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--:-- [Sabrina Siddiqui: In California, there's a push for an unprecedented wealth tax on billionaires. Plus, an inflection point in hackers using AI to automate dozens of attacks on governments and corporations. It's an arms race, really, between AI companies and people who would misuse them. And Verizon plans to cut roughly 15,000 jobs in its largest reduction ever.]
--:-- [Sabrina Siddiqui: It's Thursday, November 13th. I'm Sabrina Siddiqui for The Wall Street Journal, sitting in for Alex Osola. This is the PM edition of What's News, the top headlines and business stories that move the world today.]
--:-- [Sabrina Siddiqui: We exclusively report that Verizon is planning to cut roughly 15,000 jobs in its largest reduction ever. That's according to people familiar with the matter. The cuts are likely going to happen next week, and most of them will be layoffs. The company also plans to turn about 200 stores into franchises, moving employees off its payroll.]
--:-- [Sabrina Siddiqui: Verizon is the largest U.S. telecom company when you're going by subscribers, but it's struggling to hold on to customers in both the wireless and home Internet markets. Last month, the company named a new CEO, Dan Schulman, who is the former chief executive of PayPal and Virgin Mobile USA.]
--:-- [Sabrina Siddiqui: He has said he would aggressively reduce the company's cost base and take steps to reverse the customer losses. In other tech and media news, Disney's stock fell more than 7% today after lackluster quarterly results that fell short of Wall Street expectations.]
--:-- [Sabrina Siddiqui: Revenue was basically flat, and a key operating profit measure dropped 5%. The company's parks and streaming businesses posted profit gains, but investors remain worried about Disney's ability to manage the transition from traditional TV to streaming and to execute on the multi-billion dollar investments it is making in theme parks and cruise ships.]
--:-- [Sabrina Siddiqui: We're exclusively reporting that Anthropic, one of the world's largest AI startups, said today that state-sponsored hackers from China used the company's tools for dozens of cyber attacks on governments and major corporations.]
--:-- [Sabrina Siddiqui: Anthropic says the September hacking campaign involved an unprecedented level of automation, with a company official saying 80 to 90 percent of the attack was automated. Sam Schechner, a tech reporter at The Wall Street Journal, joins us now to discuss.]
--:-- [Sam Schechner: Yeah, it really does seem to be something of an inflection point. We've seen hackers do more and more individual tasks using AI. It helps them write phishing emails. It helps them scan for vulnerabilities.]
--:-- [Sam Schechner: What Anthropic is reporting here is that they saw AI orchestrating an attack over all of these different steps with humans only getting involved in a few individual choke points. And so the company itself says that this is an inflection point.]
--:-- [Sam Schechner: And what do we know about the hackers the targets and what information they were able to get? We don't know that much. Anthropic did not disclose who the targets were. It said that there were roughly 30 targets that it detected, including tech corporations, financial services, a chemical company, as well as foreign governments.]
--:-- [Sam Schechner: They wouldn't say whether the U.S. was a target, but they did confirm that the U.S. was not one of the handful of three or four instances where the hackers did manage to get into their target systems.]
--:-- [Sam Schechner: Hackers were able to go around safeguards in Anthropics' AI tools known as CLAWD. How did they do that? The company says that the hackers posed as security contractors for the targets and said that they were conducting what's called penetration testing, trying to get into those targets and find vulnerabilities, which is a legitimate use of AI.]
--:-- [Sam Schechner: And so that was how the hackers were able to sidestep some of Anthropix's protections. Is that an unusual approach to pose as testers? No. In fact, that's a pretty standard approach to what's known as jailbreaking an AI system.]
--:-- [Sam Schechner: In this case, not only did they pose as security researchers, but they also cut the tasks into much smaller bits so that each bit didn't necessarily seem that illicit. And then they were stitched together in such a way that Claude still did most of the activity, but it didn't necessarily, each instance of it didn't understand that it was part of a broader hacking campaign.]
--:-- [Sam Schechner: What has the company done in response in updating methods to circumvent hackers? Anthropic said that it has new methods of detecting hackers. And so they've updated the methods that are kind of outside of Claude that you would use to detect this kind of misuse.]
--:-- [Sam Schechner: It's an arms race, really, between AI companies and people who would misuse them. In general, the private AI companies who keep a tighter hold of their systems like Anthropic or like OpenAI are somewhat less exposed to this kind of misuse.]
--:-- [Sam Schechner: Hackers were using the latest technology to hack long before AI, and they're going to continue to do that. And the question is, you know, who comes out ahead?]
--:-- [Sabrina Siddiqui: That was The Wall Street Journal's Sam Schechner. Thank you, Sam.]
--:-- [Sam Schechner: Of course. Thanks so much for having me.]
--:-- [Sabrina Siddiqui: There was a broad market decline on Wall Street today, with worries that the Federal Reserve could decide not to cut interest rates next month weighing on stocks.]
--:-- [Sabrina Siddiqui: The Nasdaq-led declines, dropping 2.3 percent as chip stocks including NVIDIA, AI infrastructure company CoreWeave, Tesla, and other technology companies took a dive.]
--:-- [Sabrina Siddiqui: The Dow was off nearly 800 points, or 1.7%, and the S&P also fell 1.7%. Coming up, how it pushed for a first-of-its-kind tax on billionaires is playing out in California. That's after the break.]
--:-- [Christopher Mims: Hi, I'm Christopher Mims. And I'm Tim Higgins. We're the hosts of the Wall Street Journal's Bold Names podcast.]
--:-- [Christopher Mims: On our show we bring the bold name companies featured in the pages of The Wall Street Journal to life through real conversations with the people that lead them. If you're looking for more news and insights that bring you inside the C-suite, consider becoming a subscriber to The Wall Street Journal.]
--:-- [Christopher Mims: Visit subscribe.wsj.com slash bold names to subscribe now.]
--:-- [Melissa Korn: The range of options for how to watch shows and movies without cable is only growing, and so is the price tag.]
--:-- [Melissa Korn: In the last several months, we've seen price increases from HBO Max, Disney+, Peacock, and Apple TV. Paramount Plus is raising prices early next year.]
--:-- [Melissa Korn: The Journal's Deputy Media Bureau Chief, reporting on the newest wave of streamflation. We seem to be stubbornly committed to our streaming subscriptions these days.]
--:-- [Melissa Korn: And even though the prices have risen, in some cases quite significantly over the past few years, research shows that people are still subscribing to multiple plans.]
--:-- [Melissa Korn: Streaming is kind of running our lives right now. There's all these different tiers of service now for a lot of the different streaming platforms, but essentially the two main versions are ad-free and ad-supported.]
--:-- [Melissa Korn: And there's been a shift more toward the ad-supported. So you pay a little less, but you do have to watch commercials.]
--:-- [Melissa Korn: Melissa says people aren't significantly changing their streaming habits, even as prices go up. We haven't seen this price fatigue yet, but when people do kind of an audit of their subscriptions, they're sometimes shocked to see how many things they subscribe to.]
--:-- [Melissa Korn: So occasionally we'll see some push toward that and people trimming down. But at the same time, people want to be able to talk about whatever the hot show is that their friends are watching. So they don't really want to walk away from all of it.]
--:-- [Melissa Korn: So you may see more of a push toward the bundled plans, more of a push toward the ad-supported plans, and more and more, we've already started to see this and reported on it, pausing, right? So you pause your subscription for three months and then you rejoin it when the new season of the show you want comes back.]
--:-- [Melissa Korn: So you're kind of dipping in and out of these subscriptions more actively versus just holding them long term. You can hear more from Melissa on tomorrow's episode of Tech News Briefing.]
--:-- [Melissa Korn: And even if it's the age of streaming, NBCUniversal is going old school and launching a new cable channel. NBCSN will launch on Monday and mostly carry sports that are also streamed on the company's Peacock service, including NBA games, Big Ten college football, golf, and Premier League soccer.]
--:-- [Melissa Korn: Google's YouTube TV, one of the country's largest paid TV providers with roughly 10 million subscribers, has agreed to carry the channel.]
--:-- [Melissa Korn: Comcast, NBCU's parent company, will also carry it on its Xfinity cable platform, and NBCU said it expects to sign more deals by the end of the year.]
--:-- [Paul Kiernan: The Justice Department is suing California to block its new congressional map for the 2026 midterm elections.]
--:-- [Paul Kiernan: The lawsuit intensifies a political and legal fight that could determine control of the House of Representatives.]
--:-- [Paul Kiernan: The federal government argues that California's new electoral lines adding five Democratic districts are an illegal racial gerrymander.]
--:-- [Paul Kiernan: The state hasn't yet responded to the litigation, but California Democrats have described their efforts as a legal response to a Texas map.]
--:-- [Paul Kiernan: That map, approved this summer, adds as many as five Republican-leaning districts and is also the subject of litigation.]
--:-- [Paul Kiernan: And in California, there's a new approach to taxing the rich. A ballot initiative proposed by a health care workers union would take aim at the state's billionaires with a one-time 5% tax on net worth over $1 billion.]
--:-- [Paul Kiernan: If this went into effect, it would be an unprecedented effort to tax wealth rather than income. That means instead of taxing, for example, salary, the state would be taxing assets, a person's stock portfolio, art collection, cars, and even intellectual property rights.]
--:-- [Paul Kiernan: WSJ economics reporter, reporting on the ballot initiative for a wealth tax that's already run into steep opposition.]
--:-- [Paul Kiernan: The union is being pretty disciplined about saying this is only aiming to raise tax revenue to offset health care cuts. But everyone around this proposal, everyone who is advising it, everyone who's supporting it, when you talk to them, they couch it much more in terms of like tax the rich.]
--:-- [Paul Kiernan: A lot of the people who are supporting this proposal are people who have been saying for a long time that the richest Americans have basically gotten too wealthy and too powerful, and the only way to take them down a peg is by taxing their assets.]
--:-- [Paul Kiernan: You can't really get there by taxing their income. The ballot measure is no sure thing. Supporters need to gather 875,000 signatures and then win approval from California voters next November.]
--:-- [Paul Kiernan: It's already encountered significant opposition. Governor Gavin Newsom has said he is against the measure. He's against wealth taxes. And also this week, a group of political strategists with ties to Newsom launched a political action committee called Stop the Squeeze to oppose the campaign.]
--:-- [Paul Kiernan: When you talk to people who oppose this idea, they're very concerned that it could open up the floodgates. You know, critics of this measure say that it's not outlandish. In fact, it's to be expected that if it succeeds, you could get a whole slew of other interest groups trying to tax billionaires to raise money for their initiatives.]
--:-- [Paul Kiernan: Paul also says it would be hard for California to figure out the logistics of a tax on assets. It would impose a pretty substantial burden on the state revenue authorities.]
--:-- [Paul Kiernan: One reason for that is that California is home to a lot of tech startups. Shares of private companies are hard to value. They're liquid. Another thing that's going to make it difficult is nobody really knows exactly how many billionaires there are.]
--:-- [Paul Kiernan: It's much harder to get conclusive data on billionaires who own shares in private companies, intellectual property rights, who own a lot of art and collectibles.]
--:-- [Paul Kiernan: The state, if this passes, is going to have its work cut out for it, just figuring out who to go after.]
--:-- [Sabrina Siddiqui: And that's what's news for this Thursday afternoon. Today's show was produced by Pierre Bien-Aimé and Zoe Culkin with supervising producer Tali Arbel.]
--:-- [Sabrina Siddiqui: I'm Sabrina Siddiqui for The Wall Street Journal. We'll be back with a new show tomorrow morning. Thanks for listening.]
