Meta Pays for News Again
Three years after walking away from publisher deals, Meta just signed multiyear agreements with CNN, Fox News, USA Today, and others. The catch? This time your eyeballs won’t see the articles in your feed. They’ll be summarized by an AI chatbot instead.
📰 The Rundown
📰 Meta Reverses Course, Signs AI Deals With Major News Publishers
➡️ The move: Meta announced multiyear licensing agreements with CNN, Fox News, Fox Sports, USA Today, People Inc., Le Monde, The Daily Caller, and The Washington Examiner. The deals grant Meta AI real-time access to publisher content for answering news questions. Financial terms remain undisclosed, but this marks Meta’s first major news compensation since it killed its Facebook News tab in 2024.
⚡ Why it matters: The company that spent two years dismantling its news business is now rebuilding it for AI. The bipartisan mix of CNN and Fox News suggests Meta learned from past accusations of political bias. More importantly, it signals that licensed news access is becoming table stakes for AI chatbots competing with Perplexity and ChatGPT.
🎯 Your takeaway: When you ask Meta AI about current events now, the answers pull from verified sources with links back to publishers. It’s a small win for accuracy in a sea of AI hallucinations.
🤝 Anthropic and Snowflake Ink $200 Million Enterprise AI Deal
➡️ The move: Anthropic and Snowflake announced a $200 million multi-year partnership to embed Claude directly into Snowflake’s AI Data Cloud. The deal reaches more than 12,600 global customers across AWS, Google Cloud, and Azure. Claude will power Snowflake Intelligence, an enterprise agent that lets business users query structured and unstructured data using plain English.
⚡ Why it matters: This is the largest publicly disclosed AI model deal focused specifically on “agentic AI” in the enterprise. Snowflake reports greater than 90% accuracy on complex text-to-SQL tasks with Claude. For regulated industries like healthcare and financial services, the combination of frontier AI reasoning with Snowflake’s governance controls removes a major adoption barrier.
🎯 Your takeaway: If your company uses Snowflake, Claude-powered features are arriving soon. Start thinking about which business questions you’d ask if you could query all your data in plain language.
🌏 UN Warns AI Could Displace Millions of Asian Workers
➡️ The move: A new UN Development Programme report warns that AI adoption concentrated in wealthy nations could replicate 19th-century industrialization’s inequality. Women and young adults face the highest workplace exposure. Meanwhile, AI is projected to generate nearly $1 trillion in economic gains across Asia over the next decade, but those benefits remain concentrated in China, Singapore, and South Korea.
⚡ Why it matters: The gap between AI adopters and AI avoiders is becoming a geopolitical divide. Countries with limited infrastructure, skills, and computing power face both job displacement and exclusion from AI benefits. The report urges governments to invest in AI literacy and ethics frameworks before rolling out further.
🎯 Your takeaway: Individual professionals face the same dynamic as nations. The skills gap between AI-fluent workers and everyone else is widening. Your competitive advantage isn’t avoiding AI; it’s mastering it faster than your peers.
🔧 Tool Spotlight: Snowflake Intelligence
Snowflake Intelligence is an enterprise intelligence agent that lets business users analyze all their company data using natural language. Powered by Claude Sonnet 4.5, it converts plain English questions into SQL queries, retrieves answers from structured and unstructured data, and shows its reasoning.
What makes it different: Unlike chatbots that require you to paste data into a prompt, Snowflake Intelligence connects directly to your company’s data warehouse. Ask “Which customers churned last quarter and what did they have in common?” and it pulls the answer from your actual CRM and usage data. The 90%+ accuracy on complex queries means fewer hallucinations and more trustworthy answers.
Best for: Data analysts spending hours writing SQL, business leaders who need quick answers from company data, and any team that’s tired of waiting for reports.
Pricing: Available to Snowflake customers through Cortex AI. Pricing varies by usage and enterprise tier. Contact Snowflake for quotes.
👉 Try it: Visit snowflake.com/cortex to learn more or ask your data team about enabling Snowflake Intelligence.
✨ Try This Today: The Data Question Sprint
Most professionals approach data backwards. They wait until reports exist, then try to extract insights. The smarter approach is to start with the questions you wish you could answer.
The technique: Spend 10 minutes writing down every data question you’d ask if you had unlimited analyst time. Don’t filter for feasibility. Just capture what you’d want to know.
How to do it:
1. Set a timer for 10 minutes
2. Write questions in plain language: “Which deals closed fastest last quarter and why?” or “What do our happiest customers have in common?”
3. Don’t worry about whether the data exists
4. Group similar questions into themes
5. Pick your top 3 and share them with your data team or try them in an AI tool with data access
Why it works: The bottleneck in most organizations isn’t data availability. It’s knowing what questions to ask. Natural language AI tools like Snowflake Intelligence, Microsoft Copilot, and Tableau Pulse are making these questions directly answerable. The professionals who benefit most will be the ones who’ve already clarified what they need to know.
Time required: 10 minutes for the sprint. The questions you generate will shape weeks of better decisions.
✨ The Wire
🔗 Geoffrey Hinton told Business Insider he now expects Google to beat OpenAI in the AI race, praising Gemini 3 and Google’s custom chip strategy as decisive advantages. Business Insider
🔗 The New York Times filed a lawsuit against Perplexity demanding the AI search startup stop scraping its content until a formal licensing agreement is reached. TechCrunch
🔗 India leads the world in active generative AI use at 66.4%, with 89% of users calling AI useful and 78% reporting they’ve received some AI training, according to a new OECD-Cisco study. The Indian Express
Neural Notes — AI that amplifies your value, not replaces it.
