The twist in the Ticketmaster antitrust fight
3/10/20261 hr 10 min
Last week, it appeared the US Department of Justice was off to a strong start in its antitrust case against Live Nation Ticketmaster. Then, this week, the two sides surprised everyone by settling. The Verge's Lauren Feiner joins the show to explain the stakes of the case, the facts of the settlement, and why things aren’t entirely over just yet. Then, The Verge’s Hayden Field catches us up on what’s happening between Anthropic, OpenAI, and the Department of Defense. OpenAI got the contract, but it looks like Anthropic might be the real winner here. If the company’s business can survive, that is. Finally, David answers a question on the Vergecast Hotline (call 866-VERGE11 or email vergecast@theverge.com!) about whether you should get a foldable phone. And why foldable phones even exist. Further reading: Live Nation settles government antitrust suit — that probably doesn’t include a breakup How Live Nation allegedly terrorized the concert industry Did Live Nation punish a venue by taking Billie Eilish away? Inside Anthropic’s existential negotiations with the Pentagon We don’t have to have unsupervised killer robots How OpenAI caved to the Pentagon on AI surveillance Trump orders federal agencies to drop Anthropic’s AI Iran Strikes: Anthropic Claude AI Helped US Attack. But How Exactly? - Bloomberg My favorite folding phone is the one that doesn’t exist yet Google Pixel Fold review: closing the gap Motorola Razr Ultra (2025) review: looking sharp Subscribe to The Verge for unlimited access to theverge.com, subscriber-exclusive newsletters, and our ad-free podcast feed.We love hearing from you! Email your questions and thoughts to vergecast@theverge.com or call us at 866-VERGE11. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices
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First 90 secondsDavid Pierce· Host0:00
[upbeat music] Welcome to The Vergecast, the flagship podcast of classified AI models. I'm your friend David Pierce, and I am doing one of my favorite things to do every year, which is update the software on my giant stack of iPads. Um, this is, this is the six iPads that I find myself using on any given day. And I just reviewed the new M4 iPad Air. We have a bunch of Apple reviews coming out this week, the iPhone 17E, the MacBook Neo, which is one I'm very excited about. We're gonna talk a bunch about that on Friday. Um, but what I have to do is just test a bunch of chips against each other because all iPad updates are now is new chips. And so I have to update all the software, and then I have to sit there and just do the same things on a bunch of screens over and over, because this is the glamorous life of a tech reporter. Anyway, on today's show, we're not here to talk about iPads. We're gonna do two things on today's show. First, I'm gonna talk to The Verge's Lauren Feiner about the Live Nation Ticketmaster trial, which had a week of testimony and then a really, really surprising and kind of fascinating development. We're gonna get into that. Then Hayden Field is gonna come on and talk about what's going on between Anthropic and the Department of Defense and OpenAI. We've had 10 days of just absolute chaos between those two companies and that agency about who gets to use AI and who gets to be in charge, and I think there's something bigger happening there that's gonna have ramifications for how we think about AI in general. All of that is coming up in just a second,