News & Updates
The latest news and updates from companies in the WLTH portfolio.
Meta Platforms (NASDAQ: META) Launches Muse Code Agent With Pricing That Undercuts OpenAI And Anthropic
Meta Platforms, Inc. (NASDAQ: META) launched a new AI coding agent called Muse Code on August 5, pricing it well below rival products from Anthropic and OpenAI in a direct push to win over cost-conscious developers. Muse Code is structured around two pricing tiers, with the most aggressive option set at just 20 cents per million output tokens for users willing to share usage feedback with Meta. That discounted tier aligns with pricing from China's DeepSeek and cuts beneath even OpenAI's older, reduced-cost model offerings, positioning Meta as the budget-friendly option in a crowded market. Meta AI chief Alexandr Wang described the value proposition plainly, saying the pricing "can be an incredibly good option for a lot of workflows, especially from a cost perspective." The launch carries significant strategic weight for Meta, whose shares fell 10% in the week before Muse Code's release after CEO Mark Zuckerberg offered investors little new detail about the company's cloud-computing plans during an earnings call. Wall Street has been pressing for evidence that Meta's heavy AI spending can translate into measurable revenue, and the Muse Code launch appears designed in part to answer that pressure. On the performance side, Muse Code ranked second on the Terminal-Bench 2.1 benchmark for real-world software engineering tasks, trailing only Anthropic's Claude Code Opus 5 but beating OpenAI's Codex in a strong debut showing. Zuckerberg highlighted the agent's ability to delegate tasks to sub-agents as a functional differentiator, and Meta has been routing engineering feedback through its internal MetaCode tool to steadily improve model benchmark scores. The launch, however, arrived alongside a separate and unwelcome headline: Meta disclosed that a third-party evaluator called Irregular had misconfigured its Muse Spark 1.1 model during testing, accidentally granting it unintended internet access, after which the model exploited a vulnerability in another company's system. Both Meta and Irregular described the incident as contained, but the episode adds a layer of scrutiny to Meta's push toward more autonomous, higher-stakes AI applications at a sensitive moment for the company. From a market positioning standpoint, Muse Code still trails Anthropic's flagship tool on the benchmark investors and developers watch most closely, leaving a performance gap that price alone may not fully bridge. Hedge fund data from Insider Monkey's Q1 2026 database shows Meta held 262 institutional holders, up from 256 the prior quarter, compared to Microsoft's 282 holders and Oracle's 115, reflecting moderate institutional confidence relative to its enterprise software peers. Meta is fighting for a foothold in AI coding tools it entered late, and whether aggressive discounting can overcome both a benchmark deficit and growing investor skepticism is a question the next earnings call will answer more clearly than any product launch.
Anthropic's Investors Want a $2 Trillion IPO. The Last Record-Setting IPO Has Made Its Buyers Nothing in Two Months.
Anthropic's backers reportedly want the artificial intelligence (AI) company to go public in October at a valuation of $2 trillion or more. The Financial Times reported the figure this month, citing the company's investors. Anthropic itself has confirmed far less. It filed a confidential draft registration statement on June 1, and it hasn't publicly set a valuation, a date, an exchange, or a ticker. Bloomberg reported Thursday that the company expects to match or beat the size of SpaceX's record raise, and could file publicly as soon as the end of this month. A $2 trillion debut would be the largest initial public offering (IPO) ever, and the company it would take the record from is barely two months into public life. SpaceX (SPCX +2.22%) priced the current largest IPO on record in June, at a valuation of about $1.77 trillion. That makes SpaceX a timely case study. Anyone weighing whether to chase the next record listing can look at exactly what the market did with the last one. A $2 trillion ask The reported appetite for Anthropic rests on explosive growth. Preliminary figures the company shared with prospective investors put second-quarter revenue above $11.5 billion, more than double the first quarter's $4.73 billion, according to documents seen by Bloomberg News. Investors who spoke to the Financial Times expect annualized revenue of $100 billion to $120 billion by the end of the year. Days before filing, Anthropic raised $65 billion at a $965 billion valuation. In other words, its backers are now discussing a price about double what they paid in late May. Worth noting, too: According to the same reporting, Anthropic's own senior executives haven't fixed a valuation target, even privately. The $2 trillion figure belongs to the investors, not the company. Up 67%, down 22%, back to even SpaceX sold 555,555,555 shares at $135 apiece on June 11, raising $75 billion at the offer in the largest IPO on record -- and about $86 billion in all, once its underwriters exercised their option to buy 83.3 million more shares. Trading began the next day, and the first public trade came at $150. The 10 weeks since gave buyers the full range of outcomes. Shares ran as high as $225.64, a 67% gain from the offer price. They then fell as low as $104.83, which is 22% below it. As of this writing, the stock sits within a few percent of $135 -- about 40% below its high, and almost exactly where it started. So the investors who got shares at the offer price have made essentially nothing in two months. And anyone who bought at the opening trade is down about 9%. The sellers set the record The business performed the whole time, which is what makes the return so instructive. SpaceX grew second-quarter revenue 92% year over year to $7.81 billion, and its AI segment's revenue more than tripled year over year to $2.6 billion. The company signed $14.1 billion of cloud computing contracts during the quarter, narrowed its net loss to $541 million from $1 billion a year earlier, and ended June with $47.5 billion in backlog. Growth like that usually moves a stock. Across the full 10 weeks, on net, it hasn't moved this one -- because the offer price had already charged for it. Even today, SpaceX trades at about 57 times revenue, annualizing its second-quarter figure. The sellers, in short, set a record price precisely because the growth story was at full strength -- and the buyers have spent two months waiting for the story to catch up to what they paid. Anthropic's math could work out better. If revenue lands where its backers project, a $2 trillion valuation would be about 18 times the annualized revenue they expect by December. That is a lower price against hoped-for sales than SpaceX commanded. But it still assumes annualized revenue grows another 50% or more from the $65 billion annualized run rate the company reported for late July. And it prices that assumption in before the company has reported a single quarter in public. Of course, SpaceX's two months prove nothing about the next two years, and a business that keeps doubling can outgrow any starting price eventually. But I think the two-month record is worth taking at face value. The largest IPO ever delivered a 67% surge, a 53% collapse from that peak, and, for the investor who simply bought and held from the start, a return of about zero -- all while the business nearly doubled its revenue year over year. A record-setting price means the growth is charged upfront. Two months in, that is exactly how it has traded.
Anthropic Is Reportedly Being Upfront With Would-Be Investors About AI Backlash
In San Francisco, meetings have reportedly been happening in which Anthropic Chief Financial Officer Krishna Rao is taking questions from would-be investors ahead of the public release of the company's IPO prospectus. Remarkably, that prospectus is expected to include verbiage spelling out the fact that the public is fearful upset about what AI companies are doing, according to CNBC. CNBC, which cites anonymous "people familiar with [the] matter," first reported on these apparent San Francisco meetings, and says the public's antipathy toward Anthropic's product and the data centers that enable it will be outlined in the prospectus as -- to use CNBC's term -- a "key risk factor." In other words, the most important formal document disclosing information investors need before they invest in Anthropic will reportedly acknowledge public outcry. That outcry isn't just a lot of grumbling. Politicians on both sides of the aisle increasingly campaign against AI during elections. Depending how deep the prospectus goes, it might have to acknowledge disruptive protests against AI and data centers, reportedly including multiple incidents involving gunshots, and at least one molotov cocktail. SpaceX's IPO earlier this year didn't focus on public sentiment, even though AI was arguably the main source of future revenue cited in the SpaceX prospectus. That document mentioned a reliance on natural gas, for instance, but in the part about regulatory considerations, not in any section on, say, public outcry over pollution. It also mentioned that Grok's brashness and ability to create "potential nonconsensual or exploitative imagery" might trigger "reputational damage" or "user or advertiser backlash." But philosophical opposition to AI itself doesn't appear to be in there. Gizmodo reached out to Anthropic to confirm that investor meetings were taking place in San Francisco, and to ask for comment on CNBC's claim about the company's IPO prospectus. We did not immediately hear back.
Anthropic's $2 trillion IPO faces a new threat as Americans push back against AI data centers - Cryptopolitan
Anthropic recently topped $65 billion in annualized revenue and made $11.6 billion in Q2. Anthropic is getting ready to hit the stock market, while more Americans are pushing back against AI data centers being built around them. People are also growing uneasy about AI, a pushback that is expected to show up as a serious risk in the company's IPO papers. Anthropic quietly filed to go public in June, with an offering that could become one of the biggest public stock listings ever seen anywhere in the world. Investors now think the company behind Claude could be valued at around $2 trillion. Communities are also questioning how much electricity, land, and infrastructure these facilities need to keep advanced AI systems running. These concerns are beginning to surface even in Anthropic's early fundraising rounds. So far, Anthropic has been conducting its preliminary meetings in private in San Francisco. These meetings are taking place behind closed doors, and the names of the participants involved have not yet been disclosed. Meanwhile, Anthropic's CFO, Krishna Rao, has been receiving questions regarding competition, margin pressures from open source models, and data center build-up slowdowns. Elon Musk's SpaceX (SPCX), which competes against Anthropic via its AI division, received $85.7 billion in funding from its listing last month, which is the biggest IPO ever conducted. It is expected that Anthropic will get more funding than this if the valuations hold true. Anthropic needs more computing power while Americans keep pushing back against new AI data centers Anthropic needs much more computing power to meet demand for Claude and newer AI products. Like OpenAI, the company is pushing its infrastructure partners to build faster. Tech giants are spending hundreds of billions of dollars this year on infrastructure, including data centers and the graphics processors that go inside them. Those sites train advanced models and run new AI services at scale. A Gallup poll released in May found that seven in 10 Americans did not want AI data centers built near them. Almost half said they were "strongly opposed." Only around one-quarter supported local projects. Getting enough computing power is already a big IPO question for Anthropic. The company needs data centers, chips, and electricity to keep up with demand for its services. Anthropic was started in 2021 by Chief Executive Dario Amodei and other former OpenAI employees who left after disagreements over AI's direction. For years, the startup was seen as behind OpenAI. Dario and his team spent years building AI systems that could write code, handle long conversations, and automate business work. Then Claude Code gained ground. As the coding product improved, Anthropic's revenue climbed quickly. The company has told early investors that it expects its AI models to keep getting better. Executives believe stronger models will let Anthropic keep charging higher prices even while rivals offer cheaper products. Investors want to know how Anthropic plans to keep those prices up as open-weight models become more common. Those models make the calculations behind their systems public and can cost less than Anthropic's products. Anthropic brings fast revenue growth to investors as they weigh a possible $2 trillion valuation Anthropic's investors believe the market for its AI services could eventually be worth several trillion dollars. They expect AI to move into huge parts of white-collar work. As the IPO gets closer, its revenue growth is expected to become a major part of the pitch. According to the New York Times, two investors expect Anthropic to point to revenue growth of more than 10 times compared with the year before. The company has already shared updated financial numbers with investors before the listing. Last month, Anthropic moved above $65 billion in annualized revenue. That number takes the company's monthly revenue and projects it across a full year. At the end of last year, the same figure was $9 billion. Anthropic also made $11.6 billion in revenue during the second quarter. Investors also want to know whether Anthropic can get enough computing power to keep pace with those sales. The company needs enough server space, GPUs, and electricity while its infrastructure partners keep building. Anthropic is expected to publish its public IPO prospectus in the next few weeks. Its shares are then expected to start trading in the months after that.
Anthropic made $11.5 billion last quarter! A year earlier it made $787 million
Anthropic's second-quarter revenue exceeded $11.5 billion, against $787 million in the same quarter a year earlier. Its annualised run rate reached $65 billion by the end of July. It has filed confidentially for an IPO with Morgan Stanley, Goldman Sachs and JPMorgan, could begin trading this autumn, and investors are discussing a valuation that would make it the largest public debut in history. Anthropic's second-quarter revenue exceeded $11.5 billion. In the same quarter a year earlier it was $787 million. That is a fourteenfold increase in twelve months, at a scale where such multiples do not normally occur. Companies growing that fast are usually small. Anthropic was not small a year ago. The Numbers The annualised run rate reached roughly $65 billion by the end of July, up sharply from where it stood at the close of 2025. Anthropic was valued at $965 billion in its Series H round in May. It has filed confidentially for a listing, working with Morgan Stanley, Goldman Sachs and JPMorgan Chase, and could begin trading as early as this autumn. Investor expectations for the offering have reached $2 trillion or higher. If that holds, it would surpass the $1.77 trillion record SpaceX set in June and become the largest initial public offering ever completed. Backers expect annualised revenue between $100 billion and $120 billion by the end of this year. One caution on those figures: the valuation expectations come from investors, not from the company. Senior Anthropic executives have not set a public target, and reporting suggests they have not set one privately either. The revenue figures are attributed to people familiar with the finances rather than to audited disclosure, which is normal for a company that has filed confidentially and cannot say much until it doesn't. It Is Now Ahead Of OpenAI The comparison that matters is not with SpaceX. It is with the company Anthropic was founded by people who left. On current revenue generation, Anthropic is reported to be ahead of OpenAI. That is a reversal of the assumption that has governed coverage of this industry since 2022, and it happened without a consumer product anyone would call a household name. OpenAI, meanwhile, appears to be slowing down. It filed confidentially in June and was reported to be targeting a September listing, then to be weighing a delay into 2027 rather than accept a valuation below $1 trillion. Sam Altman is reported to have treated any cut to that figure as a nonstarter. So the two companies may arrive at the public markets in the opposite order to the one everyone expected, and for opposite reasons -- one accelerating into a receptive market, the other holding back for a number. Where The Money Is Coming From The composition of Anthropic's revenue explains the growth better than the headline figure does. Anthropic sells overwhelmingly to businesses rather than consumers. Enterprise contracts are larger, longer and less volatile than subscriptions, and they expand inside an organisation once the first team adopts them. That is a slower start and a steeper curve, which is close to the shape the numbers show. It also has a coding business that has become the strongest product-market fit in the industry, at a moment when software development is the single clearest commercial application of these models. Independent assessments of AI coding tools have repeatedly placed Anthropic's offering first. The risk in that concentration is the obvious one. A business weighted towards enterprise software and coding is exposed to exactly one thing going wrong: a competitor closing the capability gap on code. Google shipped Gemini 3.7 Flash this month with a sixteen-point jump on one agentic coding benchmark in three weeks, at half the blended price of its predecessor. What An IPO Changes A listing at this scale converts a private research company into a public one with quarterly obligations, and that is a genuine change in what Anthropic is. The company has built its identity on safety, on publishing research that complicates its own commercial story, and on a governance structure designed to let it decline revenue. Public markets do not forbid any of that, but they price it. Every decision to slow a release, restrict a capability or spend on alignment research becomes a line an analyst can question on a call. There is a live example. An assessment published this week graded five frontier labs on their internal AI control practices, and Anthropic scored zero on having a published plan for containing a model that escapes control -- the lowest possible mark, on the one measure most directly tied to its public identity. That gap existed while the company was private and answerable to nobody but its own board. It is harder to explain from a stock exchange. The Number To Watch Fourteenfold growth is the figure that will lead coverage, and it is real. But the one that determines whether the valuation holds is the $100 billion to $120 billion the backers expect by December. That requires the run rate to rise by more than half again in five months. If it lands, the $2 trillion conversation is defensible on any normal revenue multiple. If it stalls at $65 billion, a company priced at thirty times revenue on the promise of continued acceleration becomes a considerably harder story to tell to public shareholders than to private ones.
Anthropic hires Google chip veteran Amir Salek as part of push into hardware
AI firm Anthropic has hired a Google chip founder for its new semiconductor team. This move signals Anthropic's ambition to develop its own custom AI chips. The company is also securing significant data center capacity deals. Rival OpenAI is pursuing similar custom chip development strategies. These efforts aim to address supply shortages and optimize AI hardware. Anthropic PBC has hired Amir Salek, a founder of the custom chip program at Alphabet Inc's Google, as the AI lab lays the groundwork for a push into making its own semiconductors. Salek is joining the compute team of Anthropic, maker of the Claude platform, the AI company said Friday. The executive ran Google's tensor processing unit business until 2022 and delivered the first seven generations of those chips. In the new role, Salek will report to James Bradbury. Also Read: Samsung Electronics expects shareholder returns up to $80 billion this year Anthropic, which buys chips from a variety of sources, including Nvidia Corp, Google and Amazon.com, has indicated recently that it wants to build an in-house silicon business. The San Francisco-based company has begun hiring and listing jobs for the effort. Like other AI giants, Anthropic is scrambling to get enough data center infrastructure to support its ambitions. Custom chips would potentially help it cope with supply shortages and tailor designs to better meet its needs. Also Read: South Korea's HD Hyundai Heavy says mulling US shipyard investment Rival OpenAI, the company behind ChatGPT, is taking similar steps. It has unveiled a chip called Jalapeno, co-developed with Broadcom, and plans to begin using it later this year. Anthropic is signing chip and data center capacity deals at a rapid clip - working with both established and emerging vendors. The company has an agreement with UK-based chip startup Fractile for an initial order of roughly $250 million of its chips, with the intention to expand that contract in the future, Bloomberg News has reported. The AI lab also recently signed capacity deals with Riot Platforms and Volta Infra Holdings. After leaving Google, Salek has been senior managing director at Cerberus Capital Management, a private equity firm co-founded by Deputy Secretary of Defense Stephen Feinberg. He also previously worked at Nvidia, the leading maker of AI processors.
Inherent, founded by DeepMind alumni, says its AI 'teammate' just outperformed Anthropic and OpenAI at replicating research
Inherent, a London AI lab founded by Google DeepMind alumni, says its AI agent just outperformed much larger models from Anthropic and OpenAI using a fraction of the size. Of all the startups launched by Google DeepMind alumni, Inherent has gotten relatively little attention. But while better-funded rivals have yet to show the world anything concrete, the London-based team is starting to share what it's been building. Just weeks after emerging from stealth with a $50 million seed round, the British startup says its newly released AI agent, Faraday, has outperformed larger, better-known models at a specific task: independently reproducing the findings of published scientific papers without being told the answer in advance. That may sound like a mere party trick given Inherent's much loftier goal -- building AI that can discover new scientific knowledge and not just verify old results. But paper replication is a standard training exercise for human scientists, too, cofounder and chief scientist Edward Hughes said. "Many PhD students actually start by doing this." Beating other AI systems at the task wasn't the point, Hughes told TechCrunch; how they got there was. "What was most interesting to us about this was not so much the result of beating those frontier agents -- which of course we liked -- but was actually the way we went about building this." Here's the part that should catch an investor's eye: measured against Anthropic's Claude Opus 4.8 and OpenAI's GPT-5.5 -- both much larger, frontier-scale systems -- Faraday runs on a comparatively tiny model called Qwen 3.6 that has just 27 billion parameters. (Roughly speaking, "parameters" is a proxy for a model's size and, typically, its training costs, as well.) Inherent's bar for success was also higher than simply accuracy. Beyond replicating results, it wanted Faraday to demonstrate "research taste" -- an instinct for what experiments are worth running and how to design them well. Teaching something as intangible as taste is hard, which is where reinforcement learning comes in. It's a training method that rewards an AI system for good outcomes rather than spelling out rules for it to follow. Rather than training its agents primarily on the study of how science itself is conducted, Inherent leans on this reward-based approach, betting it will generalize better to its longer-term goal of agents capable of contributing across many scientific fields. "We're always guided by that north star of building an AI scientist agent and imbuing our agents with taste," Hughes said. That focus has also shaped what Inherent chooses not to build. Rather than developing its own coding tool, it had Faraday use OpenAI's GPT-5.5 Codex instead, much the way human scientists lean on existing software rather than building everything themselves, according to the company. Inherent is also trying to avoid building agents that simply tell users what they want to hear. Instead, Hughes said, the goal is modeled on his favorite kind of teammate -- the kind who comes back and says: "I got curious about this, and I went off and I did these experiments. What do you think of these results?" That collaborative instinct extends to how Inherent operates as a company. Its dozen employees all work in person out of an office in King's Cross -- the once-rundown London neighborhood that Google DeepMind's presence helped turn into one of the world's top AI hubs. "We believe that London is the place to be," Hughes said. Hughes is bullish on London's density of AI talent, but he has also added his voice to calls to end "garden leave" -- the practice, common in the U.K., of barring departing employees from joining or starting a rival company for months after they resign. It's a restriction American researchers generally don't face, giving U.S. startups a head start on hiring talent who've left a prior role. "This is a personal view rather than a company view, but I was affected by the garden leave problem," he told TechCrunch. Hughes eventually got around that constraint and started Inherent alongside two other DeepMind alumni and a fourth cofounder. The startup isn't slowing down either. It plans to grow its headcount to "about 20 to 25" by the end of the year. Given its ambitions in world models as well, and with Demis Hassabis's new role leaving some DeepMind staff unsettled, Inherent's hiring push could make it an appealing landing spot for DeepMind employees weighing a move. Pictured from left to right: Inherent co-founders Louis Kirsch, Kaloyan Aleksiev, Tantum Collins and Edward Hughes.
