Ted Turner, Founder of CNN, Dies at 87

Ted Turner, who founded CNN and transformed global television news, died at age 87 on May 6, 2026, surrounded by family and friends, Turner Enterprises said. His family confirmed the death, which CNN reported the same day.

He also founded the Nuclear Threat Initiative. In the 1990s he sold Turner Broadcasting System, which included CNN, to Time Warner Inc. In 2018 he announced he had Lewy body dementia. He was briefly hospitalized in 2025 with a mild case of pneumonia.

Turner is survived by five children, 14 grandchildren and two great-grandchildren. On the same day, Dario Amodei, the 43-year-old CEO of Anthropic, told the company's annual Code with Claude developer conference in San Francisco that the AI firm had planned for roughly 10 times growth this year but is instead experiencing growth that could make it 80 times as big.

Anthropic saw 80-fold year-over-year growth in revenue and usage in Q1 2026 on an annualized basis.

"I hope that 80-times growth doesn’t continue because that’s just crazy and it’s too hard to handle," Amodei said. " Anthropic’s annual revenue run rate surpassed $30 billion last month, up from $9 billion at the end of 2025. The surge has been driven by demand for its Claude chatbot and Claude Code programming tool.

To address computing shortages, Anthropic announced a deal with SpaceX to use all capacity from the Colossus 1 data center in Memphis. The agreement provides access to more than 220,000 Nvidia AI chips and 300 megawatts of power. It immediately allows expansion of the amount of coding some Claude Code subscribers can perform before hitting usage limits.

Anthropic and SpaceX are also working to create AI data centers in space. The company separately launched a new Claude feature called “dreaming” that lets AI systems review work between sessions, spot patterns and update user preference files. Google committed last month to invest as much as another $40 billion in Anthropic.

Amazon agreed to invest as much as $25 billion. The company is in talks with investors about raising cash at a valuation of $900 billion. The Pentagon awarded Meta-backed Scale AI a $500 million contract, five times last year's deal.

In March the Pentagon declared Anthropic a supply chain risk and blacklisted it from military work.