News & Updates
The latest news and updates from companies in the WLTH portfolio.
Anthropic launches presidential engagement program for 2028 elections
The Claude maker is building a Washington team to work with candidates from both parties as it heads toward a possible $2 trillion IPO Anthropic wants a seat at the table for the 2028 presidential race. Not as a candidate, but as the AI company every campaign has already been briefed by. The San Francisco lab behind the Claude models is creating a "presidential engagement" program. An in-house team will work directly with US presidential candidates from both parties on AI issues. The same team will help Anthropic's leadership shape political strategy and run the company's political funding program. The program is coming together before the November midterms and ahead of an IPO that could value Anthropic at as much as $2 trillion. What the new team will actually do Anthropic is hiring a Political Programs Lead, based in Washington, D.C., with a salary range of $295K to $345K. The posting went up around October 7, 2026. According to the listing, the role will lead the new presidential engagement effort for the 2028 cycle. The hire will map the candidate fields in both parties and provide AI policy education. The role also covers executive training, field programs, and management of the company's political contributions portfolio. The money and the paper trail The company has committed a total of $40 million to Public First Action this year. That money is aimed at supporting AI safety and regulation. On the lobbying side, Anthropic spent nearly $2 million on federal lobbying in the second quarter of 2026. Its priorities were AI safety standards and export controls. On October 8, 2026, one day after the job posting, Anthropic revised its Usage Policy to tighten restrictions on election misinformation. Those changes take effect November 12, 2026. The IPO angle Anthropic filed its S-1 confidentially in June 2026, targeting a valuation of up to $2 trillion. The IPO could potentially land around or after the November midterms. What this means The next markers are concrete. Watch for who fills the Political Programs Lead role, how the November 12 policy changes are enforced, and what the S-1 eventually reveals about political spending when it becomes public.
Anthropic launches Claude Haiku 5.5 with 75% lower average costs
The release includes cheaper Sonnet cache reads and monthly API credits for Max and Team subscribers. Anthropic launched Claude Haiku 5.5, a small AI model designed for fast, high volume workloads that the company says costs roughly 75% less to run on average than Haiku 4.5. The company describes Haiku 5.5 as its fastest model to date and its most capable small model. It targets tasks such as summarization, database queries, classification, live customer support and browser use. For prompts of up to 100,000 tokens, Haiku 5.5 costs $0.10 per million input tokens and $0.50 per million output tokens. That compares with $1 and $5, respectively, for Haiku 4.5. For prompts above that threshold, pricing rises to $0.50 per million input tokens and $2.50 per million output tokens. Anthropic said roughly 90% of requests to its previous Haiku model fell within the lower pricing tier. Haiku 5.5 is also the first model in the Haiku family with an adjustable effort setting, allowing users to balance cost against reasoning capability. Anthropic's evaluations showed substantial improvements over Haiku 4.5. On the offline subset of OSWorld 2.1, which tests computer operation, Haiku 5.5 scored 72.4%, compared with 15.7% for its predecessor. On Terminal Bench 4.0, an agentic coding evaluation, it scored 39.2%, versus 70.6% for Sonnet 5.5. The company said Sonnet 5.5 and Opus 5.5 remain better suited to complex coding tasks. Haiku is intended for narrower assignments and can work alongside the larger models as a coding subagent. Alongside the launch, Anthropic halved Sonnet 5.5's cache read price to $0.10 per million tokens. It estimates the change reduces costs by around 20% on most agentic workloads, where cached content accounts for a large share of token consumption. Anthropic also announced monthly Claude Platform API credits for Max and Team subscribers, with rollout scheduled for this week. Max 5x users will receive $100 per month, while Max 20x users will receive $200. Team subscribers will receive up to $500 pooled across their users. The credits can be used with any Anthropic model to build applications, tools and agents. Haiku 5.5 is available through the Claude Platform, Amazon Web Services, Google Cloud and Microsoft Azure. Anthropic is also adding beta support for computer and browser use to its Python and TypeScript software development kits.
