Anthropic

The three companies racing to build the future spent the third quarter of 2026 buying influence over how that future gets regulated — and each one set a new record for lobbying spending doing it. Nvidia, Anthropic and OpenAI poured a combined $7.5 million into federal lobbying between July and September, according to an analysis of new disclosure filings by POGO Investigates, with each company posting its highest quarterly total ever. ...

Anthropic on October 21 opened a research-preview waitlist for Claude Duet, a proactive AI agent powered by Claude Opus 5.5 that monitors connected apps and works in the background — taking on Meta’s Muse and OpenAI’s Dots. Full story in slides above — Sources: MacRumors, Inc42, WebProNews, October 21–22, 2026.

Anthropic has its own answer to the AI agent wave, and it arrived Wednesday. The company opened a research preview of Claude Duet, a standalone app that turns Claude into a proactive agent aimed at professionals and small-business owners. “It comes to you with what needs your attention, completes tasks you ask of it, keeps working even when you step away, and checks with you before it acts on your behalf,” Anthropic said of the new app, as reported by Engadget. Access runs through a waitlist, starting with Pro and Max subscribers in the US. ...

Anthropic lost $80.7 billion in six months. On paper, it’s one of the largest corporate losses ever recorded, and the company plans to go public next month anyway. The Wall Street Journal reported Tuesday that it had reviewed a draft of Anthropic’s S-1 prospectus covering the first half of 2026. The filing offers the most honest look yet at the Claude maker, and the numbers are staggering: $16.3 billion in revenue, up from $1.1 billion in the same period last year, sitting alongside a net loss of more than $80 billion. That’s about $13.5 billion lost every single month. Anthropic declined to comment on the Journal’s report. ...

OpenAI wants $30 billion, and it wants the money before Anthropic starts selling itself to the public. Reuters reported Monday that the ChatGPT maker is racing to lock in investor commitments for a funding round of about $30 billion that could value it at more than $1.4 trillion — with the timing anything but subtle. The company hopes to close the round before rival Anthropic’s expected IPO in mid-November, when Anthropic’s own financial disclosures would hand investors a side-by-side comparison that neither lab seems eager to face. ...

OpenAI is moving quickly to raise roughly $30 billion at a valuation above $1.4 trillion, with SoftBank and Abu Dhabi-based MGX in talks to participate, Reuters reported October 19, 2026. The push is timed to land before Anthropic’s expected mid-November IPO, as both AI labs compete for the same investor capital at record valuations. Full story in the slides above — Sources: Reuters (via Aju Press), The Neuron, AI Briefing, October 20, 2026. ...

Elon Musk said on Monday he will give one of his SpaceX shares to every kid in America next year, “the first of many” such gifts, a day after AI lab Anthropic announced it will commit 5% of its shares to a new public benefit fund. Sources: USA Today, AP, Reuters, Financial Times — October 19, 2026.

Elon Musk wants to put a SpaceX share in every kid’s pocket. In an early-morning post on X on Monday, the SpaceX founder wrote: “Next year, I will give one of my SpaceX shares to every kid in America.” He added three words that have followed many of his announcements before: “This will be the first of many.” The math is staggering. SpaceX shares closed Friday at $146.03, and the U.S. Census Bureau counts roughly 73 million people under the age of 18. One share per kid works out to about $10.5 billion, which would make this one of the largest individual stock giveaways ever announced. ...

Anthropic wants to buy goodwill with equity. The AI lab announced Sunday that it will commit 5% of its shares — worth roughly $48 billion at its most recent valuation — to a new public benefit fund, with the stake growing automatically as the company gets bigger. The fund, called the Anthropic Public Benefit Fund, will be set up as a wholly-owned LLC inside the company rather than an independent nonprofit, Anthropic said in a blog post. That structure, it argues, gives it more flexibility between different kinds of giving than a traditional 501(c)(3) would allow. ...

OpenCode, the open-source AI coding assistant, woke up Saturday to the email no developer wants. The company disclosed October 17 that attackers breached a legacy system it was in the middle of decommissioning, and that third-party API keys saved in user workspaces may have gone with it. About 1.4% of OpenCode Console users are affected. The disclosure landed in two waves: an X post from the official @opencode account on October 17, then emails to affected customers on the morning of October 18. OpenCode said the intruders hit a legacy system that was being phased out, and that “third party provider keys (eg OpenAI, Anthropic) saved in your workspace may have been exposed.” Affected users were told to revoke and replace their keys and check their provider bills for anything unexpected. ...

Anthropic just published the most detailed self-portrait yet of what happens when an AI company lets AI agents do real work. The headline number will sting anyone starting a tech career: junior engineers, once 27% of the company’s technical hires, now make up just 9%. The report, “How employment is changing at Anthropic,” was released Friday by the company’s own economists, Nathan Wilmers, Regina Catipon, Maxim Massenkoff, and Peter McCrory at the Anthropic Institute, and it reads like a dispatch from the future of work that is already here. ...

Anthropic’s internal study “How employment is changing at Anthropic” (published October 16, 2026) found the junior share of technical hires fell from 27% to 9% since early 2025 while AI agents logged six times as many work hours as human staff by August. Full story in slides above — sources: The Decoder, The Inference, TSN, October 18, 2026.

DeepSeek quietly released V4.1-Flash-1017 on October 17, a minor checkpoint update that reportedly beats Claude Sonnet 5.6 on 10 of 11 coding benchmarks while producing roughly 20% fewer tokens at the same intelligence level. Independent runs, including the Browser Use benchmark, confirm the story: near-frontier scores at a tenth of the price. Sources: ai0.news, MarkTechPost, SoftTechHub, dev.to (October 17–18, 2026).

Anthropic said on Friday that an internal Claude research model has finally answered one of cryptography’s most stubborn questions: where the mysterious seed values behind the NIST elliptic curves came from. The answer, published in an October 16, 2026 research report and reached in under 30 minutes, was almost aggressively boring. “It’s just timestamps,” the company’s post begins. That’s the punchline, and it’s a good one. For roughly 25 years, researchers worried the NSA had cherry-picked the parameters of the internet’s most widely used cryptographic curves, or worse, slipped in a hidden weakness. What Claude found was a garden-variety C-library random-number generator, started with the computer’s clock, run on some workstation sometime between May 1997 and April 1998. Cryptographer Filippo Valsorda, who had put up a $36,864 bounty for the answer, independently reimplemented the solution in Go, confirmed the match, and saw the money donated to the Internet Security Research Group. ...

Anomaly Innovations (formerly SST), the company behind the open-source coding agent OpenCode, confirmed on October 17 that a large-scale attack on a legacy console system exposed stored OpenAI, Anthropic and Google API keys for about 1.4% of users. Affected developers were notified by email and told to rotate keys immediately — some users reported unauthorized charges before the notice landed. Full story in the slides above. Sources: Startup Fortune, AIToolsRecap, Dev Community (dev.to), Medium. ...

Anthropic co-founder Jack Clark told officials at the IMF and World Bank annual meetings in Bangkok that one of the company’s internal economic models projects AI could push US GDP to about $44 trillion by 2030, up from just over $30 trillion today. The extreme scenario assumes rapid AI improvement, near-total automation of knowledge work, and the creation of entirely new industries — with growth near 15% a year. Clark paired the forecast with a warning: policymakers have only a few years to set international rules, as AI is already causing job losses in fields like call centers and could enable dangerous misuse. ...

Sam Altman admits OpenAI looked “opportunistic and sloppy.” Those are his words, not his critics'. The OpenAI CEO said so publicly after a rough week for the company’s newest military deal. On Friday, OpenAI announced it had struck an agreement with the Pentagon to deploy its AI models across the department’s classified networks. The timing raised eyebrows: the announcement came just hours after Trump ordered federal agencies to stop using technology from OpenAI’s rival, Anthropic, a company holding a $200 million Pentagon contract. ...

Anthropic wants to be regulated. Just not by anyone’s rules but its own. The company has been quietly pitching Capitol Hill lawmakers on a draft federal bill to regulate frontier AI safety, Politico reported on Friday, citing three people familiar with the effort. The draft would let the government block a model’s release or use only if it poses a foreseeable, imminent risk of more than $1 billion in damages — or of killing or seriously injuring more than 50 people. ...

The next AI cybersecurity nightmare won’t need a data center. According to new research from Anthropic’s Frontier Red Team, small AI models may be only months away from copying themselves from one internet-connected gadget to the next: smart TVs, fridges, ovens, and vacuum cleaners, with no human help at all. The paper, published Monday and written by researchers William Zhou and Daniel Freeman, puts a name to the threat: “AI worms,” or autonomous replication and adaptation (ARA). A traditional computer worm copies code between machines. An AI worm would carry its own model weights (or re-download them from a public hub), run inference on the hardware it compromises, and figure out unfamiliar devices by itself. ...

The Federal Trade Commission has sent civil subpoenas to OpenAI and Anthropic, demanding documents about AI safety incidents, Axios reported on Wednesday, citing a person familiar with the matter. Each set of demands runs to more than 50 pages, and the agency also plans to compel executives at both companies to testify. That’s the FTC putting America’s two biggest AI labs on formal notice. The regulator wants records on security incidents, safeguards, marketing materials, and privacy policies — a document request that reaches straight into how these companies build, test, and sell their models. ...