AI NewsFresh off bond sale, Amazon borrows $17.5B from banks as AI spending continues

Fresh off bond sale, Amazon borrows $17.5B from banks as AI spending continues

3:35 AM IST · June 11, 2026

Companies are burning through exorbitant sums of money to keep pace in the AI arms race.Debt is climbing. Amidst this flurry of activity, Amazon has signed a deal to borrow some $17.5 billion from a number of financial lenders,according to Bloomberg. The banks behind the loanreportedlyinclude Citigroup, JPMorgan Chase, Wells Fargo, HSBC, and BofA Securities. The deal has been characterized as adelayed draw term loan, meaning Amazon can draw down the funds on its own timeline rather than taking the full sum upfront, giving it flexibility in how and when the money gets deployed. The loan comes just two days after it was reported that Amazon would alsoraise $14 billion in a Canadian bond sale, bringing its total new financing to roughly $31.5 billion in the span of roughly 48 hours. It’s not clear exactly how Amazon plans to spend all the new money. Reutersnotes thatthe new loan will be used for “general corporate purposes.” TechCrunch has reached out to Amazon for more information. Amazon is hardly alone. To fund new AI infrastructure like chips and data centers, companies are leveraging historic capex. Increasingly, companiesare borrowing moneyto fund their massive AI buildouts. The question investors and analysts are increasingly asking isn’t whether this spending is necessary — it’s whether the returns will ever justify it. The scale of the borrowing is striking even by Silicon Valley standards. About a week ago, Google parent company Alphabet said that itplanned to raise $80 billionthrough a stock sale designed to help “fund its investments in a balanced way while retaining a healthy balance sheet.” Meta has also announced plans toraise $30 billion in a bond sale— its largest ever.

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Authors push back as publishers and agents make claims on Anthropic settlement

Some authors hoping to receive their share of Anthropic’s $1.5 billion copyright settlement said they received surprising emails this week — emails informing them that someone else was making a claim on their payments. Anthropicsettled a copyright class action suitlast year, after a judge ruled that training AI models on copyrighted material is legal under fair use doctrine, but pirating that material was not. The dealreceived final approvalin July, allowing the payments to move forward. Under the terms of the settlement, the authors of nearly 500,000 titles will be paid $3,000 for each pirated work. If the book is still in-print with a traditional publisher, the money will be split 50-50 between author and publisher. If the book was self-published, or if the publisher reverted the rights by allowing the book to go out-of-print, then the author should get the entire payment. But writers have been posting on social media that publishers seem to be claiming more than their fair share of some payments. For example, mystery and thriller author April Henryasked, “WTF is HarperCollins playing at? They claimed one of my books on the Anthropic Settlement that reverted back at least 17 years ago AND on the same day I got a credit alert saying they had been added as my employer! (which they never were).” Atthe popular blog Writers Beware, Victoria Strauss wrote that she’s been receiving author complaints that fall into two broad categories: one where publishers are seeking payment for works that they no longer have a legitimate claim on (because the rights have reverted), and another where publishers are seeking a full 100% payment when they’re only entitled to 50%. In both cases, Strauss said she’s “reluctant to attribute to malice what can be plausibly explained by poor recordkeeping” — and she noted that some publishers have already said this is a mistake that they’ve asked Anthropic to fix. Similarly,Authors Guild CEO Mary Rasenberger told The New York Timesthat she doesn’t see this as “a grab by the publishers” and that she doesn’t believe publishers are “specifically trying to screw any author over.” Instead, she argued that this is the predictable result of bad record-keeping and a confusing settlement process. Strauss also acknowledged that any complaints she’s seen are just “a peek through a small crack in a massive wall.” “But the unusually large number of reports I’ve received over the last two days, as well as the fact that authors are reporting the exact same errors over and over, suggest to me that these aren’t the kind of routine glitches you might expect from such a large operation, but something much more wide[s]pread and systemic,” she wrote. And publishers aren’t the only ones seeking a cut of the payments. Strauss said she’s gotten complaints that a number of literary agencies are also making claims, which she said is surprising since “agents are not rightsholders in the books that they sell.” Author Courtney Milan (the pen name of former law clerk and law professor Heidi Bond) was more blunt ina post on Bluesky, writing, “Apparently some agents are trying to claim percentages on the Anthropic settlement, and I do not REMOTELY think they should do this, what the fuck, stop that shit!” Milanandthe Authors Guildalso shared more details about how authors can dispute their payment allocations. (One tricky issue: When the rights to a specific book reverted. In order for an author to make a 100% claim on a book, the rights reversion needs to have happened before August 10, 2022, which is the “download date” in the settlement.)

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Travis Kalanick’s Atoms might be getting into the robotaxi business

Earlier this summer, Travis Kalanick’s Atoms announceda $1.7 billion funding round led by Andreessen Horowitz. But even after raising that mega round, the Uber founder remained a bit cagey about what he was actually aiming to do. Nowa story in the Financial Timesoffers more details about Atoms’ goals. The startup is reportedly preparing for a hiring spree, as well as acquisitions, that could make it a major player in the autonomous vehicle industry. In fact, the FT said Atoms has talked to Uber about how the ride-hailing company could use the startup’s robotaxi technology. (Uber has alreadypartnered with a long list of autonomous vehicle companies.) The report also noted that Uber has invested $100 million in Atoms — a figure previouslyconfirmed by TechCrunch. While sources emphasized that robotaxis don’t represent the entirety of Atoms’ plans, this direction seems consistent with Kalanick’s description of the round as “unfinished business.” It also fits withAtoms’ acquisition of Pronto, an autonomous mining startup led by Uber’s former self-driving chief Anthony Levandowski. (Levandowski was convicted of stealing trade secrets andsentenced to 18 months in prison, but was then pardoned by President Donald Trump.)

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ITC Infotech-Happiest Minds Merger Is a Warning Shot for India's Mid-Tier IT

The ₹7,000-crore merger creates scale. But its bigger significance lies in what it says about the pressure building on India’s mid-sized IT services firms.

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Genesys Launches New Innovations To Automate End-To-End Customer Service

Snippet: The platform retains information across interactions, determines its actions and coordinates work between AI and human employees while operating within predefined business rules.

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Fresh off bond sale, Amazon borrows $17.5B from banks as AI spending continues

最新 AI 资讯

Authors push back as publishers and agents make claims on Anthropic settlement

Travis Kalanick’s Atoms might be getting into the robotaxi business

ITC Infotech-Happiest Minds Merger Is a Warning Shot for India's Mid-Tier IT

Genesys Launches New Innovations To Automate End-To-End Customer Service

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