Financial Mindset

Anthropic, the high-flying AI company, is facing a backlash from some of its most prolific users over a perceived decline in the performance of its Claude AI models. The issues have left the company—recently valued at $380 billion and reportedly en route to an IPO—scrambling to respond to user revolt and online speculation about its motives and its ability to serve its newest wave of customers. Anthropic’s popular Claude AI model has seen a significant decline in performance recently, according to many developers and heavy users, who say the model increasingly fails to follow instructions, opts for sometimes inappropriate shortcuts, and makes more mistakes on complex workflows. The complaints appear to be connected to recent changes Anthropic quietly made to the way Claude operates, reducing the model’s default “effort” level in order to economize on the number of tokens, or units of data, the model processes in response to each request. (An Anthropic spokesperson has said pu...

Curtis Campbell knows exactly what kind of company people think H&R Block is. It is the place you go in late winter or early spring when your W-2s, 1099s, deductions, and deadlines are piling up, your refund feels urgent, and your anxiety is rising. It is familiar, local, and useful, but not the kind of company that usually comes to mind when people think about product velocity, AI deployment, or a culture of experimentation. Campbell wants to change that. The new CEO, who previously served as H&R Block’s president and chief product officer, is trying to turn the 70-year-old tax preparation giant into something more expansive: a year-round financial platform powered by software, data, and AI, while preserving the human trust that has long set the company apart. That means reimagining H&R Block not just as a seasonal tax brand, but as a business that can advise creators, serve small businesses, help customers manage money, and use technology to automate the most tedious p...

As recently as a few years ago, Dell appeared to be a name destined for the business history books. The stock lost nearly a third of its value in 2022, and it was hard to see the once iconic PC-maker’s place in a post-PC world. Then something extraordinary happened. In the span of two years, Dell quietly built a $25 billion AI infrastructure business from scratch, posted total company record revenues of $113.5 billion, and it is now guiding Wall Street toward $50 billion in AI server sales next year alone. Recently Fortune visited Dell’s CFO in New York to find out more about how the company pulled off something almost no company of its size has managed to do: Reinvent itself in real time. David Kennedy is a 27-year veteran of Dell, and was confirmed as CFO in November 2025 after serving as interim. In a conference room overlooking the chaos of 34th Street, Kennedy walks me through the recent record performance posted by the Round Rock, Texas-based giant ( No. 44 on the Fortune 500)...

AI may be restoring the importance of the liberal arts degree, at least according to the cofounder of one of the industry’s biggest players. Jack Clark, a billionaire cofounder of Anthropic and a former journalist who majored in English literature with creative writing, said his literary education and knowledge of “the kind of stories that we tell ourselves about the future,” helped him become an influential figure in the world of AI. “I’m a literature graduate and I don’t think you’d put that as a cofounder of a frontier AI company but what turned out to be useful is that I got to learn a lot about history and a lot about the kind of stories that we tell ourselves about the future,” he said during the Semafor World Economy Summit Monday. “That’s turned out to be, like, extremely relevant for AI in a way that I think people wouldn’t have predicted,” he added. For young people trying to figure out where they fit in the increasingly AI-fueled economy, their best bet may be learnin...

Early on April 13, the oil tanker Rich Starry—loaded with Iranian crude and headed for China—made a dramatic U-turn. Instead of exiting the Strait of Hormuz, as it had planned, the ship joined a stationary flotilla of about 800 other vessels, including 400 oil and gas tankers, most of which have remained idle and stranded since late February. “We have not seen any transits from tankers since the U.S. blockade began this morning,” said Claire Jungman, director of maritime risk and intelligence for Vortexa, while noting the abrupt turnaround of the Rich Starry. As peace talks between the U.S. and Iran fell apart over the weekend —although back-channel communication continues—President Donald Trump decided the U.S. would initiate its own blockade over the watery chokepoint through which roughly 20% of the world’s oil and liquefied natural gas typically flows. Instead of Iran letting through almost 10% of the normal traffic through a financial tolling system, traffic has for now been r...

China now has a word for token: ciyuan .  Liu Liehong, the administrator of China’s National Data Administration, the country’s main data regulator, unveiled the term at a State Council press conference in March, explaining that tokens were now “the settlement unit linking technological supply with commercial demand.”  The National Data Administration disclosed that China now processes 140 trillion tokens every day, up from just 100 billion at the start of 2024 . Chinese AI models have now surpassed U.S. models on OpenRouter, a popular marketplace for AI models.  Investors have bought into the AI boom. IPOs in Hong Kong are at a five-year high thanks to a steady stream of Chinese AI and tech startups, including AI labs MiniMax and Zhipu AI, and chip designer Biren.  “We believe that China is the big winner in this tech war for a number of reasons: valuation, wider adoption of AI, an advantage in power generation,” Mohit Kumar, Jefferies’ global macro strategis...

A federal judge must reconsider the possible national security implications of halting construction of President Donald Trump’s $400 million  White House ballroom , an  appeals court  ruled on Saturday. A three-judge panel from the U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit said it did not have enough information to decide how much of the project can be suspended without jeopardizing the safety of the president, his family or the White House staff. The case was returned to the trial judge who,  in a March 31 ruling,  barred work from proceeding without congressional approval, but suspended enforcement of that order for 14 days. The appeals court extended that for three days, to April 17, to allow the Trump administration to seek Supreme Court review. The panel instructed U.S. District Judge Richard Leon to clarify whether — and how — his injunction interferes with the administration’s plans for safety and security. Government lawyers had argu...