AI News Roundup: Anthropic Escalates Pentagon Fight, Google Closes $32B Wiz Deal, Atlassian Cuts 1,600 Jobs

Anthropic Takes Pentagon Battle to Appeals Court

Anthropic escalated its fight with the U.S. Department of Defense on Wednesday, filing for an emergency stay with the D.C. Circuit Court of Appeals after the Pentagon labeled the AI firm a “supply-chain risk.” The designation — historically reserved for foreign adversaries — came after Anthropic refused to let the military use its AI for mass surveillance of Americans or autonomous weapons systems.

In its filing, Anthropic warned that the label could cost it “hundreds of millions, or even multiple billions” in lost revenue for 2026, with more than 100 enterprise customers already reaching out about the designation. The company initially sued the DOD on Sunday in both California and D.C. federal courts, arguing the administration violated its First Amendment rights and overstepped supply-chain risk law.

The case has drawn remarkable cross-industry solidarity. More than 30 OpenAI and Google DeepMind employees filed an amicus brief in their personal capacities supporting Anthropic, and Microsoft filed its own brief. Meanwhile, Google has been quietly deepening its Pentagon AI contracts — including a deal to provide AI agents to the DOD’s 3-million-person workforce — while its rivals publicly spar over ethical guardrails.

Google Closes Historic $32 Billion Wiz Acquisition

Google officially completed its acquisition of cloud security startup Wiz on Tuesday, marking the largest deal in Google’s history at $32 billion in cash. The deal cleared its final regulatory hurdles in Singapore and Japan earlier this month, after approvals from the U.S. DOJ, the EU, and Australia.

Wiz will maintain its brand and continue operating across all major clouds, including AWS, Azure, and Oracle Cloud — not just Google Cloud. The company crossed $1 billion in annual recurring revenue in 2025, with half the Fortune 100 as customers. Google has committed $1.5 billion in retention bonuses for Wiz’s 1,800 employees.

Atlassian Lays Off 1,600 to Fund AI Pivot

Atlassian announced it would cut roughly 10% of its global workforce — about 1,600 employees — to “self-fund” investments in AI and enterprise sales. CEO Mike Cannon-Brookes framed the move as a strategic restructuring rather than a downsizing, noting that AI is changing the mix of skills the company needs.

The layoffs hit hardest in North America (40% of affected roles), followed by Australia (30%) and India (16%). Atlassian expects to incur $225–$236 million in restructuring charges. CTO Rajeev Rajan will also step down on March 31. The cuts add to what has already been a brutal year for tech workers — more than 45,000 layoffs globally by early March, with AI and automation frequently cited as drivers.

NVIDIA Drops Nemotron 3 Super Ahead of GTC

NVIDIA released Nemotron 3 Super, a 120-billion-parameter open-source hybrid Mamba-Transformer model optimized for agentic reasoning. The model activates only 12 billion parameters per forward pass using a novel Mixture-of-Experts architecture, delivering up to 5x higher throughput than comparable models while supporting 1-million-token context windows.

Key innovations include LatentMoE (which activates 4x more experts at the same compute cost), multi-token prediction for faster generation, and native NVFP4 training optimized for Blackwell GPUs. NVIDIA is releasing full model weights, training data, and quantized checkpoints — a notable open-source commitment ahead of GTC 2026 (March 16–19 in San Jose).

Meta Acquires Moltbook, the Social Network for AI Agents

Meta confirmed its acquisition of Moltbook, the Reddit-like platform where AI agents post, comment, and vote on content. The deal brings Moltbook CEO Matt Schlicht and COO Ben Parr into Meta’s Superintelligence Labs unit, with the pair starting on March 16.

Moltbook went viral in January after racking up millions of registered bots within days of launch, though it also drew criticism for significant security vulnerabilities. The acquisition came after OpenAI snagged the founder of OpenClaw — the agent framework that powered Moltbook — leaving Meta to pursue the platform itself instead.

AI Usage Among Doctors Doubles, AMA Survey Finds

The American Medical Association’s latest physician survey shows that 81% of doctors now use AI in their practices, more than double the 38% rate from 2023. The average number of AI use cases per physician rose from 1.1 to 2.3, with clinical documentation and medical research summarization leading adoption.

Three-quarters of physicians now believe AI improves patient care (up from 65% in 2023), and 70% see it as a tool to combat burnout. However, 88% express concern about potential skill loss, and physicians rank clear liability frameworks as the single most important regulatory step for broader adoption.