RapidCanvas has raised $29 million in Series B funding to expand a business built around a persistent enterprise AI problem: getting useful applications into production, then keeping them working as the business changes. The round was led by Vertex Ventures SEA & India, with participation from Hitachi Ventures. Existing investors Accel, Peak XV Partners, Valley Capital Partners, and Titanium Ventures also participated. The October 16 announcement puts total funding at $52.5 million and reports…

The company will start off by testing its self-driving vehicles on Toronto's streets.

Investors are pouring more into AI data center infrastructure than they can hope to recoup by 2030, according to Gartner. “Enterprise and consumer AI revenue will be insufficient to support profitable returns on all planned AI capital expenditures during this period,” said Gartner Senior Director Analyst Will Sommer. AI data center owners would need to generate $8.5 trillion in revenue through 2030 to cover announced capital spending, financing costs and expected investment returns, he said. “However, total enterprise and consumer AI revenue that can be attributed to AI data centers during this period is forecast to reach no more than $3.6 trillion.” Gartner joins a growing chorus warning that major AI players may be over-committing themselves. Bain and Co. recently made a similar forecast, estimating that annual spending on AI infrastructure could reach $1.5 trillion by 2031 and that the AI services market would need to top $6 trillion annually to pay for it. This is particularly bad news for neocloud providers, said Gartner. While the hyperscalers are large enough to absorb the financial pressures, the research company suggests that the cost pressure will force more than 80% of neocloud providers to cease independent operations.​ The Bain and Gartner surveys don’t cover quite the same ground, but their conclusions are very similar: a lot of AI infrastructure investment is never going to make a return, and companies need to prepare themselves for some degree of financial loss. This article first appeared on Network World.

Audian Paxson, Principal Technical Strategist at IRONSCALES, is a cybersecurity and product strategy veteran with more than two decades of experience spanning email security, threat detection, networking, and enterprise technology. At IRONSCALES, he focuses on product launches, messaging and positioning, go-to-market strategy, and thought leadership around the use of artificial intelligence and machine learning to address emerging email security threats. His career includes senior product…

AI neurons and their connections are easier to understand than we thought, according to a researcher's new findings. : Sergi Reboredo/VW Pics/Universal Images Group via Getty Images AI researchers don't really know how the models they are building "think." They know what goes into them and what comes out, but that's about it. A new theory may change that, allowing safety researchers to prevent them from going off the rails. How AI models think may be easier to decipher than we thought. An independent researcher who formerly worked at OpenAI published a report on Thursday that some in the AI world are describing as a bombshell. It could have implications as safety researchers scramble to get the jump on AI models that may not have humanity's best interests in mind. Previously, the prevailing wisdom was that AI "neurons," which, like those in a human brain, light up when an AI model encounters specific stimuli, were ultimately uninterpretable — meaning, basically, that there was no way to guess why a specific neuron would fire when an AI model was exposed to, say, a picture of a cat. Those building AI models at places like OpenAI and Anthropic don't write instructions for everything a model does. Instead, they train neurons to respond to information and influence one another. As the AI learns, it develops its own ways of processing that information, and humans have not yet cracked the code of how it works. That means those building AI models know what goes into the AI and what comes out, but not necessarily what happens in between. So if an AI goes rogue, they don't always know why. The author of the new report, however, says he may have discovered patterns in how the neurons react to stimuli that make sense. Nick Cammarata, who said he left OpenAI in 2023, said AI neural networks are knowable, so long as you look carefully. In one example, he says that a single AI neuron might react to both a cat and the front of a car. Humans would see those as two very different things, and different neurons would fire as a result. The AI, however, sees something related, perhaps the triangle shape of the two, and a single neuron fires for both. For years, AI researchers had assumed that AI models packed unrelated things into a single neuron to save space. "Almost the entire network is interpretable if we look closely enough," Cammarata wrote. The findings, though undeniably dense, couched in polysyllabic jargon, and still theoretical, could have real-world implications for researchers trying to ensure humans maintain control over AI models. Understanding how AI thinks is a principal concern for the best and brightest at frontier AI companies. Until recently, they've largely done this by tracking an AI's self-reported "thinking," called chain-of-thought reasoning. Jakub Pachocki, OpenAI's chief scientist, however, warned in a blog post last month that AI agents could now obfuscate their visible reasoning, leaving open the possibility that an agent could lie to its human minders and the minders wouldn't be able to tell. "With improved pretraining performance, we also see the models become much smarter even without using verbalized reasoning at all," Pachocki said. Now, Cammarata's research could give human engineers a new understanding of the AI's internal world — and that's exciting for those worried AI could kill us all. "I had long since given up on reaching any real level of interpretability before superintelligence arrived," Andrew Curran, a prominent AI analyst, said on X. "I stopped writing about it because of how demoralizing it was. Hard to overstate how big this may be." Read the original article on Business Insider

According to Elorian's evaluations, Glimpse outperforms even GPT-6 Astra on scientific chart reasoning and short-form video captioning, with competitive results on other visual reasoning tasks.

Nathan Fielder's documentary about disgraced Theranos CEO Elizabeth Holmes has created a constellation of colliding personas that interrogate the very nature of authenticity.

Tressfecta builds products for textured hair. Its first project is a tool called Plait Pilot that helps braiders with the initial process of separating hair from packs before braiding begins.

The Roadster's price is likely at least $250,000. Musk said it will be Tesla's only vehicle that humans drive themselves. Tesla Want to physically drive a Tesla in the future? The Roadster will be your only option, Musk said. The car is not cheap. Musk has compared today's driving to elevator operators. Want to physically drive a Tesla in the future? Get ready to pay up. On Thursday, Tesla CEO Elon Musk unveiled the new Roadster with a gravity-defying demo. The car suctioned to the side of a vertical ramp, drove upside down, briefly flew, stuck the landing, and later bunny-hopped and twirled over a standing lineup of other Tesla vehicles. The stunts were choreographed with autonomy, Musk said — but Roadster owners will eventually be able to manually take the wheel. That will make it unique in Tesla's lineup. "This will actually be, long-term, the only manually driven car that Tesla makes," Musk said on stage, before Tesla's lead engineer, Lars Moravy, added, "You gotta have some fun sometimes." Tesla hasn't revealed the car's final price, but we know it'll firmly be in the luxury supercar tier. The company's reservation queue asks customers who want the base Performance trim to fork over a $50,000, due within 10 days. That reservation, alone, is nearly the price of an average car in America, and it doesn't capture the car's final price. Our best pricing ballpark dates back to 2017, when Tesla first said it was bringing back the Roadster. At the time, the automaker collected $250,000 payments from people who wanted a Founder Series model. Meanwhile, Tesla has been ramping up its autonomy push for its more price-conscious vehicles. In September, it started rolling out the Cybercab — a vehicle that leans so heavily into self-driving that it has no steering wheel, brake pedals, or side mirrors. Tesla says it wants to eventually sell those cars to consumers at less than $30,000 apiece. On recent earnings calls, Musk has also praised the recurring revenue from subscriptions of Full Self-Driving (Supervised) from Cybertruck, Model Y, and Model 3 owners. Musk has talked a lot about a world where driving becomes obsolete. He has compared driving a car to operating an elevator, a profession that was largely phased out in the mid-20th century as elevators became automated. "Now, you just get in, press a button and a modern elevator, if inspected regularly, is extremely safe," he wrote on X in March. Treating driving like elevator operation requires a pretty big leap. Driving is still a hobby, a sport, and — for many people — a point of pride. By Moravy's own admission, driving is fun. There's still a chance in Musk's vision of his carmaker's future that drivers can control their own Tesla and lean into that fun. They'll just need to open their checkbooks. Read the original article on Business Insider

I have spent my whole career trying to understand intelligence. I studied neuroscience because I was interested in AI and figured that learning how the brain works first was a good way to begin. Intelligence first, before “artificial” intelligence. That training left me with a habit. When a new capability or technology arrives, my first question is practical. What can this really do, and for what types of real-world problems? As an AI guy, I rarely cheer on AI headlines. I look past the noise…

Meta “streamlined” its commercial TOS. Legal experts warn it’s an AI power grab.

How Raven, previously known as Geospy, can now find which house a photo was taken in; why a judge ruled a Flock search unconstitutional; and the wild AI video in a court case.

IntroductionSupply chain attacks on package registries have grown in volume and sophistication [1]...

The data comes from Vercel's AI gateway, a unified API service similar to OpenRouter.

Companies are giving agents more authority, but many are still struggling to track what they can access, what they're doing and how to stop them.

I rated my confidence 4 out of 5, then couldn’t find a planted bug in 8 minutes. Here is the tool, the run, and its limits. The post Do You Still Own the Code Your AI Wrote? I Built CodeOwnership to Measure It appeared first on Towards Data Science.

A more powerful AI model isn’t necessarily the answer to unreliable business analytics. New research from AtScale found that leading AI models answered fewer than 40% of business questions correctly when querying databases directly. But when AtScale added its semantic layer, accuracy improved by 1.7x to 2.4x across all seven models tested. In one test, […] The post AtScale Finds Semantic Layer Boosts AI Accuracy on Enterprise Data by Up to 2.4x appeared first on BigDATAwire.

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While it’s true that today isiPhone Duo pre-order day, that’s arguably not really the big news. It is not the big news because Apple this week made huge steps in AI. Not only has it come up with a nifty tool to turn Macs into distributed inferencing data centers; not only does it now have a plan for Apple Intelligence in China; but it has also worked with Meta to make it possible to run on-premises instances of Muse Spark Open on a couple of Mac Studios. While working on that, its machine learning team also introduced a new version of MLX that enables AI researchers and developers to run large language models (LLMs) locally on Mac Studio with Apple silicon. What’s new to MLX from Apple?In case you’d missed it, MLX leverages the unified memory architecture of Apple silicon, which is invaluable if you want to build new inference and fine-tuning methods. Over the past year, the ML team has worked on “several key innovations” to make it easier and more efficient to “run state-of-the-art LLMs locally on recent Apple silicon.” These improvements include: Software support for the Neural Accelerators in the GPU of the M5 family of chips, Low-latency communication across several Macs using Remote Direct Memory Access (RDMA) over Thunderbolt.Efficient implementations of recent popular architectures such as mixture of experts (MoE).  The release leans heavily into what Apple’s teams have been doing with Muse, and once again demonstrates how the very architecture of Apple silicon supports AI inferencing. That’s no surprise to anybody at this point as not only have I been banging on that drum regularly, but almost anyone who is anyone in AI development and research already works on a Mac.LLM Inference with MLX and RDMA on Mac StudioA new white paper from Apple’s machine learning team shares what it has been doing with MLX as well as significant statistics concerning how well its systems support Muse Spark Open. “On a cluster of four Mac Studios, Muse Spark Open generates over 36 tokens per second, well above average human reading speed,” they said. That’s impressive. It means for the cost of four Mac Studios a business can run a full-strength, frontier class model with almost a trillion parameters, on-premises, securing company data while extracting whatever benefits there are to be extracted from the use of it.Mac Meta mattersApple and Meta collaborated on making it possible to run Muse Spark Open AI models on Macs. It’s a shrewd move for both companies, given the growing desire to run powerful AI models locally rather than in the cloud. As a result of this work the collaboration has made it possible to use Muse Spark Open on two or four Mac Studios to engage in all kinds of agentic tasks. Commenting on this on X, new Apple CEO, John Ternus wrote:  “Amazing to run a model of Muse Spark Open’s caliber and scale this efficiently, right from your desk. Mac Studio keeps pushing the boundaries of on-device AI!” Meta’s AI chief, Alexandr Wang pointed out that this is in part made possible by Apple’s Unified Memory architecture, which can provide sufficient memory to run these models.Your Macs. Your supercomputer“Apple’s unified memory architecture lets the M5 Ultra's integrated GPU use up to 512 GB per Mac Studio, so two machines can hold an entire model,” Meta explained. “And the chip’s 1.2 TB/s of memory bandwidth is fast enough to read the small slice each token needs. The result is two Mac Studios behave like one supercomputer with a terabyte of unified memory.”Meta says it tested the system using agentic workflows running entirely on-device, including applying bug fixes and new features to an open source Mastodon client and driving DaVinci Resolve to review footage and transact tasks. The use of DaVinci Resolve makes this commentator curious, given Apple is expected to introduce new pro Macs this month. The idea that you may be able to run tasks like this on other Macs will surely be something Apple’s developers are thinking about.One more thingStep by step Apple is defining the playground for AI. In doing so it is attempting, as Apple’s VP Worldwide Marketing told TIME, not to make AI for “the lunatic fringe”, but to create an ecosystem for artificial intelligence that will actually help people — a strategic approach that, if it comes together, will help maintain Apple’s position at the intersection of computing and the liberal arts. Read my Mac Studio review here.Now please subscribe to my daily, human-curated Apple-related news headline feed at The Core, or follow me on BlueSky, LinkedIn, or Mastodon.Welcome to the week Apple showed us how serious it really is about artificial intelligence on Macs, with the company making more moves to deliver the tech in the most cost effective, responsible way. While it’s true that today is iPhone Duo pre-order day, that’s arguably not the big news.  It is not the big news because Apple this week made huge steps in AI. Not only have its researchers come up with a nifty tool to turn Macs into distributed inferencing data centers, not only does the company now have a plan for Apple Intelligence in China, but it has also worked with Meta to make it possible to run on-premises instances of Muse Spark Open on a couple of Mac Studios. Its machine learning team also introduced a new version of MLX that enables AI researchers and developers to run large language models (LLMs) locally on Mac Studio with Apple silicon.  What’s new to MLX from Apple? In case you’d missed it, MLX leverages the unified memory architecture of Apple silicon, which is invaluable if you want to build new inference and fine-tuning methods. Over the past year, the ML team has worked on “several key innovations” to make it easier and more efficient to “run state-of-the-art LLMs locally on recent Apple silicon.” These improvements include: Software support for the Neural Accelerators in the GPU of the M5 family of chips Low-latency communication across several Macs using Remote Direct Memory Access (RDMA) over Thunderbolt Efficient implementations of recent popular architectures such as mixture of experts (MoE) The release leans heavily into what Apple’s teams have been doing with Muse, and once again demonstrates how the very architecture of Apple silicon supports AI inferencing. That’s no surprise to anybody at this point: not only have I been banging on that drum regularly, but almost anyone who is anyone in AI development and research already works on a Mac. LLM inference with MLX on Mac Studio A new white paper from Apple’s machine learning team shares what it has been doing with MLX, along with significant statistics concerning how well its systems support Muse Spark Open, Meta’s new open-weight frontier model.  “On a cluster of four Mac Studios, Muse Spark Open generates over 36 tokens per second, well above average human reading speed,” they said.  That’s impressive. It means for the cost of four Mac Studios, a business can run a full-strength, frontier-class model with almost a trillion parameters, on-premises, securing company data while extracting whatever benefits there are to be extracted from the use of it. Mac Meta matters Apple and Meta collaborated on making it possible to run Muse Spark Open AI models on Macs. It’s a shrewd move for both companies, given the growing desire to run powerful AI models locally rather than in the cloud. As a result of this work, it’s possible to use Muse Spark Open on two or four Mac Studios to engage in all kinds of agentic tasks.  Commenting on this on X, new Apple CEO John Ternus wrote: “Amazing to run a model of Muse Spark Open’s caliber and scale this efficiently, right from your desk. Mac Studio keeps pushing the boundaries of on-device AI!”  Meta’s AI chief Alexandr Wang pointed out that this is in part made possible by Apple’s Unified Memory architecture, which can provide sufficient memory to run these models. Your Macs. Your supercomputer “Apple’s unified memory architecture lets the M5 Ultra’s integrated GPU use up to 512 GB per Mac Studio, so two machines can hold an entire model,” Meta explained. “And the chip’s 1.2 TB/s of memory bandwidth is fast enough to read the small slice each token needs. The result is two Mac Studios behave like one supercomputer with a terabyte of unified memory.” Meta says it tested the system using agentic workflows running entirely on-device, including applying bug fixes and new features to an open-source Mastodon client and driving DaVinci Resolve to review footage and transact tasks. The use of DaVinci Resolve makes this commentator curious, given that Apple is expected to introduce new pro Macs this month. The idea that you may be able to run tasks like this on other Macs will surely be something Apple’s developers are thinking about. One more thing Step by step, Apple is defining the playground for AI. In doing so it is attempting, as Greg Joswiak, Apple’s senior VP of worldwide marketing, told TIME, not to make AI for “the lunatic fringe,” but to create an ecosystem for artificial intelligence that will actually help people — a strategic approach that, if it comes together, will help maintain Apple’s position at the intersection of computing and the liberal arts. (Read my Mac Studio review here.) Now please subscribe to my daily, human-curated Apple-related news headline feed at The Core, or follow me on BlueSky, LinkedIn, or Mastodon.

Google's Rambler voice typing cleans up spoken thoughts instead of transcribing them word for word. Here's how rewriting, offline use, privacy, and review work. The post Pixel 11 Rambler AI Voice Typing: How It Rewrites Speech appeared first on TechRepublic.

Chick-fil-A has come a long way since opening as a small roadside diner in Georgia in 1946. Irene Jiang / Business Insider In 1946, Chick-fil-A founder S. Truett Cathy opened the Dwarf Grill in Hapeville, Georgia. In 1967, Cathy opened the first Chick-fil-A and invented the restaurant's iconic chicken sandwich. Chick-fil-A is now the third-largest restaurant chain in the US. Eighty years after Chick-fil-A founder Truett Cathy opened his first restaurant, Chick-fil-A is now the third-largest restaurant brand in the country. The family-owned chain has since grown to more than 3,200 US restaurants and generated nearly $24 billion in US systemwide sales in 2025, trailing only McDonald’s and Starbucks, per Technomic's Top 500 chains report. The chicken chain's rise has not been without controversy. Chick-fil-A faced widespread backlash in 2012 after Cathy's son Dan, then the company’s CEO, publicly opposed same-sex marriage, while the company and its foundation were criticized for donations to organizations with anti-LGBTQ+ positions. This week, current CEO Andrew Cathy declined to directly address the company’s history or state its position on LGBTQ+ equality in an interview with NBC, instead saying Chick-fil-A is focused on hospitality and welcoming everyone who comes through its doors. Here’s how Chick-fil-A grew from a small Southern diner into a fast-food powerhouse. Chick-fil-A's origin story began when Truett Cathy opened the Dwarf Grill in Hapeville, Georgia, in 1946. Chick-fil-A The small roadside diner was later renamed when it became one of the chain's "Dwarf Houses." The original location previously served as one of 12 Chick-fil-A locations, offering modern favorites and items from the original restaurant's "blue menu." The first official Chick-fil-A locations were located in shopping malls. Chick-fil-A The first restaurant to bear the name Chick-fil-A opened in the Greenbriar Mall in Atlanta in 1967. According to the company, the restaurant occupied just 384 square feet, and some have credited the chain with being an "early pioneer" of what would become the modern mall food court. Chick-fil-A opened its first stand-alone restaurant in 1986 in Atlanta. Chick-fil-A Free-standing locations are now the norm for Chick-fil-A, and mall locations are much less common. Chick-fil-A also experimented with drive-thru-only restaurant locations. Chick-fil-A The first-ever drive-thru-only Chick-fil-A restaurant opened in 1993 in Greenville, South Carolina. By eliminating dining rooms in these locations, the restaurants were designed to be faster and more convenient for customers. Today, there are more than 3,000 Chick-fil-A restaurants in North America. Chick-fil-A The chain, which was founded in Georgia, still has its headquarters there, and is regarded as a "Southern" fast-food chain. However, restaurants can actually be found in 48 different states as well as Washington, DC. In 2019, Chick-fil-A expanded internationally by opening its first location in Toronto. Later that year, the chain opened its first restaurant in the United Kingdom. The chain now has locations across Canada, Puerto Rico, the UK, and Singapore. Before Chick-fil-A began using a cow as its mascot, the chain was represented by — perhaps unsurprisingly — a chicken. Chick-fil-A The chain's tag line used to read, "The best thing that ever happened to a Chicken." Now, Chick-fil-A's slogan pays homage to its most famous menu item — its chicken sandwich. An employee picks up a fried chicken sandwich during an event ahead of the grand opening for a Chick-fil-A restaurant in New York. 465-square-meter/Getty Images The "A" in Chick-fil-A comes from both a play on the word "fillet" and a nod to the "grade-A top quality chicken" used in Chick-fil-A's chicken sandwiches. However, the chain also still uses cows and the words "Eat Mor Chikin" to bring customers through its doors. John Adams/Icon Sportswire/Corbis/Icon Sportswire/Getty Images The "Eat Mor Chikin" slogan, accompanied by two "rebel cows," debuted in 1995 on an Atlanta billboard, according to the company. The campaign quickly gained traction and is now regarded as one of Chick-fil-A's most famous and successful advertising campaigns. The original Dwarf Grill menu served diner favorites like breakfast and burgers. Hayley Peterson/Business Insider Menu items included everything from waffles to sandwiches, steak and potatoes, and the chain's famous Hot Brown, a hot casserole dish made with lean white meat chicken, gravy, mashed potatoes, cheese, and bacon.  Today, Chick-fil-A still serves breakfast, but the menu items look much different. Irene Jiang / Business Insider Launched in 1986, the first item added to the breakfast menu was the Chick-fil-A chicken biscuit. Today, the Chick-fil-A menu typically includes more than 50 items. At the Dwarf Grill, Truett Cathy's first restaurant, you could order burgers. Business Insider/Hayley Peterson The Dwarf Grill served both hamburgers and cheeseburgers, which the restaurant's menu said were made from "100% choice beef, chopped in our kitchen." Served on a large toasted bun, the menu also boldly said that "they're the best." Business Insider's Hayley Peterson tried the burger for herself when she visited the Dwarf House, and she found the patty "thick and flavorful" and that the cheese "melted perfectly between the patty and the bun." You won't find burgers on any Chick-fil-A menus, but you will find the chain's famous chicken sandwich. Irene Jiang / Business Insider In 1964, Truett Cathy created the recipe for Chick-fil-A's original chicken sandwich: a fried, boneless chicken breast nestled between two buttered buns and topped with two pickles. Though the sandwich soon shot to popularity at the Dwarf House, the invention was odd compared to other fast-food offerings and food tastes of the time. However, Cathy's bet on chicken would soon pay off. Though Chick-fil-A has expanded immensely since the launch of its chicken sandwich, the recipe has remained virtually the same. In 1989, Chick-fil-A added a grilled chicken sandwich to its menu. Hollis Johnson Introduced as a health-conscious option for Chick-fil-A customers, Cathy introduced the original grilled chicken sandwich alongside the deluxe grilled chicken sandwich, which included the same pickle-juice-marinated grilled chicken, pickles, and white bun, along with lettuce and tomato. According to the restaurant's website, Cathy tested more than 1,200 recipes to perfect the chain's grilled chicken recipe. Chick-fil-A revolutionized its menu yet again when it launched its spicy chicken sandwich nationwide in 2010. Irene Jiang/Business Insider "While we recognize that not everyone enjoys spicy food, for the growing customer constituency that does, our Spicy Chicken Sandwich offers a unique, well-balanced and craveable spicy flavor," William F. Faulk, Chick-fil-A's vice president of innovation and new ventures, said in a press release at the time. A precursor to Chick-fil-A's famous fries was its fried okra, a traditional Southern favorite. Business Insider/Hayley Peterson "The batter on the outside is light and crispy, and the okra inside is hot and juicy, with a hint of salt," Business Insider's Hayley Peterson said in a previous article. Today, the chain's waffle fries are a beloved menu item. Irene Jiang / Business Insider The chain began selling waffle fries in 1985, with the unique shape chosen as a perfect vehicle for dipping sauces. In 1982, chicken nuggets were added to the menu. Irene Jiang / Business Insider The first Chick-fil-A nuggets came in a six-count box, inspired by customers asking restaurant employees to cut up pieces of its signature chicken sandwich so they could eat them by hand or serve bite-sized nuggets at parties. "We are still serving the same delicious nuggets today that we started with," Shona Jonson, senior manager of culinary, product strategy, and development at Chick-fil-A, once said. Today, Chick-fil-A chicken nuggets come in 5-, 8-, 12-, or 30-count packs.  Chick-fil-A introduced grilled chicken nuggets in 2012. Erin McDowell/Business Insider The item first appeared on the chain's kids' menu before being added to the main menu. Chick-fil-A's success is largely credited to the chain's founder and CEO, S. Truett Cathy, a devout Baptist who built the family-owned business on Christian values. Chick-fil-A Cathy's impact on Chick-fil-A is undeniable, from his decades working at the Dwarf Grill to the invention of the chain's famous chicken sandwich. Another part of Cathy's legacy that contributed to Chick-fil-A's success was its unique process for hiring franchisees, which also upheld the chain's values of "customer first, personal excellence, continuous improvement, working together, and stewardship." As the creator of the first Chick-fil-A scholarship fund for restaurant employees, Cathy left a legacy that inspired franchisees and employees across the country to continue his mission of building a customer- and employee-focused fast-food chain. Cathy's son, Dan T. Cathy, led the company as CEO until 2021. Cyrus McCrimmon/The Denver Post/Getty Images Dan T. Cathy was made CEO in 2013, two years before his father died. Cathy worked alongside his brother, Donald "Bubba" Cathy, who still serves as executive vice president of the chicken chain and president of the company's Dwarf House and Truett's Grill restaurant concepts. Both Donald and Dan T. Cathy recall growing up in their father's early restaurants, doing odd jobs like scraping gum from underneath tables and spending time in the Hapeville Dwarf House. Dan T. Cathy stepped down as CEO of Chick-fil-A on November 1, 2021, but still serves as chairman of the company. He was succeeded by his son, Andrew Cathy. Over the years, the Cathy family and Chick-fil-A have received criticism for their apparent stances on issues like same-sex marriage. Tibrina Hobson/FilmMagic/Getty Images Chick-fil-A's contentious reputation largely stems from donations made by Chick-fil-A to charities criticized for anti-LGBTQ+ positions, as well as comments made by Dan T. Cathy in 2012. According to a previous article by Business Insider, the Cathy family and Chick-fil-A donated millions of dollars to groups opposing same-sex marriage, from Christian charities to "more extreme" anti-LGBTQ+ lobbying organizations through the WinShape Foundation. Some of these organizations included Fellowship of Christian Athletes, an athletic organization that, according to Vox, requires applicants to sign a "sexual purity statement" that condemns LGBTQ+ relationships, the Marriage & Family Foundation, which has spoken out against marriage equality, and Exodus International, a group that supported the use of gay-conversion therapy. Comments made by Dan T. Cathy in a 2012 interview with the Baptist Press quickly prompted backlash from LGBTQ+ activists and organizations. William Plowman/AP Images In the interview, Cathy said that he believed in the "biblical definition of the family unit," or that a marriage should be between a man and a woman. Protests ensued nationwide, including a number of "kiss-ins" led by LGBTQ+ activists, at Chick-fil-A restaurants across the country, CNN reported. Others came out in support of the chain and Cathy's comments. Following the controversy and subsequent calls to boycott the brand, former Arkansas Governor Mike Huckabee created a Facebook page encouraging people to participate in "Chick-fil-A Appreciation Day" and to buy food from the chain that day, Huffington Post reported. Cathy did little to quell criticism of his comments when he later clarified his position in a 2012 radio interview, saying, "As it relates to society in general, I think we are inviting God's judgment on our nation when we shake our fist at him and say, 'We know better than you do as to what constitutes marriage.'" Protests against the company predate the chain's controversial donations and comments made by Dan T. Cathy. Tibrina Hobson/FilmMagic/Getty Images In 2002, a Houston Chick-fil-A restaurant manager sued the chain for discrimination, Forbes reported. The employee, who is Muslim, said he was fired one day after refusing to pray to Jesus along with their fellow coworkers during a training session. At the time, Jerry Johnston, a spokesperson for Chick-fil-A, told the Houston Chronicle that the company had not yet been served with a lawsuit and therefore couldn't comment on the dispute, My Plainview reported. Forbes states that the suit was settled out of court on undisclosed terms. Then, in 2011, a Pennsylvania Chick-fil-A prompted a nationwide boycott of the chain when the restaurant provided free lunch to a Valentine's Day marriage seminar sponsored by the Pennsylvania Family Institute, a controversial "pro-family" group that has spoken out against same-sex marriage. The decision prompted criticism, including a petition that gathered thousands of signatures urging Chick-fil-A to stop discriminating against LGBTQ+ people. However, the franchise in question claimed the decision to donate food was not motivated by any anti-LGBTQ+ sentiments. "It's absolutely, categorically blown out of proportion," the Pennsylvania franchise owner Brian Gibson said, Penn Live reported. "We donate food all the time. We certainly don't take into consideration anyone's political affiliations or anything like that. We just like to feed people." Dan T. Cathy released a statement in 2011 following the accusations that Chick-fil-A was anti-LGBTQ+, saying, "In recent weeks, we have been accused of being anti-gay. We have no agenda against anyone. At the heart and soul of our company, we are a family business that serves and values all people regardless of their beliefs or opinions. We seek to treat everyone with honor, dignity, and respect, and believe in the importance of loving your neighbor as yourself." Cathy continued, saying, "While my family and I believe in the Biblical definition of marriage, we love and respect anyone who disagrees ... Chick-fil-A's Corporate Purpose is 'To glorify God by being a faithful steward of all that is entrusted to us, and to have a positive influence on all who come in contact with Chick-fil-A.' As a result, we will not champion any political agendas on marriage and family." The chain also received criticism for Dan T. Cathy's ties to a charitable organization that notably opposes the Equality Act. A Chick-fil-A sign above the glass entrance to a Manhattan restaurant. Smith Collection/Gado/Getty Images The Daily Beast reported on June 1, 2021, that the National Christian Charitable Foundation (NCF) has donated money to groups actively fighting legislation to protect LGBTQ+ rights in the US. Among the organization's "high-dollar donors" is Chick-fil-A's CEO, Dan Cathy. The National Christian Charitable Foundation is one of the largest charitable organizations in the country and supports thousands of charities and causes. Among them are the Heritage Foundation and the legal advocacy group Alliance Defending Freedom, both of which strongly oppose the Equality Act. Chick-fil-A itself has not donated any funds to Christian charities or political groups in recent years, saying in 2019 that it would instead support charities focused on "three specific initiatives of homelessness, hunger, and education."  Chick-fil-A has taken steps to overturn its reputation as being anti-LGBTQ. Facebook/Chick-fil-A In 2019, Chick-fil-A announced it would no longer donate to the Fellowship of Christian Athletes and the Salvation Army, two groups that have been criticized as being anti-LGBTQ+. "We made multiyear commitments to both organizations, and we fulfilled those obligations in 2018. Moving forward, you will see that the Chick-fil-A Foundation will support the three specific initiatives of homelessness, hunger, and education," a Chick-fil-A representative said in a statement to Business Insider. However, some LGBTQ+ advocates said that while they were hopeful about the decision, Chick-fil-A still has a ways to go before it can be considered truly inclusive of the LGBTQ+ community. "In addition to refraining from financially supporting anti-LGBTQ organizations, Chick-fil-A still lacks policies to ensure safe workplaces for LGBTQ+ employees and should unequivocally speak out against the anti-LGBTQ+ reputation that their brand represents," Drew Anderson, the director of campaigns and rapid response for GLAAD, an organization that condemns LGBTQ+ discrimination, said in a statement in 2019. Andrew Cathy, who took over as CEO in 2021, recently declined to comment on the company's "anti-LGBTQ+" past. Andrew T. Cathy in 2024. Paras Griffin/Getty Images When asked to comment on the company's past controversies and criticism from LGBTQ+ advocacy groups in 2026, Cathy offered a diplomatic response, emphasizing the company's commitment to serving "anybody" who walks through the door. "We've always been focused on serving great food and hospitality, and so for anybody that comes in the door, we're going to continue to do that," he said in a recent interview with NBC News. Despite a series of controversies, the fast-food chain has continued to grow. Tom Pennington/Getty Images Business Insider previously reported that anti-same-sex-marriage comments said by Dan T. Cathy in 2012, controversial donations, and resulting backlash over the years have done little to slow Chick-fil-A's growth. Today, Chick-fil-A is the third-largest chain in America and has frequently been voted the most popular chain among customers. Nation's Restaurant News reported that the company generated nearly $24 billion in sales in 2025 and operates over 3,000 locations nationwide. One thing is for sure — while Chick-fil-A has an undeniably controversial past, there's no stopping the chicken chain from winning over customers nationwide, one chicken sandwich at a time. Read the original article on Business Insider