Aditi Bharade

The two giants of the blind box world are joining forces

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The two big leagues in the toy world are joining forces: Pop Mart’s iconic Labubu doll is getting a Sanrio makeover.

The collection features Labubus dressed as popular Sanrio characters, including Hello Kitty, Cinnamoroll, Kuromi, My Melody, and more.

The small 7-inch Labubu keychains in the collection are priced at $39.99 and sold in blind boxes, which conceal the exact character inside, making the purchase feel like a gamble.

The collection also includes 15-inch plush dolls priced at $149.90.

The collection will go live on Pop Mart’s online store on Thursday at 10 p.m. E.T. It will be available in stores in April, Pop Mart said in the press release.

“Both LABUBU and Sanrio have passionate fanbases, and this partnership engages collectors and fans alike, blending timeless Sanrio appeal with the playful mischief that has made LABUBU a global icon,” said Emily Brough, Pop Mart Americas’ head of licensing, in the press release.

This is not the first time Pop Mart, a Chinese toymaker, has pulled off a flashy collaboration. It’s partnered with brands like Uniqlo, Coca-Cola, and the anime One Piece.

Shunsuke Kuriyama, a Jefferies analyst who analyzes Sanrio, said the collaboration could be effective in “pooling fans from both sides,” and could “introduce one group to another brand IP, potentially leading to a win-win scenario.”

“Both brands are seeing solid demand from ‘kidults,’ so this collab could drive demand from both groups of fans,” Kuriyama added. “Kidults” is a term for adult collectors of toys who buy them for nostalgia or as emotional support objects.

Per its latest earnings report in September, The Monsters IP — which Labubu is part of — earned a half-year revenue of $700 million USD, accounting for nearly half of the company’s IP sales.

Historically, Labubu launches have drawn huge crowds to Pop Marts around the world. The company has shifted product launches online, but new launches still draw large crowds to physical stores.

In August, when Pop Mart launched its mini Labubu series, the dolls were sold out instantly, and customers flooded its stores in Singapore hoping to get their hands on them.




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After weeks of getting bashed, two software giants can make the case for why AI won’t kill them

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After being marked for dead, software companies have a chance to tell their side of the story.

Excluding Canada’s Olympic hockey teams, no one has had a tougher go recently than software companies. Everyone faces some fear over AI, but software’s diagnosis has been more dire than most. (Author Nassim Taleb was the latest to write software’s eulogy, although he’s not known for his optimism.)

Two software giants — Salesforce and Snowflake — get to make the case for why they’re still very much alive. Both companies report earnings after the bell and will be interested in changing a narrative that’s helped push their stocks down 27% (Salesforce) and 26% (Snowflake) this year.

(Workday, another software company that’s been getting hammered, made the case yesterday why AI is friend, not foe.)

A major problem for software companies is that their opponent is largely hypothetical. Even if both companies report blockbuster earnings, there’s still the counterargument that AI will eventually eat their lunch.

Anthropic has played this game masterfully. The startup has strategically rolled out product announcements for its AI chatbot, Claude. The news has devastated entire industries despite there being no evidence of widespread adoption yet.

Here’s what to look out for from Salesforce and Snowflake when they report:

Salesforce: Marc Benioff’s company is the prototypical enterprise software company. Customer relationship management systems are all about workflow and rely heavily on seat-based subscriptions. That makes Salesforce a prime target for AI automation and a bellwether for other software companies.

Benioff has sought to address competitors head-on with Salesforce’s own AI agents and even contemplated a name change to acknowledge the shift. But Agentforce has had its share of challenges. An internal survey showed that most employees feel AI is increasing their productivity, but Salesforce will want the same positivity coming from outside its walls.

These days, AI might not even be Salesforce’s biggest headache. An off-color joke from Benioff at a recent employee event has outraged many workers and even prompted fellow Salesforce executives to speak out.

Snowflake: The data-warehousing giant might seem like a major beneficiary of AI. Models need tons of data to function. Snowflake helps companies organize and analyze massive amounts of data. Everybody wins!

The potential future isn’t as rosy. Snowflake’s business might not face the direct risk that other software companies struggle with, but it could slide down the totem pole of customers’ tool set. Instead of being considered a crucial software, it could become just another piece of back-end infrastructure.

Snowflake’s own CEO warned of this future, saying models’ desire to have easy access to all types of data means “everything else, the world, is just a dumb data pipe that feeds into that big brain.”

And unfortunately for Snowflake, the value you provide to customers as a “dumb data pipe” is a lot lower, meaning you can’t charge as much.




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Trump tells tech giants to power their own AI ambitions

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  • President Donald Trump said he’s told top tech companies they must pay more for electricity near data centers.
  • Trump made the announcement during the State of the Union. He did not name the companies.
  • Big Tech’s data center push is driving up US electricity demand and costs.

President Donald Trump said Tuesday that top tech companies have to cover their own power needs when they are building data centers.

“We’re telling the major tech companies that they have the obligation to provide for their own power needs,” Trump said during his State of the Union address on Tuesday evening, adding, “They can build their own power plants as part of their factory so that no one’s prices will go up, and in many cases, prices of electricity will go down for the community.”

Trump said he negotiated a new “rate-payer protection pledge.” He did not specify what the pledge entailed or which companies had agreed to it.

“They’re going to produce their own electricity,” he said.

Tech companies have already begun building their own off-grid infrastructure.

Politico first reported on the pledge earlier on Tuesday, saying tech companies had agreed to pay more for electricity in places near data centers. A White House spokesperson confirmed the report to Business Insider but did not provide additional details.

The announcement comes as Big Tech companies spend hundreds of billions of dollars to build AI infrastructure and data centers, driving up electricity demand in the US. Utility costs are rising across the US as a result of the increased electricity demand for data centers, a report from the Center for American Progress found.

Trump has previously said Americans should not have to pay higher electricity costs due to data centers, and that the companies that build them “must pay their own way.”

Decisions about utility costs are typically made at the state and local levels. It’s unclear how the newly announced pledges would be implemented.




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Snowflake’s CEO says software giants risk becoming a ‘dumb data pipe’ to AI models

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The biggest software companies might be reduced to mere data sources, says Snowflake’s CEO.

“The big model makers want to create a world in which all of the data for all of the enterprises is easily available to them,” Sridhar Ramaswamy said on an episode of Alex Kantrowitz’s “Big Technology Podcast” published last week. “Everything else, the world, is just a dumb data pipe that feeds into that big brain.”

Prior to becoming Snowflake’s CEO in 2024, Ramaswamy was a partner at Greylock Ventures and cofounded AI search startup Neeva, which was acquired by Snowflake.

Ramaswamy added that Snowflake needs to operate with a “fear” that people would stop using AI agents developed by software companies and instead want an all-inclusive agent that has data from Snowflake, for example, and everywhere else

He said his solution was to let customers take the lead and decide how they want to access their data — directly through their own agents, or through a product like ChatGPT.

In the last few months, AI labs have evolved from being sources of AI infrastructure to becoming software providers themselves. OpenAI has entered the sales, support, and document analysis market, threatening incumbents such as Salesforce and Oracle.

On a podcast released last week, Andreessen Horowitz general partner Anish Acharya said software firms were being unnecessarily punished by Wall Street over fears that AI could take over their industry. The VC said that legacy software could not be replaced so easily, because it would not be worth it to use AI for every business function.

He said that software accounts for 8% to 12% of a company’s expenses, so vibe coding to build the company’s resource planning or payroll tools would only save about 10%. Instead, companies should focus on big-ticket items, like developing their core businesses or optimizing other costs.

Ramaswamy and Acharya’s comments follow a brutal start of the month for software stocks, which dragged down tech and broader markets. The sell-off started when already-wary investors panicked about Anthropic’s new AI tool, which can perform a range of clerical tasks for people working in the legal industry.




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China’s tech giants are opening their doors to OpenClaw. The Chinese internet is lapping it up.

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The viral AI agent OpenClaw — formerly known as Clawdbot, then Moltbot — has found an audience in China.

Since last week, Chinese tech companies including Tencent, Alibaba, and Volcano Engine, a cloud service platform under ByteDance, have begun integrating OpenClaw into their platforms, making it easier for Chinese users to run the agent. That includes connecting the agent to workplace tools such as Alibaba’s collaboration platform, DingTalk, and Tencent Holdings’ WeCom, the work version of China’s super app, WeChat.

OpenClaw began circulating widely in tech circles last month, attracting high-profile fans including Y Combinator CEO Garry Tan and multiple partners at Andreessen Horowitz.

The agent has also taken off among Chinese users, with demos, tutorials, and use cases spreading rapidly across local social platforms.

OpenClaw is designed to run around the clock and plug into a wide range of consumer apps, allowing users to automate tasks such as managing schedules, overseeing vibe-coding sessions, or even building AI employees.

In a post on Tencent Cloud’s developer platform, the company said last Thursday that its servers have rolled out a preconfigured OpenClaw application template, enabling users to deploy the AI assistant in the cloud with minimal setup.

Alibaba Cloud has also rolled out support for OpenClaw on its platforms and said the agent can connect to a range of models from Alibaba’s Qwen series.

Volcano Engine, ByteDance’s cloud services arm, outlined how developers can deploy Moltbot in its environment in an article published on Monday, while also flagging key safety considerations.

“Because the tool has extensive data, account, and network access permissions, please deploy it in a dedicated environment, avoid handling sensitive information, and be sure to review permissions regularly and set access restrictions for ECS and API keys,” the article said, referring to cloud servers and access credentials.

For OpenClaw to run as a digital assistant across apps, it requires access to users’ files, login details, browser activity, and other data.

Cybersecurity specialists told Business Insider in a report published on Wednesday that agents like OpenClaw can be vulnerable to “prompt injections,” a tactic that uses hidden instructions to trick AI into performing actions such as leaking data or publishing content on users’ behalf.

Despite mounting privacy and security concerns, enthusiasm for the agent among Chinese users shows little sign of slowing.

OpenClaw’s popularity on Chinese social media

Posts and demos featuring OpenClaw have surged on the Chinese social media platform RedNote.

One RedNote user who goes by “Brother C” posted a video tutorial last Tuesday, walking viewers through how to use OpenClaw. “See how the 24/7 proactive AI assistant is revolutionizing workflows,” he wrote. The post drew more than 4,000 likes and was saved over 6,000 times.

Another user posting under the nickname “Teacher Du” shared his own explainer on Monday, describing how OpenClaw could be deployed in everyday workflows. His post was saved more than 2,000 times and received over 1,000 likes.

“My experience was truly mind-blowing,” he wrote, adding that the agent could handle “all sorts of tasks” and that the “concept of a true AI employee is getting closer.”

Like their counterparts in the US, Chinese users are buying Mac Minis to run the agent. A RedNote user named Wu Bin said he had ordered a secondhand Mac Mini to serve as his “super assistant.”

“It’s incredibly convenient, I can control it remotely to organize files and handle all sorts of tasks,” he wrote.

Not everyone is convinced. A user who goes by “Programmer Yago” warned in a RedNote post on Sunday that using the agent could leave users’ data “running naked all over the internet.”

OpenClaw did not respond to a request for comment from Business Insider.




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China’s AI push is about spreading economic gains, not enriching tech giants, a finance CEO says

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Open source — that might be the clearest signal of how China wants artificial intelligence to reshape its economy.

Hisham Alrayes, the group CEO of Bahrain-based GFH Financial Group, said China is prioritizing open models and broad deployment to spread AI’s gains across the economy, instead of funneling them to a few tech giants.

Speaking at a Davos panel on China’s “AI+ Economy” strategy on Wednesday, Alrayes said the country’s approach reflects a fundamentally different economic philosophy.

“You look at the open structure of the China AI philosophy — then you have the non-open structure,” Alrayes said. “That signals that the benefit they want to see is to trickle down into the economy, into the companies.”

Open source as economic strategy

China’s most prominent AI breakout, DeepSeek, reflects that philosophy.

It mostly uses open-source models that have drawn global attention, in contrast to many large US language models that remain closed and proprietary, reaping the benefits of tightly controlled commercial ecosystems.

Meta’s former chief AI scientist Yann LeCun, has said that a key reason behind DeepSeek’s success is its open-source model, which, he said, can outperform proprietary models in terms of efficiency and innovation by building on shared research.

Meanwhile, former Google CEO Eric Schmidt has said that China’s open-source AI models could gain an edge globally because they’re free, making them more attractive than costly proprietary US systems for governments and countries that can’t afford closed models.

Similarly, Alrayes said, China — in pursuing the open model — is aiming for affordability and scale.

“It’s not the benefit of that company, of that product, the return of that individual. It’s not an individual — it’s an economy,” Alrayes said.

That philosophy is reflected in China’s national “AI Plus” action plan, which prioritizes diffusion, said fellow panelist Gong Ke, executive director of the Chinese Institute for New Generation AI Development Strategies at Nankai University.

The policy, he said, focuses on embedding AI across manufacturing, healthcare, finance, education, and other sectors, rather than on breakthroughs such as artificial general intelligence.

He added that the plan sets explicit adoption targets, with AI agents and intelligent terminals expected to reach 70% penetration by 2027 and 90% by 2030.

AI as infrastructure, not a profit engine

Alrayes said China’s open-source tilt ultimately reflects a broader goal: making AI an economic utility rather than a profit center for a small group of companies.

“China is looking to create value throughout the economy, very clear, with very specific objectives across the economy,” he said. “Not just as a benefit to those companies. This is the difference in the philosophy.”




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