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By Foo Yun Chee BRUSSELS (Reuters) -U.S. tech giant Microsoft looks set to avoid a French antitrust investigation into its search operations because regulators are planning to dismiss a complaint by Qwant, the French rival search engine said on Wednesday. Qwant, which has historically relied on Microsoft's Bing platform to deliver search and news results, took a grievance against Microsoft's search practices to the French regulator earlier this year. It said on Wednesday it may challenge the decision to reject its case in court or take it to other authorities. Qwant had asked the watchdog to take interim action against Microsoft while it decided if there was sufficient grounds for an investigation. Qwant Chief Executive Olivier Abecassis said the French authority's investigators at a June closed-door hearing issued a recommendation to reject the company's request for an injunction and complaint. "In that case we will be left with no other option but to pursue all available legal avenues to protect our business from Microsoft's egregious abuse, to defend our rights, and to seek compensation," he said. The French regulator declined to comment. It is expected to issue its decision in the next two weeks, though the timing may still change, people with direct knowledge of the matter said. Microsoft said the Qwant complaint lacks merit. "The complaint alleges harm to competition in the market for search, which is dominated by Google," a Microsoft spokesperson said. Qwant alleged Microsoft imposes exclusivity restrictions on Qwant in search results and search advertising, hampering the latter's ability to develop its own search engine, and also alleged it favours itself in allocating search advertising, according to the French company. Microsoft is a major player in the search-engine syndication sector, where it provides search results to smaller European rivals such as Qwant, Ecosia, DuckDuckGo and Lilo. (Reporting by Foo Yun Chee;Editing by Elaine Hardcastle)

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By Foo Yun Chee BRUSSELS (Reuters) -U.S. tech giant Microsoft looks set to avoid a French antitrust investigation into its search operations because regulators are planning to dismiss a complaint by Qwant, the French rival search engine said on Wednesday. Qwant, which has historically relied on Microsoft's Bing platform to deliver search and news results, took a grievance against Microsoft's search practices to the French regulator earlier this year. It said on Wednesday it may challenge the decision to reject its case in court or take it to other authorities. Qwant had asked the watchdog to take interim action against Microsoft while it decided if there was sufficient grounds for an investigation. Qwant Chief Executive Olivier Abecassis said the French authority's investigators at a June closed-door hearing issued a recommendation to reject the company's request for an injunction and complaint. "In that case we will be left with no other option but to pursue all available legal avenues to protect our business from Microsoft's egregious abuse, to defend our rights, and to seek compensation," he said. The French regulator declined to comment. It is expected to issue its decision in the next two weeks, though the timing may still change, people with direct knowledge of the matter said. Microsoft said the Qwant complaint lacks merit. "The complaint alleges harm to competition in the market for search, which is dominated by Google," a Microsoft spokesperson said. Qwant alleged Microsoft imposes exclusivity restrictions on Qwant in search results and search advertising, hampering the latter's ability to develop its own search engine, and also alleged it favours itself in allocating search advertising, according to the French company. Microsoft is a major player in the search-engine syndication sector, where it provides search results to smaller European rivals such as Qwant, Ecosia, DuckDuckGo and Lilo. (Reporting by Foo Yun Chee;Editing by Elaine Hardcastle)

(The article has been published through a syndicated feed. Except for the headline, the content has been published verbatim. Liability lies with original publisher.)

By Krystal Hu and Deepa Seetharaman (Reuters) -Artificial intelligence startup Anthropic is projecting to more than double and potentially nearly triple its annualized revenue run rate next year, fueled by the rapid adoption of its enterprise products, according to two people familiar with the matter. The company is on track to meet an internal goal of $9 billion in annual revenue run rate – a calculation of annual revenue extrapolated from the current sales pace – by the end of 2025, the people said. For 2026, Anthropic has set even more aggressive targets: a base case of more than doubling to $20 billion in annualized revenue and a best case of as much as $26 billion, the people said, requesting anonymity to discuss private figures. Anthropic told Reuters its annual revenue run rate is approaching $7 billion this month, but declined to comment on future projections. The company has said its annual revenue run rate was more than $5 billion in August. Anthropic debuted a new version of its cheapest AI model, Haiku, on Wednesday, as part of a broader effort to appeal to companies that are looking for capable AI systems that are dramatically cheaper than its more advanced models. The Haiku 4.5 model sells for about one-third the price of Sonnet 4, one of its medium-sized models. AI DEMAND SOARS The revenue projections underscore continued strong demand for generative AI tools among businesses and help explain investor enthusiasm, even as AI spending, especially in infrastructure buildout, comes under scrutiny. Some people worry the level of investment might be unsustainable. Fueling the expansion is the uptake of enterprise products, which are built for organizations. Anthropic has more than 300,000 business and enterprise customers, which account for about 80% of its revenue. The company sells access to its models via application programming interfaces, which are tools that help different software communicate. It offers products including the code‑generation tool Claude Code, which has reached an annualized revenue run rate of nearly $1 billion since its launch earlier this year, one of the people added. The revenue trajectory positions Anthropic as a rival to ChatGPT maker OpenAI. OpenAI said it crossed $13 billion in annualized revenue in August, and is on pace to achieve over $20 billion by end of the year, driven by the continued growth of ChatGPT, the generative AI assistant that has more than 800 million weekly active users. Anthropic's revenue milestones follow a period of brisk fundraising and valuation gains for the San Francisco-based startup. The company was recently valued at $183 billion after raising $13 billion in a Series F round led by ICONIQ, more than doubling its $61.5 billion valuation in March. Backed by technology companies including Alphabet's Google and Amazon.com, Anthropic develops the Claude family of large language models, which compete with OpenAI's GPT series. The company emphasizes AI safety and building models for enterprise use cases. Its models have helped power a boom in code‑generation startups such as Cursor. Anthropic has been expanding sales to governments and growing outside the U.S. In August, it said it would offer its Claude model to the U.S. government for $1. The company plans to open its first office in Bengaluru, India, in 2026 — its second-largest market after the U.S.— and intends to triple its international workforce and expand its applied AI team fivefold this year to meet rising demand. (Reporting by Krystal Hu and Deepa Seetharaman in San Francisco; editing by Kenneth Li and Rod Nickel)

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WASHINGTON (Reuters) -U.S. government officials said on Wednesday that federal networks are being targeted by an unidentified "nation-state cyber threat actor" that's trying to exploit vulnerabilities in products made by the cybersecurity company F5. In a statement and an accompanying emergency directive, the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency said hackers had compromised F5's systems and extracted files, including a portion of its source code and information about vulnerabilities, and could use the knowledge as a roadmap to break into F5 devices and software, something that could eventually lead to a full compromise of the targeted networks.  "The cyber threat actor presents an imminent threat to federal networks" using F5 products, CISA said. CISA's Executive Assistant Director for Cybersecurity Nick Andersen told reporters that government officials were being ordered to identify F5's devices on their network and apply urgent updates. Andersen encouraged others to do the same, noting that "the risk of this vulnerability extends to every organization and sector that's using this product." Andersen refused to say who the hackers were and said there had so far been no evidence of any compromise at a U.S. civilian agency.  Earlier, F5 said it had detected unauthorized access to certain company systems by a threat actor, but the breach had no impact on its operations. The company discovered the intrusion on August 9 and took "extensive actions" to contain the threat, engaging external experts, including CrowdStrike, Mandiant, NCC Group and IOActive, to assist with the investigation, it said in a filing with the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission. The company said it found no signs that its software development process had been tampered with. F5, which has clients across the private and public sector, said information from a few customers was involved in the breach, and it was reaching out to those affected directly. The company continues to strengthen its security controls and infrastructure following the incident, it said, adding that the U.S. Department of Justice had approved a delay in publicly disclosing the breach until September 12, citing national security considerations. British authorities also issued an alert urging F5 users to update their software. (Reporting by Akash Sriram in Bengaluru and Raphael Satter in Washington; Editing by Shilpi Majumdar, David Gregorio and Diane Craft)

(The article has been published through a syndicated feed. Except for the headline, the content has been published verbatim. Liability lies with original publisher.)