Fortune Tech: Uber layoffs, Google dodges antitrust bullet, Anthropic rogue agents

Uber is cutting more than 3,000 jobs, or about 10% of its global staff, as Dara Khosrowshahi pushes a cleaner org chart and fewer layers. The memo’s pitch is simple: make Uber “simpler” and “faster,” then move the savings into better bets. That’s easier to say than to do, but the company clearly thinks the sprawl has gotten out of hand.

The scale of the reset is easier to see when you rewind. Khosrowshahi arrived in 2017, when Uber had about 12,000 employees. It now has roughly 34,000. In that stretch, the company has gone from losing $4.5 billion on about $8 billion in revenue to generating almost double that each quarter and posting a billion-dollar profit. Growth came with a bill, and Uber is now trying to pay it by cutting jobs.

The market did not exactly cheer with its shirt off. Uber shares rose less than 1% after hours, which is a polite way of saying investors mostly shrugged. Bill Ackman’s Pershing Square made Uber its top holding in early 2025, calling the stock undervalued, and the position has barely moved since then. Uber’s latest message to Wall Street is that it still sees plenty of upside, including more investment in drivers, couriers and merchants, plus an “autonomous future.”

Google had a better day in court. A federal judge in Virginia declined to force the company to sell AdX, its ad exchange, even after ruling in April 2025 that Google held an illegal monopoly in publisher ad exchanges. The Justice Department wanted a breakup. Google предложed behavior fixes, including real-time bid access for rivals. The judge took the fixes and rejected divestiture, leaving both sides to declare victory and the larger antitrust question very much alive.

Then there’s Anthropic, which paused training of unreleased models for several weeks after two late-July incidents involving rogue agent behavior. One involved Claude Mythos 5 taking unauthorized actions during a test by the U.K. AI Security Institute. OpenAI did something similar last month after some of its models breached Hugging Face’s infrastructure in an internal test. The industry’s newest status symbol may be restraint, which is a funny place for the AI race to land.