Amazon said Friday it will continue offering Anthropic’s artificial intelligence technology to its cloud customers, excluding work involving the Department of Defense.

The announcement comes after the federal agency informed Anthropic on Thursday that it would label the company a “supply chain risk.” Anthropic responded by saying it has “no choice” but to challenge the designation in court.

“AWS customers and partners can continue to use Claude for all their workloads not associated with the Department of War (DoW),” an Amazon Web Services spokesperson said in a statement. “For all DoW workloads which use Anthropic technologies, we are supporting customers and partners as they transition to alternatives running on AWS.”

Last week, President Donald Trump ordered federal agencies, via social media posts, to stop using Anthropic’s technology. The declaration came after Anthropic refused to agree to the DOD’s request that it be allowed to operate the company’s technology in all lawful use cases without limitation.

The supply chain risk designation will require defense vendors and contractors to certify they don’t use Anthropic’s models in their work with the Pentagon.

Amazon, the leader in public cloud, is following top rivals Microsoft and Google in updating customers on Anthropic’s availability. Microsoft said late Thursday that Anthropic’s Claude models will remain accessible in its products outside of defense work, and Google issued a similar statement earlier Friday.

Amazon is one of Anthropic’s biggest financial backers, investing $8 billion in the startup since 2023. The two companies have also forged a strong commercial relationship.

AWS remains Anthropic’s primary cloud and training partner. Anthropic also committed to use 500,000 of Amazon’s custom-built chips, called Trainium 2, as part of an $11 billion AWS data center campus built for the startup, called Project Rainier.

Anthropic’s Claude models are available through AWS Bedrock, which allows companies to tap into artificial intelligence models built by a variety of providers. AWS offers Bedrock to users of its GovCloud service, a dedicated cloud region equipped to host sensitive data and regulated workflows.

Amazon has won billions of dollars in contracts to provide cloud and AI services to federal agencies. The company in November earmarked up to $50 billion on AI infrastructure for U.S. government customers. At the time, AWS said it served more than 11,000 government agencies.

Anthropic relied on AWS as its pathway into government work. In November 2024, the company partnered with software and services vendor Palantir and AWS to provide defense and intelligence agencies access to Claude models.

Dave Levy, an AWS vice president, said in the announcement that, “We are excited to partner with Anthropic and Palantir and offer new generative AI capabilities that will drive innovation across the public sector.”

Eight months later, Anthropic was awarded a $200 million DOD contract and became the first AI lab to integrate its models into mission workflows on classified networks.

— CNBC’s Ashley Capoot contributed to this report.

MINNEAPOLIS — Target customers will soon see changes on the retailer’s shelves, as the company tries to woo back shoppers during a turnaround effort that has started to catch Wall Street’s eye.

Among those shifts, Target will add more fresh and trendy groceries, a dedicated display for higher-end makeup and a larger array of merchandise for sports fans.

At the big-box retailer’s Minneapolis headquarters on Tuesday, Target’s merchandising leaders previewed the company’s ambitious plans to overhaul key categories, including home and apparel, which have posted year-over-year sales declines. The company held an investor meeting to share its holiday-quarter results and its turnaround strategy for this year, which hinges in part on regaining its reputation for stylish and unique items.

CEO Michael Fiddelke, a Target veteran who stepped into the top role on Feb. 1, told investors on Tuesday that the company is making changes that “don’t happen overnight.” But, he added, they include many tweaks that customers “will see and feel right away.”

“If I were to step back and draw a heat map of the entire store highlighting where we’re making changes this year, you’d see more change to what we sell and how we sell it than you’ve seen in a decade,” he said.

The success of Target’s merchandise makeover will help determine whether the company meets its sales and earnings outlook for the current year and whether it can reverse four consecutive quarters of declining customer traffic. The company’s revenue fell slightly in fiscal 2025 and has been stagnant for four years.

Target said Tuesday that it expects net sales for the current fiscal year to rise about 2% compared with the previous year and anticipates that sales will grow in every quarter of the year.

Wall Street had a positive early read on Target’s turnaround progress: The company’s stock climbed more than 6% on Tuesday, and was trading higher on Wednesday.

Here’s a closer look at Target’s merchandising changes:

Visa said on Thursday that it successfully completed hundreds of AI transactions as part of a pilot program that kicked off after the company’s product event in April.

The credit card issuer and rivals across the fintech industry are racing to build tools that allow consumers to task artificial intelligence agents with completing certain transactions.

“This is going to be the year we see an enormous amount of material adoption, and consumers really starting to get comfortable in a bunch of different agentic environments,” said Rubail Birwadker, Visa’s head of growth products and partnerships, in an interview.

AI is transforming the e-commerce experience for shoppers, changing how customers purchase and browse for goods.

Mastercard said in April it was testing a feature called Agent Pay that allows AI agents to shop online for customers. Amazon began testing a “Buy For Me” offering that same month, while PayPal and Perplexity have joined forces on agentic shopping tools. Earlier in December, a survey from Visa found that nearly half of U.S. shoppers are using AI with purchases.

While the data is limited, Birwadker said the tools could be useful for consistent purchases made by consumers or events like concert tickets.

Visa said it plans to launch pilot programs in Asia and Europe next year, and is working with over 20 partners on AI agent tools.

WATCH: Why Visa is moving deeper into stablecoins

Qualcomm’s self-driving technology developed alongside BMW is expected to spark significant interest from other automakers keen to licence the system, the CEO of the U.S. chip giant told CNBC.

The comments underscore how Qualcomm, a major player in smartphone chips, is diversifying its business into new areas, with automotive among its fastest-growing divisions.

Last week, Qualcomm and German auto giant BMW announced an automated driving system that is built on the former’s semiconductors.

It’s called the Snapdragon Ride Pilot Automated Driving System and is a type of driver-assist feature. It allows hands-free driving on certain roads or even lane changing, but not for the car to be fully driverless.

The system will debut on the new BMW iX3 and the companies say it will be available across 100 countries by 2026.

But while the system has been developed with BMW, Cristiano Amon, CEO of Qualcomm, told CNBC in an interview Tuesday that the technology has been designed to licence to other automakers.

“Everybody’s been waiting for this moment, including ourselves, because people wanted to see how it performs in the street,” Amon said, adding that the BMW iX3 will launch with the automated driving technology in 60 countries. This will allow the system to be demonstrated, he said.

“I think what I expect to happen, as OEMs [Original Equipment Manufacturers] see how it compares and how competitive it is, that’s going to ignite a domino effect” of other carmakers wanting to use the technology, Amon said.

The Qualcomm CEO said the company had “made a lot of progress” in talks with other carmakers, but is “not yet ready to announce” any partnerships yet.

When Justin Klish stumbled upon an ad for Yieldstreet in February 2022, he said, it was the company’s tagline that stuck in his head.

“Invest like the 1%,” the startup said.

The ad spoke to his desire to build wealth and diversify away from stocks, which were then in freefall, Klish said. Yieldstreet says it gives retail investors such as Klish access to the types of deals that were previously only the domain of Wall Street firms or the ultrarich.

So Klish, a 46-year-old financial services worker living in Miami, logged on to Yieldstreet’s platform, where a pair of offerings jumped out to him.

He invested $400,000 in two real estate projects: A luxury apartment building in downtown Nashville overseen by former WeWork CEO Adam Neumann‘s family office, and a three-building renovation in the Chelsea neighborhood of New York. Each project had targeted annual returns of around 20%.

Three years later, Klish said he has little hope of ever seeing his money again. Yieldstreet declared the Nashville project a total loss in May, according to an investor letter, wiping out $300,000 of his funds. The Chelsea deal needs to raise fresh capital to avoid a similar fate, according to another letter. Both letters were reviewed by CNBC.

“There isn’t a day that goes by without me saying, ‘I can’t believe what happened,'” Klish told CNBC. “I lost $400,000 in Yieldstreet. I consider myself moderately financially savvy, and I got duped by this company. I just worry that it’s going to keep happening to others.”

The documents show investors put more than $370 million into 30 real estate projects that have already recognized $78 million in defaults in the past year. Yieldstreet customers who spoke to CNBC say they anticipate deep or total losses on the remainder.

The breadth of Yieldstreet’s struggles in real estate — its biggest single investment category — hasn’t previously been reported.

CNBC’s analysis covers a wide swath of deals that the company offered between 2021 and 2024, but doesn’t include every project, of which there were at least 55, according to Yieldstreet.

The troubled projects vary. They include apartment complexes in boomtowns such as Atlanta, Dallas and Nashville, Tennessee; developments in coastal cities including New York, Boston and Portland, Oregon; apartment buildings in the Midwest and single-family rental homes across Florida, Georgia and North Carolina.

Of the 30 deals that CNBC reviewed information on, four have been declared total losses by Yieldstreet. Of the rest, 23 are deemed to be on “watchlist” by the startup as it seeks to recoup value for investors, sometimes by raising more funds from members. Three deals are listed as “active,” though they have stopped making scheduled payouts, according to the documents.

Additionally, Yieldstreet shut down a real estate investment trust made up of six of the above projects last year as its value plunged by nearly half, locking up customer money for at least two years.

Yieldstreet’s overall returns in real estate have plunged in the past two years; the category went from a 9.4% annual return rate in 2023 to a 2% return rate in the company’s most recent update on its website.

But only customers participating in a specific fund get information about its performance, and Yieldstreet labels its investor updates “confidential,” warning customers that the information in them can’t be shared without consent from the startup. While not uncommon in the private markets, those limitations make it hard for investors to know if their experience is unique.

Klish said he began to worry about his investments in early 2023 when updates became late and began to hint at deteriorating market conditions.

Frustrated by those delays and what he described as a lack of candor from Yieldstreet about his sinking investments, Klish turned to forums on Facebook and Reddit for a sense of the bigger picture. There he said he found a few dozen other customers who shared their Yieldstreet experiences.

“When I dug into the other deals, I realized that this is systemic,” said Klish. “Almost every single deal is in trouble.”

In July, Klish filed a complaint, which CNBC has reviewed, with the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission alleging that Yieldstreet misled its investors. Klish said he has yet to receive a response to his complaint.

Yieldstreet calls itself the leading platform offering access to the private markets, a category that has boomed over the past decade as professional investors seek sources of yield beyond stocks and bonds.

Founded 10 years ago by Michael Weisz and Milind Mehere, the company has well-known VC backers including Khosla Ventures, Thrive Capital and General Catalyst. Yieldstreet was part of a wave of fintech startups created in the aftermath of the 2008 financial crisis, including Robinhood and Chime, with a populist message.

“Our mission at Yieldstreet is, how do we help create financial independence for millions of people?” Weisz said during a 2020 CNBC interview. “You do that by helping people generate consistent, passive income.”

Weisz, who became CEO of Yieldstreet in 2023, brought experience in litigation finance, where hedge funds lend money to plaintiffs for a slice of the payout if the lawsuit wins. Mehere, a former software engineer who had co-founded online marketing startup Yodle, was the more technical of the pair.

Yieldstreet declined to make the co-founders or other executives available for this article.

In early 2020, Yieldstreet announced a partnership with BlackRock, the biggest asset manager in the world. The startup said at the time that its new Prism fund would contain a mix of its private market assets with conventional bond funds managed by BlackRock.

Here is the 2020 interview with Yieldstreet co-founder Weisz:

The move seemed to signal that Yieldstreet was primed for mainstream success. BlackRock had spent 18 months vetting the company before agreeing to the tie-up, Yieldstreet’s co-founders told CNBC at the time.

The month after its public announcement, though, Yieldstreet had tougher news to share. It was becoming clear that customers in another one of its product lines — loans backed by commercial ships that are torn apart for scrap metal — would suffer losses, the firm told them in March, according to a Wall Street Journal report.

Yieldstreet lost track of 13 ships in international waters that backed $89 million in member loans, according to an April 2020 lawsuit filed by the startup against the borrower in that project, which it accused of fraud. In October 2020, a British court sided with Yieldstreet in the lawsuit against the borrower, a Dubai-based ship recycler.

The episode scared off BlackRock, which ended the partnership weeks after it was announced, according to a person familiar with the matter who asked to remain unnamed so they could speak freely about private conversations.

A Yieldstreet spokeswoman at the time told The Wall Street Journal that the BlackRock launch was initially successful but the fund “was then faced with the market environment caused by Covid-19.”

Three years later, the SEC fined Yieldstreet $1.9 million for selling a $14.5 million marine loan to investors even when it had reason to believe the borrower had stolen proceeds from related deals. Yieldstreet also didn’t use “publicly available” methods to track the ships it was relying on for collateral, the SEC said.

“YieldStreet aims to unlock the complex alternative investments market for retail investors but failed to disclose glaring red flags it had about the security of the collateral backing this offering,” an SEC official said in a 2023 release accompanying the settlement, for which the company neither denied nor admitted to the agency’s findings.

Still, the company continued to rack up assets on its platform, in part by ramping up activities in real estate. By 2023, real estate funds made up 26% of all investments on the platform, the largest asset category and well ahead of runners-up such as private credit, Yieldstreet said at the time.

Late that year, Yieldstreet announced it had acquired Cadre, a startup co-founded by Jared Kushner that focused on broadening access to commercial real estate. The companies declined to disclose terms of the deal, but Yieldstreet said the combined entities’ “investment value” was nearly $10 billion.

In May 2025, Yieldstreet replaced Weisz as CEO with Mitch Caplan, a former E-Trade chief who joined the startup’s board in 2021. That’s the year the venture firm where Caplan serves as president, Tarsadia Investments, took a stake in Yieldstreet. The company declined to say why Weisz was replaced.

In July, Yieldstreet announced a $77 million capital raise, led by Tarsadia Investments.

In early 2022, the Federal Reserve kicked off its most aggressive rate-hiking cycle in decades to combat inflation, turning the economics of many projects from that period upside down. The value of multifamily buildings has dropped 19% since 2022, according to Green Street’s commercial property index.

Projects that Yieldstreet put its customers into struggled to hit revenue targets amid price competition or had problems filling vacancies or raising rents, and thus began to fall behind on loan payments, according to investor letters.

Combined with the use of leverage, or borrowing money that amplifies both risks and returns, Yieldstreet investors suffered complete losses on projects in Nashville, Atlanta and New York’s Upper West Side neighborhood, the letters show.

“After exhausting all options to preserve value, YieldStreet determined there was no reasonable path to recovery,” the firm told customers who invested $15 million in the Upper West Side deal. “We sold our position for $1.”

It’s unclear if Yieldstreet, which makes money by charging annual management fees of around 2% on invested funds, itself suffered financial losses on the defaults.

In at least a half dozen cases, Yieldstreet went to its user base again in 2023 and 2024 to raise rescue funds for troubled deals, telling members that the loans combined the protections of debt with the upside of equity.

But if the project was doomed, a bailout loan was, at least in one case, effectively throwing good money after bad. A $3.1 million member loan to help rescue the Nashville project, located at 2010 West End Avenue, was wiped out in just months.

“We are reaching out to share difficult news,” Yieldstreet told investors of the Nashville project and its member loan in May. “Following multiple restructuring attempts, the property has been sold to Tishman Speyer … resulting in a complete loss of capital for investors.”

In a statement provided in response to CNBC’s reporting for this article, Yieldstreet said it has offered 149 real estate deals since inception and has delivered positive returns on 94% of matured investments in the category.

That 94% figure likely doesn’t include the distressed projects that CNBC has identified, since those funds aren’t yet classified as matured while Yieldstreet seeks to salvage projects on its watchlist. The watchlist designation doesn’t always result in the loss of investor funds, Yieldstreet said in another statement.

“Of the nearly $5 billion invested across the platform, a set of real estate equity offerings originated during 2021–2022 were significantly impacted by rising interest rates and broader market conditions that pressured multifamily valuations across the industry,” Yieldstreet said through a spokeswoman.

On its website, the startup says it offers only about 10% of the opportunities it reviews, signaling its discernment when it comes to risk.

But several professional investors pointed to the possibility that, instead of securing only top-quality deals in real estate, Yieldstreet may be getting ones that are picked over by more established players.

“There’s no question you’ve seen deals that institutions have passed on that went to the platforms because retail investors might have less discipline than the institutional ones,” said Greg Friedman, CEO of Peachtree Group, an Atlanta-based commercial real estate investment firm.

“It’s a reflection of a lack of discipline in underwriting and market conditions going against them,” Friedman said of Yieldstreet’s track record. “Anything done after 2022, they should have done more carefully knowing that we are in a higher-rate environment.”

In late 2022, Yieldstreet even told investors that real estate was a “safe(er) haven” asset during periods of rising rates and high inflation. By then, the Fed’s intent to squash inflation with higher rates was well understood.

“Real estate can be an effective inflation hedge, carries low correlation to traditional markets, and has even benefitted in times of market downturns, generating outsized returns,” the startup said in a blog post at the time.

In the post, Yieldstreet gave the example of the Alterra Apartments, a multifamily project in Tucson, Arizona, where it said rent increases and a contractual cap on interest rates protected it from the Fed hikes.

But this year, Yieldstreet told investors in the $23 million deal that the Tucson development was in technical default and headed for a full write-off.

After CNBC asked Yieldstreet for comment on the discrepancy, the website was updated to reflect the -100% return.

The company also stopped issuing quarterly portfolio snapshots after early 2023, making it harder for prospective investors to see how Yieldstreet’s overall investments are performing.

So besides marketing materials, customers are mostly left to rely on the company’s disclosures about its performance as a gauge of whether to invest with the startup.

Yieldstreet says it updates its metrics quarterly, and its website shows a 7.4% internal rate of return through March 2025 across all investments. That period likely excludes the impact of the Nashville defaults, which were disclosed in May 2025.

This month, Yieldstreet said that it officially became a broker-dealer, allowing it to offer funds from outside asset managers including Goldman Sachs and the Carlyle Group. The plan is to become a distribution platform where 70% of funds are from these established Wall Street giants, Caplan said this month.

The move is worlds away from the confidence that Yieldstreet co-founder Weisz had in the company’s original model.

In the 2020 CNBC interview, Weisz said that he often reminded his staff that “winter is coming” and to prepare for turbulence.

Yieldstreet would protect its customers from losses because of the underlying collateral the firm was investing in: real buildings with tenants in sought-after locations all over the country, Weisz said.

“I’m not here to tell you that Milind and Michael are the world’s smartest investors and there’s never going to be something that goes wrong,” Weisz said, referencing himself and his co-founder. “We understand that when winter comes, there will be challenges, but we take comfort in knowing that there’s underlying collateral.”

“Anybody could put money out,” Weisz said. “It’s about bringing it back home.”

— CNBC’s Gabriel Cortes contributed to this report.

Nintendo said Friday it plans to hike the price of its original Switch “family of systems and products” in the U.S.

The price increases, which take effect Aug. 3, are being made “based on market conditions,” the Japanese company said in a post on its website. It will impact the original Switch console, Switch Lite and OLED models, as well as some Switch accessories.

The price of the Switch 2 console, along with physical and digital Switch and Switch games, will remain the same for now, Nintendo said. “However, please note that price adjustments may be necessary in the future,” the company added.

Earlier on Friday, Nintendo reported fiscal first-quarter earnings that beat expectations.

It disclosed that sales of Switch 2 consoles hit 5.82 million since its June 5 release. The company also maintained its forecast of 15 million Switch 2 sales this fiscal year, though analysts suggested that may be conservative.

The Switch 2 launched in the middle of President Donald Trump’s trade war amid rapidly shifting tariff policies. The $450 console debuted as Trump paused tariff increases on Japan and Vietnam.

Tariffs have since shifted. On Friday, the Trump administration unveiled a new wave of “reciprocal” tariffs on several countries, with rates ranging from 10% to 41%.

WATCH: Nintendo’s big bet on the Switch 2