Anthropic Eyes October IPO While Beating Back the White House in Court
On the same day Bloomberg reported Anthropic is weighing a $60 billion-plus IPO as soon as October, a federal judge issued an injunction blocking the Trump administration's ban on government use of Claude. The juxtaposition raises a pointed question: can a company simultaneously be too principled for the Pentagon and ambitious enough to court Wall Street?
Read full story →A Senator Wants to Tax Data Centers to Pay for the Jobs AI Destroys
Senator Mark Warner called for a dedicated data centre tax to fund worker retraining, citing a 35% drop in entry-level US job postings since 2023 and a law firm that has stopped hiring junior associates because AI handles their work. The "pound of flesh" framing is deliberately provocative, but it signals that the policy debate has moved from "will AI displace jobs" to "who pays."
Read full story →China's AI Compute Is Growing Faster Than Anyone Expected
New projections show China added over 500 gigawatts of AI power capacity last year and could have three times US compute levels by 2035. Export controls on Nvidia chips appear to have accelerated China's domestic chip industry rather than constraining it, and Chinese open-source models are now influencing the global AI ecosystem in ways no embargo can reach.
Read full story →The Robot Startup Worth More Than Most Airlines
Physical Intelligence, founded by ex-DeepMind researchers, is in talks to raise $1 billion at an $11 billion valuation, doubling in four months. The bet: foundation model techniques can produce robots that generalise across tasks without bespoke programming. But the valuation is a claim about the future, and the gap between demo video and warehouse deployment remains substantial.
Read full story →The AI Czar Leaves the Room, and a Much Bigger Room Opens Up
David Sacks has ended his 130-day stint as Trump's AI czar and will now co-chair PCAST alongside Jensen Huang, Zuckerberg, Sergey Brin and a roster of tech industry heavyweights. Bloomberg reports Sacks believes Congress could pass an AI standards framework within months. The open question is whether the council produces substantive policy or merely provides political cover for decisions already made.
Read full story →Apple Admits Defeat on AI by Opening Siri to Its Rivals
iOS 27 will let users invoke Claude, Gemini, or any rival assistant directly from Siri, extending beyond the current ChatGPT-only arrangement. It is a striking reversal for a company built on vertical integration, and a concession that Apple cannot build a competitive AI brain on its own terms.
Read full story →The AI Defence Boom Reaches $12.7 Billion
Shield AI has raised $2 billion at a $12.7 billion valuation, doubling in a year, on the back of a US Air Force contract for autonomous drone wingmen. The company's Hivemind software flies aircraft without GPS or human operators, and investors are betting it becomes the operating system for a new category of warfare.
Read full story →The Safety Company Goes to Wall Street
Anthropic's IPO plans are not a scandal, but they are a structural problem. Public companies answer to shareholders; safety commitments answer to mission. When those two things come into tension, on a quarterly timeline, over a decade, one of them tends to win. Peter Harrison on why the gravitational pull of markets nearly always beats individual institutional resolve.
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