Business

Alibaba shares soar most since 2022 after making headway in AI

Published

5 days ago

September 1, 2025

[HONG KONG] Alibaba Group Holding’s stock leapt more than 18 per cent after reporting a surge in revenue from artificial intelligence (AI), underscoring the steady progress it’s making against rivals in a post-DeepSeek Chinese development frenzy.

China’s e-commerce leader posted a triple-digit percentage gain in AI-related product revenue as well as a better-than-anticipated 26 per cent jump in sales from the cloud division, the business most closely tied to the AI boom.

That helped assuage investors nervous about the fallout from a worsening battle with Meituan and JD.com in Internet commerce. Its shares gained their most intraday since November 2022 in Hong Kong, after investors looked past a disappointing 2 per cent rise in revenue and a surprise decline in operating income. Alibaba’s rally also helped energise the broader AI sphere: Ernie developer Baidu gained as much as 5.8 per cent, while Tencent Holdings climbed.

“Alibaba’s earnings underscore a bifurcation within China tech: AI is delivering scalable growth, while traditional consumer-facing segments remain mired in destructive price competition,” said Charu Chanana, chief investment strategist at Saxo Markets.

“The triple-digit surge in AI revenue and robust cloud sales show Alibaba is repositioning for longer-term relevance in the tech stack, not just retail dominance,” she added.

Alibaba’s progress in AI, where it is considered among the frontrunners in Chinese AI development, helped gloss over concerns about an intense price war with JD and Meituan in the giant food delivery sector.

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That three-way battle has dealt more damage than anticipated to some of the country’s e-commerce leaders: JD’s profit halved in the quarter while Meituan warned of major losses, triggering a US$27 billion sell-off of the three companies’ shares last week.

The AI element helps explain why Alibaba’s stock has easily outpaced its more commerce-reliant rivals this year. Alibaba has also leveraged the growth of an international arm that encompasses some of the world’s most-recognised online shopping platforms from Lazada to AliExpress.

It has “China’s best AI enabler thesis”, Morgan Stanley analysts, including Gary Yu, wrote in a research note. That’s as losses from meal delivery and instant commerce peak this quarter, they said.

Investors are now focused on whether Alibaba will pursue that margin-eroding competition, at a time it’s declared record amounts of spending towards developing AI services and computing.

On Friday, commerce chief Jiang Fan argued that investments in quick commerce, food delivery and instant shopping had already driven 20 per cent growth in users on its main Taobao marketplace. The fledgling division has, in four months, grown to the point that it can begin to achieve economies of scale, he added.

Alibaba is simultaneously making substantial investments in the AI field, developing large language models to avoid falling behind in a critical technological race.

The company views AI as essential to its future, whether in terms of providing cloud computing, powering its core business or coming up with services to challenge OpenAI and DeepSeek. CEO Eddie Wu went as far as saying in February that artificial general intelligence, or AGI, is now the company’s primary objective.

Just last week, Alibaba updated its own open-source video generating model, part of a string of recent upgrades that span the gamut from agentic AI services to chatbots.

It remains to be seen if Alibaba can turn AI into a money-spinner in an increasingly competitive field. From Baidu to Tencent, Chinese firms are enhancing and releasing AI models at a frenetic pace, increasing the pressure on Alibaba to deliver breakthroughs.

“Alibaba’s breakout reinforces a broader theme in Asia: while global tech remains preoccupied with geopolitics and valuations, parts of China tech are quietly reaccelerating-driven not by hype, but by real revenue growth in AI and cloud,” Chanana said. “This isn’t a broad-based rotation yet-but the divergence is real.” BLOOMBERG

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Business

AI company Anthropic to pay authors $1.5 billion in landmark settlement

Published

1 hour ago

September 6, 2025

The Editors

Big numbers often get thrown around in the aftermath of legal battles, as judges hand down judgements—or attorneys arrange settlement amounts—in the tens, or hundreds, of millions of dollars. Still, even jaded legal observers can occasionally run into a genuinely daunting number while parsing this stuff. Like, say, the $1.5 billion settlement that AI company Anthropic has agreed to pay in the ongoing class-action suit against it, launched by authors who said the company infringed on their copyrighted works by feeding them as training data to its “AI assistant” Claude. Sure, parts of that sum (calculated at $3,000 per work for a staggering number of works, and with its first $300 million installment due just five days after the settlement is approved) might potentially vanish in a puff of future bankruptcy. But it’s still the “largest publicly reported copyright recovery in history,” according to legal documents from the authors’ attorneys.

That being said, the win here on the wider AI front is quite a bit less clear than “hand our clients the annual estimated GDP of Grenada” might suggest. Yes, U.S. District Judge William Alsup set the stage for Anthropic to eat that massive price tag by ruling that the company clearly violated copyright agreements via how it acquired the books it fed into its own personal woodchipper. (I.e., downloading pirated datasets of millions of books that had been floating around the internet.) And, yes, the settlement will require Anthropic to destroy those “shadow library” datasets in its possession. (But notably, with no actual changes to the Claude large language model itself.) Most critically, though, back in June, Alsup also ruled that “reproducing purchased-and-scanned books to train AI” falls under fair use, calling the case “exceedingly transformative” as a justification for the designation.

As such, both sides in the fight issued statements claiming a form of victory today, with the authors’ side focusing mostly on the massive size of the settlement amount. Anthropic, meanwhile—which has been backed in the past with more than $6 billion in contributions from Amazon and Google—focused its statements on the legal precedent it achieved in the case: “In June, the District Court issued a landmark ruling on AI development and copyright law, finding that Anthropic’s approach to training AI models constitutes fair use. Today’s settlement, if approved, will resolve the plaintiffs’ remaining legacy claims.” What this likely means is that AI companies aren’t going to slow down—especially with, say, a $1.5 billion mortgage suddenly hanging over their heads—but simply become a lot more choosy about how they get their training data.

[via Deadline]

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Business

Runway founder Cristóbal Valenzuela wants Hollywood to embrace AI

Published

3 hours ago

September 5, 2025

The Editors

At 84, veteran mogul John Malone is still a power broker, hinting at “further consolidation in the media industry” following a recent sit down with David Ellison. Should we be on the lookout for a Warner–Paramount merger? Meanwhile in Vegas, the Sphere’s $100 million Wizard of Oz reimagining leans on AI to expand the visuals and even slip in cameos of David Zaslav and James Dolan. The Directors Guild did not take kindly to the stunt. Partners in Banter Kim Masters and Matt Belloni pull back the curtain on the Sphere’s Emerald City sideshow.

Plus, Masters speaks with Runway co-founder Cristóbal Valenzuela about the role of artificial intelligence in Hollywood. The Chilean-born developer acknowledges that AI may lead to some job losses, but he argues it will ultimately benefit filmmakers. He explains why studios including Lionsgate, Netflix, and Disney are already using Runway’s tools. Plus, he compares the current backlash against AI to the upheaval that followed the introduction of sound in film.

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