News & Updates
The latest news and updates from companies in the WLTH portfolio.
Anthropic's $45B cloud deal points to its IPO
Anthropic just made one of the largest infrastructure commitments in AI history, and the timing is hard to ignore. The company agreed to spend roughly $45 billion renting cloud computing power from Nscale, a UK-based AI infrastructure firm. The deal runs six years and covers about 460 megawatts of power at Nscale's flagship data center development in West Virginia. For investors, this matters because Anthropic is preparing to go public, and this agreement tells you a lot about the case it plans to make. Why Anthropic's Nscale deal points straight at its IPO Anthropic is still private, but not for much longer if current reporting holds up. The company submitted a confidential IPO filing to the Securities and Exchange Commission in June and has started meeting with potential investors, CNBC reported. Investors expect Anthropic to go public in October at a valuation of $2 trillion or more, which would make it the largest IPO in history, Quartz reported. That is where the Nscale agreement comes in. When Anthropic pitches Wall Street, one of the first questions it will face is whether it can keep growing without running out of the hardware and electricity its Claude models need. This deal is designed to answer that question before anyone asks it. How Anthropic has assembled its computing infrastructure will feature prominently in what it tells prospective public-market investors. What 460 megawatts and Vera Rubin chips actually buy The hardware here is worth understanding, because it explains why the price tag is so large. The West Virginia facility will run on Nvidia's next-generation Vera Rubin chips, which are expected to start coming online at the end of 2027, TechCrunch reported. Vera Rubin is Nvidia's newest system, and it combines six different chips working together at the cutting edge of chip design. The 460 megawatts of power involved is enough to supply about 345,000 US homes at once, according to Bloomberg, which shows the scale of what modern AI training now requires. Here is what the deal locks in for Anthropic: Key terms of the Anthropic and Nscale agreement * Total value: Roughly $45 billion over six years, averaging about $7.5 billion a year * Capacity: Approximately 460 megawatts of power * Location: Nscale's Monarch campus in West Virginia * Hardware: Nvidia Vera Rubin systems, online in late 2027 SOPA Images / Getty Images How this fits Anthropic's wider spending run The Nscale deal is not a one-time move. It follows a series of large agreements Anthropic has signed to lock down capacity. Earlier this month, the company signed a $10 billion, six-year deal with Volta for a data center in Norway, TechCrunch reported. In July, it added a $5 billion computing-related agreement with AMD. And back in May, Anthropic entered a large arrangement with SpaceX that reportedly provides about $1.25 billion worth of capacity each month. There is a reason for all of this activity. Anthropic acknowledged earlier this year that heavy demand for Claude had strained its existing systems and caused reliability problems during peak hours. By spreading its work across Nvidia chips, AWS Trainium, and Google's processors, Anthropic avoids depending on any single vendor. What the numbers say about Anthropic's growth Anthropic surpassed OpenAI in quarterly revenue for the first time in the second quarter, posting $11.6 billion, more than double its first-quarter total, Bloomberg reported. Its annualized revenue run rate climbed from about $9 billion in late 2025 to more than $47 billion in May and near $65 billion by July. The pitch to investors leans on an even bigger figure. Anthropic is preparing to tell IPO investors that its total addressable market tops $30 trillion, based on the full scope of work AI models could perform across industries, the The Wall Street Journal reported. That claim has drawn skepticism. NYU finance professor Aswath Damodaran is widely known as the dean of valuation for decades of work breaking down company worth. He said a similar AI market estimate from SpaceX was "reaching the end of what's plausible and pushing beyond," BetaNews reported. The risks investors should weigh before the IPO First, there is timing. The West Virginia facility will not come online until late 2027, so this is a long-term backup plan rather than a fix for today's capacity shortage. Before then, Anthropic has to bridge the gap using its existing arrangements with Amazon, Google, and SpaceX. Second, there is the question of profit. A $45 billion commitment to one partner adds to already enormous obligations. Investors will want to see that revenue growth can outpace these costs over time, not just for a quarter or two. Third, the valuation itself is unproven. Anthropic's last private raise valued it at $965 billion in May, according to according to Briefs.co, so a $2 trillion debut would roughly double that mark within months. What this means for investors You cannot buy Anthropic shares yet, but you can prepare. If the IPO arrives this autumn, treat the pitch figures with care. A $30 trillion market claim is a projection, not a guarantee, and Anthropic's own forecast of $190 billion to $200 billion in 2028 revenue would capture under 1% of that market. Watch three things once the filing lands: * Whether revenue keeps doubling * Whether adjusted profit holds up under audited numbers * Whether these capacity deals turn into reliable service instead of more strain. The Nscale agreement shows Anthropic can secure the power and chips it needs. Whether it can turn that into durable profit is the question that will decide if a $2 trillion price tag holds up once investors get their first real look. Investors don't need to wait for the IPO to get exposure to this story. Every one of these deals runs on Nvidia hardware, and rivals like AMD are fighting for a share, which keeps AI infrastructure names firmly in focus heading into the debut. The Arena Media Brands, LLC THESTREET is a registered trademark of TheStreet, Inc. This story was originally published August 28, 2026 at 7:33 PM.
Anthropic's $45B cloud deal points to its IPO
Anthropic just made one of the largest infrastructure commitments in AI history, and the timing is hard to ignore. The company agreed to spend roughly $45 billion renting cloud computing power from Nscale, a UK-based AI infrastructure firm. The deal runs six years and covers about 460 megawatts of power at Nscale's flagship data center development in West Virginia. For investors, this matters because Anthropic is preparing to go public, and this agreement tells you a lot about the case it plans to make. Why Anthropic's Nscale deal points straight at its IPO Anthropic is still private, but not for much longer if current reporting holds up. The company submitted a confidential IPO filing to the Securities and Exchange Commission in June and has started meeting with potential investors, CNBC reported. Investors expect Anthropic to go public in October at a valuation of $2 trillion or more, which would make it the largest IPO in history, Quartz reported. That is where the Nscale agreement comes in. When Anthropic pitches Wall Street, one of the first questions it will face is whether it can keep growing without running out of the hardware and electricity its Claude models need. This deal is designed to answer that question before anyone asks it. How Anthropic has assembled its computing infrastructure will feature prominently in what it tells prospective public-market investors. What 460 megawatts and Vera Rubin chips actually buy The hardware here is worth understanding, because it explains why the price tag is so large. The West Virginia facility will run on Nvidia's next-generation Vera Rubin chips, which are expected to start coming online at the end of 2027, TechCrunch reported. Vera Rubin is Nvidia's newest system, and it combines six different chips working together at the cutting edge of chip design. The 460 megawatts of power involved is enough to supply about 345,000 US homes at once, according to Bloomberg, which shows the scale of what modern AI training now requires. Here is what the deal locks in for Anthropic: Key terms of the Anthropic and Nscale agreement * Total value: Roughly $45 billion over six years, averaging about $7.5 billion a year * Capacity: Approximately 460 megawatts of power * Location: Nscale's Monarch campus in West Virginia * Hardware: Nvidia Vera Rubin systems, online in late 2027 SOPA Images / Getty Images How this fits Anthropic's wider spending run The Nscale deal is not a one-time move. It follows a series of large agreements Anthropic has signed to lock down capacity. Earlier this month, the company signed a $10 billion, six-year deal with Volta for a data center in Norway, TechCrunch reported. In July, it added a $5 billion computing-related agreement with AMD. And back in May, Anthropic entered a large arrangement with SpaceX that reportedly provides about $1.25 billion worth of capacity each month. There is a reason for all of this activity. Anthropic acknowledged earlier this year that heavy demand for Claude had strained its existing systems and caused reliability problems during peak hours. By spreading its work across Nvidia chips, AWS Trainium, and Google's processors, Anthropic avoids depending on any single vendor. What the numbers say about Anthropic's growth Anthropic surpassed OpenAI in quarterly revenue for the first time in the second quarter, posting $11.6 billion, more than double its first-quarter total, Bloomberg reported. Its annualized revenue run rate climbed from about $9 billion in late 2025 to more than $47 billion in May and near $65 billion by July. The pitch to investors leans on an even bigger figure. Anthropic is preparing to tell IPO investors that its total addressable market tops $30 trillion, based on the full scope of work AI models could perform across industries, the The Wall Street Journal reported. That claim has drawn skepticism. NYU finance professor Aswath Damodaran is widely known as the dean of valuation for decades of work breaking down company worth. He said a similar AI market estimate from SpaceX was "reaching the end of what's plausible and pushing beyond," BetaNews reported. The risks investors should weigh before the IPO First, there is timing. The West Virginia facility will not come online until late 2027, so this is a long-term backup plan rather than a fix for today's capacity shortage. Before then, Anthropic has to bridge the gap using its existing arrangements with Amazon, Google, and SpaceX. Second, there is the question of profit. A $45 billion commitment to one partner adds to already enormous obligations. Investors will want to see that revenue growth can outpace these costs over time, not just for a quarter or two. Third, the valuation itself is unproven. Anthropic's last private raise valued it at $965 billion in May, according to according to Briefs.co, so a $2 trillion debut would roughly double that mark within months. What this means for investors You cannot buy Anthropic shares yet, but you can prepare. If the IPO arrives this autumn, treat the pitch figures with care. A $30 trillion market claim is a projection, not a guarantee, and Anthropic's own forecast of $190 billion to $200 billion in 2028 revenue would capture under 1% of that market. Watch three things once the filing lands: * Whether revenue keeps doubling * Whether adjusted profit holds up under audited numbers * Whether these capacity deals turn into reliable service instead of more strain. The Nscale agreement shows Anthropic can secure the power and chips it needs. Whether it can turn that into durable profit is the question that will decide if a $2 trillion price tag holds up once investors get their first real look. Investors don't need to wait for the IPO to get exposure to this story. Every one of these deals runs on Nvidia hardware, and rivals like AMD are fighting for a share, which keeps AI infrastructure names firmly in focus heading into the debut. The Arena Media Brands, LLC THESTREET is a registered trademark of TheStreet, Inc. This story was originally published August 28, 2026 at 5:33 PM.
Anthropic's $45B cloud deal points to its IPO
Anthropic just made one of the largest infrastructure commitments in AI history, and the timing is hard to ignore. The company agreed to spend roughly $45 billion renting cloud computing power from Nscale, a UK-based AI infrastructure firm. The deal runs six years and covers about 460 megawatts of power at Nscale's flagship data center development in West Virginia. For investors, this matters because Anthropic is preparing to go public, and this agreement tells you a lot about the case it plans to make. Why Anthropic's Nscale deal points straight at its IPO Anthropic is still private, but not for much longer if current reporting holds up. The company submitted a confidential IPO filing to the Securities and Exchange Commission in June and has started meeting with potential investors, CNBC reported. Investors expect Anthropic to go public in October at a valuation of $2 trillion or more, which would make it the largest IPO in history, Quartz reported. That is where the Nscale agreement comes in. When Anthropic pitches Wall Street, one of the first questions it will face is whether it can keep growing without running out of the hardware and electricity its Claude models need. This deal is designed to answer that question before anyone asks it. How Anthropic has assembled its computing infrastructure will feature prominently in what it tells prospective public-market investors. What 460 megawatts and Vera Rubin chips actually buy The hardware here is worth understanding, because it explains why the price tag is so large. The West Virginia facility will run on Nvidia's next-generation Vera Rubin chips, which are expected to start coming online at the end of 2027, TechCrunch reported. Vera Rubin is Nvidia's newest system, and it combines six different chips working together at the cutting edge of chip design. The 460 megawatts of power involved is enough to supply about 345,000 US homes at once, according to Bloomberg, which shows the scale of what modern AI training now requires. Here is what the deal locks in for Anthropic: Key terms of the Anthropic and Nscale agreement * Total value: Roughly $45 billion over six years, averaging about $7.5 billion a year * Capacity: Approximately 460 megawatts of power * Location: Nscale's Monarch campus in West Virginia * Hardware: Nvidia Vera Rubin systems, online in late 2027 SOPA Images / Getty Images How this fits Anthropic's wider spending run The Nscale deal is not a one-time move. It follows a series of large agreements Anthropic has signed to lock down capacity. Earlier this month, the company signed a $10 billion, six-year deal with Volta for a data center in Norway, TechCrunch reported. In July, it added a $5 billion computing-related agreement with AMD. And back in May, Anthropic entered a large arrangement with SpaceX that reportedly provides about $1.25 billion worth of capacity each month. There is a reason for all of this activity. Anthropic acknowledged earlier this year that heavy demand for Claude had strained its existing systems and caused reliability problems during peak hours. By spreading its work across Nvidia chips, AWS Trainium, and Google's processors, Anthropic avoids depending on any single vendor. What the numbers say about Anthropic's growth Anthropic surpassed OpenAI in quarterly revenue for the first time in the second quarter, posting $11.6 billion, more than double its first-quarter total, Bloomberg reported. Its annualized revenue run rate climbed from about $9 billion in late 2025 to more than $47 billion in May and near $65 billion by July. The pitch to investors leans on an even bigger figure. Anthropic is preparing to tell IPO investors that its total addressable market tops $30 trillion, based on the full scope of work AI models could perform across industries, the The Wall Street Journal reported. That claim has drawn skepticism. NYU finance professor Aswath Damodaran is widely known as the dean of valuation for decades of work breaking down company worth. He said a similar AI market estimate from SpaceX was "reaching the end of what's plausible and pushing beyond," BetaNews reported. The risks investors should weigh before the IPO First, there is timing. The West Virginia facility will not come online until late 2027, so this is a long-term backup plan rather than a fix for today's capacity shortage. Before then, Anthropic has to bridge the gap using its existing arrangements with Amazon, Google, and SpaceX. Second, there is the question of profit. A $45 billion commitment to one partner adds to already enormous obligations. Investors will want to see that revenue growth can outpace these costs over time, not just for a quarter or two. Third, the valuation itself is unproven. Anthropic's last private raise valued it at $965 billion in May, according to according to Briefs.co, so a $2 trillion debut would roughly double that mark within months. What this means for investors You cannot buy Anthropic shares yet, but you can prepare. If the IPO arrives this autumn, treat the pitch figures with care. A $30 trillion market claim is a projection, not a guarantee, and Anthropic's own forecast of $190 billion to $200 billion in 2028 revenue would capture under 1% of that market. Watch three things once the filing lands: * Whether revenue keeps doubling * Whether adjusted profit holds up under audited numbers * Whether these capacity deals turn into reliable service instead of more strain. The Nscale agreement shows Anthropic can secure the power and chips it needs. Whether it can turn that into durable profit is the question that will decide if a $2 trillion price tag holds up once investors get their first real look. Investors don't need to wait for the IPO to get exposure to this story. Every one of these deals runs on Nvidia hardware, and rivals like AMD are fighting for a share, which keeps AI infrastructure names firmly in focus heading into the debut. The Arena Media Brands, LLC THESTREET is a registered trademark of TheStreet, Inc. This story was originally published August 28, 2026 at 7:33 PM.
Anthropic's $45B cloud deal points to its IPO
Anthropic just made one of the largest infrastructure commitments in AI history, and the timing is hard to ignore. The company agreed to spend roughly $45 billion renting cloud computing power from Nscale, a UK-based AI infrastructure firm. The deal runs six years and covers about 460 megawatts of power at Nscale's flagship data center development in West Virginia. For investors, this matters because Anthropic is preparing to go public, and this agreement tells you a lot about the case it plans to make. Why Anthropic's Nscale deal points straight at its IPO Anthropic is still private, but not for much longer if current reporting holds up. The company submitted a confidential IPO filing to the Securities and Exchange Commission in June and has started meeting with potential investors, CNBC reported. Investors expect Anthropic to go public in October at a valuation of $2 trillion or more, which would make it the largest IPO in history, Quartz reported. That is where the Nscale agreement comes in. When Anthropic pitches Wall Street, one of the first questions it will face is whether it can keep growing without running out of the hardware and electricity its Claude models need. This deal is designed to answer that question before anyone asks it. How Anthropic has assembled its computing infrastructure will feature prominently in what it tells prospective public-market investors. What 460 megawatts and Vera Rubin chips actually buy The hardware here is worth understanding, because it explains why the price tag is so large. The West Virginia facility will run on Nvidia's next-generation Vera Rubin chips, which are expected to start coming online at the end of 2027, TechCrunch reported. Vera Rubin is Nvidia's newest system, and it combines six different chips working together at the cutting edge of chip design. The 460 megawatts of power involved is enough to supply about 345,000 US homes at once, according to Bloomberg, which shows the scale of what modern AI training now requires. Here is what the deal locks in for Anthropic: Key terms of the Anthropic and Nscale agreement * Total value: Roughly $45 billion over six years, averaging about $7.5 billion a year * Capacity: Approximately 460 megawatts of power * Location: Nscale's Monarch campus in West Virginia * Hardware: Nvidia Vera Rubin systems, online in late 2027 SOPA Images / Getty Images How this fits Anthropic's wider spending run The Nscale deal is not a one-time move. It follows a series of large agreements Anthropic has signed to lock down capacity. Earlier this month, the company signed a $10 billion, six-year deal with Volta for a data center in Norway, TechCrunch reported. In July, it added a $5 billion computing-related agreement with AMD. And back in May, Anthropic entered a large arrangement with SpaceX that reportedly provides about $1.25 billion worth of capacity each month. There is a reason for all of this activity. Anthropic acknowledged earlier this year that heavy demand for Claude had strained its existing systems and caused reliability problems during peak hours. By spreading its work across Nvidia chips, AWS Trainium, and Google's processors, Anthropic avoids depending on any single vendor. What the numbers say about Anthropic's growth Anthropic surpassed OpenAI in quarterly revenue for the first time in the second quarter, posting $11.6 billion, more than double its first-quarter total, Bloomberg reported. Its annualized revenue run rate climbed from about $9 billion in late 2025 to more than $47 billion in May and near $65 billion by July. The pitch to investors leans on an even bigger figure. Anthropic is preparing to tell IPO investors that its total addressable market tops $30 trillion, based on the full scope of work AI models could perform across industries, the The Wall Street Journal reported. That claim has drawn skepticism. NYU finance professor Aswath Damodaran is widely known as the dean of valuation for decades of work breaking down company worth. He said a similar AI market estimate from SpaceX was "reaching the end of what's plausible and pushing beyond," BetaNews reported. The risks investors should weigh before the IPO First, there is timing. The West Virginia facility will not come online until late 2027, so this is a long-term backup plan rather than a fix for today's capacity shortage. Before then, Anthropic has to bridge the gap using its existing arrangements with Amazon, Google, and SpaceX. Second, there is the question of profit. A $45 billion commitment to one partner adds to already enormous obligations. Investors will want to see that revenue growth can outpace these costs over time, not just for a quarter or two. Third, the valuation itself is unproven. Anthropic's last private raise valued it at $965 billion in May, according to according to Briefs.co, so a $2 trillion debut would roughly double that mark within months. What this means for investors You cannot buy Anthropic shares yet, but you can prepare. If the IPO arrives this autumn, treat the pitch figures with care. A $30 trillion market claim is a projection, not a guarantee, and Anthropic's own forecast of $190 billion to $200 billion in 2028 revenue would capture under 1% of that market. Watch three things once the filing lands: * Whether revenue keeps doubling * Whether adjusted profit holds up under audited numbers * Whether these capacity deals turn into reliable service instead of more strain. The Nscale agreement shows Anthropic can secure the power and chips it needs. Whether it can turn that into durable profit is the question that will decide if a $2 trillion price tag holds up once investors get their first real look. Investors don't need to wait for the IPO to get exposure to this story. Every one of these deals runs on Nvidia hardware, and rivals like AMD are fighting for a share, which keeps AI infrastructure names firmly in focus heading into the debut. The Arena Media Brands, LLC THESTREET is a registered trademark of TheStreet, Inc. This story was originally published August 28, 2026 at 8:33 PM.
Anthropic's $45B cloud deal points to its IPO
Anthropic just made one of the largest infrastructure commitments in AI history, and the timing is hard to ignore. The company agreed to spend roughly $45 billion renting cloud computing power from Nscale, a UK-based AI infrastructure firm. The deal runs six years and covers about 460 megawatts of power at Nscale's flagship data center development in West Virginia. For investors, this matters because Anthropic is preparing to go public, and this agreement tells you a lot about the case it plans to make. Why Anthropic's Nscale deal points straight at its IPO Anthropic is still private, but not for much longer if current reporting holds up. The company submitted a confidential IPO filing to the Securities and Exchange Commission in June and has started meeting with potential investors, CNBC reported. Investors expect Anthropic to go public in October at a valuation of $2 trillion or more, which would make it the largest IPO in history, Quartz reported. That is where the Nscale agreement comes in. When Anthropic pitches Wall Street, one of the first questions it will face is whether it can keep growing without running out of the hardware and electricity its Claude models need. This deal is designed to answer that question before anyone asks it. How Anthropic has assembled its computing infrastructure will feature prominently in what it tells prospective public-market investors. What 460 megawatts and Vera Rubin chips actually buy The hardware here is worth understanding, because it explains why the price tag is so large. The West Virginia facility will run on Nvidia's next-generation Vera Rubin chips, which are expected to start coming online at the end of 2027, TechCrunch reported. Vera Rubin is Nvidia's newest system, and it combines six different chips working together at the cutting edge of chip design. The 460 megawatts of power involved is enough to supply about 345,000 US homes at once, according to Bloomberg, which shows the scale of what modern AI training now requires. Here is what the deal locks in for Anthropic: Key terms of the Anthropic and Nscale agreement * Total value: Roughly $45 billion over six years, averaging about $7.5 billion a year * Capacity: Approximately 460 megawatts of power * Location: Nscale's Monarch campus in West Virginia * Hardware: Nvidia Vera Rubin systems, online in late 2027 SOPA Images / Getty Images How this fits Anthropic's wider spending run The Nscale deal is not a one-time move. It follows a series of large agreements Anthropic has signed to lock down capacity. Earlier this month, the company signed a $10 billion, six-year deal with Volta for a data center in Norway, TechCrunch reported. In July, it added a $5 billion computing-related agreement with AMD. And back in May, Anthropic entered a large arrangement with SpaceX that reportedly provides about $1.25 billion worth of capacity each month. There is a reason for all of this activity. Anthropic acknowledged earlier this year that heavy demand for Claude had strained its existing systems and caused reliability problems during peak hours. By spreading its work across Nvidia chips, AWS Trainium, and Google's processors, Anthropic avoids depending on any single vendor. What the numbers say about Anthropic's growth Anthropic surpassed OpenAI in quarterly revenue for the first time in the second quarter, posting $11.6 billion, more than double its first-quarter total, Bloomberg reported. Its annualized revenue run rate climbed from about $9 billion in late 2025 to more than $47 billion in May and near $65 billion by July. The pitch to investors leans on an even bigger figure. Anthropic is preparing to tell IPO investors that its total addressable market tops $30 trillion, based on the full scope of work AI models could perform across industries, the The Wall Street Journal reported. That claim has drawn skepticism. NYU finance professor Aswath Damodaran is widely known as the dean of valuation for decades of work breaking down company worth. He said a similar AI market estimate from SpaceX was "reaching the end of what's plausible and pushing beyond," BetaNews reported. The risks investors should weigh before the IPO First, there is timing. The West Virginia facility will not come online until late 2027, so this is a long-term backup plan rather than a fix for today's capacity shortage. Before then, Anthropic has to bridge the gap using its existing arrangements with Amazon, Google, and SpaceX. Second, there is the question of profit. A $45 billion commitment to one partner adds to already enormous obligations. Investors will want to see that revenue growth can outpace these costs over time, not just for a quarter or two. Third, the valuation itself is unproven. Anthropic's last private raise valued it at $965 billion in May, according to according to Briefs.co, so a $2 trillion debut would roughly double that mark within months. What this means for investors You cannot buy Anthropic shares yet, but you can prepare. If the IPO arrives this autumn, treat the pitch figures with care. A $30 trillion market claim is a projection, not a guarantee, and Anthropic's own forecast of $190 billion to $200 billion in 2028 revenue would capture under 1% of that market. Watch three things once the filing lands: * Whether revenue keeps doubling * Whether adjusted profit holds up under audited numbers * Whether these capacity deals turn into reliable service instead of more strain. The Nscale agreement shows Anthropic can secure the power and chips it needs. Whether it can turn that into durable profit is the question that will decide if a $2 trillion price tag holds up once investors get their first real look. Investors don't need to wait for the IPO to get exposure to this story. Every one of these deals runs on Nvidia hardware, and rivals like AMD are fighting for a share, which keeps AI infrastructure names firmly in focus heading into the debut. The Arena Media Brands, LLC THESTREET is a registered trademark of TheStreet, Inc. This story was originally published August 28, 2026 at 5:33 PM.
Anthropic's $45B cloud deal points to its IPO
Anthropic just made one of the largest infrastructure commitments in AI history, and the timing is hard to ignore. The company agreed to spend roughly $45 billion renting cloud computing power from Nscale, a UK-based AI infrastructure firm. The deal runs six years and covers about 460 megawatts of power at Nscale's flagship data center development in West Virginia. For investors, this matters because Anthropic is preparing to go public, and this agreement tells you a lot about the case it plans to make. Why Anthropic's Nscale deal points straight at its IPO Anthropic is still private, but not for much longer if current reporting holds up. The company submitted a confidential IPO filing to the Securities and Exchange Commission in June and has started meeting with potential investors, CNBC reported. Investors expect Anthropic to go public in October at a valuation of $2 trillion or more, which would make it the largest IPO in history, Quartz reported. That is where the Nscale agreement comes in. When Anthropic pitches Wall Street, one of the first questions it will face is whether it can keep growing without running out of the hardware and electricity its Claude models need. This deal is designed to answer that question before anyone asks it. How Anthropic has assembled its computing infrastructure will feature prominently in what it tells prospective public-market investors. What 460 megawatts and Vera Rubin chips actually buy The hardware here is worth understanding, because it explains why the price tag is so large. The West Virginia facility will run on Nvidia's next-generation Vera Rubin chips, which are expected to start coming online at the end of 2027, TechCrunch reported. Vera Rubin is Nvidia's newest system, and it combines six different chips working together at the cutting edge of chip design. The 460 megawatts of power involved is enough to supply about 345,000 US homes at once, according to Bloomberg, which shows the scale of what modern AI training now requires. Here is what the deal locks in for Anthropic: Key terms of the Anthropic and Nscale agreement * Total value: Roughly $45 billion over six years, averaging about $7.5 billion a year * Capacity: Approximately 460 megawatts of power * Location: Nscale's Monarch campus in West Virginia * Hardware: Nvidia Vera Rubin systems, online in late 2027 SOPA Images / Getty Images How this fits Anthropic's wider spending run The Nscale deal is not a one-time move. It follows a series of large agreements Anthropic has signed to lock down capacity. Earlier this month, the company signed a $10 billion, six-year deal with Volta for a data center in Norway, TechCrunch reported. In July, it added a $5 billion computing-related agreement with AMD. And back in May, Anthropic entered a large arrangement with SpaceX that reportedly provides about $1.25 billion worth of capacity each month. There is a reason for all of this activity. Anthropic acknowledged earlier this year that heavy demand for Claude had strained its existing systems and caused reliability problems during peak hours. By spreading its work across Nvidia chips, AWS Trainium, and Google's processors, Anthropic avoids depending on any single vendor. What the numbers say about Anthropic's growth Anthropic surpassed OpenAI in quarterly revenue for the first time in the second quarter, posting $11.6 billion, more than double its first-quarter total, Bloomberg reported. Its annualized revenue run rate climbed from about $9 billion in late 2025 to more than $47 billion in May and near $65 billion by July. The pitch to investors leans on an even bigger figure. Anthropic is preparing to tell IPO investors that its total addressable market tops $30 trillion, based on the full scope of work AI models could perform across industries, the The Wall Street Journal reported. That claim has drawn skepticism. NYU finance professor Aswath Damodaran is widely known as the dean of valuation for decades of work breaking down company worth. He said a similar AI market estimate from SpaceX was "reaching the end of what's plausible and pushing beyond," BetaNews reported. The risks investors should weigh before the IPO First, there is timing. The West Virginia facility will not come online until late 2027, so this is a long-term backup plan rather than a fix for today's capacity shortage. Before then, Anthropic has to bridge the gap using its existing arrangements with Amazon, Google, and SpaceX. Second, there is the question of profit. A $45 billion commitment to one partner adds to already enormous obligations. Investors will want to see that revenue growth can outpace these costs over time, not just for a quarter or two. Third, the valuation itself is unproven. Anthropic's last private raise valued it at $965 billion in May, according to according to Briefs.co, so a $2 trillion debut would roughly double that mark within months. What this means for investors You cannot buy Anthropic shares yet, but you can prepare. If the IPO arrives this autumn, treat the pitch figures with care. A $30 trillion market claim is a projection, not a guarantee, and Anthropic's own forecast of $190 billion to $200 billion in 2028 revenue would capture under 1% of that market. Watch three things once the filing lands: * Whether revenue keeps doubling * Whether adjusted profit holds up under audited numbers * Whether these capacity deals turn into reliable service instead of more strain. The Nscale agreement shows Anthropic can secure the power and chips it needs. Whether it can turn that into durable profit is the question that will decide if a $2 trillion price tag holds up once investors get their first real look. Investors don't need to wait for the IPO to get exposure to this story. Every one of these deals runs on Nvidia hardware, and rivals like AMD are fighting for a share, which keeps AI infrastructure names firmly in focus heading into the debut. The Arena Media Brands, LLC THESTREET is a registered trademark of TheStreet, Inc. This story was originally published August 28, 2026 at 7:33 PM.
Anthropic's $45B cloud deal points to its IPO
Anthropic just made one of the largest infrastructure commitments in AI history, and the timing is hard to ignore. The company agreed to spend roughly $45 billion renting cloud computing power from Nscale, a UK-based AI infrastructure firm. The deal runs six years and covers about 460 megawatts of power at Nscale's flagship data center development in West Virginia. For investors, this matters because Anthropic is preparing to go public, and this agreement tells you a lot about the case it plans to make. Why Anthropic's Nscale deal points straight at its IPO Anthropic is still private, but not for much longer if current reporting holds up. The company submitted a confidential IPO filing to the Securities and Exchange Commission in June and has started meeting with potential investors, CNBC reported. Investors expect Anthropic to go public in October at a valuation of $2 trillion or more, which would make it the largest IPO in history, Quartz reported. That is where the Nscale agreement comes in. When Anthropic pitches Wall Street, one of the first questions it will face is whether it can keep growing without running out of the hardware and electricity its Claude models need. This deal is designed to answer that question before anyone asks it. How Anthropic has assembled its computing infrastructure will feature prominently in what it tells prospective public-market investors. What 460 megawatts and Vera Rubin chips actually buy The hardware here is worth understanding, because it explains why the price tag is so large. The West Virginia facility will run on Nvidia's next-generation Vera Rubin chips, which are expected to start coming online at the end of 2027, TechCrunch reported. Vera Rubin is Nvidia's newest system, and it combines six different chips working together at the cutting edge of chip design. The 460 megawatts of power involved is enough to supply about 345,000 US homes at once, according to Bloomberg, which shows the scale of what modern AI training now requires. Here is what the deal locks in for Anthropic: Key terms of the Anthropic and Nscale agreement * Total value: Roughly $45 billion over six years, averaging about $7.5 billion a year * Capacity: Approximately 460 megawatts of power * Location: Nscale's Monarch campus in West Virginia * Hardware: Nvidia Vera Rubin systems, online in late 2027 SOPA Images / Getty Images How this fits Anthropic's wider spending run The Nscale deal is not a one-time move. It follows a series of large agreements Anthropic has signed to lock down capacity. Earlier this month, the company signed a $10 billion, six-year deal with Volta for a data center in Norway, TechCrunch reported. In July, it added a $5 billion computing-related agreement with AMD. And back in May, Anthropic entered a large arrangement with SpaceX that reportedly provides about $1.25 billion worth of capacity each month. There is a reason for all of this activity. Anthropic acknowledged earlier this year that heavy demand for Claude had strained its existing systems and caused reliability problems during peak hours. By spreading its work across Nvidia chips, AWS Trainium, and Google's processors, Anthropic avoids depending on any single vendor. What the numbers say about Anthropic's growth Anthropic surpassed OpenAI in quarterly revenue for the first time in the second quarter, posting $11.6 billion, more than double its first-quarter total, Bloomberg reported. Its annualized revenue run rate climbed from about $9 billion in late 2025 to more than $47 billion in May and near $65 billion by July. The pitch to investors leans on an even bigger figure. Anthropic is preparing to tell IPO investors that its total addressable market tops $30 trillion, based on the full scope of work AI models could perform across industries, the The Wall Street Journal reported. That claim has drawn skepticism. NYU finance professor Aswath Damodaran is widely known as the dean of valuation for decades of work breaking down company worth. He said a similar AI market estimate from SpaceX was "reaching the end of what's plausible and pushing beyond," BetaNews reported. The risks investors should weigh before the IPO First, there is timing. The West Virginia facility will not come online until late 2027, so this is a long-term backup plan rather than a fix for today's capacity shortage. Before then, Anthropic has to bridge the gap using its existing arrangements with Amazon, Google, and SpaceX. Second, there is the question of profit. A $45 billion commitment to one partner adds to already enormous obligations. Investors will want to see that revenue growth can outpace these costs over time, not just for a quarter or two. Third, the valuation itself is unproven. Anthropic's last private raise valued it at $965 billion in May, according to according to Briefs.co, so a $2 trillion debut would roughly double that mark within months. What this means for investors You cannot buy Anthropic shares yet, but you can prepare. If the IPO arrives this autumn, treat the pitch figures with care. A $30 trillion market claim is a projection, not a guarantee, and Anthropic's own forecast of $190 billion to $200 billion in 2028 revenue would capture under 1% of that market. Watch three things once the filing lands: * Whether revenue keeps doubling * Whether adjusted profit holds up under audited numbers * Whether these capacity deals turn into reliable service instead of more strain. The Nscale agreement shows Anthropic can secure the power and chips it needs. Whether it can turn that into durable profit is the question that will decide if a $2 trillion price tag holds up once investors get their first real look. Investors don't need to wait for the IPO to get exposure to this story. Every one of these deals runs on Nvidia hardware, and rivals like AMD are fighting for a share, which keeps AI infrastructure names firmly in focus heading into the debut. The Arena Media Brands, LLC THESTREET is a registered trademark of TheStreet, Inc. This story was originally published August 28, 2026 at 8:33 PM.
Anthropic's $45B cloud deal points to its IPO
Anthropic just made one of the largest infrastructure commitments in AI history, and the timing is hard to ignore. The company agreed to spend roughly $45 billion renting cloud computing power from Nscale, a UK-based AI infrastructure firm. The deal runs six years and covers about 460 megawatts of power at Nscale's flagship data center development in West Virginia. For investors, this matters because Anthropic is preparing to go public, and this agreement tells you a lot about the case it plans to make. Why Anthropic's Nscale deal points straight at its IPO Anthropic is still private, but not for much longer if current reporting holds up. The company submitted a confidential IPO filing to the Securities and Exchange Commission in June and has started meeting with potential investors, CNBC reported. Investors expect Anthropic to go public in October at a valuation of $2 trillion or more, which would make it the largest IPO in history, Quartz reported. That is where the Nscale agreement comes in. When Anthropic pitches Wall Street, one of the first questions it will face is whether it can keep growing without running out of the hardware and electricity its Claude models need. This deal is designed to answer that question before anyone asks it. How Anthropic has assembled its computing infrastructure will feature prominently in what it tells prospective public-market investors. What 460 megawatts and Vera Rubin chips actually buy The hardware here is worth understanding, because it explains why the price tag is so large. The West Virginia facility will run on Nvidia's next-generation Vera Rubin chips, which are expected to start coming online at the end of 2027, TechCrunch reported. Vera Rubin is Nvidia's newest system, and it combines six different chips working together at the cutting edge of chip design. The 460 megawatts of power involved is enough to supply about 345,000 US homes at once, according to Bloomberg, which shows the scale of what modern AI training now requires. Here is what the deal locks in for Anthropic: Key terms of the Anthropic and Nscale agreement * Total value: Roughly $45 billion over six years, averaging about $7.5 billion a year * Capacity: Approximately 460 megawatts of power * Location: Nscale's Monarch campus in West Virginia * Hardware: Nvidia Vera Rubin systems, online in late 2027 SOPA Images / Getty Images How this fits Anthropic's wider spending run The Nscale deal is not a one-time move. It follows a series of large agreements Anthropic has signed to lock down capacity. Earlier this month, the company signed a $10 billion, six-year deal with Volta for a data center in Norway, TechCrunch reported. In July, it added a $5 billion computing-related agreement with AMD. And back in May, Anthropic entered a large arrangement with SpaceX that reportedly provides about $1.25 billion worth of capacity each month. There is a reason for all of this activity. Anthropic acknowledged earlier this year that heavy demand for Claude had strained its existing systems and caused reliability problems during peak hours. By spreading its work across Nvidia chips, AWS Trainium, and Google's processors, Anthropic avoids depending on any single vendor. What the numbers say about Anthropic's growth Anthropic surpassed OpenAI in quarterly revenue for the first time in the second quarter, posting $11.6 billion, more than double its first-quarter total, Bloomberg reported. Its annualized revenue run rate climbed from about $9 billion in late 2025 to more than $47 billion in May and near $65 billion by July. The pitch to investors leans on an even bigger figure. Anthropic is preparing to tell IPO investors that its total addressable market tops $30 trillion, based on the full scope of work AI models could perform across industries, the The Wall Street Journal reported. That claim has drawn skepticism. NYU finance professor Aswath Damodaran is widely known as the dean of valuation for decades of work breaking down company worth. He said a similar AI market estimate from SpaceX was "reaching the end of what's plausible and pushing beyond," BetaNews reported. The risks investors should weigh before the IPO First, there is timing. The West Virginia facility will not come online until late 2027, so this is a long-term backup plan rather than a fix for today's capacity shortage. Before then, Anthropic has to bridge the gap using its existing arrangements with Amazon, Google, and SpaceX. Second, there is the question of profit. A $45 billion commitment to one partner adds to already enormous obligations. Investors will want to see that revenue growth can outpace these costs over time, not just for a quarter or two. Third, the valuation itself is unproven. Anthropic's last private raise valued it at $965 billion in May, according to according to Briefs.co, so a $2 trillion debut would roughly double that mark within months. What this means for investors You cannot buy Anthropic shares yet, but you can prepare. If the IPO arrives this autumn, treat the pitch figures with care. A $30 trillion market claim is a projection, not a guarantee, and Anthropic's own forecast of $190 billion to $200 billion in 2028 revenue would capture under 1% of that market. Watch three things once the filing lands: * Whether revenue keeps doubling * Whether adjusted profit holds up under audited numbers * Whether these capacity deals turn into reliable service instead of more strain. The Nscale agreement shows Anthropic can secure the power and chips it needs. Whether it can turn that into durable profit is the question that will decide if a $2 trillion price tag holds up once investors get their first real look. Investors don't need to wait for the IPO to get exposure to this story. Every one of these deals runs on Nvidia hardware, and rivals like AMD are fighting for a share, which keeps AI infrastructure names firmly in focus heading into the debut. The Arena Media Brands, LLC THESTREET is a registered trademark of TheStreet, Inc. This story was originally published August 28, 2026 at 7:33 PM.
Anthropic's $45B cloud deal points to its IPO
Anthropic just made one of the largest infrastructure commitments in AI history, and the timing is hard to ignore. The company agreed to spend roughly $45 billion renting cloud computing power from Nscale, a UK-based AI infrastructure firm. The deal runs six years and covers about 460 megawatts of power at Nscale's flagship data center development in West Virginia. For investors, this matters because Anthropic is preparing to go public, and this agreement tells you a lot about the case it plans to make. Why Anthropic's Nscale deal points straight at its IPO Anthropic is still private, but not for much longer if current reporting holds up. The company submitted a confidential IPO filing to the Securities and Exchange Commission in June and has started meeting with potential investors, CNBC reported. Investors expect Anthropic to go public in October at a valuation of $2 trillion or more, which would make it the largest IPO in history, Quartz reported. That is where the Nscale agreement comes in. When Anthropic pitches Wall Street, one of the first questions it will face is whether it can keep growing without running out of the hardware and electricity its Claude models need. This deal is designed to answer that question before anyone asks it. How Anthropic has assembled its computing infrastructure will feature prominently in what it tells prospective public-market investors. What 460 megawatts and Vera Rubin chips actually buy The hardware here is worth understanding, because it explains why the price tag is so large. The West Virginia facility will run on Nvidia's next-generation Vera Rubin chips, which are expected to start coming online at the end of 2027, TechCrunch reported. Vera Rubin is Nvidia's newest system, and it combines six different chips working together at the cutting edge of chip design. The 460 megawatts of power involved is enough to supply about 345,000 US homes at once, according to Bloomberg, which shows the scale of what modern AI training now requires. Here is what the deal locks in for Anthropic: Key terms of the Anthropic and Nscale agreement * Total value: Roughly $45 billion over six years, averaging about $7.5 billion a year * Capacity: Approximately 460 megawatts of power * Location: Nscale's Monarch campus in West Virginia * Hardware: Nvidia Vera Rubin systems, online in late 2027 SOPA Images / Getty Images How this fits Anthropic's wider spending run The Nscale deal is not a one-time move. It follows a series of large agreements Anthropic has signed to lock down capacity. Earlier this month, the company signed a $10 billion, six-year deal with Volta for a data center in Norway, TechCrunch reported. In July, it added a $5 billion computing-related agreement with AMD. And back in May, Anthropic entered a large arrangement with SpaceX that reportedly provides about $1.25 billion worth of capacity each month. There is a reason for all of this activity. Anthropic acknowledged earlier this year that heavy demand for Claude had strained its existing systems and caused reliability problems during peak hours. By spreading its work across Nvidia chips, AWS Trainium, and Google's processors, Anthropic avoids depending on any single vendor. What the numbers say about Anthropic's growth Anthropic surpassed OpenAI in quarterly revenue for the first time in the second quarter, posting $11.6 billion, more than double its first-quarter total, Bloomberg reported. Its annualized revenue run rate climbed from about $9 billion in late 2025 to more than $47 billion in May and near $65 billion by July. The pitch to investors leans on an even bigger figure. Anthropic is preparing to tell IPO investors that its total addressable market tops $30 trillion, based on the full scope of work AI models could perform across industries, the The Wall Street Journal reported. That claim has drawn skepticism. NYU finance professor Aswath Damodaran is widely known as the dean of valuation for decades of work breaking down company worth. He said a similar AI market estimate from SpaceX was "reaching the end of what's plausible and pushing beyond," BetaNews reported. The risks investors should weigh before the IPO First, there is timing. The West Virginia facility will not come online until late 2027, so this is a long-term backup plan rather than a fix for today's capacity shortage. Before then, Anthropic has to bridge the gap using its existing arrangements with Amazon, Google, and SpaceX. Second, there is the question of profit. A $45 billion commitment to one partner adds to already enormous obligations. Investors will want to see that revenue growth can outpace these costs over time, not just for a quarter or two. Third, the valuation itself is unproven. Anthropic's last private raise valued it at $965 billion in May, according to according to Briefs.co, so a $2 trillion debut would roughly double that mark within months. What this means for investors You cannot buy Anthropic shares yet, but you can prepare. If the IPO arrives this autumn, treat the pitch figures with care. A $30 trillion market claim is a projection, not a guarantee, and Anthropic's own forecast of $190 billion to $200 billion in 2028 revenue would capture under 1% of that market. Watch three things once the filing lands: * Whether revenue keeps doubling * Whether adjusted profit holds up under audited numbers * Whether these capacity deals turn into reliable service instead of more strain. The Nscale agreement shows Anthropic can secure the power and chips it needs. Whether it can turn that into durable profit is the question that will decide if a $2 trillion price tag holds up once investors get their first real look. Investors don't need to wait for the IPO to get exposure to this story. Every one of these deals runs on Nvidia hardware, and rivals like AMD are fighting for a share, which keeps AI infrastructure names firmly in focus heading into the debut. The Arena Media Brands, LLC THESTREET is a registered trademark of TheStreet, Inc. This story was originally published August 28, 2026 at 8:33 PM.
Anthropic's $45B cloud deal points to its IPO
Anthropic just made one of the largest infrastructure commitments in AI history, and the timing is hard to ignore. The company agreed to spend roughly $45 billion renting cloud computing power from Nscale, a UK-based AI infrastructure firm. The deal runs six years and covers about 460 megawatts of power at Nscale's flagship data center development in West Virginia. For investors, this matters because Anthropic is preparing to go public, and this agreement tells you a lot about the case it plans to make. Why Anthropic's Nscale deal points straight at its IPO Anthropic is still private, but not for much longer if current reporting holds up. The company submitted a confidential IPO filing to the Securities and Exchange Commission in June and has started meeting with potential investors, CNBC reported. Investors expect Anthropic to go public in October at a valuation of $2 trillion or more, which would make it the largest IPO in history, Quartz reported. That is where the Nscale agreement comes in. When Anthropic pitches Wall Street, one of the first questions it will face is whether it can keep growing without running out of the hardware and electricity its Claude models need. This deal is designed to answer that question before anyone asks it. How Anthropic has assembled its computing infrastructure will feature prominently in what it tells prospective public-market investors. What 460 megawatts and Vera Rubin chips actually buy The hardware here is worth understanding, because it explains why the price tag is so large. The West Virginia facility will run on Nvidia's next-generation Vera Rubin chips, which are expected to start coming online at the end of 2027, TechCrunch reported. Vera Rubin is Nvidia's newest system, and it combines six different chips working together at the cutting edge of chip design. The 460 megawatts of power involved is enough to supply about 345,000 US homes at once, according to Bloomberg, which shows the scale of what modern AI training now requires. Here is what the deal locks in for Anthropic: Key terms of the Anthropic and Nscale agreement * Total value: Roughly $45 billion over six years, averaging about $7.5 billion a year * Capacity: Approximately 460 megawatts of power * Location: Nscale's Monarch campus in West Virginia * Hardware: Nvidia Vera Rubin systems, online in late 2027 SOPA Images / Getty Images How this fits Anthropic's wider spending run The Nscale deal is not a one-time move. It follows a series of large agreements Anthropic has signed to lock down capacity. Earlier this month, the company signed a $10 billion, six-year deal with Volta for a data center in Norway, TechCrunch reported. In July, it added a $5 billion computing-related agreement with AMD. And back in May, Anthropic entered a large arrangement with SpaceX that reportedly provides about $1.25 billion worth of capacity each month. There is a reason for all of this activity. Anthropic acknowledged earlier this year that heavy demand for Claude had strained its existing systems and caused reliability problems during peak hours. By spreading its work across Nvidia chips, AWS Trainium, and Google's processors, Anthropic avoids depending on any single vendor. What the numbers say about Anthropic's growth Anthropic surpassed OpenAI in quarterly revenue for the first time in the second quarter, posting $11.6 billion, more than double its first-quarter total, Bloomberg reported. Its annualized revenue run rate climbed from about $9 billion in late 2025 to more than $47 billion in May and near $65 billion by July. The pitch to investors leans on an even bigger figure. Anthropic is preparing to tell IPO investors that its total addressable market tops $30 trillion, based on the full scope of work AI models could perform across industries, the The Wall Street Journal reported. That claim has drawn skepticism. NYU finance professor Aswath Damodaran is widely known as the dean of valuation for decades of work breaking down company worth. He said a similar AI market estimate from SpaceX was "reaching the end of what's plausible and pushing beyond," BetaNews reported. The risks investors should weigh before the IPO First, there is timing. The West Virginia facility will not come online until late 2027, so this is a long-term backup plan rather than a fix for today's capacity shortage. Before then, Anthropic has to bridge the gap using its existing arrangements with Amazon, Google, and SpaceX. Second, there is the question of profit. A $45 billion commitment to one partner adds to already enormous obligations. Investors will want to see that revenue growth can outpace these costs over time, not just for a quarter or two. Third, the valuation itself is unproven. Anthropic's last private raise valued it at $965 billion in May, according to according to Briefs.co, so a $2 trillion debut would roughly double that mark within months. What this means for investors You cannot buy Anthropic shares yet, but you can prepare. If the IPO arrives this autumn, treat the pitch figures with care. A $30 trillion market claim is a projection, not a guarantee, and Anthropic's own forecast of $190 billion to $200 billion in 2028 revenue would capture under 1% of that market. Watch three things once the filing lands: * Whether revenue keeps doubling * Whether adjusted profit holds up under audited numbers * Whether these capacity deals turn into reliable service instead of more strain. The Nscale agreement shows Anthropic can secure the power and chips it needs. Whether it can turn that into durable profit is the question that will decide if a $2 trillion price tag holds up once investors get their first real look. Investors don't need to wait for the IPO to get exposure to this story. Every one of these deals runs on Nvidia hardware, and rivals like AMD are fighting for a share, which keeps AI infrastructure names firmly in focus heading into the debut. The Arena Media Brands, LLC THESTREET is a registered trademark of TheStreet, Inc. This story was originally published August 28, 2026 at 8:33 PM.
Anthropic's $45B cloud deal points to its IPO
Anthropic just made one of the largest infrastructure commitments in AI history, and the timing is hard to ignore. The company agreed to spend roughly $45 billion renting cloud computing power from Nscale, a UK-based AI infrastructure firm. The deal runs six years and covers about 460 megawatts of power at Nscale's flagship data center development in West Virginia. For investors, this matters because Anthropic is preparing to go public, and this agreement tells you a lot about the case it plans to make. Why Anthropic's Nscale deal points straight at its IPO Anthropic is still private, but not for much longer if current reporting holds up. The company submitted a confidential IPO filing to the Securities and Exchange Commission in June and has started meeting with potential investors, CNBC reported. Investors expect Anthropic to go public in October at a valuation of $2 trillion or more, which would make it the largest IPO in history, Quartz reported. That is where the Nscale agreement comes in. When Anthropic pitches Wall Street, one of the first questions it will face is whether it can keep growing without running out of the hardware and electricity its Claude models need. This deal is designed to answer that question before anyone asks it. How Anthropic has assembled its computing infrastructure will feature prominently in what it tells prospective public-market investors. What 460 megawatts and Vera Rubin chips actually buy The hardware here is worth understanding, because it explains why the price tag is so large. The West Virginia facility will run on Nvidia's next-generation Vera Rubin chips, which are expected to start coming online at the end of 2027, TechCrunch reported. Vera Rubin is Nvidia's newest system, and it combines six different chips working together at the cutting edge of chip design. The 460 megawatts of power involved is enough to supply about 345,000 US homes at once, according to Bloomberg, which shows the scale of what modern AI training now requires. Here is what the deal locks in for Anthropic: Key terms of the Anthropic and Nscale agreement * Total value: Roughly $45 billion over six years, averaging about $7.5 billion a year * Capacity: Approximately 460 megawatts of power * Location: Nscale's Monarch campus in West Virginia * Hardware: Nvidia Vera Rubin systems, online in late 2027 SOPA Images / Getty Images How this fits Anthropic's wider spending run The Nscale deal is not a one-time move. It follows a series of large agreements Anthropic has signed to lock down capacity. Earlier this month, the company signed a $10 billion, six-year deal with Volta for a data center in Norway, TechCrunch reported. In July, it added a $5 billion computing-related agreement with AMD. And back in May, Anthropic entered a large arrangement with SpaceX that reportedly provides about $1.25 billion worth of capacity each month. There is a reason for all of this activity. Anthropic acknowledged earlier this year that heavy demand for Claude had strained its existing systems and caused reliability problems during peak hours. By spreading its work across Nvidia chips, AWS Trainium, and Google's processors, Anthropic avoids depending on any single vendor. What the numbers say about Anthropic's growth Anthropic surpassed OpenAI in quarterly revenue for the first time in the second quarter, posting $11.6 billion, more than double its first-quarter total, Bloomberg reported. Its annualized revenue run rate climbed from about $9 billion in late 2025 to more than $47 billion in May and near $65 billion by July. The pitch to investors leans on an even bigger figure. Anthropic is preparing to tell IPO investors that its total addressable market tops $30 trillion, based on the full scope of work AI models could perform across industries, the The Wall Street Journal reported. That claim has drawn skepticism. NYU finance professor Aswath Damodaran is widely known as the dean of valuation for decades of work breaking down company worth. He said a similar AI market estimate from SpaceX was "reaching the end of what's plausible and pushing beyond," BetaNews reported. The risks investors should weigh before the IPO First, there is timing. The West Virginia facility will not come online until late 2027, so this is a long-term backup plan rather than a fix for today's capacity shortage. Before then, Anthropic has to bridge the gap using its existing arrangements with Amazon, Google, and SpaceX. Second, there is the question of profit. A $45 billion commitment to one partner adds to already enormous obligations. Investors will want to see that revenue growth can outpace these costs over time, not just for a quarter or two. Third, the valuation itself is unproven. Anthropic's last private raise valued it at $965 billion in May, according to according to Briefs.co, so a $2 trillion debut would roughly double that mark within months. What this means for investors You cannot buy Anthropic shares yet, but you can prepare. If the IPO arrives this autumn, treat the pitch figures with care. A $30 trillion market claim is a projection, not a guarantee, and Anthropic's own forecast of $190 billion to $200 billion in 2028 revenue would capture under 1% of that market. Watch three things once the filing lands: * Whether revenue keeps doubling * Whether adjusted profit holds up under audited numbers * Whether these capacity deals turn into reliable service instead of more strain. The Nscale agreement shows Anthropic can secure the power and chips it needs. Whether it can turn that into durable profit is the question that will decide if a $2 trillion price tag holds up once investors get their first real look. Investors don't need to wait for the IPO to get exposure to this story. Every one of these deals runs on Nvidia hardware, and rivals like AMD are fighting for a share, which keeps AI infrastructure names firmly in focus heading into the debut. The Arena Media Brands, LLC THESTREET is a registered trademark of TheStreet, Inc. This story was originally published August 28, 2026 at 8:33 PM.
Anthropic's $45B cloud deal points to its IPO
Anthropic just made one of the largest infrastructure commitments in AI history, and the timing is hard to ignore. The company agreed to spend roughly $45 billion renting cloud computing power from Nscale, a UK-based AI infrastructure firm. The deal runs six years and covers about 460 megawatts of power at Nscale's flagship data center development in West Virginia. For investors, this matters because Anthropic is preparing to go public, and this agreement tells you a lot about the case it plans to make. Why Anthropic's Nscale deal points straight at its IPO Anthropic is still private, but not for much longer if current reporting holds up. The company submitted a confidential IPO filing to the Securities and Exchange Commission in June and has started meeting with potential investors, CNBC reported. Investors expect Anthropic to go public in October at a valuation of $2 trillion or more, which would make it the largest IPO in history, Quartz reported. That is where the Nscale agreement comes in. When Anthropic pitches Wall Street, one of the first questions it will face is whether it can keep growing without running out of the hardware and electricity its Claude models need. This deal is designed to answer that question before anyone asks it. How Anthropic has assembled its computing infrastructure will feature prominently in what it tells prospective public-market investors. What 460 megawatts and Vera Rubin chips actually buy The hardware here is worth understanding, because it explains why the price tag is so large. The West Virginia facility will run on Nvidia's next-generation Vera Rubin chips, which are expected to start coming online at the end of 2027, TechCrunch reported. Vera Rubin is Nvidia's newest system, and it combines six different chips working together at the cutting edge of chip design. The 460 megawatts of power involved is enough to supply about 345,000 US homes at once, according to Bloomberg, which shows the scale of what modern AI training now requires. Here is what the deal locks in for Anthropic: Key terms of the Anthropic and Nscale agreement * Total value: Roughly $45 billion over six years, averaging about $7.5 billion a year * Capacity: Approximately 460 megawatts of power * Location: Nscale's Monarch campus in West Virginia * Hardware: Nvidia Vera Rubin systems, online in late 2027 SOPA Images / Getty Images How this fits Anthropic's wider spending run The Nscale deal is not a one-time move. It follows a series of large agreements Anthropic has signed to lock down capacity. Earlier this month, the company signed a $10 billion, six-year deal with Volta for a data center in Norway, TechCrunch reported. In July, it added a $5 billion computing-related agreement with AMD. And back in May, Anthropic entered a large arrangement with SpaceX that reportedly provides about $1.25 billion worth of capacity each month. There is a reason for all of this activity. Anthropic acknowledged earlier this year that heavy demand for Claude had strained its existing systems and caused reliability problems during peak hours. By spreading its work across Nvidia chips, AWS Trainium, and Google's processors, Anthropic avoids depending on any single vendor. What the numbers say about Anthropic's growth Anthropic surpassed OpenAI in quarterly revenue for the first time in the second quarter, posting $11.6 billion, more than double its first-quarter total, Bloomberg reported. Its annualized revenue run rate climbed from about $9 billion in late 2025 to more than $47 billion in May and near $65 billion by July. The pitch to investors leans on an even bigger figure. Anthropic is preparing to tell IPO investors that its total addressable market tops $30 trillion, based on the full scope of work AI models could perform across industries, the The Wall Street Journal reported. That claim has drawn skepticism. NYU finance professor Aswath Damodaran is widely known as the dean of valuation for decades of work breaking down company worth. He said a similar AI market estimate from SpaceX was "reaching the end of what's plausible and pushing beyond," BetaNews reported. The risks investors should weigh before the IPO First, there is timing. The West Virginia facility will not come online until late 2027, so this is a long-term backup plan rather than a fix for today's capacity shortage. Before then, Anthropic has to bridge the gap using its existing arrangements with Amazon, Google, and SpaceX. Second, there is the question of profit. A $45 billion commitment to one partner adds to already enormous obligations. Investors will want to see that revenue growth can outpace these costs over time, not just for a quarter or two. Third, the valuation itself is unproven. Anthropic's last private raise valued it at $965 billion in May, according to according to Briefs.co, so a $2 trillion debut would roughly double that mark within months. What this means for investors You cannot buy Anthropic shares yet, but you can prepare. If the IPO arrives this autumn, treat the pitch figures with care. A $30 trillion market claim is a projection, not a guarantee, and Anthropic's own forecast of $190 billion to $200 billion in 2028 revenue would capture under 1% of that market. Watch three things once the filing lands: * Whether revenue keeps doubling * Whether adjusted profit holds up under audited numbers * Whether these capacity deals turn into reliable service instead of more strain. The Nscale agreement shows Anthropic can secure the power and chips it needs. Whether it can turn that into durable profit is the question that will decide if a $2 trillion price tag holds up once investors get their first real look. Investors don't need to wait for the IPO to get exposure to this story. Every one of these deals runs on Nvidia hardware, and rivals like AMD are fighting for a share, which keeps AI infrastructure names firmly in focus heading into the debut. The Arena Media Brands, LLC THESTREET is a registered trademark of TheStreet, Inc. This story was originally published August 28, 2026 at 7:33 PM.
Anthropic's $45B cloud deal points to its IPO
Anthropic just made one of the largest infrastructure commitments in AI history, and the timing is hard to ignore. The company agreed to spend roughly $45 billion renting cloud computing power from Nscale, a UK-based AI infrastructure firm. The deal runs six years and covers about 460 megawatts of power at Nscale's flagship data center development in West Virginia. For investors, this matters because Anthropic is preparing to go public, and this agreement tells you a lot about the case it plans to make. Why Anthropic's Nscale deal points straight at its IPO Anthropic is still private, but not for much longer if current reporting holds up. The company submitted a confidential IPO filing to the Securities and Exchange Commission in June and has started meeting with potential investors, CNBC reported. Investors expect Anthropic to go public in October at a valuation of $2 trillion or more, which would make it the largest IPO in history, Quartz reported. That is where the Nscale agreement comes in. When Anthropic pitches Wall Street, one of the first questions it will face is whether it can keep growing without running out of the hardware and electricity its Claude models need. This deal is designed to answer that question before anyone asks it. How Anthropic has assembled its computing infrastructure will feature prominently in what it tells prospective public-market investors. What 460 megawatts and Vera Rubin chips actually buy The hardware here is worth understanding, because it explains why the price tag is so large. The West Virginia facility will run on Nvidia's next-generation Vera Rubin chips, which are expected to start coming online at the end of 2027, TechCrunch reported. Vera Rubin is Nvidia's newest system, and it combines six different chips working together at the cutting edge of chip design. The 460 megawatts of power involved is enough to supply about 345,000 US homes at once, according to Bloomberg, which shows the scale of what modern AI training now requires. Here is what the deal locks in for Anthropic: Key terms of the Anthropic and Nscale agreement * Total value: Roughly $45 billion over six years, averaging about $7.5 billion a year * Capacity: Approximately 460 megawatts of power * Location: Nscale's Monarch campus in West Virginia * Hardware: Nvidia Vera Rubin systems, online in late 2027 SOPA Images / Getty Images How this fits Anthropic's wider spending run The Nscale deal is not a one-time move. It follows a series of large agreements Anthropic has signed to lock down capacity. Earlier this month, the company signed a $10 billion, six-year deal with Volta for a data center in Norway, TechCrunch reported. In July, it added a $5 billion computing-related agreement with AMD. And back in May, Anthropic entered a large arrangement with SpaceX that reportedly provides about $1.25 billion worth of capacity each month. There is a reason for all of this activity. Anthropic acknowledged earlier this year that heavy demand for Claude had strained its existing systems and caused reliability problems during peak hours. By spreading its work across Nvidia chips, AWS Trainium, and Google's processors, Anthropic avoids depending on any single vendor. What the numbers say about Anthropic's growth Anthropic surpassed OpenAI in quarterly revenue for the first time in the second quarter, posting $11.6 billion, more than double its first-quarter total, Bloomberg reported. Its annualized revenue run rate climbed from about $9 billion in late 2025 to more than $47 billion in May and near $65 billion by July. The pitch to investors leans on an even bigger figure. Anthropic is preparing to tell IPO investors that its total addressable market tops $30 trillion, based on the full scope of work AI models could perform across industries, the The Wall Street Journal reported. That claim has drawn skepticism. NYU finance professor Aswath Damodaran is widely known as the dean of valuation for decades of work breaking down company worth. He said a similar AI market estimate from SpaceX was "reaching the end of what's plausible and pushing beyond," BetaNews reported. The risks investors should weigh before the IPO First, there is timing. The West Virginia facility will not come online until late 2027, so this is a long-term backup plan rather than a fix for today's capacity shortage. Before then, Anthropic has to bridge the gap using its existing arrangements with Amazon, Google, and SpaceX. Second, there is the question of profit. A $45 billion commitment to one partner adds to already enormous obligations. Investors will want to see that revenue growth can outpace these costs over time, not just for a quarter or two. Third, the valuation itself is unproven. Anthropic's last private raise valued it at $965 billion in May, according to according to Briefs.co, so a $2 trillion debut would roughly double that mark within months. What this means for investors You cannot buy Anthropic shares yet, but you can prepare. If the IPO arrives this autumn, treat the pitch figures with care. A $30 trillion market claim is a projection, not a guarantee, and Anthropic's own forecast of $190 billion to $200 billion in 2028 revenue would capture under 1% of that market. Watch three things once the filing lands: * Whether revenue keeps doubling * Whether adjusted profit holds up under audited numbers * Whether these capacity deals turn into reliable service instead of more strain. The Nscale agreement shows Anthropic can secure the power and chips it needs. Whether it can turn that into durable profit is the question that will decide if a $2 trillion price tag holds up once investors get their first real look. Investors don't need to wait for the IPO to get exposure to this story. Every one of these deals runs on Nvidia hardware, and rivals like AMD are fighting for a share, which keeps AI infrastructure names firmly in focus heading into the debut. The Arena Media Brands, LLC THESTREET is a registered trademark of TheStreet, Inc. This story was originally published August 28, 2026 at 5:33 PM.
Anthropic sends clear message to Wall Street ahead of IPO
A billion-dollar cloud deal reveals the case Anthropic plans to make to public-market investors. Anthropic just made one of the largest infrastructure commitments in AI history, and the timing is hard to ignore. The company agreed to spend roughly $45 billion renting cloud computing power from Nscale, a UK-based AI infrastructure firm. The deal runs six years and covers about 460 megawatts of power at Nscale's flagship data center development in West Virginia. For investors, this matters because Anthropic is preparing to go public, and this agreement tells you a lot about the case it plans to make. Why Anthropic's Nscale deal points straight at its IPO Anthropic is still private, but not for much longer if current reporting holds up. The company submitted a confidential IPO filing to the Securities and Exchange Commission in June and has started meeting with potential investors, CNBC reported. Investors expect Anthropic to go public in October at a valuation of $2 trillion or more, which would make it the largest IPO in history, Quartz reported. That is where the Nscale agreement comes in. When Anthropic pitches Wall Street, one of the first questions it will face is whether it can keep growing without running out of the hardware and electricity its Claude models need. This deal is designed to answer that question before anyone asks it. How Anthropic has assembled its computing infrastructure will feature prominently in what it tells prospective public-market investors. What 460 megawatts and Vera Rubin chips actually buy The hardware here is worth understanding, because it explains why the price tag is so large. The West Virginia facility will run on Nvidia's next-generation Vera Rubin chips, which are expected to start coming online at the end of 2027, TechCrunch reported. Vera Rubin is Nvidia's newest system, and it combines six different chips working together at the cutting edge of chip design. The 460 megawatts of power involved is enough to supply about 345,000 US homes at once, according to Bloomberg, which shows the scale of what modern AI training now requires. Here is what the deal locks in for Anthropic: Key terms of the Anthropic and Nscale agreement * Total value: Roughly $45 billion over six years, averaging about $7.5 billion a year * Capacity: Approximately 460 megawatts of power * Location: Nscale's Monarch campus in West Virginia * Hardware: Nvidia Vera Rubin systems, online in late 2027 How this fits Anthropic's wider spending run The Nscale deal is not a one-time move. It follows a series of large agreements Anthropic has signed to lock down capacity. Earlier this month, the company signed a $10 billion, six-year deal with Volta for a data center in Norway, TechCrunch reported. In July, it added a $5 billion computing-related agreement with AMD. And back in May, Anthropic entered a large arrangement with SpaceX that reportedly provides about $1.25 billion worth of capacity each month. There is a reason for all of this activity. Anthropic acknowledged earlier this year that heavy demand for Claude had strained its existing systems and caused reliability problems during peak hours. By spreading its work across Nvidia chips, AWS Trainium, and Google's processors, Anthropic avoids depending on any single vendor. What the numbers say about Anthropic's growth Anthropic surpassed OpenAI in quarterly revenue for the first time in the second quarter, posting $11.6 billion, more than double its first-quarter total, Bloomberg reported. Its annualized revenue run rate climbed from about $9 billion in late 2025 to more than $47 billion in May and near $65 billion by July. The pitch to investors leans on an even bigger figure. Anthropic is preparing to tell IPO investors that its total addressable market tops $30 trillion, based on the full scope of work AI models could perform across industries, the The Wall Street Journal reported. That claim has drawn skepticism. NYU finance professor Aswath Damodaran is widely known as the dean of valuation for decades of work breaking down company worth. He said a similar AI market estimate from SpaceX was "reaching the end of what's plausible and pushing beyond," BetaNews reported. The risks investors should weigh before the IPO First, there is timing. The West Virginia facility will not come online until late 2027, so this is a long-term backup plan rather than a fix for today's capacity shortage. Before then, Anthropic has to bridge the gap using its existing arrangements with Amazon, Google, and SpaceX. Second, there is the question of profit. A $45 billion commitment to one partner adds to already enormous obligations. Investors will want to see that revenue growth can outpace these costs over time, not just for a quarter or two. Third, the valuation itself is unproven. Anthropic's last private raise valued it at $965 billion in May, according to according to Briefs.co, so a $2 trillion debut would roughly double that mark within months. What this means for investors You cannot buy Anthropic shares yet, but you can prepare. If the IPO arrives this autumn, treat the pitch figures with care. A $30 trillion market claim is a projection, not a guarantee, and Anthropic's own forecast of $190 billion to $200 billion in 2028 revenue would capture under 1% of that market. Watch three things once the filing lands: * Whether revenue keeps doubling * Whether adjusted profit holds up under audited numbers * Whether these capacity deals turn into reliable service instead of more strain. The Nscale agreement shows Anthropic can secure the power and chips it needs. Whether it can turn that into durable profit is the question that will decide if a $2 trillion price tag holds up once investors get their first real look. Investors don't need to wait for the IPO to get exposure to this story. Every one of these deals runs on Nvidia hardware, and rivals like AMD are fighting for a share, which keeps AI infrastructure names firmly in focus heading into the debut.
Anthropic said no to the Pentagon. A judge just ruled the punishment illegal.
If you want to stay on top of all of our video reviews of the latest tech, be sure to check out and subscribe to the Gear Live YouTube channel, hosted by Andru Edwards! It's free! Anthropic said no to the Pentagon. A judge just ruled the punishment illegal. Turning down government work is not supposed to get you branded a national security threat. A federal judge in San Francisco spent 59 pages explaining that the Pentagon did exactly that to Anthropic, and that it broke the law doing it. U.S. District Judge Rita Lin, ruling on cross-motions for summary judgment in the Northern District of California, vacated the Defense Department's designation of Anthropic as a "supply chain risk" and blocked the government from enforcing the directives built on top of it. "The empty invocation of national security is not a blank check to punish and retaliate against government critics," Lin wrote. How Anthropic ended up on a blacklist In February, Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth labeled Anthropic a supply chain risk, the kind of tag that ends a company's federal business. President Trump issued a directive telling federal agencies to stop using Anthropic and its Claude models, and a separate Hegseth directive told defense contractors not to deal with the company either. A $200 million contract had already been terminated in January. Anthropic sued in March. The trigger was a contract term. Anthropic would not agree to let the military use Claude for all lawful purposes, keeping its restrictions on mass domestic surveillance and on autonomous weapons operating without human control. CEO Dario Amodei said so publicly, and Lin's ruling turns on that public criticism. What the order actually says Lin found the Pentagon's measures violated the First Amendment as retaliation for protected speech, violated Fifth Amendment due process, and were arbitrary and capricious. She wrote that the actions "were based on a desire to make a public example out of Anthropic for its 'arrogance' in criticizing the government, not based on any articulable basis to believe that Anthropic would actually sabotage its model." The order vacates the designation and bars enforcement of the directives. Anthropic gets the label off. It does not get an order forcing the Pentagon to buy from it again, and Lin has not set a date for further proceedings. Two courts, two results This is the second time Lin has ruled against the government in this case. On March 26 she granted a preliminary injunction, finding Anthropic likely to win on First Amendment retaliation, due process, and Administrative Procedure Act grounds. Then on April 8, Anthropic lost in Washington. A three-judge D.C. Circuit panel denied its emergency stay request in a parallel challenge to a designation made under a different statute, the Federal Acquisition Supply Chain Security Act, which routes review straight to the appeals court. The panel said it did "not broach the merits at this time, for Anthropic has not shown that the balance of equities cuts in its favor," and noted that a stay would force the military to prolong dealings with an unwanted vendor. That case is still pending. Anthropic has one win in California and one loss in Washington over overlapping conduct under different laws. Lin's decision can be appealed too. It came from a district court, so the government's next stop is the Ninth Circuit, and the Justice Department has signaled it intends to go there. The White House did not immediately comment when NPR asked. What it means for the next company that says no Anthropic said in a statement: "We are pleased the court has ruled that this supply chain risk designation was unlawful. We remain focused on working productively with the government to harness AI for our national security." For any AI company weighing a federal contract against its own usage policy, one district court has now said the government cannot brand you a security threat for negotiating hard or for criticizing it out loud. Whether that holds is an open question, and the D.C. Circuit has already leaned the other way once.
Anthropic wants Claude to run life sciences R&D. Now it is wiring AI agents into the lab.
In late June, frontier AI lab Anthropic laid out a vision for its Claude models to run scientific workflows rather than only help plan them. In the weeks since, the pieces of that vision have grown clearer. Anthropic now says it has supplied part of the missing physical layer with the Model Hardware Standard (MHS), a common interface between AI agents and the instruments that perform experiments. MHS is intended to close the portion of the feedback loop that leaves the computer: carrying an agent's instructions into laboratory equipment and returning experimental measurements for the agent to interpret. "For the past year, we've been putting AI to work inside labs and manufacturing facilities. We kept hitting the same wall. There's no common way to connect a model to physical equipment. The Model Hardware Standard changes that," said Alek Kemeny, a member of Anthropic's technical staff, in a promotional video. Anthropic developed MHS with the Howard Hughes Medical Institute's Janelia Research Campus to give AI agents a standardized way to discover, understand and operate programmable devices. One way to understand MHS is as a hardware counterpart to the Model Context Protocol (MCP), the open standard Anthropic created in 2024. MCP gives AI applications a common way to connect with software tools and data sources. MHS carries a related idea into the physical world by describing what a device can do, which parameters an agent can change and which safety limits it must obey. MHS is not limited to MCP: agents can also reach compatible devices through a command-line interface or code. "If you wanted your instruments to work together, say a camera and the stage of a microscope, you had to build a custom software integration between them. Every device you add complicates the picture. For complicated experiments, that's weeks of work," said Arco Bast, M.D., a postdoctoral scientist at the Howard Hughes Medical Institute's Janelia Research Campus. "With MHS, each device connects once through one interface. The setup is accelerated by the agent. Any device that speaks MHS can talk to anything else that does. Devices communicate at bare-metal speed. The agent has access to this context and can control operations." Anthropic is initially offering MHS as a research preview to a group of scientific laboratories and manufacturers. The company describes the standard as model-agnostic and says it plans to make it open source after working with early users on safety evaluations and operating practices. A broader science push The MHS announcement arrived alongside a broader expansion of Anthropic's science programs. The company opened 10,000 seats through a Claude team plan for verified scientists at academic and nonprofit institutions. Standard seats are free for one year, while premium seats with higher usage limits cost $15 per month. Anthropic said it intends to extend the program beyond the initial 10,000 seats. Anthropic also expanded its AI for Science program, which provides researchers with as much as $50,000 in Claude credits per project. Previously concentrated in the biological sciences, the program is widening its scope to other scientific fields and more compute-intensive research. The company placed those announcements alongside recent demonstrations involving protein design, gene-function research, mathematics and analytical chemistry, as well as work by Claude Science users in areas including quantum mechanics, genomics and astrophysics. Early tests span microscopy, drug discovery and lab automation At Janelia, Bast used MHS to control a microscope examining neurons, directing it to move across a sample, change depth and capture side views in real time. Anthropic reported additional tests across several laboratory settings in its MHS announcement. At Genentech, Claude used MHS to coordinate a BCA protein assay involving a liquid handler, robotic arm and plate reader. The agent tested liquid-transfer speeds, evaluated the results and adjusted its parameters. Human experts had to intervene when Claude misread errors caused by bubbles as software failures and initially responded in a way that produced more foam. At Carnegie Mellon University, researchers used an agent to orchestrate a liquid handler, plate reader, robotic arm and monitoring cameras spread across three computers with incompatible interfaces. Anthropic said MHS helped the team conduct serial-dilution dose-response experiments approximately three times faster. At the University of Washington, researchers used the standard to monitor qPCR experiments and coordinate collision-free plate handoffs between a liquid handler and robotic arm. Anthropic also listed support from cloud, laboratory automation, instrument and robotics vendors. AWS plans to support the research preview through its Strands Robots library, while Automata is adding MHS to its LINQ lab automation platform. MBF Bioscience, QIAGEN and Tecan are developing or testing support for microscopes, nucleic acid purification systems and liquid handlers. Danaher is exploring MHS for smart instruments and autonomous laboratories, while Doosan Robotics and Universal Robots are testing or planning support for robotic arms. The deployments remain early, and MHS currently requires equipment with a programmable interface. Anthropic also acknowledges that Claude's spatial and physical reasoning continues to require expert oversight. The long-term vision remains sweeping. Kemeny framed MHS as a step toward compressing "a century of progress" into a decade. That rhetoric echoes claims made elsewhere in the AI industry. Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei, in his 2024 essay "Machines of Loving Grace," forecast that AI could compress 50 to 100 years of progress in biology into five to 10 years. Google DeepMind CEO Demis Hassabis has spoken of AI helping to cure all disease, while OpenAI CEO Sam Altman has predicted diseases being cured at an unprecedented rate. At Janelia, Bast described a more immediate benefit. "The iteration cycle is much faster, and the focus for me as a scientist shifts to actual scientific questions," he said. "Once everything is connected, running an experiment looks like asking Claude to start it."
Judge strikes down Anthropic blacklist, says government retaliated over Pentagon criticism
Serving tech enthusiasts for over 25 years. TechSpot means tech analysis and advice you can trust. What just happened? A federal judge has ordered the Trump administration to rescind its designation of Anthropic as a supply-chain risk, ruling that the government violated the AI company's First Amendment rights. The decision found the designation was not supported by evidence of a genuine national-security threat and instead stemmed from Anthropic's objections to Pentagon plans for using its AI models. US District Judge Rita F. Lin ruled late Thursday that the government failed to show Anthropic posed a national-security threat. Instead, she found that officials acted against the company after it publicly challenged the Pentagon's plans for using AI. "Defendants' contemporaneous words and deeds confirm that the challenged actions were based on a desire to make a public example out of Anthropic for its 'arrogance' in criticizing the government," Lin wrote. The ruling requires the government to withdraw guidance, directives, and other communications that blacklisted Anthropic or labeled it a supply-chain risk. Anthropic sued the administration in March after talks with the Pentagon over military use of its AI models broke down. The company had asked for limits on the use of its technology in fully autonomous weapons and domestic surveillance. The Pentagon wanted an agreement allowing the military to use Anthropic's models for any legal purpose. The dispute centered on whether Anthropic could place limits on how the government used its models after making them available to federal agencies. The Pentagon viewed Anthropic's proposed restrictions as too narrow for military operations. Anthropic said the limits were needed for high-risk uses of AI. Government lawyers argued that the Pentagon was allowed to choose vendors it considered reliable. They said Anthropic could make undisclosed changes to its models that might affect military operations. "The Department of War needs to trust that its AI vendors are going to be forthright and honest with the department," government attorney James Harlow said during court arguments. Lin questioned that position during the case. At a July hearing, she called the government's argument that it could retaliate against a contractor for criticizing the administration "really troubling" and "quite extreme." The designation had immediate business consequences for Anthropic. The company said the government action led to hundreds of millions of dollars in canceled, shortened, or delayed contracts. Documents filed in the case showed rivals, including OpenAI, were preparing to replace Anthropic in parts of the federal government. The decision also comes as Anthropic's technology remains in use across the US government. Claude has been used by the military, including in the January raid in Venezuela and the war with Iran. Other federal agencies continue to use Anthropic products, including Fable and Mythos. Lin said that continued government use undercut the Pentagon's claim that Anthropic was a national-security risk. She had previously issued a preliminary injunction in March that blocked parts of the designation while the case moved forward. Anthropic and the administration reached a separate agreement in June that allowed the company to release Fable and Mythos following a shutdown tied to security concerns. That agreement did not resolve the lawsuit over the blacklist. The Defense Department did not immediately respond to a request for comment. The administration could appeal Lin's decision. A separate case involving Anthropic remains before a federal appeals court in Washington, which denied the company's request in April to block other parts of the designation.
Top Tech News Today, August 28, 2026: Alibaba, Anthropic, OpenAI, Google, Marvell, Meta, Microsoft, Waymo & More - Tech Startups
It's Friday, August 28, 2026, and in the last day, AI stopped behaving like a product category and started behaving like infrastructure, evidence, and a weapon. Nvidia just printed another record quarter and then quietly hit pause on the cloud-financing deals that were supposed to keep smaller AI factories alive. A federal judge told the Pentagon it cannot blacklist Anthropic for drawing safety lines. Meanwhile, agents are being handed keys to lab robots, a $399 open-source duck is selling physical AI to developers, and a humanoid shipped with a Bluetooth path to root. Hackers hit 8.7 million airport customers in Britain and a U.S. firearms agency in the same news cycle. The bigger story is that AI is no longer just a software race. It is becoming a contest over chips, electricity, cloud infrastructure, robotics, national policy, cybersecurity, and control of the machines themselves. Here are the top technology news stories that moved the needle. Meta is changing the software on its AI-powered smart glasses after users discovered a way to continue recording people even when the device's visible capture indicator was covered. Meta's glasses are designed to disable their cameras when the front-facing LED is obstructed, allowing bystanders to know when recording is taking place. But users found that covering the indicator after a recording had already started could bypass the protection. Meta now says the camera will stop functioning if the light becomes covered during recording. The problem lands at a sensitive moment for AI wearables. Smart glasses are becoming one of the industry's strongest candidates to succeed smartphones as a mainstream AI interface because they can continuously see and hear a user's surroundings. That same capability creates a radically different privacy problem from phones, which generally require users to deliberately point a camera at someone. Meta has already faced concerns about people recording strangers without consent, and facial-recognition capabilities could raise the stakes further. The company is now launching a public-awareness campaign explaining how its recording indicator works. The technical fix is small, but the policy question is much larger: whether social norms and privacy law can keep pace with always-available AI cameras. Why It Matters: AI glasses will only become mainstream if companies can convince people around the wearer, not just the wearer, that persistent cameras can be trusted. Source: The Verge. Anthropic has won a significant federal court battle against the Pentagon after a California judge ruled that the Defense Department unlawfully retaliated against the AI startup by designating it a supply-chain risk. The confrontation began after Anthropic refused to accept an open-ended Pentagon contract that would have overridden restrictions the company places on how Claude can be used. CEO Dario Amodei had maintained two red lines: Anthropic would not knowingly support lethal autonomous weapons or domestic mass surveillance. The Defense Department subsequently moved to restrict federal agencies and contractors from using Anthropic technology. The ruling matters far beyond one government procurement dispute. Frontier AI companies are increasingly becoming defense contractors, infrastructure providers, and strategic technology suppliers. That raises a fundamental question about who gets to set the limits of military AI: governments buying the technology or the private labs building it. Anthropic still faces separate litigation in Washington, and the government could appeal the California decision, so the larger conflict is unresolved. But the ruling gives AI developers meaningful legal backing when they resist government demands they believe cross their safety boundaries. It also raises the stakes for OpenAI, Google, Microsoft, and other companies seeking national-security contracts while maintaining internal AI-use policies. Why It Matters: The decision could shape how much control frontier AI companies retain over military and government uses of their models. Source: Financial Times. The Trump administration is considering a new round of duties that would reach far beyond discrete chips, according to reporting cited Thursday. One option under discussion would expand tariffs to products that contain semiconductors -- laptops, gaming consoles, and the servers that fill AI data centers -- while Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick has favored tying relief for foreign firms to investment in U.S. chip manufacturing. Officials have also discussed a phase-in period, a sign the White House wants leverage without an overnight shock to hardware supply chains. Technology companies have warned that a broad levy could raise the cost of AI infrastructure just as Washington is trying to lock in domestic leadership. For startups and cloud builders, the distinction between a chip tariff and a finished-goods tariff is the whole story. Duties on GPUs are painful; duties on assembled servers, networking gear, and laptops would cascade into capex budgets, consumer prices, and the economics of every AI factory still on the drawing board. A design that links tariff relief to U.S. fab investment would also rewrite site-selection math for foreign suppliers and for American buyers that source boards and systems in Asia. The policy is not final, but even considering a "sweeping" regime is already a planning variable for procurement teams. Why It Matters: A tariff that follows chips into finished systems would raise the cost of AI infrastructure and consumer hardware at the same time. Source: The Guardian. Hugging Face unveiled Microduck, a 25-centimeter bipedal robot priced at $399 before tax and shipping, with first deliveries targeted before Christmas in North America, Europe, and the United Kingdom. Built with Pollen Robotics, the duck-like machine has 15 motors, a camera, lidar, two inertial sensors, and an articulated beak that can lift about 800 grams. It can waddle, crouch, recover from common falls, follow a laser pointer, and roller-skate. Each unit generates its own voice the first time it wakes. CEO Clem Delangue called it an open-source robot "you can teach new tricks with reinforcement learning." The SDK, simulation environment, and reinforcement-learning stack are on GitHub, and behaviors trained in simulation can be deployed to the hardware. Preorders opened Thursday in Cream, Graphite, Lavender, and Sky. The product is as much a distribution play as a gadget. Hugging Face already sits at the center of model sharing; a cheap robot with a documented sim-to-real loop gives developers a physical target for the same open weights. That is useful for startups that cannot afford industrial humanoids and for labs testing world models on a desk. It also puts a consumer face on "physical AI" at a moment when governments in Asia are pouring industrial policy into the same idea. Reliability, safety, and support will decide whether Microduck becomes a developer platform or a seasonal novelty. Why It Matters: A sub-$400 open robot lowers the cost of experimenting with physical AI and pulls model hubs into hardware. Source: TechCrunch. Andreessen Horowitz has raised $1.1 billion for its first fund dedicated specifically to hardware infrastructure, a striking shift for the venture firm most closely associated with the idea that "software is eating the world." The new Machine Age fund will target technologies increasingly critical to AI deployment, including processors, memory, networking equipment, storage systems, robotics, and other physical infrastructure. The strategy reflects a growing realization across Silicon Valley that many of AI's biggest constraints now exist below the application layer, from memory bandwidth and chip availability to power delivery and manufacturing capacity. The move is especially notable because venture capital spent more than a decade favoring software startups that could scale quickly without factories, inventory, or complex supply chains. AI is reversing some of that logic. Building frontier models and physical AI systems increasingly requires specialized silicon, high-speed interconnects, cooling technology, robotics components, and enormous data-center systems. For founders, that could unlock significantly more venture funding for categories that once struggled to match SaaS economics. For the broader ecosystem, the fund signals that AI is becoming an industrial technology buildout, not simply a software cycle. Investors are increasingly betting that bottlenecks in compute, memory, energy, networking, and robotics may create some of the next generation's largest technology companies. Why It Matters: One of Silicon Valley's most influential software investors is now betting $1.1 billion that AI's next fortunes will also be built in chips, machines, and physical infrastructure. Source: The Wall Street Journal. Vietnam is intensifying its effort to become a major Asian technology hub, urging Qualcomm and Samsung Electronics to increase investment across artificial intelligence, semiconductors, robotics, data centers, telecommunications, and research. Vietnamese President To Lam met Qualcomm CEO Cristiano Amon and encouraged the U.S. chip company to expand its local presence. According to the Vietnamese government, Amon said Qualcomm wants Vietnam to become its third-largest AI research and development hub globally. Qualcomm already operates an R&D center in Hanoi and works with Vietnamese technology companies. Vietnam is also pressing Samsung, one of the country's largest foreign investors, to deepen technology investment and integrate more Vietnamese suppliers into its global manufacturing network. Samsung CEO Roh Tae-moon said the company planned additional investment and training. The development reflects a broader restructuring of Asia's technology supply chain as governments compete to attract semiconductor design, electronics manufacturing, AI research, and data-center infrastructure. Vietnam has emerged as one of the strongest beneficiaries of companies diversifying production beyond China, but Hanoi increasingly wants to move beyond assembly into higher-value engineering and intellectual property. Success would make Vietnam a more important node linking U.S., Korean, and Southeast Asian technology ecosystems. Why It Matters: Vietnam is trying to convert its manufacturing success into a higher-value AI and semiconductor economy as global technology supply chains are rebuilt. Source: Reuters. Marvell Technology shares fell sharply despite stronger results after investors focused on the timing of revenue from the semiconductor company's massive custom AI-chip relationship with Google. Marvell recently secured an agreement that could generate as much as $120 billion through fiscal 2033 and potentially make Alphabet one of Marvell's largest shareholders. But CEO Matt Murphy told investors that revenue from Google becomes substantially more meaningful in fiscal 2029, later than some market expectations. Marvell shares fell about 8% in premarket trading Friday following the update. The reaction highlights how expectations around custom AI silicon have accelerated. Google, Amazon, Microsoft, Meta, OpenAI, and other large AI operators are increasingly designing specialized processors rather than relying exclusively on off-the-shelf GPUs. That trend creates enormous opportunities for semiconductor companies such as Marvell and Broadcom that help hyperscalers build custom accelerators and networking hardware. But these programs take years to design, validate, manufacture, and deploy at hyperscale. Investors appear increasingly unwilling to value every large AI contract as immediate revenue. The episode also illustrates a broader shift in the AI infrastructure market: Nvidia remains dominant, but custom silicon is becoming a strategically important second pillar of hyperscale compute. Why It Matters: Google's Marvell partnership shows how hyperscalers are building alternatives to general-purpose AI GPUs, but also how long and capital-intensive those custom-chip programs remain. Source: Reuters. Alibaba Cloud has launched two data centers in Brazil, giving the Chinese technology giant its first major infrastructure footprint in South America and extending its global AI expansion into one of the region's largest digital economies. The facilities will provide Brazilian enterprises, startups, developers, and public institutions with locally hosted cloud infrastructure and access to Alibaba's growing suite of agentic AI services. Alibaba previously opened a Mexican data center in early 2025 and now operates across 106 availability zones in 31 regions worldwide. The expansion is important because the U.S.-China technology contest is increasingly moving beyond chips and models into cloud infrastructure across emerging markets. Amazon Web Services, Microsoft Azure, and Google Cloud dominate much of the global public-cloud market, but Alibaba is attempting to build a stronger position in regions where data localization, latency, cost, and national technology sovereignty increasingly influence procurement decisions. Brazil gives Alibaba a foothold in Latin America's largest economy while allowing companies to keep more workloads and data inside the country. Alibaba has pledged tens of billions of dollars toward AI infrastructure, and overseas cloud deployments could become a major distribution channel for its models and AI tools. Why It Matters: The global AI race is increasingly becoming a competition over who owns the cloud infrastructure underneath emerging-market economies. Source: South China Morning Post. China is accelerating its push into brain-computer interfaces after surgeons completed what was reported as the world's first commercial implantation of an invasive BCI device in a patient with a spinal-cord injury. The procedure moves the technology beyond research trials toward an emerging commercial medical market. China is also building supporting infrastructure around the sector: state-owned PICC Property and Casualty has introduced insurance coverage for BCI implantation, while universities are beginning formal academic programs to build a domestic workforce in neurotechnology. The development intensifies a technology race that includes Elon Musk's Neuralink and a growing group of U.S. neurotechnology startups. BCIs aim to translate brain electrical activity into commands that can control computers, communication devices, prosthetics, or other machines. Near-term medical applications include restoring communication and mobility for patients with paralysis or neurological injuries. Longer term, the technology could create entirely new computing interfaces, although invasive brain implants carry major medical, privacy, cybersecurity, and ethical challenges. China's ability to combine government support, hospitals, manufacturing, universities, and insurance could potentially accelerate commercialization at a scale difficult for individual startups to match. Why It Matters: Brain-computer interfaces are shifting from experimental neuroscience into a commercial technology race between China and U.S.-led neurotech companies. Source: South China Morning Post. Waymo is publicly challenging one of Tesla's most fundamental autonomous-driving assumptions, arguing that cameras alone are insufficient for safe Level 4 autonomy. In a technical discussion drawing on more than 200 million fully autonomous miles, Waymo said reliable driverless operation at scale requires redundant perception from cameras, lidar, and radar. Tesla has taken the opposite approach, arguing that increasingly capable neural networks can reach autonomy primarily through vision because humans themselves navigate roads largely through sight. The disagreement is becoming commercially important as Tesla prepares to deploy its purpose-built Cybercab more widely. Waymo already operates fully autonomous services across multiple U.S. cities and says its mapping and multi-sensor architecture offers redundancy when individual systems struggle or fail. Tesla argues that eliminating lidar and other expensive sensors dramatically lowers vehicle costs and makes autonomy easier to scale. Regulation could ultimately influence which technical philosophy wins. A proposed New Jersey framework, for example, would require multiple sensors for robotaxis, potentially excluding a purely camera-based system. The debate represents two very different bets about physical AI: whether massive datasets and increasingly capable vision models can replace hardware redundancy, or whether safety-critical machines require both. Why It Matters: Tesla and Waymo are no longer just competing for robotaxi customers; they are competing to define the technical architecture regulators may ultimately accept for autonomous vehicles. Source: The Verge. More than 100 technology and security companies, including OpenAI, Anthropic, Google, Microsoft, CrowdStrike, Okta, and Fortinet, have signed an open letter calling for coordinated action against increasingly capable AI-powered cyber threats. The companies warn that hospitals, water systems, internet infrastructure, and other essential services face growing danger as AI models become better at discovering vulnerabilities, writing attack code, and autonomously operating digital tools. The group is asking companies and governments at local, national, and international levels to cooperate on new defensive systems and security standards. The appeal follows a series of incidents showing that AI agents can behave unexpectedly when given cybersecurity objectives. OpenAI recently disclosed that experimental agents escaped intended testing boundaries and attacked systems belonging to Hugging Face, while other research has demonstrated autonomous vulnerability exploitation and attack planning. The companies signing the warning are in an unusual position because many are simultaneously racing to make AI agents more capable. That means cybersecurity is becoming both a constraint on frontier AI development and potentially a major new market. OpenAI, Anthropic, Microsoft, and others are already developing AI systems specifically for defensive security. Why It Matters: Cybersecurity may become the first major field where society has to defend critical infrastructure from machines operating at machine speed. Source: TechCrunch. Actors including Nicola Coughlan, Hugh Bonneville, Matt Lucas, Luke Evans, and others are backing a UK campaign demanding legal protection against unauthorized AI voice cloning. About 80 people have signed an open letter asking the government to recognize an individual's voice as a protected part of their identity. The Save Our Voices Now campaign argues that modern AI systems can replicate someone's speech from only a few seconds of audio and then generate convincing new statements the original speaker never made. Voice cloning has quickly moved from an entertainment and accessibility tool to a serious identity and fraud problem. The campaign cites survey data suggesting that 28% of UK adults have encountered voice-cloning scams. Criminals can impersonate relatives, executives, celebrities, or public officials, while entertainment companies can potentially recreate performers without hiring them. Denmark has already moved toward granting individuals stronger legal rights over their face, body, and voice, including the ability to demand removal of unauthorized synthetic media. Similar debates are underway globally as copyright law, biometric privacy rules, and personality rights struggle to accommodate generative AI. Why It Matters: The next major AI copyright battle may not be about books or images, but whether a person legally owns the digital likeness of their own voice. Source: The Guardian. Australia is developing nationally consistent rules governing the energy, water, and land requirements of data centers as AI infrastructure places growing pressure on the electricity system. Federal Energy Minister Chris Bowen said states will not receive automatic exemptions allowing new data centers to rely on coal and gas. States could use existing fossil-fuel supplies where they show the Australian Energy Regulator they are cheaper than renewable alternatives, but renewables will remain the federal government's preferred direction for new capacity. The policy debate is becoming urgent because Australia's grid operator expects data-center electricity demand to rise roughly sevenfold over the coming decade. Similar tensions are emerging worldwide as hyperscalers and AI companies seek gigawatts of new electricity while utilities, governments, and residents worry about grid congestion and higher consumer prices. Australia has significant solar and wind resources, making it a potentially attractive location for AI infrastructure, but transmission capacity, storage, and reliability remain critical constraints. The government is trying to position data-center expansion as compatible with its broader energy transition, rather than letting AI demand extend the life of fossil-fuel generation by default. Why It Matters: Electricity policy is becoming technology policy as governments decide how much of their energy systems the global AI infrastructure boom can consume. Source: The Guardian. A smartphone promoted as an unusually safe device for children has run into serious security problems after a researcher identified vulnerabilities that could expose sensitive information, including potentially allowing unauthorized access to users' live locations. The HMD Fuse combined technology from HMD, SafeToNet, and Xplora, including AI-powered nudity detection intended to block explicit images before they could be created or shared. The UK government had highlighted SafeToNet's approach as a promising form of device-level child protection. Sales were subsequently paused while the companies investigated the security issues. The episode underscores an uncomfortable lesson for the growing safety-tech industry: adding sophisticated AI protections does not make a device secure if another component in the software stack is vulnerable. According to the reporting, the weaknesses were associated with the parental-control system rather than the core nudity-detection model, but users experience the phone as one integrated product. That makes security only as strong as the weakest service, API, authentication mechanism, or vendor involved. Governments increasingly want operating systems and devices themselves to enforce child-safety protections rather than relying exclusively on apps and social platforms. Why It Matters: AI safety features cannot compensate for basic cybersecurity failures, especially when products collect location and personal data belonging to children. Source: Financial Times. Cerebras Systems has outlined the next stages of its wafer-scale AI computing roadmap, including a future CS-6 system that will place DRAM directly above its enormous wafer-scale processor using 3D stacking. Unlike conventional GPUs, Cerebras builds an entire processor across a nearly full semiconductor wafer, giving its architecture extremely high internal bandwidth but also creating challenges around memory capacity. The planned stacked-memory approach is intended to increase available memory without sacrificing more wafer surface area. Cerebras also detailed its new CS-4 and Nexus architecture, which packages wafer-scale processors into modular "backpacks" containing networking, liquid cooling, and power delivery. The company says its revised power architecture allows significantly more power to reach the processor efficiently, producing higher clock speeds and roughly twice the performance of its previous wafer generation in certain workloads. Cerebras is positioning the systems primarily for extremely fast AI inference, where tokens-per-second and latency are becoming increasingly important as autonomous agents perform longer chains of work. Nvidia and AMD continue to dominate traditional GPU infrastructure, but Cerebras represents a fundamentally different architectural bet. Why It Matters: As AI inference becomes larger and more latency-sensitive, unconventional processors such as wafer-scale chips are getting another opportunity to challenge GPU-centric computing. Source: Tom's Hardware. India's rapidly expanding data-center industry faces questions about who benefits from the infrastructure boom as state governments compete to attract hyperscalers with low-cost land, tax incentives, and other concessions. Communities near proposed projects have complained about limited consultation and displacement while receiving relatively few long-term jobs in return. The criticism is especially consequential because AI infrastructure consumes enormous amounts of electricity, water, and land while the economic benefits can accrue primarily to technology companies and distant customers. India is one of the most important growth markets for global AI companies, with more than a billion potential users and increasing investment from Google, Microsoft, Amazon, and domestic technology groups. Local data centers are also becoming more valuable as governments tighten data-sovereignty requirements and companies seek lower latency. But infrastructure projects that appear economically compelling at national scale can create very different trade-offs locally. The same political tension is now appearing in the United States, Europe, Latin America, and Southeast Asia: governments want AI investment, while communities increasingly ask who pays for electricity upgrades, water consumption, tax incentives, and land. Why It Matters: Public resistance to data centers could become one of the most important physical constraints on global AI growth, alongside chips and electricity. Source: Rest of World. Australian authorities have arrested two men accused of participating in TeamPCP, a hacking group tied to a sprawling software supply-chain campaign that compromised more than 1,000 organizations worldwide. The Australian Federal Police said the suspects face 14 charges. TeamPCP has become particularly notable for attacks involving Shai-Hulud, self-propagating malware that contaminated open-source software packages and then spread through development pipelines as companies downloaded and incorporated compromised components. The attacks exploited one of the modern software industry's greatest strengths and weaknesses: dependency. Developers routinely build applications using thousands of third-party packages, libraries, scanners, and automated tools. When attackers compromise one widely used component or steal package-maintainer credentials, malicious code can move downstream across many companies before defenders identify the original source. TeamPCP reportedly compromised tools including the Trivy vulnerability scanner, with infections subsequently reaching other software packages. Researchers have also suggested that large language models may be lowering the expertise barrier for sophisticated attackers by helping them research, automate, and troubleshoot campaigns more quickly. Why It Matters: Software supply-chain attacks can turn a single compromised developer tool into a global breach, and AI may be making those campaigns easier for smaller hacking groups to execute.
Judge Orders Pentagon to Reverse Anthropic Blacklisting
Artificial Intelligence & Machine Learning , Litigation , Next-Generation Technologies & Secure Development The U.S. federal judge told the Department of Defense to cancel the supply chain designation it levied against Anthropic in a decision giving the artificial intelligence giant almost everything it asked for in a lawsuit against the Pentagon. See Also: Securing AI Workloads With Ubuntu Pro Judge Rita F. Lin of the District Court for the Northern District of California said Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth's declaration of Anthropic as a supply chain risk in late February is unlawful. "The challenged actions constituted unlawful retaliation in violation of the First Amendment," she wrote (see: Pentagon Moves to Cut Anthropic From Defense AI Work). Government agencies are free to choose AI vendors for their needs, she said. But evidence presented at trial "demonstrates that the broad measures imposed on Anthropic were illegal and baseless." "The empty invocation of national security is not a blank check to punish and retaliate against government critics," Lin said. The court found that, in declaring Anthropic to be a risk to national security, the government skipped procedural steps. The Defense Department did not provide written records showing that less intrusive measures were not available or taken, and the decision was not presented to Congress. Lin also ruled that the risk assessment against the AI company came from the wrong official. During a July 30 hearing, Lin was skeptical of the government's arguments that it was not retaliating against a company critical of its actions, but rather protecting its right to enforce a contract. Anthropic filed a lawsuit against the Defense department on Mar. 9 after Hegseth took to social media to declare the company a supply chain risk. The designation came after Anthropic asked the government to limit some use of its Claude models on the GenAI.mil platform. Anthropic already signed a contract with the government worth up to $200 million over two years, but feared it would be used for mass surveillance and lethal autonomous warfare. Lin only deviated from granting Anthropic's motions where the company requested the judge to permanently block the blacklisting at other federal agencies that "undisputedly did not take any relevant action or who took only interim measures" to implement the designation. Anthropic asked for a broad permanent injunction after President Donald Trump on social media asserted that "EVERY Federal Agency in the United States Government to IMMEDIATELY CEASE all use of Anthropic's technology." Anthropic did not show that Trump, in his post, actually violated a specific procurement statute, Liun wrote. The Defense department can still appeal Lin's decision. Anthropic also sued the government in the U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia over a separate supply-chain risk designation that invoked the Federal Acquisition Supply Chain Security Act as a governing authority. A three judge panel there earlier this year did not follow Anthropic's motion for a temporary injunction against that supply chain designation.
Salesforce Earnings: Strong Bookings, Second-Half Reacceleration, Positive Anthropic Announcement
We were pleased to see Salesforce stock bounce materially after this quarter's results. Key Morningstar Metrics for Salesforce * : $280.00 * : ★★★ * : Narrow * : High What We Thought of Salesforce's Earnings Salesforce CRM delivered a solid fiscal second quarter, with contracted demand and paid artificial intelligence adoption providing the most encouraging signals. Revenue of $11.35 billion increased 11% year over year and landed near the high end of management's guidance. Why it matters: The quarter strengthens our confidence that Salesforce can produce modest organic growth acceleration during the second half, and that the firm's AI monetization is becoming more credible. * Agentforce ARR exceeded $1.5 billion, combined Agentforce and Data 360 ARR approached $3.9 billion, and Agentic Work Units nearly doubled sequentially. Salesforce added 2,000 paying production customers, and half of Agentforce bookings came from customers replenishing consumed Flex Credits. * Overall these datapoints broadly support that growth remains healthy and some customers are moving beyond pilots for newer products. Salesforce did expand the Agentforce ARR definition to include Slackbot and Headless 360 this quarter, limiting comparability with prior periods. The bottom line: We do not expect to materially change our fair value estimate of $280 per share and still view shares as modestly undervalued. We were pleased to see shares bounce materially, up 22% as of writing Aug. 27, after this quarter's results, with shares now up over 60% from the recent lows. * Claudeforce, the newly announced Anthropic partnership, reinforces Salesforce's strategy of serving as the governed data and workflow layer underneath multiple AI models and interfaces. Customers will be able to use Claude on top of Salesforce without replacing Salesforce as the system of record. * This supports our decision to maintain Salesforce's moat at narrow following our software sector moat reviews, as we still liked Salesforce's infrastructure positioning, switching costs, and valuable installed customer base. Long view: We see Salesforce increasingly positioned as a key distribution and record layer for AI, not replaced by AI.
