Business
WGA cancels Los Angeles awards show amid labor strike
The Writers Guild of America West has canceled its awards ceremony scheduled to take place March 8 as its staff union members continue to strike, demanding higher pay and protections against artificial intelligence.
In a letter sent to members on Sunday, WGA West’s board of directors, including President Michele Mulroney, wrote, “The non-supervisory staff of the WGAW are currently on strike and the Guild would not ask our members or guests to cross a picket line to attend the awards show. The WGAW staff have a right to strike and our exceptional nominees and honorees deserve an uncomplicated celebration of their achievements.”
The New York ceremony, scheduled on the same day, is expected go forward while an alternative celebration for Los Angeles-based nominees will take place at a later date, according to the letter.
Comedian and actor Atsuko Okatsuka was set to host the L.A. show, while filmmaker James Cameron was to receive the WGA West Laurel Award.
WGA union staffers have been striking outside the guild’s Los Angeles headquarters on Fairfax Avenue since Feb. 17. The union alleged that management did not intend to reach an agreement on the pending contract. Further, it claimed that guild management had “surveilled workers for union activity, terminated union supporters, and engaged in bad faith surface bargaining.”
On Tuesday, the labor organization said that management had raised the specter of canceling the ceremony during a call about contraction negotiations.
“Make no mistake: this is an attempt by WGAW management to drive a wedge between WGSU and WGA membership when we should be building unity ahead of MBA [Minimum Basic Agreement] negotiations with the AMPTP [Alliance of Motion Picture and Television Producers],” wrote the staff union. “We urge Guild management to end this strike now,” the union wrote on Instagram.
The union, made up of more than 100 employees who work in areas including legal, communications and residuals, was formed last spring and first authorized a strike in January with 82% of its members. Contract negotiations, which began in September, have focused on the use of artificial intelligence, pay raises and “basic protections” including grievance procedures.
The WGA has said that it offered “comprehensive proposals with numerous union protections and improvements to compensation and benefits.”
The ceremony’s cancellation, coming just weeks before the Academy Awards, casts a shadow over the upcoming contraction negotiations between the WGA and the Alliance of Motion Picture and Television Producers, which represents the studios and streamers.
In 2023, the WGA went on a strike lasting 148 days, the second-longest strike in the union’s history.
Times staff writer Cerys Davies contributed to this report.
Dario Amodei, the chief executive of Anthropic, said on Wednesday that his artificial intelligence company had planned for growing about 10 times as big this year, only to reach a growth rate that could make it 80 times as big this year instead.
Mr. Amodei, 43, made his remarks at Anthropic’s annual developer conference in San Francisco, where he and other executives gave a glimpse into the company’s plans. Anthropic is one of the world’s leading A.I. start-ups with its Claude chatbot and its popular A.I. coding tool, Claude Code, which people can pay to subscribe to. Last month, Anthropic said its annual revenue run rate had surpassed $30 billion, up from $9 billion at the end of 2025.
At the conference, Mr. Amodei said Anthropic had been overwhelmed by the rate of growth, which has increased the company’s need for computing power to deliver its A.I. products to customers.
“I hope that 80-times growth doesn’t continue because that’s just crazy and it’s too hard to handle,” Mr. Amodei said. “I’m hoping for some more normal numbers.”
To obtain more computing power, Anthropic has signed a series of deals with industry giants. At the conference, Anthropic said it had sealed an agreement with Elon Musk’s SpaceX to use all of the computing capacity from the rocket company’s Colossus 1 data center in Memphis. The move gives Anthropic access to the computing power of more than 220,000 Nvidia A.I. chips, the company said, and opens the door to working with SpaceX to create A.I. data centers in space.
Anthropic declined to disclose the terms of the deal. SpaceX did not respond to a request for comment.
“As you saw today with the SpaceX compute deal, we’re working as quickly as possible to provide more compute than we have in the past,” Mr. Amodei said, using an industry term for computing power. He added that his company was working every day “to obtain even more compute” for users.
With the SpaceX deal, Anthropic said, it can expand the amount of coding that some Claude Code subscribers can do before they hit a usage limit with the tool. Anthropic offers people different pricing depending on the amount of coding they want to do.
Warner Bros. Discovery’s impending sale has rattled Hollywood — and the company’s balance sheet as the auction’s high costs increasingly come into focus.
The New York-based media company released its first-quarter earnings report Wednesday, which included a $2.9-billion loss. That amount includes $1.3 billion in restructuring expenses, including updated valuations for Warner’s declining linear cable television networks.
Contributing to the net loss was the $2.8-billion termination fee paid to Netflix in late February when the streaming giant bowed out of the bidding for Warner. The auction winner, Paramount Skydance, covered the payment to Netflix, but Warner still must carry the obligation on its balance sheet in case the Paramount takeover falls apart. Should that happen, Warner would have to reimburse Paramount.
Warner also spent an additional $100 million to run the auction and prepare for the upcoming transaction, according to its regulatory filing.
Stockholders late last month overwhelmingly approved Warner’s sale to Paramount.
The $111-billion deal faces opposition among film and television industry workers, many of whom have been sidelined after previous consolidations among the original studios and a pullback in production that has hurt the L.A. economy.
“As we prepare for our next chapter, our focus remains on executing our key strategic priorities: scaling HBO Max globally, returning our Studios to industry leadership, and optimizing our Global Linear Networks,” Warner Bros. Discovery leaders said Wednesday in a letter to shareholders.
In the January-March period, Warner generated $8.9 billion in revenue, a 3% decline from the same quarter one year ago, excluding the effect of foreign exchange rate fluctuations.
The company’s results fell short of Wall Street estimates. It posted a $1.17-per-share loss, much wider than analysts’ expectations for a loss of about 11 cents per share.
Warner’s streaming services, including HBO Max, notched milestones in the quarter and 9% revenue growth to $2.9 billion. The company launched HBO Max in Germany, Italy, Britain and Ireland during the quarter.
Advertising revenue for streaming was up 20% compared with the first quarter of 2025.
The streaming unit posted a 17% increase to $438 million in adjusted earnings before interest, taxes, depreciation and amortization, or EBITDA.
Warner’s studios, primarily its TV business, had a strong quarter, in part because of those international rollouts.
Studio revenue rose 35% to $3.1 billion compared with the prior-year quarter.
Television revenue soared 58% (excluding exchange rate fluctuations) because of increased program licensing fees to support the launch of HBO Max in the international markets. The launches also propelled the movie studio, which saw revenue increase 21%.
Video game revenue declined 30% because of lower library revenues.
Adjusted EBITDA for the studios grew $516 million (156%) to $775 million compared with the same quarter last year.
The company’s vast linear television networks — including CNN, TBS, Cartoon Network, HGTV, Animal Planet and TLC — saw revenue fall 8% to $4.4 billion.
TV distribution revenue tumbled 7% largely because of a 10% decrease in domestic linear pay TV subscribers.
The company also felt the loss of its NBA contract for its TNT channel, which NBC picked up for its network and streaming service. Advertising revenue fell 11%. “The absence of the NBA negatively impacted the year-over-year growth rate,” Warner said.
The collapse of the legacy cable TV business is one of the drivers behind Paramount’s quest to acquire Warner. Both companies have long relied on their cable TV profits to shore up more volatile business segments, including their film studios. Paramount also wants Warner’s prestigious properties, including its film and TV studios and HBO Max, which now has 140 million subscribers.
But as the Paramount-Warner merger draws closer, the opposition has grown louder.
More than 4,000 artists and entertainment industry workers, including Bryan Cranston, Noah Wyle, Kristen Stewart and Jane Fonda, have signed an open letter warning about the dangers of the merger with Paramount.
“This transaction would further consolidate an already concentrated media landscape, reducing competition at a moment when our industries — and the audiences we serve — can least afford it,” according to the letter.
“The result will be fewer opportunities for creators, fewer jobs across the production ecosystem, higher costs, and less choice for audiences in the United States and around the world.”
The merger still needs the approval of regulators in the U.S. and abroad.
Adjusted EBITDA for the television networks fell 10% to $1.6 billion.
Warner ended the quarter with $3.3 billion in cash on hand and $33.4 billion of gross debt.
Howard Lutnick, President Trump’s commerce secretary, faced questions on Wednesday in a closed-door session of the House Oversight Committee over his ties to Jeffrey Epstein, the convicted sex offender.
Mr. Lutnick is one of the highest-profile cabinet members to come under scrutiny in connection with Mr. Epstein. The commerce secretary’s name appeared in more than 250 documents in the Epstein files released by the Justice Department, a review by The New York Times found.
Asked whether Mr. Lutnick’s credibility had been undermined, Representative James Comer, a Republican of Kentucky who chairs the House Oversight Committee said Wednesday, “we’re going to ask him all these questions, and we’ll let the American people judge whether the credibility was damaged or not at the end of the day.”
Mr. Comer said that Mr. Lutnick “wasn’t 100 percent truthful with whether he or not he had been on the island.”
He added that it was the first time in the last decade that a chairman of the oversight committee had brought in a cabinet secretary of his own party.
During the hearing Mr. Lutnick downplayed his ties to Mr. Epstein, claiming their relationship was inconsequential, according to two people familiar with his testimony.
Mr. Lutnick lived next door to Mr. Epstein on the Upper East Side of Manhattan for over a decade. Until recently, he had claimed to have not been in the same room with Mr. Epstein after an encounter in 2005. But millions of documents that were released by the Justice Department earlier this year showed that Mr. Lutnick had traveled to Mr. Epstein’s private island in 2012.
The documents suggest Mr. Lutnick had another encounter with Mr. Epstein at his house in 2011, years after Mr. Lutnick claimed to have cut ties with him. The records also indicated that the men invested in the same privately held company together and dealt with each other on neighborhood and philanthropic issues.
Mr. Epstein, who was convicted in Florida in 2008 of soliciting prostitution from a minor, died in a Manhattan jail in 2019 while being held on federal sex-trafficking charges.
Mr. Lutnick has received questions from lawmakers about his connections with Mr. Epstein in congressional hearings on other topics, first in February and again last month.
All Democrats and some Republicans on the Oversight Committee signaled that they would try to force a vote on a subpoena for Mr. Lutnick. But the panel’s Republican chairman, Representative James R. Comer of Kentucky, said that Mr. Lutnick had volunteered to testify.
The Commerce Department said in a statement on Wednesday that Mr. Lutnick looked forward to “putting to rest the inaccurate and baseless claims in the media.”
Though the committee’s investigation into Mr. Epstein and the Justice Department’s handling of the case against him has sprawled to include a number of political figures, Mr. Lutnick is the first current Trump administration official to testify before the panel.
The committee also issued a subpoena to Pam Bondi, the former attorney general who Mr. Trump fired last month, before she was dismissed from her position. She has not yet appeared for a deposition.
Questions by lawmakers in the closed-door session on Wednesday could touch on Mr. Lutnick’s former nanny. The files showed that Mr. Epstein expressed an interest in meeting the nanny in 2013 and had her résumé sent to him. It is not clear if they ever met.
Mr. Lutnick said in February that he did not know if the nanny had met Mr. Epstein, or if she was one of the nannies Mr. Lutnick had brought to the island. Mr. Lutnick has four children.
In October, Mr. Lutnick said in a podcast interview that he had decided after a 2005 incident not to associate with Mr. Epstein, after Mr. Epstein alluded to his sexual encounters with women while giving Mr. Lutnick and his wife a tour of his house.
“My wife and I decided that I will never be in the room with that disgusting person ever again,” Mr. Lutnick said on the podcast, “Pod Force One.” “So I was never in the room with him socially, for business or even philanthropy.”
But in a congressional hearing in February, Mr. Lutnick told lawmakers that he not only met with Mr. Epstein after that encounter, but that he and his family also traveled to his private Caribbean island, Little St. James, in 2012 for lunch. Mr. Lutnick was traveling aboard his yacht, accompanied by his wife, children, nannies and another family.
The visit took place four years after Mr. Epstein had pleaded guilty in Florida to soliciting prostitution from a minor as part of a plea bargain with federal prosecutors.
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