News & Updates
The latest news and updates from companies in the WLTH portfolio.
Anthropic's Claude Agents Formalized Fermat's Last Theorem in 11 Days - Startup Fortune
Anthropic says dozens of Claude agents worked almost autonomously for 11 days to produce the first complete, machine-verified proof of Fermat's Last Theorem in the Lean proof assistant. The project generated 13 million lines of code and proved over 30,000 theorems after early agents lost track of the proof and had to be coordinated through a shared dependency graph called Prove2Me. Anthropic says dozens of Claude agents worked largely on their own for 11 days to produce a complete, machine-checked proof of Fermat's Last Theorem in the Lean proof assistant, generating 13 million lines of code and burning through 6 billion tokens along the way. Fermat scribbled his famous claim in a margin in 1637 and said he had a proof too big to fit there. Andrew Wiles needed seven years and 129 pages to actually deliver one, in 1995. Anthropic says a swarm of Claude agents just did something almost as remarkable: they took Wiles's proof and translated it into a form a computer can check step by step, and they did it in 11 days. According to Anthropic's research team, dozens of Claude agents wrote about 13 million lines of code in Lean, the proof assistant built originally at Microsoft Research. They ran on an internal model that Anthropic says performs roughly on par with Claude Fable 5.1. That is five times the size of Mathlib, Lean's core math library, which human contributors have built up over more than a decade. Along the way, they proved 30,300 theorems. About 29,500 of them made it into the final proof. The whole run burned 6 billion tokens. That's an enormous amount of effort. All spent re-deriving a result mathematicians already trust. How the swarm actually pulled it off Formalizing a proof doesn't mean discovering new math. It means re-deriving every logical step of an already-accepted proof in a language a computer can verify clause by clause, with no room for the small gaps and hand-waves that occasionally slip into published mathematics. Wiles's proof is one of the most scrutinized results of the twentieth century, and formalizing it by hand was still expected to take mathematicians years. Kevin Buzzard is the Imperial College London mathematician who has led a volunteer project to formalize the theorem in Lean since 2022, with more than 60 contributors submitting verified code. He called Anthropic's result an "extraordinary autoformalization achievement" that "proves Fermat's Last Theorem with no assumptions other than the axioms of mathematics." OpenAI Changed GPT-6 Astra's Benchmark Numbers Days After Its Launch Fortune reported that OpenAI quietly revised several GPT-6 Astra benchmark figures after its September 3 launch, including cutting its hallucination rate in half before later reverting it, and boosting a cybersecurity score using a reasoning tier that isn't commercially available. The changes mostly flattered Astra, though some of Anthropic's... - OpenAI changed GPT-6 Astra benchmark numbers after launch - how OpenAI modified benchmark results for GPT-6 Astra The first attempts didn't go well. Anthropic says its agents made real early progress, then lost track of what had already been proven and what still needed work. Each agent held its own mental model of the sprawling proof in its context window. Those models drifted apart, and the effort collapsed into noise: agents duplicating work, contradicting each other, or building on theorems nobody had actually finished. The fix came from a tool called Prove2Me. It's open-source, built by Tianyi Peng and collaborators at Columbia University. Instead of asking each agent to hold the entire project in its head, Prove2Me keeps a directed acyclic graph of every theorem statement the proof still needs. It shows which ones are ready to attempt, and lets an agent grab an open node, prove it, and publish the result for the rest to build on. It's a shared to-do list. It stands in for the memory none of the agents could hold alone. Anthropic had already tested the idea at a smaller scale, using three Claude Max subscriptions to formalize Vinogradov's Three Primes Theorem in three days, before pointing the same setup at Fermat. Coordination, not raw model horsepower, was the unlock. What the proof does and doesn't show Anthropic is careful about what the result does and doesn't show. The company's own writeup calls the 13-million-line proof likely much longer than it needs to be, and says formalization should complement human-readable mathematical exposition, not replace it. Nobody at Anthropic is claiming Claude discovered anything new about elliptic curves or modular forms. What it did is take math the field already trusts and remove any remaining doubt that every step actually holds together logically. That's a tedious, exacting job, and until recently it was assumed to need years of specialist labor. Frankly, the harder question isn't whether an AI swarm can formalize a proof mathematicians already believe. It's whether the same shared-memory trick that got Claude through Fermat scales to problems nobody, human or machine, has solved yet. Anthropic isn't claiming that leap. For now the record stands: dozens of agents, 11 days, 13 million lines of Lean code, and one 389-year-old margin note finally checked by machine from top to bottom. Also read: Seattle Times and Newsday Sue OpenAI and Microsoft Over News Scraping * Z.ai's New GLM-5.3-Flash Model Runs 3.3 Times Faster on a Single Workstation * Oxford Professor Warns AI Is Plausibly Close to Runaway Self-Improvement Join the discussion Open in the community → Reply Almost there. Sign in and your reply posts straight away. ChatGPT, Claude and Grok Crashed Together in a Rare Triple Outage ChatGPT, Claude and Grok all went down within the same window on September 3, with Downdetector logging tens of thousands of reports across OpenAI, Anthropic and xAI while Google's Gemini stayed online. Reporting points to shared Cloudflare and Azure infrastructure, not the AI models themselves, as the likely cause. - why did ChatGPT Claude and Grok crash together - rare triple AI chatbot outage on September 3
Sam Bankman-Fried Circle's Anthropic Shares Sold Before Value Exploded - Startup Fortune
Federal prosecutors seized personal Anthropic stakes from Sam Bankman-Fried's inner circle, including Caroline Ellison and Nishad Singh, as part of their criminal sentencing in 2024. Those shares got sold off alongside FTX's own $500 million stake, years before Anthropic's valuation rocketed to $965 billion. Nishad Singh paid $40,000 for early Anthropic stock in 2022, then forfeited it as a convicted felon before it could turn into a fortune. The shares seized from Sam Bankman-Fried's inner circle were sold off in 2024, right before Anthropic's valuation exploded past $965 billion. Anthropic closed a $65 billion funding round at a $965 billion valuation on May 28, 2026, according to the company's own announcement and reporting from NBC News and TechCrunch. That number sits on top of a strange footnote from the FTX collapse. Some of the earliest money into Anthropic came from Sam Bankman-Fried and the people who ran his fraud alongside him, and a slice of what they personally held in the AI company was seized by federal prosecutors and folded into the pool of assets used to repay FTX's victims. The story actually splits into two separate stakes, and conflating them is where most retellings go wrong. The first stake was corporate. In April 2022, Bankman-Fried personally led Anthropic's Series B round and wrote a $500 million check through Alameda Research and FTX, buying roughly 8% of the company. That was FTX's institutional position. Once the exchange collapsed that November, it became bankruptcy estate property. The estate sold the bulk of it in March 2024 for $884 million, with Abu Dhabi's ATIC Third International Investment Company as the largest buyer, alongside Jane Street, HOF Capital, the Ford Foundation and funds managed by Fidelity, according to CNBC. A second tranche went for $452 million that June. Combined, FTX's own stake fetched roughly $1.3 billion. The second stake was personal, and it's the one prosecutors actually forfeited as criminal punishment. Caroline Ellison, the former Alameda CEO who testified against Bankman-Fried, personally held about $10 million worth of Anthropic shares. That stake became the core asset behind her settlement obligations when she was sentenced to two years in prison in September 2024 and ordered to forfeit $11 billion jointly with her co-conspirators. Nishad Singh, FTX's former director of engineering, held Anthropic Series B preferred stock he'd bought through a SAFE for exactly $40,000 in May 2022. Court records tied to his October 2024 sentencing, where he avoided prison entirely after cooperating extensively with prosecutors, list that stake among the assets he agreed to give up, alongside a house and his crypto holdings. Bernie Sanders wants the government to own half of OpenAI and Anthropic and the AI industry is already pricing in the risk Senator Bernie Sanders introduced the American A.I. Sovereign Wealth Fund Act, proposing a one-time 50 percent equity tax on OpenAI, Anthropic, and xAI that would give the federal government board seats and voting shares. The bill dropped the same day Anthropic confidentially filed for an IPO, forcing the industry to treat legislative risk as a... - how to price a SaaS product for enterprise - cold email template that gets replies from investors Those forfeited personal shares never sat in a government vault waiting for Anthropic's valuation to climb. They got swept into the same FTX estate asset pool as the corporate stake and sold off in the 2024 tranches, years before anyone was calling Anthropic a trillion-dollar company in waiting. Who actually captured the upside That timing is the real story here. Anthropic was valued around $18 billion when Bankman-Fried wrote his check in 2022. By the time FTX's estate liquidated its position in 2024, the company's climb had turned $500 million into $1.3 billion, a decent return on paper. But Anthropic didn't stop there. It raised money at a $183 billion valuation in September 2025, signed a term sheet for $350 billion that January, closed a $30 billion round at $380 billion in February 2026, and then closed a $65 billion Series H at $965 billion on May 28, 2026, led by Altimeter Capital, Dragoneer, Greenoaks and Sequoia Capital, with run-rate revenue above $47 billion. The company has flagged October 2026 as its target window for an IPO, according to reporting from Forbes and TechCrunch. Run that same appreciation against the 8% stake FTX sold off in 2024, and it would be worth somewhere north of $77 billion today, a figure that's circulated widely in coverage of the case. Nobody at FTX, and nobody in Bankman-Fried's inner circle, captured that gain. Abu Dhabi's sovereign fund did. So did Jane Street and Fidelity's funds. The government didn't get rich off this either. Prosecutors' job was to make victims whole as fast as the process allowed, not to speculate on where AI valuations were headed next. Selling in 2024 rather than holding was the legally sound call, even if it looks, in hindsight, like selling Amazon stock in 1998. Frankly, that's the real lesson here, not that the government "accidentally became an Anthropic investor." It didn't. It forfeited stolen property, converted it to cash as fast as the law allowed, and handed that money to the roughly one million customers FTX defrauded. The asymmetry in this story is real. It's just not the one most people assume. It wasn't the government or Sam Bankman-Fried's circle who got rich off Anthropic's rise. It was whoever had the balance sheet to buy a distressed AI stake in 2024, and the patience to hold it through 2026. Also read: Singapore Still Can't Fix Its Developer Shortage Even With Vibe Coding Tools * Bank of America Says TSMC's 2027 Capex Could Reach $85 Billion * Andrew Bailey Warns G20 That AI Cyberattacks Threaten Financial Stability
