONE |  | STOP DREAMING, START SPEAKING. | You’ve mastered your pitch, but a language barrier can turn a global opportunity into a missed connection. The fear of being a silent partner or a tourist in a vital business meeting is real. Imagine effortlessly building rapport and trust by speaking a client's native language.
Rosetta Stone’s immersive, intuitive method gives you the professional edge to expand your network, close deals, and advance your career—not just travel. | | | OPENAI SWIPES RIGHT ON THE MULTICLOUD | Silicon Valley’s star couple is rewriting their vows. After two years of strict exclusivity, OpenAI and Microsoft have agreed to a looser pact — Microsoft remains the main home, but OpenAI now has the freedom to train and deploy models on other clouds. That might look like a minor adjustment, but it shifts the balance of power. In today’s AI economy, the scarce resource isn’t clever code, it’s electricity and compute. Optionality is leverage, and OpenAI just bought itself
some.
That freedom comes with trade-offs, and Microsoft knows it. By giving up exclusivity, the company leans on the boring but decisive moat it already controls: distribution. The workday still opens in Windows, documents still live in Office, and the Copilot button still sits one click away from wherever employees spend their hours.
Even if OpenAI rents computing power from someone else’s
grid, the customer relationship still runs through Microsoft’s login screens, billing systems, and compliance rails. Microsoft has made a fortune on defaults, and this shift only makes them more valuable. The romance is gone, but the paperwork is solid. OpenAI can see other clouds, Microsoft keeps custody of the users, and the relationship is stitched together by service agreements rather than sentiment. In an industry now paced by substations and megawatts, contracts matter more than demos, and
the illusion of intimacy comes from stable invoices, not sweeping vows. It’s not cinematic, but in the AI world, durable is the new romantic. Quartz’s Shannon Carroll has more on how power lines became Silicon Valley’s new love
language. | | A NOVEL SETTLEMENT | Anthropic just offered a whole bunch of authors the biggest royalty check in history — or at least the idea of one. The AI company behind Claude proposed a $1.5 billion settlement to cover half a million pirated
books it allegedly slurped up from “shadow libraries.” On paper, that’s $3,000 per title. In practice, it feels less like a windfall and more like winning a free toaster in a lottery you didn’t know you entered.
The fine print looms larger than the figure. Judge William Alsup has already stalled preliminary approval, demanding a definitive list of works, a functional claims process, and clarity on who gets what when rights are split between authors,
publishers, estates, and translators. Even if the plan survives, the payout shrinks fast after legal fees, contract splits, and taxes. And the ruling itself is a mixed bag: Training on legally acquired books is still fair use, while pirated datasets are off-limits. That may protect publishers from the worst abuses, but it leaves the bigger fight over AI training very much alive.
So don’t picture half a million novelists lining up at the bank. Picture a queue at the DMV, where
authors, publishers, and estates shuffle forward with paperwork, uncertain whether they’re even in the right line. The real consequence isn’t a $3,000 payday; it’s the precedent. For the first time, an AI company is writing a check for copyright infringement at this scale. That means the next battles — against OpenAI, Meta, Microsoft, and Apple — will start with Anthropic’s template in the drawer. Quartz’s Catherine Baab has more on what it felt like to find her book stolen, then priced at $3,000. | | | A MESSAGE FROM DISNEY+ |  | ALL THE BLOCKBUSTERS IN ONE
BUNDLE | Why choose between services when you can have them all? With the Disney+, Hulu, and HBO Max bundle, you’ll enjoy Marvel adventures, Pixar favorites, Hulu originals
like Only Murders in the Building, and HBO Max hits like Peacemaker. From blockbuster movies to can’t-miss series, it’s all in one place—starting at just $16.99. | | | MORE FROM QUARTZ | |
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