(Ludovic Marin/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

21h

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 archrival 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 further 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 a 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.

Rani Molla2h

Forty-two is the answer to life, the universe, and everything in Douglas Adams’ classic “The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy.” It’s also the number of unsupervised Robotaxis Tesla has on the road in Texas, the only state where it’s operating autonomous service, according to records from a newly required government database in the state.

That’s much lower than CEO Elon Musk had hoped, as the company struggles to ready its camera-only autonomous vehicles for commercial scale. In 2025, Musk said that the service would be available to “half the population of the US by the end of the year.”

Even smaller competition has more: Avride has 317 and Nuro has 47. Meanwhile, Tesla’s chief rival, Alphabet subsidiary Waymo, has 577 in operation in the state. Nationwide, Waymo’s fleet currently numbers more than 3,000.

Unfortunately for Tesla, figuring out how to actually scale its robotaxi fleet remains the ultimate question.

Jon Keegan5/28/26

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 Molla5/28/26

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.