A new sports competition featuring Olympic medalists will take place in Las Vegas on Sunday. The twist? The competitors can take performance-enhancing drugs.

The Enhanced Games, dubbed the “Steroid Olympics,” will see 42 athletes compete across swimming, track and weightlifting.

The World Anti-Doping Agency (WADA) and the International Olympic Committee have been highly critical of the games, which were announced in 2023. Others, however, see opportunity.

Donald Trump Jr.’s investment firm, 1789 Capital, is joining Peter Thiel on the cap table of the company behind the games and leading its Series B in 2025.

Trading as Enhanced Group, its stock is up by around 35% over the last week ahead of the inaugural games. However, they have fallen by around 40% since going public on the New York Stock Exchange via a SPAC earlier this month.

“The Enhanced Games represent the future — real competition, real freedom and real records being smashed,” Trump Jr. said in a statement when announcing his involvement.

The Department of Defense has officially informed Anthropic’s leadership that the company and its products have been designated a supply chain risk, effective immediately, according to a senior department official.

“From the very beginning, this has been about one fundamental principle: the military being able to use technology for all lawful purposes,” the official told CNBC. “The military will not allow a vendor to insert itself into the chain of command by restricting the lawful use of a critical capability and put our warfighters at risk.”

Anthropic is the only American company ever to be publicly named a supply chain risk, as the designation has traditionally been used against foreign adversaries. The label will require defense vendors and contractors to certify that they don’t use Anthropic’s models in their work with the Pentagon.

The formal designation marks the latest development in the ongoing clash between Anthropic and the Pentagon, which have been at odds over how the startup’s artificial intelligence models, known as Claude, can be used.

Anthropic wanted assurance that its technology would not be tapped for fully autonomous weapons or domestic mass surveillance, but the DOD wanted Anthropic to grant the agency unfettered access to Claude across all lawful purposes.

Even as talks between the two organizations collapsed, the DOD has used Anthropic’s models to support the U.S. military’s operations in the ongoing conflict in Iran, as CNBC has previously reported.

Anthropic did not comment. The company said in a statement last week that it will challenge “any supply chain risk designation in court.”

Bloomberg was first to report the official designation.

Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth shared a post on Friday that said he was directing the DOD to label Anthropic a “Supply-Chain Risk to National Security,” but that alone wasn’t enough to serve as an official designation.

President Donald Trump also directed federal agencies to “immediately cease” all use of Anthropic’s technology on Friday. He said he “fired” Anthropic in an interview with Politico on Thursday.

“Anthropic is in trouble because I fired [them] like dogs, because they shouldn’t have done that,” he told Politico.

Anthropic’s relationship with the Trump administration has grown increasingly fraught in recent months.

David Sacks, the venture capitalist serving as the White House AI and crypto czar, previously accused Anthropic of supporting “woke AI” because of its stance on regulation, and of “running a sophisticated regulatory capture strategy based on fear-mongering,” after a company executive wrote an essay in October titled “Technological Optimism and Appropriate Fear.”

Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei has also largely avoided rubbing elbows with Trump, in contrast to other industry executives, including OpenAI CEO Sam Altman, Apple CEO Tim Cook and Google CEO Sundar Pichai. Amodei notably didn’t attend Trump’s inauguration last year.

Amodei reportedly said in a memo to staffers on Friday that the administration does not like Anthropic because it has not donated or offered “dictator-style praise to Trump,” according to a report from The Information.

Investors have been following the clash between Anthropic and the DOD closely, and shares of the startup’s partner Palantir moved lower on the news on Thursday. The stock closed roughly flat.

The software and services provider, which counts on government contracts for about 60% of its U.S. revenue, collaborates with Anthropic for its work with military and defense agencies as part of an agreement that was signed in late 2024.

Analysts at Piper Sandler wrote in a note to clients on Tuesday that Anthropic is “heavily embedded in the Military and the Intelligence community” and that moving off the company’s technology could “pose some short-term disruptions” to Palantir’s operations.

Anthropic signed a $200 million contract with the DOD in July, and was the first AI lab to integrate its models into mission workflows on classified networks. But as negotiations between the two organizations stalled, OpenAI and Elon Musk’s xAI also agreed to deploy their models in classified capacities.

Altman announced OpenAI’s deal with the DOD hours after Anthropic was blacklisted on Friday. He said in a post on X that the agency displayed a “deep respect for safety and a desire to partner to achieve the best possible outcome.”

WATCH: Defense Department CTO Emil Michael: We can’t be reliant on any one AI provider anymore

The current moment feels like the finale of a reality TV show, when the world learns who the winner of the competition is. This time, the victor won’t be walking away with $1 million — but influence the $112 trillion world economy.

U.S. President Donald Trump said Thursday that he will announce his pick for the next chair of the Federal Reserve on Friday morning stateside. Former Fed Governor Kevin Warsh is by far the favorite, according to prediction market Kalshi — and an administration source told CNBC that Warsh was at the White House on Thursday.

At the same event where Trump made those comments — on the sidelines of the premier of the “Melania” film — he also warned the U.K. that it would be “very dangerous” for the country to do business with China, Reuters reported. This came as U.K. Prime Minister Keir Starmer was visiting China, where the two sides reached deals on tariffs, visa-free travel and business investment, according to Downing Street.

Markets were busy processing more than politics. On Thursday after the bell, Apple reported a 16% year-on-year jump in its fiscal first-quarter revenue on “staggering” iPhone demand, topping market estimates. It also forecast current-quarter revenue above Wall Street expectations.

Investor response, however, was tepid, with Apple shares rising about 0.5% in extended trading. That could be because Apple still appears behind the curve for artificial intelligence. Investors seemed more enthused about Meta Platform‘s AI prospects, driving shares more than 10% higher. Microsoft, on the other hand, was punished for its spending plans and slowdown in cloud growth. Its stock slumped 10%, wiping out $357 billion in market cap in its worst day since March 2020.

That divergence weighed down the tech-heavy Nasdaq Composite, which declined 0.72%. The S&P 500 fell a 0.13%, while the Dow Jones Industrial Average bucked the trend to climb 0.11%

On Friday, the risk-off mood spread. Precious metals and cryptocurrencies fell alongside U.S. equities: spot gold declined over 4% and bitcoin continued its overnight slide to touch its lowest level in nearly two months.

— CNBC’s Samantha Subin and Garrett Downs contributed to this report.

Trump sues the IRS and U.S. Treasury. The plaintiffs seek at least $10 billion in damages over alleged leaks of their confidential tax information, a lawsuit showed Thursday. In addition to Trump, the plaintiffs are his sons, Donald Trump Jr. and Eric Trump, and the Trump Organization.

China’s new plan to boost consumer spending. China’s cabinet on Thursday rolled out a work plan to boost services consumption — from cruise and yacht tourism to more sports events — as policymakers sought to boost the share of consumption in its economy over the next five years.

U.S. indexes mostly retreat, weighed by Microsoft. However, the Dow Jones Industrial Average outperformed and rose on Thursday. Asia-Pacific markets mostly fell Friday. Hong Kong’s Hang Seng Index retreated nearly 2%, leading losses in the region.

[PRO] Russia and China control a key metal. It’s crucial for developing military equipment, and one U.S. company is working to replace it. That has earned the firm a “buy” rating after an investment bank initiated coverage.

President Donald Trump on Saturday threatened to sue JPMorgan Chase over allegedly “debanking” him following the Jan. 6, 2021, riot at the U.S. Capitol.

“I’ll be suing JPMorgan Chase over the next two weeks for incorrectly and inappropriately DEBANKING me after the January 6th Protest, a protest that turned out to be correct for those doing the protesting,” Trump said in a social media post. “The Election was RIGGED!”

JPMorgan and the White House didn’t immediately respond to CNBC’s request for comment.

In August, Trump signed an executive order requiring banks to ensure they are not refusing financial services to clients based on religious or political beliefs, a practice known as “debanking.”

Trump claimed in a CNBC interview in August, without providing evidence, that he was personally discriminated against by banks. He said JPMorgan Chase and Bank of America refused to take his deposits following his first term in office.

At the time, JPMorgan said it does not close accounts for political reasons, while Bank of America said it doesn’t comment on client matters. BofA also said it would welcome clearer rules from regulators on how to conduct its activities.

Trump and his family have a history of railing against financial institutions for allegedly refusing to work with them on the basis of their political orientation.

Last year, Donald Trump Jr. said his family had difficulty accessing big bank services — a situation that allegedly prompted the Trumps to enter the cryptocurrency industry.

“So, [my family] got into crypto, not because it was like, ‘hey, this is the next cool thing,’ we got into it out of necessity,” Trump Jr. told CNBC in an interview last June.

JPMorgan shares are down about 5% over the past week, even after the bank on Tuesday topped expectations for its fourth-quarter earnings and revenue.

Trump’s legal threat against JPMorgan comes as the president, in the same Truth Social post, denied a Journal report on Wednesday that said the president had offered JPMorgan CEO Jamie Dimon the position of Federal Reserve chairman months ago during a meeting at the White House.

Dimon took the proposition as a joke, according to the Journal report.

In his post, Trump denied the report, underscoring his reservations about Dimon and JPMorgan.

“This statement is totally untrue, there was never such an offer,” he wrote. “Why wouldn’t The Wall Street Journal call me to ask whether or not such an offer was made? I would have very quickly told them, “NO,” and that would have been the end of the story.”

The Journal and JPMorgan did not immediately respond to a request for comment sent outside of normal business hours.

Current Fed Chairman Jerome Powell’s term ends on May 15.

It’s been two days since news broke that Nvidia was spending $20 billion to acquire top talent from Groq in what the chip startup called a “non-exclusive licensing agreement.”

Nvidia, the world’s most valuable company, hasn’t issued a press release or regulatory filing and, according to a spokesperson, is only confirming the contents of Groq’s 90-word blog post published after the close of holiday-shortened trading on Wednesday.

“They’re so big now that they can do a $20 billion deal on Christmas Eve with no press release and nobody bats an eye,” said Stacy Rasgon, an analyst at Bernstein, in a Friday interview with CNBC’s “Squawk on the Street.”

While neither company confirmed the price tag, CNBC learned from Groq lead investor Alex Davis on Wednesday that Nvidia had agreed to buy assets from Groq, a designer of high-performance artificial intelligence accelerator chips, for $20 billion in cash. Davis’ firm, Disruptive, has invested more than half a billion dollars in Groq and led the startup’s latest financing round in September at a $6.9 billion valuation.

Groq founder and CEO Jonathan Ross along with Sunny Madra, the company’s president, and other senior leaders “will join Nvidia to help advance and scale the licensed technology,” the startup said in the post, adding that it will continue as an “independent company,” led by finance chief Simon Edwards.

As an acquisition, Groq would mark by far Nvidia’s largest in its 32-year history. Its biggest prior purchase happened in 2019, when Nvidia bought Israeli chip designer Mellanox for close to $7 billion.

But Nvidia is instead following a playbook used by other tech giants over the last couple years, spending billions of dollars to hire top talent in AI and to get access to key technology through licensing agreements.

It’s a strategy that’s been employed by Meta, Google, Microsoft and Amazon. Nvidia itself has previously used the tactic, shelling out more than $900 million in September to hire Enfabrica CEO Rochan Sankar and other employees at the AI hardware startup, and to license the company’s technology, CNBC reported at the time.

By avoiding traditional acquisitions, tech companies have been able to skirt some level of antitrust scrutiny and quickly close deals to bring in the people they most covet.

“Antitrust would seem to be the primary risk here, though structuring the deal as a non-exclusive license may keep the fiction of competition alive,” Rasgon wrote in a Thursday note to clients. His firm recommends buying Nvidia shares and has a $275 price target on the stock.

Shares of Nvidia rose about 2% on Friday to $192.40. The stock is up 43% this year and is up thirteenfold since the end of 2022, when generative AI started taking off following the launch of OpenAI’s ChatGPT.

Nvidia has been using its expanding cash pile to invest capital across the AI ecosystem, including through recent investments in OpenAI and Intel. At the end of October, Nvidia had $60.6 billion in cash and short-term investments, up from $13.3 billion in early 2023.

Nvidia isn’t commenting on any of those details for now. The first opportunity analysts and investors will likely get to hear from the company will be Jan. 5, when CEO Jensen Huang is scheduled to speak at CES in Las Vegas.

— CNBCs David Faber contributed to this report

WATCH: Nvidia GPUs to Google TPUs — Breaking down all the AI chips

Nvidia has agreed to buy assets from Groq, a designer of high-performance artificial intelligence accelerator chips, for $20 billion in cash, according to Alex Davis, CEO of Disruptive, which led the startup’s latest financing round in September.

Davis, whose firm has invested more than half a billion dollars in Groq since the company was founded in 2016, said the deal came together quickly. Groq raised $750 million at a valuation of about $6.9 billion three months ago. Investors in the round included Blackrock and Neuberger Berman, as well as Samsung, Cisco, Altimeter and 1789 Capital, where Donald Trump Jr. is a partner.

Groq said in a blog post on Wednesday that it’s “entered into a non-exclusive licensing agreement with Nvidia for Groq’s inference technology,” without disclosing a price. With the deal, Groq founder and CEO Jonathan Ross along with Sunny Madra, the company’s president, and other senior leaders “will join Nvidia to help advance and scale the licensed technology,” the post said.

Groq added that it will continue as an “independent company,” led by finance chief Simon Edwards as CEO.

Colette Kress, Nvidia’s CFO, declined comment on the transaction.

Davis told CNBC that Nvidia is getting all of Groq’s assets, though its nascent Groq cloud business is not part of the transaction. Groq said “GroqCloud will continue to operate without interruption.”

The deal represents by far Nvidia’s largest purchase ever. The chipmaker’s biggest acquisition to date came in 2019, when it bought Israeli chip designer Mellanox for close to $7 billion. At the end of October, Nvidia had $60.6 billion in cash and short-term investments, up from $13.3 billion in early 2023.

In an email to employees that was obtained by CNBC, Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang said the agreement will expand Nvidia’s capabilities.

“We plan to integrate Groq’s low-latency processors into the NVIDIA AI factory architecture, extending the platform to serve an even broader range of AI inference and real-time workloads,” Huang wrote.

Huang added that, “While we are adding talented employees to our ranks and licensing Groq’s IP, we are not acquiring Groq as a company.”

Nvidia orchestrated a similar but smaller deal in September, when it shelled out over $900 million to hire Enfabrica CEO Rochan Sankar and other employees at the AI hardware startup, and to license the company’s technology, CNBC reported at the time.

Other tech giants, including Meta, Google and Microsoft, have spent heavily over the last couple years to hire top AI talent through various types of licensing deals.

Nvidia has ramped up its investments in chip startups and the broader ecosystem as its cash pile has mounted. The company has backed AI and energy infrastructure company Crusoe, AI model developer Cohere, and boosted its investment in CoreWeave as the AI-centric cloud provider was getting ready to go public this year.

In September, Nvidia said it intended to invest up to $100 billion in OpenAI, with the startup committed to deploying at least 10 gigawatts of Nvidia products. The companies have yet to announce a formal deal. That same month, Nvidia said it would invest $5 billion in Intel as part of a partnership.

Groq has been targeting revenue of $500 million this year amid booming demand for AI accelerator chips used in speeding up the process for large language models to complete inference-related tasks. The company was not pursuing a sale when it was approached by Nvidia, Davis said.

Groq was founded in 2016 by a group of former engineers, including Ross. He was one of the creators of Google’s tensor processing unit, or TPU, the search giant’s custom chip that’s being used by some companies as an alternative to Nvidia’s graphics processing units. 

In its initial filing with the SEC, announcing a $10.3 million fundraising in late 2016, Groq listed as principals Ross and Douglas Wightman, an entrepreneur and former engineer at the Google X “moonshot factory.” Wightman left Groq in 2019, according to his LinkedIn profile.

Groq isn’t the only chip startup that’s gained traction during the AI boom.

AI chipmaker Cerebras Systems had planned to go public this year but withdrew its IPO filing in October after announcing that it raised over $1 billion in a fundraising round.

In a filing with the SEC, Cerebras said it does not intend to conduct a proposed offering “at this time,” but didn’t provide a reason. A spokesperson told CNBC at the time that the company still hopes to go public as soon as possible.

Cerebras filed for an IPO in late 2024, as it was ramping up to take on Nvidia in an effort to create processors for running generative AI models.

— CNBC’s Jordan Novet contributed to this report.

WATCH: How the massive power draw of generative AI is overtaxing our grid

Two U.S. Senators are pressing the Department of Justice and the Treasury to investigate a crypto company closely tied to the family of U.S. President Donald Trump over alleged links to illicit actors in North Korea and Russia.

In a letter on Tuesday, U.S. Senators Elizabeth Warren, D-Mass., and Jack Reed, D-R.I., minority members on the Senate Committee on Banking, Housing, and Urban Affairs, raised concerns that World Liberty Financial, a crypto firm heavily owned and run by the Trump family, may pose national security risks. 

The letter — obtained exclusively by CNBC and addressed to Attorney General Pamela Bondi and Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent — argued that World Liberty Financial lacks adequate safeguards to prevent bad actors from moving funds or gaining influence over its governance.

The senators cited a September report from a 501(c)(3) nonprofit corporate watchdog called Accountable.US, which said World Liberty Financial had sold its $WLFI tokens to “various highly suspicious entities.” 

Those entities included traders with ties on the blockchain to a notorious North Korean hacking organization, a sanctioned Russian “Ruble-backed sanctions evasion tool,” an Iranian crypto exchange and Tornado Cash, a known money laundering platform, the watchdog alleged.

CNBC has contacted World Liberty Financial for comment on the letter and relevant reports. 

The World Liberty Financial website lists family members Eric Trump, Donald Trump Jr., and Barron Trump as co-founders. The website shows Donald Trump as a “Co-Founder Emeritus.” An entity affiliated with the U.S. President and some of his family members also holds major equity interests in WLF.

A number of the company’s “governance token” $WLFI were released for public trading in September, after earlier private investment rounds. WLF says holders of the tokens “play a key role in helping to shape the future of the protocol,” with the ability to propose and vote on company proposals. 

However, Accountable.US‘ investigation called into question who those holders were. The group’s report noted that World Liberty Financial had sold $10,000 worth of its $WLFI tokens in January to traders who had a history of transacting with a wallet that is now sanctioned for association with the North Korean state-sponsored hacking team, Lazarus Group. 

By selling the tokens, World Liberty Financial took money from people with “open and obvious connections to enemies of the U.S.” and raised national security risks by giving them “a seat at the table” to influence the firm’s governance, the senators alleged in their letter.

Accountable.US, in a separate report in August, estimated that roughly $11.6 billion, or 73%, of Trump’s net worth is tied to his cryptocurrency ventures, which included the launch of a $TRUMP memecoin. According to Reuters, an annual financial disclosure released by the U.S. Office of Government Ethics for the 2024 calendar year showed that Trump’s move into crypto added significantly to his wealth.

The Democratic senators added that the timing of their requests was essential as Congress considers new crypto regulation that could shield governance tokens like $WLFI from existing U.S. oversight and exempt issuers of such tokens from certain recordkeeping and disclosure requirements. 

“As Congress considers legislation on the market structure for digital assets, we must ensure that crypto interests do not profit at the expense of U.S. national security and that illicit actors are not handed the keys to financial platforms that they can later exploit,” it added. 

Trump, once a critic of crypto during his first term, has since embraced the industry, with his administration pushing several crypto-friendly bills, including the recently passed GENIUS Act.

Warren and Reed’s letter asked the Treasury and the Justice Department to outline information related to potential enforcement actions against World Liberty Financial by Dec. 1.

The Treasury and Department of Justice did not immediately respond to CNBC’s request for comment.

The New York Times reported in September that the UAE had secured a massive chip deal from Washington shortly after the MGX deal closed.

Meanwhile, on Oct. 23, Trump pardoned Binance founder Changpeng Zhao, who had previously pleaded guilty to enabling money laundering while heading the cryptocurrency exchange. Trump would go on to say a few days later in a CBS “60 Minutes” interview that he knew nothing about Zhao despite granting him the pardon.

A report from the Wall Street Journal suggested that Binance not only facilitated the settlement of MGX’s investment using USD1, but also assisted in building the technology behind the stablecoin, citing anonymous sources familiar with the matter.

Binance CEO Richard Teng has denied that the company had any role in MGX’s decision to complete its investment in USD1. 

Donald Trump Jr. and World Liberty Financial’s CEO Zach Witkoff, son of U.S. Special Envoy to the Middle East Steve Witkoff, told CNBC in September that concerns about conflicts of interest with the Trump administration were “complete nonsense.”

“Don and my World Liberty mission is big, but our dads’ mission is much bigger. They’re not focused on stablecoins, nor are they involved in a stablecoin business,” Witkoff said.