(Photo: Ludovic MARIN / AFP via Getty Images)

Anthropic raises $65 billion at a $965 billion valuation, releases a more “honest” Claude Opus 4.8

Anthropic’s monster $965 billion valuation puts it firmly ahead of OpenAI’s $850 billion valuation as the rivals head toward expected IPOs later this year.

Jon Keegan

Anthropic announced it has raised $65 billion in a series H fundraising round, with a staggering valuation of $965 billion. The round was led by Altimeter Capital, Dragoneer, Greenoaks, and Sequoia Capital.

The official valuation puts Anthropic well ahead of arch-rival OpenAI’s reported $850 billion valuation as both companies jockey to be the first to pull off an IPO later this year. It also recently skipped farther ahead of OpenAI on generating annual recurring revenue.

In addition to the fundraising news, Anthropic also released Claude Opus 4.8, less than six weeks after its last version. The incremental update to Anthropic’s flagship AI model ekes out better benchmark score for agentic coding tasks, multidisciplinary reasoning, and financial analysis.

The company says Opus 4.8 is more “honest,” and is less likely to be overconfident and make claims that it cannot support.

The release rolls out a few new features as well. “Effort control” allows users to control how much effort Claude exerts for a response — where a greater effort could result in a higher cost for the user.

For longer, more complex tasks, Anthropic has rolled out a new feature called “dynamic workflows,” which allows for the use of hundreds of agents on tasks like huge code migrations.

The company says Claude is the first frontier model available on all three major cloud hyperscalers: Amazon Web Services, Microsoft Azure, and Google Cloud.

Jon Keegan5h

Report: Microsoft tries to get back in the AI coding game with new model

Microsoft wants to fight its way back into the AI coding field by releasing a new model next week at its annual Microsoft Build developer conference, The Information reports.

The company is expected to announce a new family of models as Microsoft AI CEO Mustafa Suleyman seeks to shore up the company’s own AI offerings and gradually wean it off OpenAI’s technology over the remainder of their $13 billion partnership.

Microsoft was initially well positioned to meet software developers with AI-enhanced tools. It owns GitHub, the most popular platform for hosting and sharing code, and GitHub’s Copilot AI-powered coding tool was released months before OpenAI’s ChatGPT debuted in 2022.

But it fumbled one of the biggest first-mover advantages in history as Anthropic’s Claude Code, OpenAI’s Codex, and Cursor rolled out coding tools that developers loved.

Microsoft to Release New Coding Model Next Week in Comeback Attempt

But it fumbled one of the biggest first-mover advantages in history as Anthropic’s Claude Code, OpenAI’s Codex, and Cursor rolled out coding tools that developers loved.

Waymo to launch free robotaxi rides in its new Ojai vans

The new vehicles are less expensive — which is important for the service to really scale.

Rani Molla5h

Rani Molla6h

Report: Tesla’s Robotaxi trainers don’t think it’s ready for prime time

If you listen to Tesla CEO Elon Musk, you might think rapid expansion of the company’s Robotaxi service is right around the corner. If you listen to the people tasked with reviewing the footage and training its AI, that future is a long way off.

An in-depth report from Reuters that interviewed nine former “data labelers” and a former Tesla self-driving engineer paints a picture of highly massaged safety stats, vehicles failing to execute basic driving functions, and a behind-the-scenes reality where the supposedly “autonomous” tech relies heavily on the exact kind of localized, labor-intensive mapping and training Musk has publicly mocked. The skepticism runs so deep that one former insider told reporters they wouldn’t ride in a Robotaxi “if you f---ing paid me.”

Currently, the service is operating about 30 unsupervised vehicles across three Texas cities — a much more circumscribed execution than Musk had initially planned. The problem, for Tesla, is that the success of its Robotaxi business is now integral to the company’s value proposition.