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On a sunny day in San Francisco, along the city’s waterfront, families dived into the wacky world of artificial intelligence inside the Exploratorium museum.
Visitors made shadow puppets for AI to identify, used AI to generate songs, asked chatbots questions and faced off with AI in a game in which players tried to draw images that only humans would recognize. A giant robot hand moved around and people peered into a video game chip.
They jotted down their hopes and worries about AI on cards displayed in the museum. Hope: AI will cure cancer. Worry: People will rely on AI to the point they can’t think for themselves.
A visitor listens to the audio component of the “Mistaking AI” exhibit at the Exploratorium’s “Adventures in AI” in downtown San Francisco on Thursday.
Billboards for the AI company Fin line Interstate 80 as the freeway enters the Financial District on Wednesday in San Francisco.
“It sort of breaks down those guardrails, those big walls that people have put up around AI, and allows them to have a conversation with somebody else,” said Doug Thistlewolf, who manages exhibit development at the Exploratorium.
Art. Office Space. Billboards. Protests. The AI craze has intensified in San Francisco, spreading through work and social life in what some have described as a new gold rush. The AI boom, coupled with the election of new Mayor Daniel Lurie, has also infused the city with optimism — tinged with anxiety. Some worry about the city’s high cost of living, and whether AI will replace workers as tech layoffs continue.
For years, Silicon Valley has been at the center of innovation with some of the world’s valuable tech companies such as Meta, Google, Apple and Nvidia locating their massive headquarters south of San Francisco. AI’s rise, though, has shone a bright spotlight on San Francisco, home to multibillion-dollar companies such as OpenAI, Scale AI, Anthropic, Perplexity and Databricks.
AI has long played a big role in consumer technology, helping to recommend social media posts, translate languages and power virtual assistants. But the popularity of OpenAI’s ChatGPT — a chatbot that can generate text, images and code — set off a fierce race to propel technology that touches industries from media to healthcare.
Companies are battling it out for talent, offering lucrative compensation to recruit top researchers and leaders, while investments in AI companies have surged.
In the first half of 2025, venture capital funding for AI companies in the San Francisco Metro area surpassed $29 billion — more than double the amount during the same period in 2022, data from PitchBook shows. As of Aug. 5, VC deals for AI startups in the area, which includes San Francisco, Oakland and Fremont, made up 46.6% of funding for U.S. AI companies this year.
The headquarters of OpenAI, the maker of the popular chatbot ChatGPT, in Mission Bay, San Francisco.
Exactly how this frenzy will shape the future of San Francisco, home to cable cars and robotaxis, remains to be seen. Ask ChatGPT what SF will look like in 10 years and it generates an image of the city’s skyline with futuristic architecture and flying saucers next to the Golden Gate Bridge.
AI has been a “bright spot” in the city’s economy, helping San Francisco to recover after retailers, office workers and some companies such as X (formerly Twitter) left the downtown area during and after the pandemic as remote work picked up.
“The economic impact is [AI companies] take more office space, they pay more taxes, they hire more people,” said Ted Egan, chief economist of the city and county of San Francisco.
Over the past five years, AI-related companies have leased more than 5 million square feet of San Francisco office space and the amount is projected to grow, according to CBRE, a real estate service and investment firm. The city’s office vacancy rate of 35.8% in the first quarter would be cut in half if these companies take up 16 million square feet of office space by 2030.
San Francisco resident Vijay Karunamurthy has seen the city’s boom and bust cycles unfold over the last 25 years while working at startups and tech giants such as Google and Apple.
In 2000, when he moved from Chicago to San Francisco for an engineering job at a data startup, he saw major business such as Pets.com collapse during the dot-com crash. Fueled by social media’s popularity, the city’s tech sector came roaring back only to take a hit during the COVID-19 pandemic.
Now the city is ascending yet again. Ambitious entrepreneurs, old and new, are advancing powerful artificial intelligence tools that could transform lives.
“That amount of energy being concentrated in San Francisco has just been huge for the city,” said Karunamurthy, 46, the former field chief technology officer at Scale AI, a data-labeling startup. “It means every single night there’s AI events, and if you go to a coffee shop, you’ll run into people working on AI.”
Still, there are plenty of AI skeptics. In late July, outside of OpenAI’s headquarters in Mission Bay, a small group of protesters including a person dressed up as a robot held up signs that said “AI will kill us all” and “AI steals your work to steal your jobs.”
Children interact with the “Giant Mirror” at the Exploratorium’s “Adventures in AI” exhibition in Downtown San Francisco on Thursday.
Generative AI’s ubiquity has forced educators to rethink what and how they teach students in the classrooms.
Arno Puder, professor and chair of San Francisco State University’s computer science department, said generative AI represents a historic “paradigm shift.”
The longtime San Francisco resident is equally excited, but also a little scared, about how it will affect labor. Over the last two years, he’s seen student enrollment in computer science at the university drop amid tech layoffs and generative AI’s rise. As coding assistants reshape computer science jobs, the university launched a new undergraduate certificate in generative AI for the fall of 2026.
“Generative AI is a different beast,” Puder said. “That does make me worry a little bit, but if you ask me for a prediction on what services or what the world’s going to look like in a few years from now, I don’t know.”
AI’s rise has inspired the creation of new spaces throughout San Francisco where people can discuss technology’s benefits and risks.
Notes written by people visiting the Exploratorium’s “Adventures in AI” exhibition list their greatest worries and hopes related to artificial intelligence in Downtown San Francisco on Thursday.
Thistlewolf said creating the AI exhibit at the Exploratorium involved talking to workers and researchers from tech companies and universities. The exhibit, which runs through mid-September, took roughly a year and half to develop.
Backed by Anthropic, the San Francisco company that developed the AI chatbot Claude, the exhibit aims to educate people about AI but doesn’t shy away from the debate surrounding technology.
San Francisco resident Martha Chesley, 77, came to the exhibit with her grandchildren. Living in San Francisco for 50 years, Chesley sees potential benefits from AI companies coming to the city.
“If it brings people and money, it’s good for the city because right now we have a lot of closed storefronts,” she said. “Maybe there would be more money also for housing being built.”
Throughout the city, AI startups are broadcasting their mission loudly on billboards and ads displayed at bus stops and train stations. Messages include “Stop Hiring Humans. To Write Cold Emails” and “Droids ship software while you touch grass.”
A bus stop advertises Outset, an AI software company, in the Mission District in San Francisco.
(Florence Middleton/For The Times)
AI ads could also be spotted in the Mission district, a neighborhood deeply rooted in Latino culture and history. The area, filled with popular taquerias, colorful murals and a park with a view of the downtown skyline, has struggled with homelessness like other parts of the city.
At a bus stop on 16th Street, an ad from AI startup Outset struck a positive tone: “Listen to humans. Don’t replace them.”
Founded in downtown San Francisco in 2022, Outset created an AI interviewer so researchers could quickly gather feedback from more people to better understand customer needs and improve products.
The company’s 36-year-old chief executive, Aaron Cannon, said before the rise of ChatGPT, he and his co-founder experimented with AI systems that can generate and understand human language and saw its potential.
“I don’t think either of us could have told you it was going to absolutely take over the world,” he said. The San Francisco resident said the city’s talent pool also makes it an attractive location for startups. He declined to disclose its finances but said the company, which employs 15 and counts Microsoft among its clients, is “growing fast.”
Throughout San Francisco, founders and real estate companies have dubbed certain areas as AI hubs.
A billboard advertising Cluely, an AI company, rises over Mission Street in downtown San Francisco.
(Florence Middleton/For The Times)
Hayes Valley, a neighborhood with Victorian houses, boutique shops and trendy restaurants, bears the nickname “Cerebral Valley,” a nod to the hacker houses and AI communities that popped up in the area.
Jamestown, a real estate and investment company, markets the Northern Waterfront an emerging AI hub after leasing more than 43,000 square feet of office space to AI companies. Some of the startups work on AI loan servicing or AI-powered lip syncing technology.
Located near public transportation, water and greenery, the fresh air and serene nature of the area has attracted AI entrepreneurs that want to collaborate in person, said Michael Phillips, principal and chairman of Jamestown.
“If you’re working on these fast to market, highly competitive products,” he said, “you really need to be together.”
A new federal lawsuit accuses 32 elite colleges of engaging in an “early decision conspiracy” that inflates the tuition paid by students.
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A class-action lawsuit filed Friday in the U.S. District Court of Massachusetts accuses 32 elite colleges and universities of conspiring to inflate tuition costs through their use of the early decision admissions process.
According to the complaint, filed by four current and former students, the universities “openly participated and are participating in practices that entrench patterns of inequality of access while inflating the price of attendance. Among these is the central practice challenged in this case: a horizontal agreement to reduce or eliminate competition through use of the early decision process.”
The 32 institutions named as defendants are Amherst College, Barnard College, Bowdoin College, Brown University, Bryn Mawr College, Carleton College, Columbia University, Cornell University, Dartmouth College, Duke University, Emory University, Haverford College, Johns Hopkins University, Macalester College, Middlebury College, Mount Holyoke College, Northwestern University, Oberlin College, Pomona College, Rice University, Smith College, Swarthmore College, Trinity College, University of Chicago, University of Pennsylvania, University of Rochester, Vanderbilt University, Vassar College, Washington University in St. Louis, Wellesley College, Wesleyan University, and Williams College.
Also named as defendants, in what the complaint calls an “early decision conspiracy,” are the Consortium on Financing Higher Education, an organization of highly selective college that shares information on admissions and financial aid, along with the Common Application and Scoir Inc., two college admissions platforms used by the schools.
Under an early-decision admissions process, students who apply early in the admissions cycle to the institution they want to attend receive an admission decision well ahead of the usual notification date. If they are accepted, they agree to enroll and accept the college’s financial aid offer, withdrawing their applications to other schools. Although early-decision agreements are not legally binding, they are traditionally regarded as firm commitments.
Using this system, highly selective schools usually accept a higher percentage of students compared to their regular admission cycle, but in exchange, applicants forego the chance to shop around for better financial aid offers from other schools.
The difference in admission odds can be considerable. According to the college admissions consulting firm, College Transitions, acceptance rates are often two to three times higher for early-decison versus regular-admissions applicants at prestigious institutions.
The plaintiffs claim this trade-off puts “price-sensitive” applicants at a disadvantage because they are forced to make a decision without knowing the full cost of attending one school or the other, a comparison that is less crucial to wealthy students.
Plaintiffs called early decision “a classic per se violation of the antitrust laws,” writing, “ultimately, Early Decision is enforced by mutual agreement between would-be competitors not to compete for students offered admission through Early Decision at other schools.”
The complaint also alleges that although the “agreement is presented in a form that resembles a contract, an applicant’s commitment is not actually legally binding.” Rather than being an “enforceable contractual obligation,” it imposes an “ethical” obligation that “doesn’t have any legal standing.”
Nonethless, colleges themselves benefit from the fact that early decision is not a binding contract, in part because they can withdraw their offers of acceptance if students don’t keep their grades up or engage in some type of prohibited conduct.
The plaintiffs also charge that early decision admissions serve to drive up the price students have to pay for their education. “The schools lose their incentive to compete on price for students admitted through Early Decision, driving up overall ‘top line’ tuition levels and reducing both need-based and merit-based aid for Early Decision admittees. The result is that both Early and non-Early Decision students pay higher prices than they would have paid absent the conspiracy at the center of the Early Decision scheme,” reads the filing.
The pros and cons of early-decision admissions have long been debated. The issue often boils down to the question of whether early-decision is good primarily for institutions or for students. It’s obvious how schools using early-decision benefit: they increase their admission yield (and revenue) and sometimes beat out more selective colleges for applicants who don’t want t0 risk being rejected by a more prestigious school.
But early admissions can discriminate against low-income students in several ways. First, compared to privileged students, non-affluent students generally are less aware of the option and the advantages of applying early. Second, they can’t afford to visit multiple schools before making a well-informed college choice. Third, it’s difficult for low-income students to commit to a college without comparing financial aid offers so they know they’re making a good financial decision.
Elite institutions are aware, of course, of the criticism that early decisions admissions creates a privilege that favors wealthy applicants. Many of them, including several of the defendants in the new lawsuit, participate in QuestBridge, one of the country’s most visible and successful efforts to mitigate some of the bias associated with early-decision admissions.
“Early Decision applicants lose choice and negotiation leverage, while Regular Decision applicants are left to scramble for an artificially diminished number of admission slots doled out at lower acceptance rates,” said Benjamin Brown, managing partner at Cohen Milstein Sellers & Toll, one of the law firms representing the plaintiffs. “We contend that all of this is only made possible by an agreement not to compete that violates bedrock antitrust law.”
Most of the defendants have not yet commented on the lawsuit. However, Brown University’s Senior Vice President for Communications Cass Cliatt told the The Brown Daily Heraldthat the complaint had no merit and the university “is prepared to mount a strong defense to make this clear.” She added, “Brown has always made decisions about its admissions processes and financial aid independently as part of the University’s longstanding commitment to enhancing access to the benefits of a Brown education regardless of socioeconomic circumstances.”
The lawsuit marks the second major antitrust claim against prestigious universities’ admission polices in recent years. In 2022, several students filed a lawsuit alleging that 17 elite institutions — members of the former “568 Presidents Group” — had colluded with their ”consensus methodology” to extend financial aid offers that artificially inflated the net prices of attendance.
Although they have consistently denied doing anything wrong, the majority of those institutions have now settled the lawsuit for a cumulative amount in excess of $300 million.
Inflation will be in the spotlight this week, with fresh data due that could influence Federal Reserve officials’ stance on interest rate cuts.
Several companies are slated to report earnings, including networking giant Cisco Systems, cloud computing company CoreWeave, and stablecoin issuer Circle.
Richmond Fed President Tom Barkin, Chicago Fed President Austan Goolsbee, and Atlanta Fed President Raphael Bostic are among the Fed officials set to deliver remarks this week.
Last week, a marked shift in comments from Federal Reserve officials suggested interest rate cuts could be coming sooner rather than later, after a weak jobs report. This week, inflation could take the spotlight, with fresh data due that could influence their position.
Scheduled earnings from a number of tech companies, including networking giant Cisco Systems and Nvidia-backed CoreWeave, could also offer more insights into AI infrastructure spending and developments in the cryptocurrency industry. Stablecoin issuer Circle’s expected report comes as U.S. legislation offering greater regulatory clarity has boosted cryptocurrencies.
Read to the bottom for our calendar of key events—and one more thing.
Inflation Data Comes as Fed Deliberates Cutting Interest Rates
Market watchers will get an update on inflation with Tuesday’s expected release of the Consumer Price Index for July, after recent reports indicated price pressures are ticking higher in the wake of Trump’s tariffs, including a higher June CPI reading.
Wholesale inflation data is set to come two days later. Plus, the planned Friday release of consumer sentiment survey results could show how the public views inflationary pressures.
Fed officials will be watching the data closely as they look ahead to their September meeting, where some members will likely be pushing for the central bank to cut rates for the first time this year. Richmond Fed President Tom Barkin, Chicago Fed President Austan Goolsbee, and Atlanta Fed President Raphael Bostic could offer more clarity when they deliver remarks this week.
Tech Earnings To Shine a Spotlight on Stablecoins, AI Data Centers
Scheduled earnings reports from several tech companies this week could also give market watchers detail on developments in the AI and cryptocurrency industries.
Stablecoin issuer Circle (CRCL) is set to report Tuesday, after the U.S. enacted the GENIUS Act in July, providing a legislative framework for stablecoins, cryptocurrencies with a value pegged to another currency or financial asset such as the U.S. dollar. Shares of Circle have soared over 400% from their initial public offering price in early June.
Cisco’s (CSCO) earnings set for Wednesday come after the network equipment maker reported strong results for the prior quarter on the back of rising AI infrastructure demand, helping to drive its revenue higher.
Cloud computing firm CoreWeave (CRWV), a partner to chipmaker Nvidia (NVDA), is also scheduled to report its second-quarter earnings just as its stock recently got a boost after CoreWeave said it would invest $6 billion in a Pennsylvania data center.
Others set to report earnings this week include semiconductor equipment maker Applied Materials (AMAT), nuclear energy provider Oklo (OKLO), construction equipment maker Deere (DE), and restaurant chain Cava (CAVA).
Quick Links: Recap Last Week’s Trading | Latest Markets News
This Week’s Calendar
Monday, Aug. 11
Key Earnings: Monday.com (MNDY) and Oklo
Tuesday, Aug. 12
Consumer Price Index (July)
Federal Reserve Officials Speaking: Richmond Fed President Barkin
More Data to Watch: Monthly U.S. federal budget (July), NFIB small business optimism (July)
Key Earnings: CoreWeave, Circle Internet Group, Cava Group, Smithfield Foods (SFD)
Wednesday, Aug. 13
Federal Reserve Officials Speaking: Chicago Fed President Goolsbee, Atlanta Fed President Bostic
Key Earnings: Cisco Systems
Thursday, Aug. 14
Producer Price Index (July)
Federal Reserve Officials Speaking: Richmond Fed President Barkin
More Data to Watch: Initial jobless claims (Week ending Aug. 9)
More Data to Watch: Consumer sentiment – preliminary (August), Import/export price index (July), Industrial production (July), Capacity utilization (July), Empire State manufacturing survey (August)
One More Thing
ESPN, the sports network owned by Walt Disney (DIS), announced a slew of new deals last week. Investopedia’s Aaron Rennie breaks down some of the changes coming to the sports broadcast giant, including a big agreement with the NFL.
HOUSTON (Reuters) – Oil held steady on Friday as markets awaited a meeting in coming days between Russian president Vladimir Putin and his US counterpart Donald Trump, but prices marked their steepest weekly losses since late June on a tariff-hit economic outlook.
Brent crude futures settled 16 cents, or 0.2%, higher at $66.59 a barrel, while US West Texas Intermediate crude futures were unchanged at $63.88.
Brent fell 4.4% over the week, while WTI finished 5.1% lower than last Friday’s close.
US crude fell over 1% earlier in the session after Bloomberg News reported that Washington and Moscow were aiming to reach a deal to halt the war in Ukraine that would lock in Russia’s occupation of territory seized during its military invasion.
US and Russian officials are working towards an agreement on territories for a planned summit meeting between Trump and Putin as early as next week, the report said, citing people familiar with the matter.
The potential meeting raises expectations of a diplomatic end to the war in Ukraine, which could lead to eased sanctions on Russia, and comes as trade tensions have been on the rise between Trump and buyers of Russian oil.
This week, Trump threatened to increase tariffs on India if it kept purchasing Russian oil. Trump also said China, the largest buyer of Russian crude, could be hit with tariffs similar to those levied against Indian imports.
“Various non-oil considerations are at play, including fears over the impact of tariffs and the headlines flying over the last few days regarding a Trump and Putin meeting in the near term,” said Neil Crosby, an energy market analyst at Sparta Commodities.
“Headline risk is particularly strong currently with flip-flopping regarding who will turn up to a meeting over Ukraine and under what circumstances.”
Higher US tariffs on imports from a host of trade partners went into effect on Thursday, raising concern over economic activity and demand for crude oil, ANZ Bank analysts said in a note.
OPEC+ agreed on Sunday to raise oil production by 547,000 barrels per day for September, the latest in a series of accelerated output hikes to regain market share, adding to supply.
The US oil rig count, an indicator of future supply, rose by one to 411 this week.
“Bearish sentiment has returned this week as key OPEC+ members announced a second ‘quadruple’ output unwind for September (thus fully restoring their extra voluntary cuts of 2.2 mmb/d) and President Trump’s sweeping import tariffs took effect against most countries,” analysts at FGE NexantECA said.
Trump on Thursday also said he will nominate Council of Economic Advisers Chairman Stephen Miran to serve out the final few months of a newly vacant seat at the Federal Reserve, fuelling expectations of a more dovish policy ahead.
Lower interest rates reduce consumer borrowing costs and can boost economic growth and demand for oil.
The dollar firmed on Friday but headed for a weekly fall. A stronger dollar hurts demand for dollar-denominated crude from foreign buyers.
Money managers cut their net long US crude futures and options positions in the week to August 5, the US Commodity Futures Trading Commission (CFTC) said.
The price of 24 karat gold witnessed a decrease of Rs. 300 per tola on Saturday and was sold at Rs. 362,400 against its sale at Rs. 362,700 on the previous trading day, All Pakistan Sarafa Gems and Jewelers Association reported.
The current price of gold is just shy of the all-time high mark of Rs. 364,900 per tola.
The prices of 10 grams of 24 karat also decreased by Rs. 257 to Rs. 310,699 from Rs. 310,956 whereas the price of 10 grams of 22 Karat went down by Rs. 236 to Rs. 284,817 from Rs. 285,053.
The price of gold in the international market decreased by $3 to $3,397 from $3,400 whereas silver decreased $0.09 to $38.31 against $38.40, the Association reported.
TikTok workers in Germany are holding strikes over mass layoffs of the company’s trust and safety team. The social media behemoth said it is planning to dismantle its entire Berlin moderation team, which removes harmful content from the platform, and outsource the work to artificial intelligence and contract workers. This means the dismissal of 150 employees.
The trade union that represents the TikTok workers, ver.di, has been pushing to negotiate with TikTok over the past few weeks. Kalle Kunkel, a ver.di spokesperson for the Berlin-Brandenburg region, said the union sent a list of demands to TikTok regarding severance for the affected employees and an extension of the layoff notice period to one year. So far, he said, TikTok has refused to come to the table.
“Basically, they said: ‘We don’t want to talk with you,’ so after that, we went on two strikes,” Kunkel said. “But they still don’t react to us.”
The Berlin employees cover the German-speaking market, which the union says has about 32 million active users. TikTok has a handful of offices around the country, but the capital city serves as the biggest hub, with about 400 employees overall. The layoffs of the trust and safety team there would constitute nearly a 40% reduction in force.
Anna Sopel, a TikTok spokesperson, said the company’s proposed layoffs are to “streamline workflows and improve efficiency” and that “we remain fully committed to protecting the safety and integrity of our platform”.
In Germany, as with other countries around the world, the trust and safety team is in charge of making sure the short-form videos published on the platform don’t contain harmful content or violate company policy. That means flagging videos for things like violence, pornography, misinformation and hate speech. The people working on this team review up to 1,000 videos per day, according to the union. This human work is often done in conjunction with AI.
A global push to replace moderators with AI
Over the past year, TikTok has been cutting trust and safety staff worldwide, often substituting those workers completely with automated systems. In September, the company fired its entire team of 300 content moderators in the Netherlands. In October, TikTok announced it would replace about 500 content moderation employees in Malaysia in favor of AI-powered moderation. This past February, Reuters reported that TikTok was laying off significant portions of its trust and safety teams across Asia, Europe, the Middle East and Africa.
The German layoffs come after TikTok CEO Shou Zi Chew testified in a hearing before the US Congress in 2024 saying the company would increase spending on trust and safety. He pledged to spend more than $2bn on a team of more than 40,000 people globally. Sopel, the spokesperson, said TikTok is investing another $2bn in trust and safety this year but did not respond to questions on how many employees the team now has worldwide.
TikTok, which is owned by the Chinese company ByteDance, is facing a ban in the US unless it’s sold to a government-approved buyer, though Donald Trump has granted it multiple months-long reprieves from the ban.
Other social media companies including Snap Inc, X and Meta, which owns Facebook and Instagram, have also made cuts to their trust and safety teams over the past couple of years. In May, NPR revealed that Meta planned to replace 90% of employees working on its product reviews with AI, including those for trust and safety. Meta and X have also terminated their human factchecking programs in favor of notes by other users.
“Replacing people tasked with ensuring that platforms are safe and rights-respecting for all users, including minors, is going to lead to more mistakes and more harmful experiences,” said Aliya Bhatia, a senior policy analyst at the non-profit Center for Democracy and Technology, who studies automated content moderation.
Strikes and protests against AI replacement
Outsourcing this work to AI is problematic, Kunkel said. Employees at TikTok have complained to the union that the company’s automated moderation system has classified videos that show things like a rainbow Pride flag as harmful content, which does not violate company policy. Conversely, employees said in union complaints, the AI can skip over actual inappropriate matter.
“AI is not able to really identify problematic pictures or videos, especially when it comes to sophisticated content,” Kunkel said.
The EU is more strict than other parts of the world when it comes to regulating tech platforms and content moderation. Under the Digital Services Act, passed in 2022, social media companies, including TikTok, are required to rigorously safeguard their platforms from harmful content or face large fines.
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TikTok says investing in AI-powered moderation means being able to more quickly remove violating content before it’s viewed by people on the social network. The company says the technology also helps reduce the volume of harmful videos that human moderators are obliged to review.
While TikTok plans to lean more heavily on AI, it says it will still outsource some of Germany’s trust and safety work to contractors. Kunkel expressed qualms that these workers, who watch large amounts of graphic content daily, may not have access to in-house health and safety programs. TikTok Germany offers mental health resources, Kunkel said, but most outside contracting companies don’t.
To put pressure on TikTok to bargain, the union organized two day-long strikes and protests in late July. Kathlen Eggerling, ver.di’s lead negotiator for the TikTok employees, said these actions were necessary to show the company the value of its staff.
After the first strike, TikTok employees received a stern warning. The company sent workers a message, seen by the Guardian, that said those who protest during work hours must notify their bosses in advance and request leave. TikTok said in the message that it was reviewing the situation with its legal team and would reach out to workers individually to address violations.
Under German law, however, unions announce the strikes and workers are not required to inform their employer if they plan to participate.
“It seems TikTok may need content moderators to factcheck its internal communications as well. We call on management to stop intimidating strikers,” Eggerling said. “Instead of spreading misinformation, TikTok should finally come to the negotiating table.”
The union said TikTok employees will continue to rally. And if the company doesn’t meet them at the bargaining table, a longer term strike could be in the works.
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What happens when a U.S. president tries to take down the CEO of a publicly traded company?
We’re about to find out in a bizarre case that could alter not just the career of a CEO but also a one-time corporate jewel of American enterprise, a global industry, and what a previous Commerce Secretary has called “the most important piece of hardware in the 21st century.”
The drama began on the morning of August 7, when President Trump posted a short statement on Truth Social: “The CEO of INTEL is highly CONFLICTED and must resign, immediately. There is no other solution to this problem. Thank you for your attention to this problem!” The post suddenly directed attention to a letter Senator Tom Cotton (R.-Ark.) had sent to Intel’s board chairman two days earlier. It said Intel CEO Lip-Bu Tan “reportedly controls dozens of Chinese companies,” and a multinational company had recently pleaded guilty to violating U.S. export controls “under Mr. Tan’s tenure,” among other accusations. By day’s end, Tan had sent a letter to Intel employees saying, “There has been a lot of misinformation circulating about my past roles…. I have always operated within the highest legal and ethical standards,” and Intel had told the media, “We look forward to our continued engagement with the Administration.” The stock fell 5% on an up day for the market, another blow to Intel shareholders who had hoped—finally—that things might have hit bottom.
How Intel lost its edge
It would have been a one-day story if it weren’t about Intel, once the world’s biggest, most advanced maker of computer chips.
It’s decline began some 20 years ago, when the company made multiple acquisitions, many of which were in telecommunications and wireless technology. In concept, that made great sense. But acquiring businesses is a skill of its own, and David Yoffie, a Harvard Business School professor who was on Intel’s board of directors at the time, told Fortune “100% of those acquisitions failed. We spent $12 billion, and the return was zero or negative.”
Intel also tried unsuccessfully to grasp the mammoth cell phone opportunity. The company understood the opportunity and was supplying chips for the highly popular BlackBerry phone. The chips were designed by Arm, a British firm that designs chips but doesn’t manufacture them. Intel understandably preferred to make phone chips with its own architecture, known as x86. The company decided to stop making Arm chips and to create an x86 chip for cell phones—in retrospect, “a major strategic error,” says Yoffie. “The plan was that we would have a competitive product within a year, and we ended up not having a competitive product within a decade,” he recalls. “It wasn’t that we missed it. It was that we screwed it up.”
As years went by, simple poor management crept in. Intel kept missing new-chip deadlines and lost market share. The company gave up on smartphone chips. CEOs were replaced, but the production troubles continued until, by 2021, for the first time in Intel’s existence, its chips were two generations behind competitors’. Those competitors were Taiwan’s TSMC and South Korea’s Samsung.
In crisis mode, Intel’s board brought back Pat Gelsinger, an engineer who had spent 30 years at Intel before leaving for 11 years to be a high-level executive at EMC and then CEO of VMware. As Intel’s CEO he announced an extraordinarily ambitious and expensive plan to reclaim the company’s stature as the world leader in chip technology. In February of this year, as the stock price fell, the board fired him and brought in Tan.
Despite it all, Intel is still crucially important because it’s the only U.S. company with the technology and know-how to make leading-edge chips in America–though it hasn’t actually done that in eight years. At the highest level of geopolitics, primacy in chips is central to power, and for the past eight years the world’s fastest, most valuable chips have been made only in Taiwan and South Korea. That’s why Congress passed the CHIPS and Science Act with bipartisan majorities. It became law in 2022 and starting last year has sent billions of dollars to chipmakers, American and foreign, building new factories and other chip infrastructure in the U.S. Intel was allotted the most subsidies, about $8 billion plus loans, though the company hasn’t received most of the money, which is disbursed based on reaching project milestones.
It’s as if the money came just a little too late. “Intel had a great opportunity,” says Gauvar Gupta, an analyst at the Gartner research firm. “They were getting all these subsidies from the government. But I think they just could not execute.” At that critical moment, poor performance was costly. “A year and a half ago there was still positivity with Intel,” says Alvin Nguyen, an analyst at the Forrester research firm. “Now, not as much. The negativity that’s hit them, it’s just snowballed.”
Now suppose Tan were to step down as CEO. “Who wants that job?” asks Stacy Rasgon, a longtime tech analyst at Bernstein. He observes in a recent note that Tan “doesn’t ‘need’ to run Intel (he’s very wealthy and has a lot of other things to occupy his time)…. He clearly wants to do what is best for Intel…” But it’s unclear if resigning would be good or bad for the company, “especially with Trump’s crosshairs on his back.” Rasgon, speaking to Fortune, asks, “How do you attract somebody else into that spot?”
Getting Tan wasn’t easy. “The board took a while in finding the new CEO when [previous boss] Pat Gelsinger left,” says Gupta. “It took a long time to find a candidate willing to take control and lead the company in a direction.”
Nonetheless, Yoffie and three other former Intel directors argued in a statement to Fortune for a new company, a new board, and a new CEO, spinning off Intel’s manufacturing arm into an independent company to secure America’s chipmaking dominance.
Trump’s post puts himself at the center of a crucial conundrum for national security. Global dominance requires a reliable source of leading-edge chips. That’s why Commerce Secretary Gina Raimondo in 2024 said they’re “the most important piece of hardware….” The world’s largest producer of leading-edge chips by far, Taiwan’s TSMC, is building two fabs in Arizona, subsidized by the CHIPS Act, with more planned. “You can make the argument that the more capacity builds in Arizona, maybe the less we need Intel,” says Rasgon. But TSMC isn’t an American firm, and Nguyen says “the best technology from TSMC is definitely not coming to the U.S. at this time.”
Which leaves Intel. “They’re the only American company that can do it,” says Rasgon. “But Intel still has to prove they could deliver. They haven’t proven that.” Trump has shined a spotlight on the once-iconic company. But identifying problems and solving them are two very different matters, something Intel-watchers have known for going on two decades.
