🤖 Anthropic nears $900B valuation in new $30B funding round

Anthropic has agreed terms for a $30 billion round that would value the company at $900 billion, according to the Financial Times.

The round is expected to be led by Dragoneer, Greenoaks, Sequoia, and Altimeter. Each could invest more than $2 billion.

The deal comes just 3 months after Anthropic raised $30 billion at a $350 billion valuation.

Anthropic’s annualized revenue is reportedly close to $45 billion, up from $9 billion at the end of last year. That pace has pushed the company ahead of OpenAI on some revenue measures.

The company is turning growth into capital almost as fast as it turns capital into compute.

AI financing is now moving in $30 billion steps.

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Trump purchased up to a $1 million worth of Nvidia $NVDA stock on January 6, 2026.

This is a week before the Commerce Department officially approved the sale of Nvidia chips to China.

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⚖️ Elon Musk loses his lawsuit against OpenAI

A California jury ruled against Elon Musk in his case accusing OpenAI of abandoning its original nonprofit mission. The jury said Musk waited too long to bring the lawsuit.

Musk claimed OpenAI misled him into contributing $38 million before shifting toward a for-profit structure backed by Microsoft and other investors.

The verdict removes a major legal overhang as OpenAI prepares for a potential IPO that could value the company at around $1 trillion.

One of the most closely watched battles in AI ended in less than 2 hours of jury deliberation.

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Anthropic and OpenAI now capture 89% of all AI startup revenue, per The Information.

The data places Anthropic and OpenAI among 34 of the most mature startups selling AI apps or models.

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Donald Trump Jr's venture firm 1789 Capital grew from $200M to $3.5B AUM in one year.

The firm bought stakes in Databricks, Ramp, Deel, Groq, Anduril, SpaceX, xAI, and Reflection AI.

It is targeting $10B and positioning itself as the new Carlyle Group.

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🔥 OpenAI Co-Founder Joins Anthropic

Andrej Karpathy, co-founder of OpenAI, has officially joined Anthropic, the company behind Claude.

Karpathy, a prominent AI researcher, helped found OpenAI in 2015 and later led AI efforts at Tesla.

He now says he wants to "return to R&D" during a critical time for large language model development.

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✖️ xAI promised employees $420 for tax returns and hasn’t paid

xAI asked employees to submit their personal tax returns as training data for Grok and offered $420 in return, according to Bloomberg.

The company wanted to improve Grok’s tax capabilities before the April 15 filing deadline as users increasingly turned to ChatGPT and Claude for accounting tasks.

Two months later, employees are still waiting for the payments.

Even training data can end up as an unpaid invoice.

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🤖 OpenAI had 11 founders. Only 3 are still there.

The OpenAI trial brought renewed attention to the company’s early days. Today, only Sam Altman, Greg Brockman, and Wojciech Zaremba remain at the company.

🖱 Wojciech Zaremba remains at OpenAI. He spent years leading robotics research and recently shifted his focus to AI safety and long-term alignment.

🖱 Elon Musk left the board in 2018 after disagreements over the company’s direction. He later launched xAI and merged it into SpaceX.

🖱 Ilya Sutskever left in 2024 after co-leading OpenAI’s research team and co-founded Safe Superintelligence, a company focused entirely on building safe AGI.

🖱 Andrej Karpathy left in 2017 to lead Tesla’s Autopilot team, returned briefly to OpenAI, founded education startup Eureka Labs, and has now joined Anthropic.

🖱 Durk Kingma, one of the most respected researchers in deep learning, moved to Google DeepMind and later joined Anthropic.

🖱 John Schulman helped create reinforcement learning systems behind ChatGPT. He left in 2024 and is now chief scientist at Mira Murati’s Thinking Machines.

🖱 Pamela Vagata was the first founder to leave. She joined Stripe’s AI efforts and later launched venture fund Pebblebed.

🖱 Trevor Blackwell had a background in robotics, left in 2017, and later became a partner at Y Combinator.

🖱 Vicki Cheung worked on engineering and infrastructure before leaving to co-found Gantry, a platform for improving machine learning systems.

OpenAI’s founders now lead or advise many of the most important companies in AI.

The original team ended up shaping the entire industry.

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GameStop $GME raised its stake in eBay $EBAY from 5% to 6.6%.

Ryan Cohen is still keen to acquire GameStop and may even launch a hostile takeover bid (half cash, half stock).

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🤖 Altman Offers Startups $2M in Tokens for Equity

Sam Altman proposed giving each YCombinator startup $2 million in tokens for about 7% equity, roughly YCombinator's usual stake.

The tokens come from Codex, which Altman aims to promote by tying new startups to his ecosystem amid competition with Anthropic.

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🤖 DeepMind Founder Holds Stake in Anthropic

The Financial Times revealed that Demis Hassabis, founder of DeepMind, secretly invested early in Anthropic as an angel investor.

Anthropic is an AI startup competing closely with DeepMind.

Despite this rivalry, Google recently agreed to invest $10 billion in Anthropic, possibly influenced by Hassabis.

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