Business brief
Studios Face State Battles; SAP Bets Big on Tabular AI
A massive multi-state antitrust challenge threatens to halt the Paramount-WBD merger, while SAP drops €1B to anchor predictive forecasting in its core database.
Business
States are blocking what legacy studios call their only survival play — if the lawsuits succeed, old Hollywood faces tech giants alone at half the scale.
BackgroundParamount and Warner Bros. Discovery represent two of the largest movie studios and cable television networks in the world. While the US Department of Justice cleared the merger in June, state attorneys general retain independent authority to sue under state and federal antitrust laws.
- California Attorney General Rob Bonta led the multi-state coalition, arguing that combining the entertainment giants violates the Clayton Act by creating illegal concentration.
- The Writers Guild of America filed its own suit, alleging the massive merger establishes a monopsony that will suppress wages and limit job opportunities for content creators.
- Paramount criticized the state lawsuits as exceptionally weak, defending the merger as a vital consolidation needed to survive against tech giants like Netflix and Apple.
Business
SAP is betting its future on specialized tabular AI — an expensive acquisition that anchors predictive planning inside the core database.
BackgroundTabular foundation models are artificial intelligence systems trained specifically on structured data, such as spreadsheets and SQL databases, rather than text or images. Unlike general large language models, these systems excel at numerical forecasts, customer churn, and inventory management.
- Prior Labs will operate as an independent research laboratory, with SAP pledging another €1B over 4 years to scale its research.
- The startup's lead model, TabPFN-3-Thinking, runs complex forecasts directly on raw enterprise data without requiring manual data preparation.
- The acquisition helps SAP defend its core enterprise resource planning (ERP) market from tech giants building generic business AI solutions.
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