Signals

Microsoft used Build to declare independence from OpenAI with seven homegrown models, Anthropic filed for an IPO, and Congress dropped the most ambitious AI bill the US has ever seen. Oh, and Nvidia entered the PC market.

Anthropic raised $65 billion at a near-trillion-dollar valuation, dropped Opus 4.8, and revealed that its Mythos model has already found over 10,000 critical software vulnerabilities. Sam Altman, meanwhile, admitted he was "pretty wrong" about AI taking jobs — and the Pope published an encyclical on the subject.

Cerebras pulled off the biggest tech IPO in years, surging 68% on its first day, while both OpenAI and Anthropic launched consulting arms to embed AI engineers directly inside enterprises. The model race paused for breath; the deployment race sprinted.

Anthropic stormed Wall Street with a $1.5 billion joint venture and ten ready-made financial agents, while the Pentagon signed AI deals with eight tech giants and pointedly left Anthropic off the list. The week crystallised a strange new reality: one company can simultaneously be the most wanted partner on Wall Street and the most unwanted in Washington.

OpenAI broke free from Microsoft's cloud and dropped GPT-5.5 in the same week, while Google and Amazon raced to write the biggest cheques Anthropic has ever seen. The walls between the AI giants are coming down — what's left is a fight over distribution.

242 billion dollars flowed into AI in a single quarter, and the week showed exactly where it's all going.