Entrepreneur and former presidential candidate Andrew Yang has a theory about where the next wave of startup opportunity lies, and it starts with a question most founders aren’t asking: what if the business model was giving money back instead of extracting it?

Yang was inspired by Mark Cuban. Not by his wealth, or his celebrity, but by Cost Plus Drugs — Cuban’s startup that sells pharmaceuticals at cost. Yang made a list.

“Housing, education, food, fuel, transportation, media, and wireless,” Yang told TechCrunch on a recent episode of Equity. “The things we all spend money on.”

He picked wireless and last September launched Nobile Mobile, a new mobile virtual network operator that provides cell service for a fraction of what traditional carriers charge and gives customers money back if they use less data. 

As AI threatens to compress wages and displace workers, Yang sees a business opportunity in bringing down the cost of living. Cost Plus Drugs, Noble Mobile, dumb phone makers like Light Phone, and even online grocery store Misfits Markets are early examples of an emerging business category where the startup’s value proposition is the margin it gives back to the customer.

“AI is going to suck up a lot of the value and the jobs, and then Americans are going to look up and say, ‘How do I meet basic needs?’” Yang said. He believes meeting people’s needs “less expensively” is “a very rich vein of opportunity.” 

That instinct didn’t emerge from nowhere. Yang first launched himself into the public eye during his 2020 presidential campaign, during which he advocated for Universal Basic Income as a means of combating AI-related workforce displacement and wealth concentration. The campaign didn’t succeed but the thesis has only grown more relevant.

Yang is still an advocate for UBI, arguing that the value generated by AI companies needs to be redistributed into the hands of the average American. But whether the government will be the vehicle for that redistribution, or whether it will just use any collected wealth to “plug a hole and do something not terribly productive,” Yang is less certain. 

“There is room for a direct connection between the money and the people,” he said. 

That’s where the market comes in. Where policy fails, Yang argues, market incentives can step in. Noble Mobile is his attempt to prove the point. Since its launch last September, the company has grown to “thousands and thousands” of customers and is bringing in “millions in revenue.”

“We’re unit profitable per customer, but we just share the profits with our subscribers with the idea that it’ll make you happy, you’ll stay around, and maybe you’ll tell your friends and family,” Yang said. 

The pitch is simple. Yang noted that the average monthly savings of $50, invested and compounded over 40 years, could amount to $24,000 — enough for a retirement down payment. And in this economy, who isn’t thinking about little ways they can upgrade their personal finance?

Whether investors will share that enthusiasm is another question entirely. Even if the opportunity is real, capital is concentrated heavily in AI right now, while consumer-facing businesses with thin margins and a social mission are a hard sell.

“I had at least one investor say to me around Noble Mobile, ‘Love you, Andrew, want to work with you — if you could just make this an AI company, we’ll invest,’” Yang said. 

The tide might be changing, though, simply because even the most wealthy, extractive companies need an economy in which consumers have enough buying power to purchase their products. 

“The value being concentrated in the hands of a handful of folks and firms is just bad for everybody,” he said. “There are some folks I know in Silicon Valley who are open to that for a variety of reasons…[like] they just don’t want to have to hire private security.”

Yang encouraged founders and investors to take on problems they’re passionate about and find a way to build a valuable enterprise on top of it.

“Think bigger and more broadly about trying to tackle problems and don’t subscribe so much to groupthink, because there are some valuable opportunities out there,” he said.

The U.S. government on Friday ordered Anthropic to immediately shut off access to two of its most powerful AI models — Claude Fable 5 and Claude Mythos 5 — citing national security concerns. Anthropic announced on X that it has complied, but it made clear it thinks the government got this one wrong.

The directive, which Anthropic said it received on Friday at 5:21 pm ET, forces the company to disable both models for all users worldwide — not just the foreign nationals the government’s export control order was nominally aimed at. Access to Anthropic’s other models isn’t affected.

Why does any of this matter? Mythos is Anthropic’s most capable AI model, one the company previewed in early April and has kept tightly restricted ever since because of what Anthropic described as its exceptional ability to find security vulnerabilities in software. According to Anthropic, Mythos identified flaws in every major operating system and web browser it tested, so rather than release it broadly, the company launched a controlled program called Project Glasswing, sharing it with roughly 50 vetted organizations, including Amazon, Apple, Google, Microsoft, and CrowdStrike, to use for defensive cybersecurity work.

Fable 5, released just three days ago, was Anthropic’s answer to the obvious commercial pressure: a version of Mythos fitted with guardrails that block responses in high-risk areas like cybersecurity and biology, making it safe enough for general release, the company argued. It was immediately the most capable AI model available to the public, according to benchmark tests from Vals AI, a company that tracks AI tech performance.

The government’s directive is framed as an export control action, restricting foreign national access to the models. But in a lengthy blog post, Anthropic says its understanding is that the underlying concern is a claimed jailbreak of Fable 5. So far, the company says, the government has provided only verbal evidence of a “potential narrow, non-universal jailbreak” — one that, as Anthropic describes it, amounts to prompting the model to read a specific codebase and identify software flaws. And by the way, adds the company, it’s a “level of capability” that’s already widely available in other publicly accessible models, including OpenAI’s GPT-5.5. It’s also used routinely by cybersecurity professionals for defensive purposes, Anthropic observes.

Anthropic’s broader argument is that its strongest safeguards operate through independent classifier systems that function separately from the model itself, meaning that even if someone convinces Fable to keep talking past a refusal, the underlying protections against the most dangerous outputs remain in place. The company also notes in it post that a review of recent usage found no evidence of those safeguards being successfully bypassed to produce true, harmful content.

Clearly, none of that was enough to stop the government from acting, and Anthropic isn’t hiding its frustration. “We disagree that the finding of a narrow potential jailbreak should be cause for recalling a commercial model deployed to hundreds of millions of people,” the company wrote. “If this standard was applied across the industry, we believe it would essentially halt all new model deployments for all frontier model providers.”

Anthropic is widely expected to pursue an IPO this year and has staked much of its public identity on being the safety-conscious alternative to its rivals. The irony isn’t lost on observers that the very caution Anthropic displayed in restricting Mythos — which it promoted as a model so dangerous it couldn’t be released publicly — has now apparently attracted exactly the kind of government scrutiny that could disrupt its business most.

OpenAI’s Sam Altman must be enjoying this, at least. In April, he told podcaster Ashlee Vance that Anthropic’s handling of Mythos amounted to “fear-based marketing.” “It is clearly incredible marketing to say, ‘We have built a bomb. We were about to drop it on your head. We will sell you a bomb shelter for $100 million,’” Altman said. Altman, whose company is also widely expected to pursue an IPO as soon as possible, didn’t predict a government shutdown, but he identified something that has come back to bite Anthropic for now, which is that when you spend months telling the world your AI is uniquely dangerous, the world — the U.S. government included — tends to listen.

Anyone who works at Meta or knows anyone who works at Meta will tell you the same thing: it is not a happy place, particularly given the seemingly endless layoffs the company has executed over the last few years — cuts that have only accelerated as the company funnels billions into AI.

Now, a new report in Wired suggests the company’s Applied AI team is on the verge of revolt.

The drama kicked off when someone hijacked a livestreamed, employee-only presentation this week with an expletive-laden meltdown, demanding that attendees tell a senior Meta AI executive that he was “a piece of sh_t.” One presenter reportedly covered their face with their hands.

That outburst, Wired reports, reflects simmering rage inside the three-month-old unit of roughly 6,500 engineers and product managers who have been tasked with supporting the company’s AI research ambitions.

Employees describe being forced into the group with no real choice: join or quit. Many call themselves “draftees.” Their assigned work? Generating puzzles and coding problems to train AI models. “It’s literally the gulag,” one employee told Wired. “Most people find the work soul-crushing,” said another.

Meanwhile, more than 1,600 Meta employees across the company have signed a petition protesting a program that monitors their clicks and keystrokes for AI training data. Even Meta’s chief product officer, Chris Cox, called the current environment “brutal” in a call with employees this week.

TechCrunch has reached out to Meta for comment.

The Applied AI team is led by Maher Saba, who was previously a vice president in Meta’s Reality Labs division, according to earlier reports. The new organization reports up to Meta CTO Andrew Bosworth.

Originally, it was structured in such a way that up to 50 employees reported to one manager.

CEO Mark Zuckerberg, for his part, reportedly addressed the situation in an internal memo Friday, acknowledging that recent changes had “caused distress” and admitting the company had made mistakes that it plans to address. According to Wired, he added in his memo that “Meta’s north star is to be the best place for the most talented people in the world to make an impact.”