BUSINESS

Real Madrid learned their 2026/27 Champions League league phase opponents in Geneva. Under the Swiss-style format, they’ll play eight matches, four home and four away.

With high prices on everyday essentials and stagnant paychecks, more consumers are relying on credit cards and loans just to keep up with basic living expenses. When bills pile up and payments fall behind, it creates immense financial stress — and it brings one group out in full force: debt collectors.

Whether you are dealing with past-due credit cards, medical bills, or personal loans, facing relentless collection efforts can feel overwhelming. But you don’t have to navigate it empty-handed.

If you or a loved one are facing relentless collection calls, here is what you need to know to protect your rights and your finances.

1. Exercise Your Legal Right to Stop the Calls

The brutality of harassing texts and phone calls from collectors causes immense emotional and physical stress. But you have rights. Under federal law, even if you owe the debt, you have the right to tell a collector to get lost.

Once you give proper written notice demanding they stop contacting you, they are legally barred from reaching out by phone, text, or email. The only action they are legally permitted to take from that point forward is serving you with a court summons. If you want to stop the harassment, learn how to properly notify a collector to stop contacting you.

2. Get Every Single Deal in Writing

If you have the means to settle a debt and want to make an accommodation, negotiation can work. Collectors will often agree to accept a lower amount to settle the balance.

However, a settlement deal is only valid if you have it in writing first.

Over the decades, I have heard from countless people who negotiated a deal in good faith over the phone and paid the agreed-upon amount, only for the collection agency to come back later demanding the rest. Their excuse? “You can’t prove we made that deal.”

Before sending a single penny, get a letter or email stating explicitly that payment of $X constitutes a full and complete settlement of the debt. (A text message isn’t enough — get an official letter or formal email.)

3. Never Ignore a Written Collection Notice

A dangerous strategy among modern debt collectors is to skip phone calls entirely and head straight for legal action.

When you receive an initial written notice about a debt, do not throw it away — even if it’s for the wrong amount, sent to the wrong person, or for a bill you already paid. If you do not dispute a debt in writing within the required timeframe, the debt (and the amount claimed) is legally presumed valid. Silence works against you.

4. Show Up to Court to Fight Default Judgments

If a debt collector files a lawsuit against you, you must respond and show up to your court date.

Estimates show that roughly 98% to 99% of people simply fail to show up when sued by debt buyers. Many people falsely believe that ignoring the problem will make it go away, but silence is acquiescence.

When you don’t show up:

Debt buyers win automatically.

The judge issues a default judgment against you.

The collector gains the legal power to garnish your wages and freeze your bank account.

Many of these debts are well past your state’s statute of limitations. If you show up and tell the judge the debt is expired, you can get the case thrown out. Simply showing up often means you win, or at least avoid devastating consequences.

Final Thoughts

Navigating deep financial stress during a split economy is exhausting, but hiding from debt collectors only transfers all the power into their hands. By knowing your rights under the law, keeping a written paper trail for every single interaction, and physically standing up for yourself if a court date arises, you protect your hard-earned paycheck from unfair judgments.

Don’t let debt collectors bully you. Stand up for yourself, put every agreement in writing, and always demand accountability.
The post 4 Rules Every Consumer Needs to Know to Fight Back Against Debt Collectors appeared first on Clark Howard.

For anyone who suffers from carsickness, the pattern is uncomfortably familiar. You’re in the passenger seat, you glance down to answer a message or read anything on your phone, and within minutes, your stomach is begging you to stop.

Google thinks a few moving dots would help.

Android 17 has started to roll out a feature called Motion Assist, which puts animated shapes around the edges of a phone’s display. The indicators react to a vehicle’s acceleration, braking, and turning, providing the eyes with visual information that can better match what the body is feeling, The Verge reports.

That makes a weird-looking software feature much more useful for commuters, parents on road trips, rideshare passengers, and anyone else who regularly reaches for a phone from the passenger seat.

For Alphabet (GOOGL), Motion Assist is a key part of the smartphone war against Apple. Sometimes the feature that consumers remember is not another AI benchmark or a faster processor. It is the one that tackles an irritating problem they actually face.

Google’s weird dots tackle a very normal problem

Motion sickness is typically associated with conflicting sensory information. While the eyes are fixed on a relatively still phone screen, the inner ear of a passenger can feel the acceleration, turns, and braking of a moving vehicle.

According to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention’s Yellow Book, the most widely accepted explanation for motion sickness is sensory conflict or mismatch.

Motion Assist seeks to mitigate that mismatch without requiring passengers to put their phones away.

For example, when a vehicle turns right, the indicators travel across the screen in the opposite direction. The indicators move with the vehicle when it brakes, mimicking that movement.

Importantly, the indicators appear around the edges of the display rather than over the content someone is trying to read.

In theory, this means a passenger can keep reading a message, looking at directions or scrolling through a webpage, while peripheral cues help the brain make sense of the vehicle’s motion.

For the person in the back of an Uber trying to respond to a work email or the teenager staring at a phone on a long family drive, the upside is easy to understand.

Android users can customize how Motion Assist works

Google is also giving users some say in how noticeable those moving indicators become.

Users will be able to adjust the opacity of the indicators and choose different colors and shapes via Motion Assist, according to The Verge. They can configure the feature to turn on automatically when Android senses they’re in a moving vehicle, or they can flip the switch in Quick Settings.

The rollout appears to be gradual. The Verge said the feature was not yet present on two Pixel devices it tested, citing Android Authority’s finding that some Pixel phones were beginning to get it.

Android’s strangest upgrade may be one of its most useful.The India Today Group / Getty Images

What Android users need to know

Feature: Motion Assist

Software: Android 17

Purpose: Designed to reduce motion sickness while looking at a phone in a moving vehicle.

How it works: Uses the phone’s accelerometer and gyroscope to create visual cues that correspond with vehicle movement.

Customization: Users can adjust indicator opacity, shapes, and colors.

Automatic mode: Motion Assist can activate when the phone detects a moving vehicle.

Availability: The rollout is occurring in phases, with some Pixel phones receiving it first.

Apple equivalent: Vehicle Motion Cues.

Those controls could matter, since the visual cues themselves must solve one problem without creating another. A feature designed to make staring at a phone more comfortable won’t be very effective if the moving images themselves become annoying.

Automatic activation may be especially significant. The function can pop up when the phone senses passengers are in a vehicle, so they don’t have to remember to dig through settings every time a trip starts.

This makes Motion Assist less of an accessibility type of setting people might forget exists and more something that could become part of daily Android use.

Apple got there first, but Google is closing the gap

This isn’t the first time Google, a big smartphone firm, has tackled this problem.

Apple has introduced Vehicle Motion Cues to the iPhone and iPad with iOS 18 and iPadOS 18. Apple’s approach also uses moving dots on the corners of the screen to show changes in vehicle movement without obscuring the primary content.

Apple now enables car Motion Cues to automatically activate when an iPhone recognizes that the user is riding in a car.

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The Verge’s Thomas Ricker posted an anecdotal example of why the technology can matter. Ricker, who has to work from the passenger seat when on the road, said Apple’s anti-nausea feature allows him to operate his devices when he’d otherwise have trouble stomaching it.

That’s not clinical proof that the device will work for everyone, but it does show the consumer proposition remarkably effectively.

For someone who usually gets nauseous staring at their phone while in a moving car, even a slight improvement can make the gadget far more usable on a commute or road trip.

Why Google’s Motion Assist matters on Main Street

Here’s where a seemingly small Android upgrade gets a lot more fascinating.

Americans spend a lot of time traveling between home, work, school, and other places. Phones are now coming along on just about every leg of those excursions.

Motion Assist aims to give motion-sick passengers some of that time back.

A commuter on a bus might be able to catch up on email. A passenger on a long car ride might be able to read just as fast without getting carsick. It can make it easier for parents to keep the kids entertained while driving.

And someone in the back of a cab might finally get to finish what they were doing before they got into the car.

Behavioral remedies for motion sickness include getting a visual horizon reference and avoiding visual tasks that aggravate the sensory conflict, the CDC noted.

What’s fascinating about Google’s solution is that it tries to resolve the underlying visual conflict while still enabling the passenger to keep staring at the screen.

There’s a significant caveat: This is a passenger function, not a reason for drivers to use their phones. Apple clearly tells users not to use its similar feature when they need to pay attention for safety, and the same common-sense restriction applies here.

Why a few moving dots matter for Alphabet

No investor should anticipate Motion Assist to meaningfully move Alphabet’s quarterly performance.

But that doesn’t make the feature irrelevant to the larger Google tale.

The smartphone race is increasingly about hundreds of little variations in the everyday experience. Camera upgrades, battery management, accessibility features, AI tools, and conveniences such as Motion Assist all add up to whether consumers believe their existing ecosystem is doing well by them.

Apple had stolen Google’s thunder, releasing Vehicle Motion Cues first.

Now Google is abolishing that distinction.

That’s important, since Android is so much more than an operating system. It’s a major entry point into Google’s broader ecosystem, including as Search, Maps, YouTube, Gemini, and the Play Store.

A consumer is never going to pick a phone because its processor scores a certain benchmark.

But the “I can look at this phone in the car and not feel as sick” benefit is one that doesn’t really need an explanation.

That’s what’s interesting about Motion Assist.

Google’s latest Android trick looks like a bunch of odd dots running across a screen.

But for some passengers, those dots may mean the difference between putting the phone aside and really being able to use it.

Related: Apple is quietly preparing a major change inside its stores

Shakira returns to Billboard’s Adult Contemporary chart for only the second time in her life as “Dai Dai” with Burna Boy debuts.

TheStreet aims to feature only the best products and services. If you buy something via one of our links, we may earn a commission.

Why we love this deal

Tidying up small odds and ends can sometimes be the most difficult part of cleaning the house, such as items that you may use often and like to keep in sight, but still need somewhere to go without taking over your counters. Easy-to-see storage organizers can help keep your items compartmentalized while still being easy to get to, instead of digging through baskets full of items. Additionally, keeping your items stowed away can help keep them clean, allowing them to stay nicer for longer. 

Finding storage that fits all of those details can be difficult, but the Neathub 2-Tier Stackable Wheeled Organizers make it easy. The versatile design provides space for all different types of items, from beauty products to art supplies to shelf-stable kitchen ingredients. At just $36 for two organizers, this is a great option that can be customized and added to later on. 

Neathub 2-Tier Stackable Wheeled Organizers, $36 (was $40) at Amazon

Courtesy of Amazon

Shop at Amazon

Why do shoppers love it?

This organizer set is super versatile, offering a wheeled design that can easily be moved from room to room, and a foldable frame that can be folded up and stored for later use. The wheels are lockable, securing your items in place once moved. The sections can be stacked on top of each other, or separated to use in different parts of the house. Another great aspect is that you can purchase additions later on if you need to add to your storage, which is useful if you have an ever-changing house, like redecorating, or are planning on moving. Each one measures 13.6 inches deep, 7.9 inches wide, and 13.2 inches tall, making them easy to use both on the floor and on the countertop.

Related: Amazon’s slim storage cabinet offers open and closed storage for $35

Each cabinet door is made of a clear panel that allows you to see what’s inside, making it easy to find what you need without opening each door and rifling around inside, and preventing multiple purchases of the same item. The inside of each organizer features adjustable shelving that allows smaller items like folded towels or larger items like detergent bottles to fit. The tops of the organizers can also be used as a small shelf, creating room for daily necessities or decorative items. They feature raised edges and a textured surface that prevent items from sliding off when moving the organizers. The two-stack is a great deal, but Amazon is also currently offering discounts on the other sets as well, including a three-tier, four-tier, and five-tier option. 

Details to know

Size: Each organizer measures 13.6 inches deep, 7.9 inches wide, and 13.2 inches tall. 

Colors: Choose from black, beige, and white.

Weight capacity: Each organizer can hold about 75 pounds. 

One reviewer wrote, “It’s the perfect size for a small bathroom! It fits right in between my sink and my wall, and has plenty of storage space. The built-in shelves are very durable. It was very easy to assemble and move into place. It’s definitely worth the money.”

Shop more deals

Sunally Slim Storage Cart, $30 (was $35) at Amazon

Sunamon 3-Drawer Slim Storage Organizer, $40 (was $42) at Amazon 

Pulnda 3-Tier Storage Cabinet, $29 (was $30) at Amazon 

The Neathub 2-Tier Stackable Wheeled Organizers are convenient and versatile, providing an easy way to keep small items put away while still allowing you to see inside. The space-saving features make these organizers useful almost anywhere, and the two-tier option is on sale for just $36.

Inventing something and owning it are two very different things.

Britain built the first commercial railways and then spent a century watching other countries lay better track. The United States invented the transistor and then handed most of the manufacturing to Asia. The pattern repeats often enough that it should probably have a name.

Germany has spent 140 years on the winning side of that equation. Carl Benz patented his three-wheeled Motorwagen in January 1886, and the country has been building the world’s aspirational cars ever since. Porsche, BMW, Mercedes-Benz, Audi, Volkswagen.

Those brands function as a kind of national resume.

That resume has been getting thinner. Roughly 691,500 people worked in Germany’s automotive industry at the close of the first half of 2026, the lowest total since 2005 and a drop of 42,300 workers in a single year, according to Germany’s Federal Statistical Office as reported by Reuters.

Now the country that invented the car is importing the driver.

Alphabet’s (GOOGL) Waymo said Tuesday, Aug. 25, that it will bring fully autonomous ride-hailing to Munich, its first market in the European Union and third outside the United States after London and Tokyo, according to CNBC.

Alphabet’s Waymo will launch driverless rides in Munich by late 2027, its first EU market.NNehring / Getty Images

Why Munich matters more than Berlin for Waymo

Waymo will spend the coming weeks driving manually through the city, building high-definition maps of the street network with trained autonomous specialists behind the wheel, according to Waymo. Commercial service opens to the public toward the end of 2027.

Munich is Germany’s third-largest city by population and its most densely populated, which makes it a harder problem than the wide grid of Phoenix or the flat sprawl of Austin.

It is also the global headquarters of BMW (BMWYY).

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That detail is the one my analysis keeps returning to. Waymo did not pick the political capital in Berlin. It picked the engineering capital.

“Munich is a world-class hub for mobility and engineering,” said co-CEO Tekedra Mawakana, according to Waymo.

German officials are not framing any of this as an incursion. Bavarian State Chancellery head Florian Herrmann called autonomous driving “a key technology for the future of mobility,” according to Agence France-Presse.

Germany also wrote the rulebook before anyone showed up to use it. The country passed an autonomous driving law in 2021 that permits driverless vehicles in defined operating areas, and a state secretary in the federal transport ministry pointed to that legal certainty as the reason Waymo came, according to Waymo.

What Germany’s auto industry is quietly losing

Here is the uncomfortable part of the story.

That 691,500 figure represents a 5.8% decline in twelve months, the steepest of any German industrial sector, with parts and accessories suppliers shedding 7.6% of their workforce.

The trade group expects worse. Germany’s automotive sector could lose another 125,000 jobs by 2035 on top of the roughly 100,000 already gone since 2019, according to the German Association of the Automotive Industry.

I ran those two figures against the current headcount, and the arithmetic is blunt. A total decline of 225,000 positions would erase close to a third of the industry’s present German workforce.

Related: Waymo’s driverless cars run on a secret weapon

That is the backdrop Waymo is walking into. Not a confident incumbent defending its turf, but a shrinking one that has spent two years asking Berlin and Brussels for relief on energy costs, labor costs and emissions rules.

The trade group has blamed Germany’s cost base rather than the technology shift alone, and it has been explicit that new mobility jobs are increasingly being created outside the country.

Here is what the company brings to that fight.

More than 20 million lifetime autonomous trips completed, according to Waymo.

More than 350 million fully autonomous kilometers driven, with 16 times fewer serious injury crashes than human drivers, according to Waymo.

$16 billion raised in February at a $126 billion post-money valuation, according to Forbes.

Service running in 11 U.S. cities with 19 more in progress, according to CNBC.

The robotaxi race in Europe just got crowded

Waymo is not arriving unopposed.

Uber (UBER), working with Pony.ai and Croatian operator Verne, launched autonomous rides in Zagreb this month, making the Croatian capital the first European city where a rider could hail a self-driving vehicle through the Uber app. Uber and WeRide have announced plans for Madrid and Zurich, and Uber has a separate Munich effort with Autobrains.

Tesla (TSLA) is the name most American investors reach for first, and it is the one with the least to show on European roads.

The German incumbents are not absent from autonomy either, which is what makes the Munich announcement sting. Mercedes-Benz (MBGYY) was the first automaker anywhere to win German approval for a Level 3 system that lets a driver legally take their eyes off the road in traffic. That was a genuine engineering first.

It was also a feature sold inside a car. Waymo is selling the trip.

Waymo is also not simply shipping hardware across the Atlantic. The company recently detailed a custom AI chip built to handle the earliest and heaviest stage of sensor processing before its main models take over, which is a per-vehicle cost story as much as a technology one.

What Munich really tests is not the driving. It is whether a European regulator, a European city government and a European public will accept an American robotaxi operating in the country that invented the category.

What Waymo’s Munich timeline means for Alphabet investors

The number that matters for Alphabet shareholders is not 2027. It is the gap in front of it.

Waymo has told the public it needs roughly fifteen months of mapping and supervised testing before a paying passenger in Munich rides without a driver. That is a long, capital-heavy stretch between announcement and revenue, and it will repeat in every European city the company enters.

Investor Vinod Khosla has described Waymo’s opportunity as “a multitrillion-dollar global market,” according to Forbes.

My analysis is less interested in the total addressable market than in the hiring line buried in the announcement. Waymo said it will invest in local fleet operations and create high-skilled jobs in Munich.

That means an American company will be recruiting from the same Bavarian engineering labor pool that BMW, Mercedes-Benz and their suppliers are currently shrinking.

The cars are the visible part. The talent is the part that moves first, and it moves quietly.

If Munich works, Germany’s automakers will face a rival in their own city that sells trips rather than vehicles, priced in euros, running on a fleet somebody else owns. Watch the 2027 date. Watch the job postings sooner.

Related: Waymo vs. human drivers: Experts reveal which is safer

The top 10 non-power conference players to watch in 2026? Here is a list of game-breakers on both sides of the ball who are expected to lead their teams.

Presented by Gravitee Agent complexity is the insidious shadow lurking inside enterprises right now that needs a light shone on it.That’s because enterprises don’t deploy a single agent and watch it run, they deploy fleets, each one calling APIs, calling other agents, reaching into applications that were never built with a machine decision-maker in mind. That’s the failure mode that should keep you up at night: a windy, complicated system nobody can see clearly enough to govern. But why do things get so opaque so quickly?Add a second agent to a system, and you’ve added one connection. Add a tenth, and you haven’t added ten connections, you’ve potentially added dozens, because now any agent might call any other, and each of those calls can trigger a call somewhere else. Complexity doesn’t creep up with agent headcount. It compounds with the number of paths between agents, and nobody’s job is to draw that graph. A support ticket that used to touch one system might now pass through four agents before a human ever lays eyes on it, and every one of those handoffs is a decision point nobody approved.Most enterprise AI programs stall when the humans responsible for their agents lose the thread. Ask a security team a simple question: which agents can reach which systems, and watch the silence. Ask which agent triggered which downstream action three hops ago. More silence.The instinct is to treat this like a checklist. Approve the agent. Log the agent. Move on. I’d argue this is the wrong instinct. A checklist checks a single point in time. Complexity runs across a chain, and you can’t govern a chain with a stack of one-time approvals any more than you can call a diet successful because you had a vegetable once.So where does it actually break down?Permissions creep first. Somebody builds an agent to summarize support tickets, grants it broad API access because scoping it properly would’ve taken another sprint, and forgets about it. Six months later, that same agent has a path into the payments system. Nobody remembers signing off on that. Nobody did.And ownership thins out the further the chain runs. Five agents touch one workflow, something breaks at step four, and now you’re asking who’s responsible for a link nobody was ever assigned to own, because the org chart stopped at “deploy the agent” and never got to “name the human who answers for it.”This is a story about governance infrastructure that hasn’t caught up with how agents actually behave: interconnected, cascading, multiplying faster than the processes built to track them.Fixing the cluster starts with identity. Every agent needs to exist as its own entity, not a shadow permission borrowed from whoever deployed it. Its own name in the register. Its own scoped authority. A named human sponsor who answers for what it does. That part is necessary.But it is nowhere near sufficient.The harder piece is the oversight that holds across the entire chain, not just at each individual link in it. You need to see what an agent did, what it set off downstream, and where that trail ends in real time, not in a report someone pulls together once a quarter. Get agent-level identity right and stop there, and you end up with a filing cabinet full of perfectly documented agents operating inside a system nobody can actually explain.And oversight by itself only tells you what already happened. Watching a chain isn’t the same as controlling it. Enforcement is the piece most programs skip: the ability to stop an out-of-policy call before it executes, not just log it for someone to find in a review three weeks later. A dashboard that shows you an agent breached its scope five minutes ago is a monitoring tool. A system that stops the breach from happening in the first place is governance. Enterprises serious about agent accountability need both, and most have only built the first.We’re all running at blazing speed to ensure we’re not the ones left behind in the race we’ve found ourselves in, and we’re all too aware that there’s a cost to slowing down. Every enterprise serious about agentic AI hits the complexity wall eventually. The ones that get past it are the ones who built enough visibility and accountability, so their fleet can keep growing without anyone losing the ability to answer one question: what is this system doing right now, and who’s responsible for it.But don’t miss the point. Complexity isn’t a reason to pump the brakes. The enterprises getting this right aren’t slowing down. They’re building toward Human-Agent Harmony, where scale and accountability grow together instead of trading off against each other.The real risk was never a single agent doing exactly what it was built to do. It’s a hundred of them doing exactly that, all at once, interacting in combinations nobody designed for. That kind of multiplication is what keeps enterprise AI stuck running pilots forever instead of running production.Solve for complexity and autonomy stops being the villain. It starts being the whole point.Rory Blundell is CEO at Gravitee. Sponsored articles are content produced by a company that is either paying for the post or has a business relationship with VentureBeat, and they’re always clearly marked. For more information, contact sales@venturebeat.com.

Anthropic is preparing to tell investors ahead of its IPO that it sees a $30 trillion revenue opportunity, exceeding the $28.5 trillion market SpaceX pitched three months earlier.

The company is chasing the largest Total Addressable Market (TAM), which is the theoretical ceiling of total revenue available if a business captured 100% of an industry. Yet, it expects to earn only a fraction of that figure.

The revenue reality gap

Anthropic’s annualized revenue run rate hit $65 billion by the end of July, up sevenfold from roughly $9 billion at the end of 2025, according to Bloomberg. That growth ranks among the fastest in software history. Even so, $65 billion is a rounding error against a $30 trillion opportunity.

Anthropic is projecting 2028 revenue of roughly $190 billion to $200 billion, with its IPO valuation hinging on those forecasts, according to Reuters.

Even that number, three years out and built on today’s breakneck growth, would capture less than one percent of the market Anthropic is describing to investors. That gap between the pitch and the plan matters more than the headline figure itself.

Related: Anthropic makes quiet move Nvidia investors must consider

The current run rate already supports a $965 billion valuation, reached after a funding round in May, according to Bloomberg. A $30 trillion TAM does not need to be accurate to be useful. It only needs to make a valuation near $2 trillion look conservative by comparison.

SpaceX’s own $28.5 trillion claim already drew skepticism

SpaceX called its $28.5 trillion total addressable market the largest actionable opportunity in human history when it filed for its IPO in May, with $26.5 trillion of that tied to AI.

The company priced its shares at $135 in June, raising $75 billion, or as much as $86 billion once underwriters exercised their option. The shares opened at $150 and the stock briefly pushed SpaceX’s valuation above $2 trillion.

TAM figures like these rest on assumptions about how much of the economy AI could eventually touch, not on signed contracts or backlog. Before SpaceX’s IPO, one Wall Street valuation expert warned its AI-driven market assumptions were already stretching past what was defensible, according to a Wall Street Journal report.

Anthropic’s $30 trillion claim asks investors to accept an even larger assumption from a company with far less operating history.

SpaceX shares, the closest public proxy for how markets are digesting these comparisons, rose as much as 2.7% Tuesday as the report on Anthropic’s figure circulated. That reaction suggests investors read Anthropic’s number as validation of the entire TAM framework, not a threat to SpaceX’s own valuation.

That comparison is easier to grasp in scale:

The U.S. economy generated roughly $31 trillion in GDP on an annualized basis last quarter, putting Anthropic’s stated opportunity in the same range as the entire domestic economy.

A preliminary second-quarter revenue figure of $11.5 billion marked Anthropic’s actual sales in the same period it pitched investors on trillions in future opportunity, according to Bloomberg.

An annualized run rate near $40 billion put OpenAI roughly $25 billion behind Anthropic heading into its own IPO process, according to CNBC.

asbe / Getty Images

The race to list first is inflating the pitch

OpenAI CFO Sarah Friar told employees this month that Anthropic could go as soon as September, putting a direct rival on the public markets first. Friar said OpenAI plans to list in 2027 or sooner and called the sequencing a matter of running its own race.

That contest matters because whichever company lists first sets the valuation benchmark the other has to clear, making it another silent competition between the two of them.

A bigger TAM gives Anthropic more room to justify a valuation near $2 trillion before it earns a fraction of that stated opportunity. It also raises the bar for OpenAI, which will need its own expansive market story once it eventually files publicly. Investors in both offerings are being asked to underwrite a market size, not just a company.

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TAM inflation is becoming its own competitive category

SpaceX set the previous high-water mark for IPO market claims. Anthropic’s response, filed just months later, suggests these figures are becoming less a market analysis and more a contest for narrative space among IPO-bound companies.

That dynamic barely existed before this year’s wave of trillion-dollar AI and space listings.

The precedent this sets outlasts either company’s specific number. If every large IPO now needs a TAM in the tens of trillions to compete for attention, investors will need sharper tools to separate genuine addressable revenue from marketing math, especially once OpenAI files its own prospectus.

The next AI company heading toward Wall Street will have to answer a simple question: what number comes after $30 trillion, and who checks the math before the shares start trading.

Related: Anthropic-powered AI model sends shocking message to employee

After decades of disciplined saving, retirement marks the point at which accumulated account balances shift from assets to income.

The conventional playbook sounds straightforward: drain taxable brokerage accounts first, leave the 401(k) and individual retirement account, and let compounding do the rest.

But research from the Schwab Center for Financial Research suggests that a widely accepted drawdown sequence could set you up for a larger tax bill. 

If tax-deferred balances remain untouched until age 73, mandatory withdrawals must eventually begin under federal law. Those distributions can become large enough to push taxable income into higher brackets.

Schwab challenges the standard 401(k) drawdown order

For most retirees, the drawdown order is less a decision than a default, inherited from decades of planning-industry consensus and rarely stress-tested against their own tax picture.

Hayden Adams, Director of Tax & Wealth Management at the Schwab Center for Financial Research, directly challenges the conventional sequence.

Many investors would pay less over their lifetimes by drawing from both taxable and tax-deferred accounts simultaneously before required minimum distributions begin, Adams noted.

How untouched 401(k) balances create a growing tax liability at 73

Federal law requires retirees born between 1951 and 1959 to begin taking annual withdrawals from traditional IRAs and 401(k) plans at age 73, the Internal Revenue Service confirms. 

That threshold rises to 75 for those born in 1960 or later under the SECURE 2.0 Act.

The annual amounts grow each year because the IRS life-expectancy divisor shrinks as the retiree ages, accelerating the drawdown.

How required minimum distributions scale as tax-deferred balances grow

At age 73, the required withdrawal alone would total approximately $56,604 on a $1.5 million balance, using the IRS Uniform Lifetime Table divisor of 26.5.

If the account continues to grow through the 70s and 80s, the annual RMD climbs materially. If continued market growth pushes the balance to $2.5 million by age 80, the RMD rises to roughly $123,800 (divisor 20.2).

By age 90 (divisor 12.2), the mandatory withdrawal rises to $205,000, and the trend accelerates with each passing year.

Source: The Required Minimum Distributions: What’s New in 2026

Untouched 401(k) balances can create a growing tax burden as required minimum distributions begin at age 73 and increase with age.Johner Images / Getty Images

The required distribution cascade hits Medicare premiums and Social Security taxes

The damage from oversized required minimum distributions extends beyond federal income tax brackets in ways that catch many retirees off guard.

Combined with other income sources, those mandatory 401(k) withdrawals can make up to 85% of Social Security benefits taxable, the Social Security Administration showed. 

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Medicare’s income-related monthly adjustment amount relies on a two-year income lookback that connects withdrawals at 73 directly to higher premiums at 75.

Because Medicare uses a two-year income lookback, a single filer whose 2024 modified adjusted gross income exceeded $109,000 will pay progressively higher Part B and Part D premiums in 2026, according to the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services.

Schwab’s pre-RMD drawdown fills lower brackets before forced distributions take over

The Schwab analysis recommends voluntary, penalty-free distributions from 401(k)s and traditional IRAs starting at age 59½, well before required minimums begin. 

Financial planners often call the period between retirement and the mandatory distribution age the ‘gap years,’ during which taxable income typically drops.

The approach centers on filling the current tax bracket with planned distributions each year, rather than leaving that bracket unused. 

Joseph Stephens, certified financial planner and financial advisor with Associated Financial Planners, LLC, told GOBankingRates that for high earners, taxes, Medicare premiums, and required minimum distributions tend to compound, making the early retirement years the most consequential for planning.

So decisions made in the first few years of retirement often determine whether someone stays in control long term or ends up reacting to tax consequences later

The firm modeled a married couple earning $275,000 in nonportfolio taxable income after the standard deduction, with $2.5 million across tax-deferred accounts at 59½.

With pre-RMD withdrawals filling the 24% federal bracket annually, the couple stays at that rate through retirement, the firm’s analysis shows. 

Without those early distributions, mandatory withdrawal income pushes the same couple into the 32% bracket at 75, the Schwab research projected.

By about age 81, the climbing forced withdrawals then lift the couple into the 35% tier, compounding the total tax cost over two decades.

How your withdrawal sequence shapes the next 20 years of retirement taxes

Adams noted in the report that the conventional approach can still work when the risk of a bracket jump from mandatory distributions stays low.

The decision depends on the specific account balances, income sources, filing status, and the tax laws in effect when one reaches 73.

Three figures shape the decision for most retirees: the projected RMD at 73, the federal bracket that their non-portfolio income already falls into, and their proximity to IRMAA thresholds. 

The first can be approximated by dividing the current tax-deferred balance by 26.5, the Uniform Lifetime Table divisor at that age. 

A required minimum distribution can also push modified adjusted gross income above the $109,000 single-filer IRMAA threshold or the higher joint-filer equivalent. 

Whether partial pre-RMD withdrawals or Roth conversions make sense depends on circumstances beyond this story’s scope, including federal tax rates. 

The tax calculation can also change significantly when a surviving spouse moves from joint to single filer, leaving less room in lower tax brackets.

Related: Vanguard data reveals a troubling Roth gap in your 401(k)