Here's your morning brief for Friday, February 27th. I'm Daniel Bach for the Wall Street Journal.

In a Hollywood twist, Paramount has come out on top in the bidding war for Warner Brothers Discovery.

Warner's board had favored Netflix through the saga, but decided it could no longer refuse

overtures from Paramount after David Ellison's company raised their offer to $31 per share and offered several other concessions.

Netflix said it would not match the higher share price and has passed on making another bid to buy Warner.

Pending regulatory approval, Paramount is set to take control of Warner Studios and HBO, along with its cable

networks like CNN, TNT, and the Food Network. Anthropic has said it won't relax its guard

rails preventing users from deploying its clawed models and scenarios involving mass domestic

surveillance or autonomous weapons. It comes ahead of the Pentagon's 5 p.m. deadline for Anthropic

to agree to the military's right to use the technology in all lawful cases. If Anthropic declines,

Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth has threatened to invoke the Defense Production Act,

to make the company do what the military wants, or to designate the company a supply chain risk, which would

hurt its ability to work with other government contractors. And Pakistan has declared open war with

Afghanistan following a series of cross-border attacks. Pakistan's defense minister said the country's

patience had run out after years of simmering conflict. The country's security forces say

they have responded in full force, striking Taliban hideouts and hitting targets in the Afghan capital

Kabul. According to the Taliban government, there were no casualties. Investors wary of risk

are weighing down U.S. stock features this morning following muted trading in Europe and Asia,

where the tech-heavy Kaspi index slipped, capping a volatile month for markets.

And we have a lot more coverage of the day's news on the WSJ's What's News podcast.

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