⚡ Situational awareness: The U.S. Senate stripped a new excise tax on solar and wind projects from the final reconciliation bill language, which was passed 51-50 and now heads back to the House.

• Increased excise taxes on large university endowments remained.

OpenAI is one of the world's most valuable private companies, and by far the global leader when it comes to consumer adoption of artificial intelligence.

• It also could be on the precipice of its first major commercial challenge.

Driving the news: Apple is considering using models from either OpenAI or Anthropic to underpin its next version of Siri, according to a blockbuster report from Bloomberg's Mark Gurman.

• Gurman writes that Apple has asked both companies "to train versions of their models that could run on Apple's cloud infrastructure for testing," although he also cautions that these discussions are in their early stages and that Apple continues to develop its own LLM.

The big picture: Were Apple to pick Anthropic, it could become a major challenge to OpenAI's consumer dominance.

• There are more than 2 billion iPhones in use globally, including around 155 million in the U.S. That's a massive installed user base that suddenly would get introduced to Claude, even if white-labeled as Siri.
• iPhone users spend a lot of time inside the Apple ecosystem — photos, storage, contacts, etc. — and may skip the ChatGPT app tap if a viable alternative is more integrated with the rest of their digital life.

By the numbers: OpenAI most recently was valued by VCs at $300 billion, while Anthropic was valued at $61.5 billion.

The bottom line: There are lots of obvious caveats here, including the possibility that Apple will stay in-house or outsource to OpenAI instead of to Anthropic.

• Plus the Google Gemini wildcard for consumer, and the likelihood of mergers that push market concentration in unexpected directions (lots of Perplexity rumors, for example).

The bottom line: Apple picking Anthropic would be a game changer. Including for a venture capital markets that's made massive bets at record valuations.

Paramount Global (Nasdaq: PARA) agreed to pay $16 million to President Trump's future presidential library, to settle a lawsuit that Trump brought over the editing of a "60 Minutes" interview with Kamala Harris.

Why it's the BFD: It's a small price to pay for merger approval. Unless you value integrity.

Catch up quick: Paramount last summer agreed to merge with David Ellison's Skydance Media, via a two-part process that would value the combined company at around $28 billion.

• RedBird Capital Partners and KKR are helping to finance the deal.
• But regulatory approval was clouded by Trump's $20 billion lawsuit, which alleged that CBS had deceptively edited the pre-election interview with Harris (something still denied by CBS, which later released the unedited transcripts).
• Just weeks after Trump took office, the FCC launched a probe into WCBS New York over the interview for "news distortion."
• In April, longtime "60 Minutes" executive producer Bill Owens quit, citing his inability "to make independent decisions." CBS News CEO Wendy McMahon resigned next.

The bottom line: Paramount chose expediency.