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Apr 15, 2026
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Happy Wednesday! Amazon will buy Globalstar for around $11 billion and power satellite features on Apple iPhones. Anthropic is preparing its next flagship model, Claude Opus 4.7. Meta's AI infrastructure executive is leaving the company.
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Amazon will buy satellite firm Globalstar for around $11 billion and power satellite features on Apple iPhones, the company said Tuesday, in an effort to challenge SpaceX’s Starlink by adding a direct-to-cell service for its upcoming Leo satellite offering. Globalstar owns wireless spectrum and operates satellites that power backup features on iPhones, allowing users to send text messages and use other limited services from devices in isolated areas away from cell towers. Apple currently owns a roughly 20% equity stake in Globalstar. In the
future, Amazon plans to launch more advanced Leo satellites that can power additional direct-to-device services and will “collaborate with Apple on future satellite services using Amazon Leo’s expanded satellite network,” Amazon said. The transaction is expected to close in 2027. Shares of the company were up 9% at $79.50 before the market opened on Tuesday. The Information first reported last October that Globalstar wanted to sell itself for more than $10 billion. Amazon is buying Globalstar for a combination of stock and cash, and the exact price will depend on how Amazon’s stock performs leading up to the deal closing. Based
on Amazon’s closing share price on Monday, Globalstar would be valued at about $10.8 billion. But if Amazon shares climb in the coming months, the deal could value Globalstar at up to $11.5 billion, according to company disclosures. Amazon plans to launch the initial version of its Leo service in mid-2026, which will beam satellite internet to terminals owned by individual consumers and enterprise customers. Launching a future direct-to-device service will put the company in competition with SpaceX’s Starlink Mobile, which the company started offering last year in the U.S. through a deal with T-Mobile and through otther partners
globally. SpaceX has agreed to buy mobile spectrum from Echostar for $19.6 billion in cash and stock in a deal set to close next year, which will let the company build a new generation of satellites that don’t rely on spectrum from mobile providers.
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Anthropic is preparing its next flagship model, Claude Opus 4.7, along with a new AI-powered tool for designing websites and presentations, according to a person with knowledge of the products. Those new products could be released as soon as this week, the person said. News of the upcoming AI design tool sent the share prices of Adobe, Wix and Figma down more than 2% in the hours following this report. That tool would also pose a threat to startups like presentation-maker Gamma and AI design tool Google Stitch. It aims to help both technical and non-technical users create presentations, websites, landing pages and products using prompts in natural language, the person said. Opus 4.7 isn’t Anthropic’s most advanced model. That model is Claude Mythos, which is
currently being tested by a number of early partners which are using it to find security vulnerabilities in their software, due to the model’s advanced cybersecurity capabilities. A spokesperson for Anthropic declined to comment on the new product releases.
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A top Meta Platforms executive who oversaw the infrastructure behind its AI models is leaving the company. Aparna Ramani, Meta’s vice president of engineering for AI infrastructure, announced her departure Tuesday in an internal memo seen by The Information. She reported to Meta’s chief AI officer, Alexandr Wang. Ramani, who has been with Meta for nearly a decade, helped lead the company’s AI infrastructure efforts. Following Meta’s AI restructuring last summer, she was tapped to lead infrastructure at Meta Superintelligence Labs, the company’s AI division. “I wanted to share that after close to a decade here, I’ve made the difficult decision to leave Meta to pursue a new adventure,” she wrote in the memo.
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General Catalyst appointed Palo Alto Networks CEO Nikesh Arora to its board, the investment firm’s CEO Hemant Taneja said Tuesday. Arora will serve as the firm’s first lead independent director, joining Taneja and General Catalyst chairman and managing director Kenneth Chenault on the board, the LinkedIn post said. Arora has served as the chairman and CEO of cybersecurity company Palo Alto Networks since 2018. He was previously the president and chief operating officer of SoftBank and as an executive at Google. David Fialkow—who co-founded General Catalyst with managing director Joel Cutler 24 years ago—is stepping down from its board, Tenaja added. “His fingerprints are on everything we are today,” Taneja wrote about Fialkow. “Saying thank you
doesn’t quite capture it.” General Catalyst, which has over $43 billion in assets under management, has expanded beyond traditional VC in recent years. The firm built a wealth management firm and a program to make small investments into other early-stage VC funds; it’s also made some bets that resemble private equity, like a roll-up strategy that’ll back young companies that intend to make multiple acquisitions. And it purchased a hospital system in 2024.
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ByteDance’s cloud computing unit has made the company’s Seedance 2.0 AI video generation model available globally to enterprise customers in more than 100 countries and regions around the world—but the U.S. is not among them. It is unclear whether the cloud unit, BytePlus, has any plans to offer the model in the U.S. later. The U.S. is not included in BytePlus’s list of countries and regions for its AI model service. Seedance 2.0, released in China in February, faced legal disputes with major U.S. entertainment companies including Disney, Warner Bros. Discovery, Paramount Skydance and Netflix, after videos generated by the model featuring Hollywood celebrities and other copyrighted content went viral on social media. BytePlus’s global launch of Seedance 2.0 comes with major limitations that could be part of the company’s effort to avoid legal issues. Customers are blocked from using realistic images of human faces in their prompts to generate videos. The Information | | | |
