How Microsoft lost its way in the AI race
Anthropic jolts market for hot Pre-IPO shares
Anthropic gets ahead of rival OpenAI with stock market filing
How Microsoft lost its way in the AI race
Anthropic jolts market for hot Pre-IPO shares
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Anthropic gets ahead of rival OpenAI with stock market filing
Anthropic has filed confidentially for an initial public offering on the US stock market, the company announced on Monday. The AI firm makes the Claude chatbot, popular with software engineers and other business clients, and has seen a meteoric rise this year.
The company did not disclose the valuation it will target on the stock market, nor did it make public other terms of the offering. The startup announced on Thursday that it had raised $65bn in funding to value the company at $965bn post-money. Anthropic was valued at $380bn in February.
Anthropic’s filing continues the company’s banner year, as well as pre-empts its rival OpenAI, which is expected to imminently file for its own IPO. Anthropic’s latest valuation also meant that the company leapfrogged OpenAI to become the world’s most valuable startup.
The filing underscores the rising financial stakes of AI race as Elon Musk’s SpaceX, OpenAI and Anthropic are all slated to go public this year. SpaceX has filed for a stock market float at a valuation of about $1.75tn as it seeks $75bn in investment....
How Microsoft lost its way in the AI race
Redmond, Washington, mid-January 2026. The weather, cold and gray. It’s the kind of morning the snooze button was built for. But the team of engineers camped out in Building 92 on Microsoft’s sprawling campus got here early. They are in a race. And they are behind.
The team is working on a new AI product, one that functions as a personal assistant, capable of doing everything from booking flights to responding to emails to finding a good local plumber. They know competing teams at other companies are working on similar products. As if they needed a reminder that a lot is riding on their work, Satya Nadella drops by. He wants to show them something.
The Microsoft CEO opens a laptop and fires up an application. It’s a kind of system for instructing and controlling multiple AI agents. He calls it “Chain of Debate.” As Nadella walks them through the demo, the engineers trade knowing looks, the sort regulars at the local basketball court exchange when they realize a newbie’s got game. Because Nadella didn’t get someone to build this app for him. He created it himself, vibe coding with an AI tool. “That set the tone for how hard the team was going to push,” recalls Jacob Andreou, the executive vice president responsible for the design of Copilot, Microsoft’s AI assistant. He was in the room with folks, like over their shoulder, there with his machine out....
Anthropic jolts market for hot Pre-IPO shares
In the moments after Anthropic expanded a ban on popular ways to buy its shares, investor chatrooms around the world lit up.
“Are we screwed?” one person wrote in a WhatsApp chat for family offices with several hundred members. Similar questions reverberated more publicly across X, Reddit and Chinese-language social media, as investors worried whether their shares in the artificial intelligence developer — one of the most coveted private companies — had suddenly become worthless.
Days later, there is little clarity. Anthropic PBC issued a stern warning on its website last week about unauthorized sales, taking the unusual step of naming eight firms whose offerings would be considered void. It also expressly prohibited investors from buying shares through special purpose vehicles, a common tool to raise financing.
Both Anthropic and rival OpenAI have long warned against unauthorized transactions — fine print overlooked by eager buyers until last week when the Claude maker removed any ambiguity. Publicly traded funds touting exposure have plunged on the back of the update and private brokers are reeling….