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A sign of the AI era? Workday exec trades CTO title for ‘member of technical staff’ role at Anthropic

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The AI era is elevating a flatter, broader “member of technical staff” role into one of the more prestigious jobs in tech.

In March, Anthropic hired Peter Bailis as a member of technical staff less than a year after he joined Workday as its chief technology officer. Workday’s president of product and technology, Gerrit Kazmaier, said at the time of hiring that Bailis would be part of the HR company’s initiative to go “all in” on AI.

Prior to the Workday post, Bailis was a VP at Google for about a year and a half, according to his LinkedIn.

“We’re grateful for Peter’s contributions and wish him the best in his next chapter,” a Workday spokesperson said in a statement. “We’re thrilled that Gabe Monroy has taken on the role of Chief Technology Officer at Workday, leading our next chapter of AI innovation.”

An Anthropic spokesperson confirmed Bailis’s move from Workday. Bailis did not immediately return a request for comment.

The Anthropic spokesperson said Bailis will be working on reinforcement learning engineering at the startup.

The MTS title is common at frontier labs — like Anthropic and OpenAI — and larger companies for technical hires across research and engineering. The title highlights a cross-functional and non-hierarchical structure. While the label doesn’t specify an executive-level position, it carries prestige and often comes with the promise of building new products.

Anthropic on its careers page says “engineers here do lots of research, and researchers do lots of engineering,” adding that engineers will “have as much input into Anthropic’s direction as anyone else.”

OpenAI president Greg Brockman similarly explained in 2023 that the AI startup did not want to “bucket people into researchers and engineers,” opting for the MTS title.

Mike Krieger was the cofounder and CTO of Instagram before he started a news aggregator app and then joined Anthropic as its chief product officer. Earlier this year, Krieger announced on X that he was shifting roles to a technical staff member of Anthropic’s Labs, which works on Claude Code.

A MTS role can also bring high pay.

In 2025, Business Insider reported, citing H-1B visa filings to the Department of Labor, that a member of technical staff at Anthropic can pay $300,000 to $405,000. At OpenAI, a member of technical staff could be paid between $210,000 to $530,000, according to the report.

The skyrocketing valuation of Anthropic also brings the prospect of minting multimillionaires through equity as the startup eyes a $380 billion post-money valuation.

The potential allure of the MTS role at a frontier AI lab comes as AI-native startups disrupt larger software companies.

In February, Anthropic’s rollout of Claude Cowork and industry-specific plugin tools triggered a stock sell-off in the software sector. The reaction was dubbed the SaaSpocalypse, reflecting fears that AI labs like Anthropic are making tools advanced enough to make companies dedicated to software services redundant.




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New era of drone warfare creates higher risks for civilians

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With wars in the Middle East and in Ukraine, a new era of drone warfare has arrived that’s harming more civilians.

Skies are full of large, powerful, and lethal drones that are much cheaper than cruise and ballistic missiles. That means more of them are being launched and need to be stopped.

The United Arab Emirates, for example, said that as of Wednesday, it had intercepted far more drones than missiles: 876, compared to 183 ballistic and cruise missiles.

The process of defeating drones and missiles can cause problems of its own. There are more targets to intercept, and US allies have said that objects hit in flight have killed civilians and damaged homes.


Sparks, smoke, and yellow light in a dark sky

Militaries want to shoot most incoming drones down, but that can still leave missile fragments and dangerous debris.

AP Photo/Evgeniy Maloletka, File



“Large-scale drone war is a civilian risk because there are more projectiles in the fight than if it were just missiles, thus inherently creating more debris,” Molly Campbell, a drone and counterdrone warfare expert at the Center for a New American Security, told Business Insider. It’s not that drone debris inherently causes more damage than missile debris, but there can be so much more of it.

The use of drones in warfare is surging. Ukraine says Russia attacks with about 6,000 Geran drones modeled after Iran’s Shaheds each month. A Shahed drone has a wingspan of roughly 8 feet and can carry a warhead up to 110 pounds.

Militaries want to stop attacks before they reach a military target, and that could be dangerous if they’re flying over populated areas.

The problem is that “what goes up must come down,” Mark Cancian, a senior advisor at the Center for Strategic and International Studies, told BI.


Black smoke rises into a blue sky, with a black tarmac road in the foreground

Iran has struck countries across the Middle East with its drones and missiles.

Mahmud HAMS / AFP via Getty Images



A missile that hits its target will typically cause more damage than a drone due to its higher speed and larger warhead.

It’s simply dangerous when “large numbers of drones are being intercepted over populated areas,” as James Patton Rogers, a drone expert at the Cornell Brooks Tech Policy Institute, put it to BI.

Most drone interceptions in the Middle East appear to be kinetic, which involves a projectile launched to hit and destroy them. “Kinetic interceptions create debris, and the risk of collateral damage is real and particularly complex in the urban settings we’re seeing in the Gulf,” said Campbell, the drone expert at the CNAS think tank.

Interception comes with its own risks. It could merely deflect the threat or achieve a partial hit that divides the missile into fragments that leaves its warhead active.

The problem of debris from intercepting an attack isn’t new, and it’s long been a factor in missile defense. In Europe, for example, Douglas Barrie, an air warfare expert at the International Institute for Strategic Studies, told BI that there has always been the knowledge of “if you try to intercept things at extended range, then you might be shooting something down effectively over somebody else’s airspace,” and cause damage to an ally.


A man in camouflage stands on the back of a black truck pointing weaponry in the air, with another man in camouflage standing beside it, all under a black sky

Ukraine uses systems like truck-mounted machine guns to take down incoming drones.

Pierre Crom/Getty Images



The problem with drones, Barrie said, is that “there are so many of them that if you intercept them at comparatively short range and it’s a kind of urban or a quasi-built-up environment, then some of them are going to fall in populated areas. It’s inevitable.”

Militaries can and do try to intercept attacks while causing minimal damage. Modern air defense systems track threats like drones and missiles to give air defense crews a sense of what they threaten and whether they should be countered.

Rogers said that civilians can often become better protected over time in a long conflict or war, as “a kind of bunkerisation begins to take place as societies adapt to the risk.” In Ukraine, for example, people receive alerts about bombardment and move to hardened shelters. But that’s also a negative outcome: “In that sense, drones don’t just kill people, they take the life out of a city.”

The low cost of drones enabled so many more of them to be used. Iran’s Shahed one-way attack drones cost an estimated $20,000 to $50,000 each, for example. Missiles cost far more: hundreds of thousands if not millions of dollars each.

The effects of large-scale drone warfare are clear in Ukraine, where drones are being used more than in any other conflict in history. Ukriane’s military relies on them, and Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy said in January that Russia had fired more than 57,000 of its Shahed-style drones since the full-scale invasion began in 2022.

Russia’s drones have devastated Ukraine. Many still caused harm even after being intercepted.


A ruined house at night, with people in head torches searching outside

Russia’s drones have devastated Ukraine’s buildings and maimed its civilians.

Diego Herrera Carcedo/Anadolu via Getty Images



Both the Middle East and Ukraine show that “future conflicts will likely feature high-volume drone and missile attacks designed to saturate air defenses,” meaning more of them flying over and near civilian areas, Campbell said.

Countries will need to stop these attacks, making the debris risk unavoidable, Campbell said.

“Debris from kinetic interceptions compounds this risk — but it remains far preferable to allowing an armed drone or missile to hit its target.”




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Amazon’s cloud reboot shows the future of consulting in the AI era

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My youngest daughter, Tessa, just accepted an internship with PwC in San Francisco. We’re overjoyed she’ll be home for a few months after heartlessly leaving us 18 months ago to study accounting at Wake Forest in North Carolina.

What surprised me: her internship isn’t until summer 2027. I had no idea these things were locked in so far ahead.

With AI reshaping so much, I can’t help wondering what consulting will look like by the time she starts. This week brought some clues, via another megascoop from Business Insider’s Eugene Kim.

He reported on ProServe, Amazon’s in-house cloud consulting arm. The unit influences more than $10 billion in annual revenue for AWS. Read the full story, but here’s the big takeaway: AI is driving radical change inside ProServe, offering a glimpse of where the broader consulting industry may be headed.

I asked Polly Thompson, who covers the Big Four at Business Insider, for her view:

  • This confirms many trends I’ve heard from these firms. How to deliver value and how to charge for it in the AI era — that’s the big question.
  • ProServe focuses on technical consulting for AWS clients, while the Big Four span audit, tax, risk, and strategy. That diversification could make them more resilient. AI isn’t the only force at work: global instability is increasing demand for complex risk consulting, for example.
  • AI’s ultimate impact on consulting remains unclear. Firms are embracing the technology and adapting their business models, but unevenly.
  • Hiring shows the divide. McKinsey, Accenture, and PwC are reducing hiring. EY is generally increasing entry-level hiring. KPMG isn’t making hiring changes.

Sign up for BI’s Tech Memo newsletter here. Reach out to me via email at abarr@businessinsider.com.




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The Anthropic-OpenAI fight could usher in a new era: chatbot monogamy

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Anthropic vs. ChatGPT: Who ya got?

The AI giants behind two of the world’s most popular chatbots, Claude and ChatGPT, have escalated their beef. Now people are picking sides.

(It looks like Katy Perry picked Claude Pro … and she liked it.)

It could represent a new stage in the AI wars. One where people settle down with one chatbot instead of playing the field.

In case you’re out of the loop: Anthropic and the Department of Defense disagreed over the government’s usage of its tech. Anthropic refused to back down. President Donald Trump banned federal agencies from using Anthropic. OpenAI cut a deal with the Pentagon a few hours later.

It shows how heated the rivalry between the two startups has gotten. From snarky Super Bowl ads to refusing to hold hands, here’s the history of the Anthropic-OpenAI relationship.

Anthropic isn’t shying away from the attention. It streamlined how users can import data from competing chatbots into Claude, which is now topping the App Store chart. “Every single day last week was an all-time record for Claude sign-ups,” a spokesperson told BI.

If you’re wondering about the differences between the chatbots, we break it all down here.

Ultimately, this could mark a new era of chatbot monogamy.

All signs point to AI giants pushing for more of a commitment from users.

Their top models all sit behind paywalls, with the gap between premium and free versions continuing to grow.

AI companies are also under considerable pressure to demonstrate a viable business model, potentially ahead of a public debut. A stable base of paid subscribers is a lot more appetizing to investors than a bunch of non-committal freeloaders.

Users also might gravitate toward a preferred chatbot. As experimentation fades into practical use, navigating multiple AI chats to be productive doesn’t feel … productive. And if it’s not free, are you really willing to pay for multiple subscriptions?

Which brings us back to Anthropic. The fight with the DoD is a perfect way to try and juice customer acquisition efforts. There are plenty of concerns about AI use. Anthropic can pitch itself as a safe antidote.

But catering to that crowd could prove challenging as competition ramps up and pressure to move quickly intensifies. Anthropic, which was founded on the proper development of AI, already weakened its foundational safety principle last week.




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Why Berkshire Hathaway’s New York Times bet is a fitting end to the Warren Buffett era

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Warren Buffett’s Berkshire Hathaway bought one new stock in his last quarter as CEO: The New York Times Company. It’s a fitting final bet for the Buffett era.

The famed investor’s conglomerate scooped up around 5.1 million shares of the newspaper publisher, securing a stake worth $352 million at December’s close, a Tuesday filing revealed.

The position’s small size points to one of Buffett’s two investment managers at the time — Ted Weschler and the since-departed Todd Combs — making the purchase.

Read all about it

Buffett is a lifelong lover of newspapers. He delivered 500,000 papers as a teenager running multiple routes, and for years, he challenged shareholders to best him at newspaper tossing during Berkshire’s annual meetings.

He went from throwing newspapers to owning dozens of publishers, including The Buffalo News and The Omaha World-Herald. He was close friends with the late publisher of The Washington Post, Katharine Graham, and one of the paper’s biggest financial backers.

By 2010, the billionaire stock picker was openly worried about declining circulation and advertising revenues for newspapers.

During Berkshire’s 2010 meeting, he recalled looking at the circulation of major titles such as the San Francisco Chronicle, and said it “blows your mind how fast people are dropping it.”

“The world has really changed, in terms of the essential nature of newspapers,” he said.

In 1965 or 1970, there was “probably nothing looked more bulletproof than a daily newspaper where the competition had melted away,” he continued. “But it’s a form of distributing information and entertainment that has lost its immediacy in many cases.”

Buffett pointed out that people no longer rely on papers to find out how their stocks were performing, or whether their sports team won. The resulting decline in circulation made newspapers less attractive to advertisers, he noted.

“And so you get this chicken and egg thing that the newspaper becomes less valuable as the advertisers float away, and the advertisers float away as the subscribers diminish,” he said.


Warren Buffett newspaper toss

Warren Buffett made the newspaper toss a fixture at Berkshire Hathaway’s shareholder meetings.



Rick Wilking/Reuters



Despite his concerns, he acquired 28 daily papers in the early 2010s.

“Charlie and I believe that papers delivering comprehensive and reliable information to tightly-bound communities and having a sensible Internet strategy will remain viable for a long time,” Buffett wrote in his 2012 letter to shareholders. “Charlie” referred to his late business partner, Charlie Munger.

“Newspapers continue to reign supreme … in the delivery of local news,” he added.

Buffett struck a far more bearish tone in 2019, telling Yahoo Finance that he expected only a few national titles, such as The New York Times, to survive, while the rest would “disappear.” He also bemoaned the demise of the newspaper ad business.

“It went from monopoly to franchise to competitive to … toast,” he said.

Berkshire’s surprise return

Buffett offloaded Berkshire’s newspapers to publisher Lee Enterprises in 2020. Given his long history in the newspaper business and eventual exit from it, it’s striking to see Berkshire return with its recent stock purchase.

One reason was undoubtedly The New York Times’ recovery in recent years. It grew revenues by 9% to $2.8 billion and its net income by 17% to $344 million last year, as subscription revenues rose 9% and advertising revenues jumped 12%.

A key driver was the paper’s addition of 1.4 million digital-only subscribers, which lifted its total subscriber count to 12.78 million as of December 31.

The publisher’s stock price has already seen some of the benefits. After collapsing from over $50 in mid-2002 to below $5 in early 2009, it has surged roughly 15-fold — including 50% in the past year — to trade at a record high of $74 at Tuesday’s close.

The shares gained another 3% in Wednesday’s premarket, perhaps marking one of the final cases of the “Buffett Effect,” where other investors mimic his buys and sells, moving markets.

The publisher’s comeback might explain why Buffett and his team decided to revisit one of his favorite industries so soon after turning the page.




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Kevin Reilly had a great time running TV during the Peak TV era. Now he’s in AI.

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TV is an endangered species. People aren’t watching it, and don’t want to pay for it. And the companies that own TV networks are trying to find someone — anyone — to buy them.

But not that long ago, lots of us were reveling in the “Peak TV” era — a time when inventive TV programming was plentiful and, crucially, popular. A time when you could watch “The Sopranos” on HBO, “Friday Night Lights” on NBC, and “The Shield” on FX.

This was also a time when Kevin Reilly had great jobs in TV, where he steered programming at networks including NBC, FX, Fox, and Turner — and had his hands on all the shows I just mentioned. That run ended in 2000, when Reilly was re-orged out of what was then called WarnerMedia.

Today, Reilly is in AI, of course: He recently became CEO of Kartel, a startup that’s supposed to help big brands use the tech.

But in a recent episode of my Channels podcast, I talked to him about life during TV’s latest (and possibly last) golden age — and whether he thinks it will ever come back. (Spoiler: There’s a reason he’s in AI now.)

You can read an edited excerpt from our conversation below, and listen to the whole thing here.

Peter Kafka: You got to be a TV executive in what we now call the Peak TV era. What was that like?

Kevin Reilly: When I got to network television, there were still these rules, like “the good guy always wins” and “people don’t want to watch depressing things on television.”

And then cable, when I went to FX, that was really one of the most fun chapters of my career because it was the very early days of basic cable. All of a sudden, we started doing “The Shield” and “Nip/Tuck” and doing these things that the press had labeled “HBO for basic cable.”

Prior to this, basic cable was mostly infomercials and reruns.

Kevin Reilly: I was sitting there talking to great creators, and I was telling them we were HBO for basic cable. And on the monitor above my head was “Cops” running 24 hours a day, keeping the lights on.

I was like, “Don’t look at the monitor.”

But all of a sudden, we were able to do stuff that really wasn’t fit for broadcast by being very particular and being a little bit more forward.

Around the same time, streaming popped up, and Netflix debuted “House of Cards” in 2013 as an explicitly HBO-style show. There was a lot of fascination with streaming but also dismissiveness: Jeff Bewkes, who was running Time Warner at the time, famously dissed Netflix as “the Albanian army.” Did you believe that back then?

I think Jeff is an extraordinary leader, and I loved working for him. At the time, though, I think he had to do what he needed to do.

You don’t think he was really dismissive of Netflix? It was just something he had to say?

I think at that point, throughout the entire business, everyone was dismissive of Netflix. “We’re picking these guys’ pockets. They’re gonna go out of business. We’re selling them all the stuff that we can’t sell. They’re idiots.”

But at the same time, Netflix was all anybody was talking about, all day long. I remember flying to Detroit to talk to a big [advertising] client for one of our series. It was going to be a $50 million, $60 million transaction. And all they were talking about was Netflix.

They were buying advertising, and then telling me how all their kids are only watching things on their phones all day long. And I was like, “Isn’t this ironic that you, an advertiser, are talking about a non-advertising-based service and how your kids don’t watch TV anymore?”

What did you think?

I thought they would experiment and do stuff, but maybe not at scale. I mean, they don’t have the system for that, and it’s really hard. Well, first of all, they did what we did (at FX) — they took a page out of the HBO handbook: Fire the money cannon and say, “Hey, we’ll just dream. Bring us in your dreams. Do what you wanna do.”

Your last job in TV was at what was then called WarnerMedia, which had been purchased by AT&T, and there were a bunch of different justifications for that deal, but the real one turned out to be “maybe Wall Street will give us a Netflix stock multiple,” which never happened. Did you think that combination was going to work?

I mean, the product itself works and has been a success. But to take the entirety of Time Warner, and then it was going to be a one-product system that we would single-handedly launch and build an ad play around it, and all of a sudden compete with Google and Netflix …

I don’t know that even Wall Street ever bought that narrative, no matter how hard we sold it.

Comcast and Paramount are bidding for WBD. Netflix is bidding, too. There’s going to be some kind of consolidation no matter what. Do you think that when all of this gets done that there’s a future for traditional television, or do you think it becomes, in the end, a subset of a bigger tech platform?

I’d love to be able to just give you the knee-jerk answer, “Of course, there’ll always be traditional television.” I think unfortunately, everybody waited too long to figure out how we were going to prop it up.

So will it have a very long tail on it, like radio? The heyday of radio went away and we still have radio. I believe it will be around in some fashion. And as some of these assets get shed or reinvented — yeah, they might end up having a little bit more life in some ways than we thought they did.

And radio became podcasts…

Exactly. So there’s always new expressions of it.

But retooling traditional businesses, especially while you’ve got to pull the profit out from underneath, is really difficult.

Correction: December 1, 2025 — An earlier version of this story misstated one of the companies bidding for WBD: They are Paramount and Comcast, along with Netflix.




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