gshc2020.com

The company reported revenues of $6.9 billion, up 1 percent from its predecessor company a year ago, while net earnings fell to $41 million, or four cents per share after $57 million, or eight cents a share, a year ago.

Paramount’s TV media segment, which includes CBS and its cable networks, continued to fall, dropping 9 percent year-over-year to $3.1 billion, while direct-to-consumer revenue rose 9 percent to $2.5 billion. Studio revenue rose 16 percent to $1.3 billion, thanks to content licensing deals and TV production arm as well as the success of Scary Movie.

Revenue at Paramount+ rose 16 percent to $2.1 billion, as the company said Q2 was its best quarter for retention ever on Paramount+ thanks to Dutton Ranch, UFC and the FIFA World Cup. The streaming services added 2 million new subscribers to hit 81.6 million worldwide, up 6 percent year over year. 

Paramount is raising its full-year outlook range to $3.8 billion to $3.9 billion in adjusted EBITDA and now expects free cash flow conversion of at least 10 percent. The company added that it had seen “double-digit growth in commitments” across the company after its Upfronts presentation, but did release further specifics.

“We continue to make progress on our transformation at Paramount, and we now expect to deliver over $2.7 billion of run-rate efficiencies by the end of 2026 versus $2.5 billion previously, and continue to expect $3 billion-plus in efficiencies from the Skydance-Paramount combination,” the letter continues.

Paramount won the bidding war for Warner Bros. Discovery in February with its $111 billion offer, after Netflix declined to raise its offer. But the merger is currently on pause, as Paramount has since been hit with several lawsuits, including from 12 state attorneys general who claim the acquisition will kill competition in the film and television industries. The company has agreed to delay the billion takeover of Warner Bros. Discovery until June 1, 2027, or until the antitrust lawsuits brought by state attorneys general are resolved. Ellison has told staff he remains “highly confident” in the completion of the merger.

But just after earnings were released Tuesday, the judge overseeing the states’ lawsuit scheduled the trial to start in March, rather than November as the studio had requested. Starting Oct. 1, Paramount will have to pay a ticking fee of roughly $7 million per day to Warners shareholders until the deal closes.

“As it relates to the ongoing litigation, we’re absolutely open to finding a solution out of court, but we also really believe that we’ll win at trial. We believe that the facts and the law are on our side, and the trial date was just set for for March of next year. And as it relates to the financing, all that is in place, there’s nothing at risk, and so we’re confident we’ll close the transaction, and we’re working towards that as fast as we possibly can,” Ellison said on the earnings call.

As for how much this will cost, CFO Dennis K. Cinelli said the company incurs costs beyond Sept. 30, with monthly bridge fees of $8 million to $9 million a month, in addition to an additional bridge commitment fee due in June 2027. In total, this adds up to about $190 million dollars if the merger doesn’t close until June. This is in addition to the ticking fee, which is 25 cents per share per quarter or about $650 million dollars per quarter, and would be funded at close through additional equity.

“We ended the quarter at $1.6 billion in cash, $3.2 billion of undrawn revolver capacity. This is sufficient to fund the business, our dividend, transaction-related costs through the extended timeline,” Cinelli said.

The earnings also come the same day that an op-ed from Ellison appeared in The New York Times, in which the executive argued that his political leanings and proposed takeover of CNN are the root cause of the lawsuits filed by a dozen state attorneys general and the Writers Guild of America.

“I believe this fight is not really about market share … I believe a plainer worry sits beneath the briefs and the news releases: the news. The issue is whether I can be trusted as a steward of Warner’s CNN. There has been speculation about my politics, my loyalties, my intentions,” Ellison wrote. “Unfortunately, I can’t give anyone a view into my heart and mind, but I can share this: I have regularly voted for candidates of both parties; I hold some views that would be called conservative and others that would be called liberal, just like most Americans; and when it comes to our news operations, I do not aspire to lead these companies to bend their newsrooms to my views. I believe that news should be based on facts and truth.” %!s()

The deal will see Hearst take full control of the media company formerly known as A+E Networks, which owns brands like A&E, History and Lifetime, including cable TV channels, content studios, and streaming offerings. A+E has also invested in companies like Vice, Propagate Content, Atlas Obscura and Philo TV.

A+E will become a part of Hearst’s entertainment group upon closing later this year.

“We thank our Disney colleagues for decades of successful partnership,” said Steven R. Swartz, president and CEO of Hearst. “We look forward to supporting Paul Buccieri and A+E Global Media’s leadership team as they continue to make must-see programs and innovate around the great HISTORY, Lifetime and A&E brands.”

Paul Buccieri has led A+E since 2018.

“In a media environment defined by fragmentation, A+E Global Media’s advantage is the strength and versatility of our brands, our strong partnerships and our vast library of owned assets,” added Buccieri, president and chairman of A+E Global Media. “As we continue extending our storytelling globally across all platforms with IP that travels to every screen and form-factor, we believe we are well suited for whatever opportunities may come next. I also want to express my deepest thanks to Hearst, The Walt Disney Company and to our board members — both recent and past — for their guidance and support over the years.”

The company was founded in 1984 (the Arts & Entertainment Network was its original cable brand), with Hearst and ABC each owning a slice alongside other investors. NBC obtained a minority stake in 1993. The company expanded with an acquisition of Lifetime Networks in 2009. Lifetime was also a JV of Disney and Hearst.

Disney and Hearst had been equal partners in A+E since 2012, when they bought out NBCUniversal’s minority stake. The company had begun to explore its options a year ago, hiring Wells Fargo to market it. Since then, of course, Comcast spun out its cable channels into Versant while Warner Bros. Discovery has inked a deal to sell itself to Paramount Skydance. %!s()

According to SaferAI’s evaluation, which the nonprofit ran via Z.ai’s public API, GLM-5.2 refused none of the offensive cyber or dual-use biology tasks it was given. By comparison, Claude Opus 4.7 “refused so consistently that SaferAI could not complete CyberGym on it at all.” (CyberGym is a benchmark that evaluates cybersecurity capabilities. OpenAI used it in the evaluation that preceded last month’s Hugging Face breach.)

It’s a stark reminder of what some critics have warned for years: that open-weight AI models could put highly capable AI into the hands of potential attackers, with no way to police how they use the technology once they download the weights. With open-weight models rapidly approaching the capabilities of the world’s leading AI systems, the debate is moving from whether they can compete to how society manages risks once they are released. 

“The frontier of capability is not the frontier of risk, and so we do have to take into account the state of the mitigations as well to assess the risk properly,” Henry Papadatos, executive director of SaferAI, told TechCrunch.

While Z.ai could apply safety measures to its hosted API, those protections become unenforceable once someone runs the weights on their own hardware, where they can remove or modify any safeguards, fine-tune the models, or change system prompts. 

Frontier developers like OpenAI and Anthropic tend to rely on safeguards like classifiers, refusal training, and API-level controls to limit dangerous cyber and biological assistance. 

Those measures are far from foolproof: jailbreaks routinely bypass protections on deployed models. Far.ai, an AI safety nonprofit, found hundreds of universal jailbreaks — defined as reusable keys that succeed on most harmful requests — in frontier models like xAI’s Grok 4.5 and Google DeepMind’s Gemini 3.1 Pro. According to the report, jailbreaks succeed when attackers combine multiple manipulation techniques — including roleplaying, authority impersonation, fake conversation history, and follow-up prompts — to amplify weak points in a model’s defenses. 

But the safeguards in place for closed models don’t work at all on open-weight models, which are designed to run on any infrastructure with any set of safeguards — or lack thereof.

“The objective should clearly be that the good capabilities — the safe ones — are accessible to anyone, and then we try to remove the bad ones, even in an open source fashion,” Papadatos said.

One technique Papadatos noted could help is called “pre-training data filtering,” which is when an AI company removes offensive cybersecurity information from their training data and then trains the model on the curated dataset. 

Some research suggests this can reduce hazardous biological knowledge without harming overall model performance. However, for cybersecurity, data filtering is much less practical. 

It’s difficult to train a general model that excels at coding but isn’t also a good hacker. Because coding has become AI’s biggest moneymaker, developers face pressure to keep improving those capabilities even as they search for ways to limit misuse. 

Because of that, frontier developers have increasingly relied on other mitigations instead. One approach has been to selectively restrict the kinds of cybersecurity assistance models will provide. Anthropic’s Opus 5, for example, can search for vulnerabilities in uncompiled source code, but not compiled software, per the model’s system card. The reasoning is that this makes it harder to use Opus 5 for offensive purposes. 

Others include rigorous pre-deployment safety evaluations, publishing risk assessments, and withholding model weights if a system is perceived as too dangerous. 

In GLM-5.2’s case, SaferAI says Z.ai didn’t publish a safety framework, pre-deployment testing commitments, or risk assessment for the model. TechCrunch has asked Z.ai whether it conducted internal or third-party frontier safety evaluations before release, but did not receive a response. 

Chinese leaders have increasingly acknowledged the risks of advanced AI. At the World AI Conference last month, Chinese President Xi Jinping emphasized the importance of open-weight models, while also stressing the necessity of ensuring AI remains a tool under strict human control. 

Graham Webster, who studies Chinese AI policy at the Stanford Cyber Policy Center, told TechCrunch that China has robust regulations governing AI, but those rules have historically focused on politically sensitive content, misinformation, and social stability rather than catastrophic AI risks like offensive cyber capabilities and biological misuse. 

“U.S. AI thinkers are, in general, more concerned with this existential catastrophic [idea] than the Chinese community,” Webster said, adding that many Chinese policy researchers believe that if there’s truly going to be a novel frontier risk, American companies will likely encounter it first. 

“The Chinese system has confidence that they control the use of these technologies inside China,” Webster continued. “Being online in China is something you do attributed to your real name, and companies can be held accountable, users can be held accountable.”

Webster mused that the same mechanism that model providers use for refusing to engage on certain political topics can potentially be tweaked to make sure models refuse to complete offensive cyber attacks or won’t deliver adverse biological engineering outcomes. He added that because Chinese companies tend to coordinate with regulators behind the scenes, it can be tough to know what internal testing they’re conducting before release.

Advocates of open-weight AI argue that releasing the weights is important for cybersecurity because it allows companies defend themselves against attacks — Hugging Face relied on GLM-5.2 to defend itself against OpenAI’s breach — and because it allows them to better prepare for future threats if they know what’s coming.

“The same systems that helped stop an AI-powered cyberattack can now help defend against millions of cyberattacks every day, while helping us identify and fix vulnerabilities before attackers exploit them,” Clem Delangue, CEO of Hugging Face, said this week in a social media post.

Papadatos said that benefit is often overstated, and doesn’t mean “we should open-source dangerous capabilities.”

“The main point in my mind is that we shouldn’t just accept that dangerous capabilities are easily accessible by anyone anywhere,” he said, stressing that he believes the industry should be striving for only making the “good capabilities” easily accessible. By default attackers adopt new tools faster than defenders do. For example, a ransomware group can change its methods in a week. A hospital cannot.”

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Following a redesign in 1955, the 150-hp, 3.9-liter Blue Flame six-cylinder engine, which debuted with the original 'Vette back in 1953 was discontinued, leaving the V8 and three-speed gearbox as the lone offering. Further improvements also followed in 1956 when the 4.3-liter (265 cubic inch) mill gained more power thanks, in part, to a redesigned camshaft that allowed it to put out between 210 and 240 horsepower. The V8 was again improved for the 1957 model year when Chevrolet increased the displacement to 283 cubic inches (4.6 liters), resulting in 220, 245, 250, 270, and 283-horsepower output levels.

Granted, a top output of 283 hp for a performance model may sound a bit disappointing today, but back when the 1957 Corvette launched, it was fairly respectable. Thanks to that output, the 283 cubic-inch V8, which used a Rochester Ramjet port injection system developed by Zora Arkus-Duntov and John Dolza, also grabbed the headlines for giving the Corvette exactly one horsepower per cubic inch.

Until that time, hitting the one horsepower per cubic inch mark had been nearly impossible for automakers. So, the 1957 Corvette finally achieving the feat was a big deal. But this wasn't the first time a car had achieved one horsepower per cubic inch. That honor belongs to the 1956 Chrysler 300B, which stole a march on the rest of the market.

The Chrysler 300B helped set the mold for performance cars

Bragging rights are an indissociable part of the car industry, and that held true even back in the '50s. Then, like now, Chrysler was too often playing catch up sales-wise and in the shadow of its huge competitors Ford and General Motors. Chevrolet had only introduced the Corvette in 1953, while Ford made the news for dominating the grueling Carrera Panamericana road race in Mexico between 1952 and 1954 with the Lincoln Capri.

Not to be outdone, Chrysler came up with a headline-grabbing car of its own, the C-300, in 1955. The luxury coupe was purpose built for road homologation in order for Chrysler to meet regulations and be allowed to go racing in NASCAR. The big news, however, was the unleashing of the beastly 331-cubic-inch FirePower Hemi, which generated an astounding 300 hp and in the process earned the Chrysler C-300 the title of the first American production car to hit 300 horsepower.

The following year, the Chrysler 300B arrived with an even larger variant of the engine, which was now displacing 354 cubic inches (5.8 liters). It made 340 hp in standard guise, but buyers could select a more powerful version rated at 355 horsepower thanks to a higher compression ratio of 10.0:1 (the 340-hp version had a compression ratio of 9.0:1). 

This output not only made the 300B the first car to produce 1 horsepower for every 1 cubic inch of displacement, but it also meant that it was the fastest stock car at the time of its launch, with a top speed of 139.37 mph. 

The 1957 DeSoto Adventurer Hardtop also pulled off the feat

Following the success of the C-300 in 1955, DeSoto, which fell under the wider Chrysler umbrella at the time, wanted a piece of that action. So, it launched the Adventurer, a two-door hardtop based on the DeSoto Fireflite Sportsman Coupe. But whereas the Fireflite used a 330-cid Hemi engine with 255 horsepower, DeSoto teamed the Adventurer with an enlarged version that had a displacement of 341.4 inches.

The engine also, among other things, adopted a more aggressive camshaft and high domed pistons that helped raise the compression ratio from 8.5:1 to 9.25:1. The result was an output of 320 horsepower, granting 0.938 horsepower for every cubic inch. As a result, the Golden Adventurer as the coupe has often been called, could hit a top speed of 144 mph.

But DeSoto wasn't done trying, as the engine's displacement grew to 345 cubic inches during the 1957 model year, bringing a corresponding increase in power to 345 hp. With that, the 1957 DeSoto achieved a power-to-displacement ratio of 1:1, just like the Corvette.

Ford also managed to cross the threshold that same year with the NASCAR-prepped supercharged Thunderbird, which produced 1 horsepower per cubic inch, thanks to a racing version of its unique Y-Block engine with 340 hp and a 312-cubic-inch capacity. But considering the Thunderbird had forced induction, you could say it was a pretty unfair fight.  %!s()

Most recently, Cornyn made a show of opposing the confirmation of Todd Blanche, Trump’s former personal attorney, as attorney general. Cornyn, along with fellow lame duck senator Thom Tillis, wanted assurances that Blanche, who is currently leading the Justice Department on an acting basis, wouldn’t help Trump establish a massive slush fund to give taxpayer money to whomever the administration deemed has been victims of government “weaponization” —  including Jan. 6 rioters.

Cornyn and Tillis have since come around, claiming Blanche has committed not to establish the fund to their satisfaction. Trump has made clear that he still wants it, though, and reporters asked Cornyn on Tuesday whether he’s concerned.

“Well, there’s nothing we could do to rein in the president when he said he likes the fund and wishes it still exists, but the fact of the matter is that it’s dead and that’s all we could do under these circumstances,” he said.

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There is, in fact, plenty Senate Republicans could and can do to rein in Trump. It’s very much the point of their jobs, and it continues to be a tragedy that they have abdicated their responsibility to check the president’s power because they’re terrified of making him mad.

Democrats in both the House and Senate introduced legislation to stop Trump’s anti-weaponization fund, but nothing ever came of the effort because Republicans would never vote for such a thing. Republicans could have introduced their own legislation to stop the fund, too, but alas, they simply could not. Why? Ask John Cornyn, who is still fumbling around for his spine, which unfortunately for the humiliated senator is still firmly in the possession of Donald Trump. %!s()