News & Updates
The latest news and updates from companies in the WLTH portfolio.
Goldman Sachs to be named lead banker in SpaceX IPO- WSJ By Investing.com
Investing.com-- Goldman Sachs (NYSE:GS) is expected to be named lead banker on SpaceX's behemoth initial public offering, the Wall Street Journal reported on Tuesday, citing people familiar with the matter. Morgan Stanley (NYSE:MS) is also a lead banker, but Goldman is expected to take the lead-left position in the IPO prospectus, which could be made public as early as Wednesday, the WSJ report said. Get more breaking news on the SpaceX IPO by subscribing to InvestingPro Bloomberg and Reuters reported similar developments. Bank of America Corp (NYSE:BAC), Citigroup Inc (NYSE:C) and JPMorgan Chase & Co (NYSE:JPM) also appeared in alphabetical order on the preliminary prospectus, reports said. SpaceX is expected to price its IPO as soon as June 11, with the Elon Musk-led space company aiming to raise up to $75 billion at a valuation of $1.75 trillion- making it the largest IPO in history.
Goldman Sachs to be named lead banker in SpaceX IPO- WSJ By Investing.com
Investing.com-- Goldman Sachs (NYSE:GS) is expected to be named lead banker on SpaceX's behemoth initial public offering, the Wall Street Journal reported on Tuesday, citing people familiar with the matter. Morgan Stanley (NYSE:MS) is also a lead banker, but Goldman is expected to take the lead-left position in the IPO prospectus, which could be made public as early as Wednesday, the WSJ report said. Get more breaking news on the SpaceX IPO by subscribing to InvestingPro Bloomberg and Reuters reported similar developments. Bank of America Corp (NYSE:BAC), Citigroup Inc (NYSE:C) and JPMorgan Chase & Co (NYSE:JPM) also appeared in alphabetical order on the preliminary prospectus, reports said. SpaceX is expected to price its IPO as soon as June 11, with the Elon Musk-led space company aiming to raise up to $75 billion at a valuation of $1.75 trillion- making it the largest IPO in history.
Goldman Sachs to be named lead banker in SpaceX IPO- WSJ By Investing.com
Investing.com-- Goldman Sachs (NYSE:GS) is expected to be named lead banker on SpaceX's behemoth initial public offering, the Wall Street Journal reported on Tuesday, citing people familiar with the matter. Morgan Stanley (NYSE:MS) is also a lead banker, but Goldman is expected to take the lead-left position in the IPO prospectus, which could be made public as early as Wednesday, the WSJ report said. Get more breaking news on the SpaceX IPO by subscribing to InvestingPro Bloomberg and Reuters reported similar developments. Bank of America Corp (NYSE:BAC), Citigroup Inc (NYSE:C) and JPMorgan Chase & Co (NYSE:JPM) also appeared in alphabetical order on the preliminary prospectus, reports said. SpaceX is expected to price its IPO as soon as June 11, with the Elon Musk-led space company aiming to raise up to $75 billion at a valuation of $1.75 trillion- making it the largest IPO in history.
SpaceX IPO Could Pressure Nvidia, SK Hynix and High-Growth Stocks
Mega $75 Billion Listing May Trigger Capital Outflows from Korean Semiconductor and AI Sectors U.S. space exploration company SpaceX is expected to go public (IPO, listing) as early as the 12th of next month. This listing is anticipated to value the company at $1.75 trillion and raise approximately $75 billion (around 113 trillion Korean won) in new funds, marking a mega-scale offering. Experts predict that while the impact on the overall stock market may not be significant, investment funds previously concentrated in similar sectors like the existing space industry or artificial intelligence (AI) could shift toward SpaceX. This could reduce the proportion of high-priced growth stocks and semiconductor-related equities, which have seen significant price increases due to future growth expectations, thereby affecting their stock prices. ◇A 113 Trillion Won Mega IPO Show, SpaceX's listing schedule, initially expected in late next month, has been moved up to the 12th of next month due to swift document reviews by the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC). Indian economic media LiveMint analyzed, "This SpaceX listing coincides with a period when investor sentiment toward high-growth tech companies is beginning to recover." While concerns exist that the massive fundraising scale could strain market supply and demand, most forecasts suggest it will not significantly disrupt the broader market, considering the U.S. stock market's average daily trading volume. During Saudi Aramco's 2019 listing, the newly raised funds accounted for 0.032% of the global stock market's total capitalization. Even if SpaceX raises $75 billion, it would represent just 0.049% of the current global market cap and 0.107% of the U.S. market cap -- only 1.2 to 1.5 times the scale of Aramco's impact. Conversely, if SpaceX is immediately included in major indices like the Nasdaq 100 after listing, massive fund investments that mechanically replicate these indices could automatically flow in, driving overall market gains. ◇Potential Capital Flight from Space·AI Sectors... Pressure on High-Multiple Growth Stocks However, there are forecasts that capital could flow out of companies with business profiles similar to SpaceX, acting as a variable in global stock markets. This is because selling pressure may emerge in existing space industry stocks, which were previously seen as alternatives to SpaceX. Additionally, as SpaceX plans to lease its robust computer infrastructure to other AI companies, established cloud firms like Oracle, which have dominated this leasing market, could face strong competition, negatively impacting their performance and stock prices. Analysts also warn that so-called high-multiple growth stocks could face greater threats due to SpaceX's listing. KB Securities researcher Kim Il-hyeok stated, "High-multiple growth stocks are those where prices are significantly higher than actual earnings, and SpaceX's listing could absorb funds from such stocks." These stocks are traded at high prices based on market expectations of future growth, even if they are not currently profitable. AI-related stocks like Nvidia, Arm, and Palantir, which have recently surged explosively, fall into this category. British financial media Global Banking & Finance Review noted, "Wall Street is benchmarking SpaceX not as a traditional aerospace company but as a high-growth AI and infrastructure-related stock, assigning it an exceptional $1.75 trillion valuation. If massive funds pour into SpaceX, investment flows to existing high-growth stocks will inevitably decrease." SpaceX's listing could impact the South Korean stock market. Foreign and domestic investors might sell their existing Korean stocks to invest in SpaceX, leading to capital outflows. A source from a securities firm who requested anonymity said, "Investors are likely to start selling stocks that have risen sharply in price first to invest in SpaceX. The recent sluggishness in domestic semiconductor stocks like Samsung Electronics and SK Hynix, which have seen significant price increases, could be partly due to the SpaceX listing news. Once the official investment roadshow begins, pressure on capital outflows from the Korean market may intensify."
Goldman Sachs Set To Be Named Lead Left Underwriter For Spacex IPO- Reuters By Investing.com
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Polymarket Wallets Net $2.4M With 98% Accuracy, Bubblemaps Reports
Blockchain analytics firm Bubblemaps has uncovered a cluster of Polymarket wallets that collectively earned $2.4 million with a staggering 98% win rate on military-related prediction bets. The wallets reportedly placed precise wagers on key geopolitical events, including the February 28 U.S. strike on Iran, raising serious questions about insider trading risks on decentralized prediction platforms. According to Bubblemaps, nine wallets placed major bets shortly before sensitive military developments, such as the killing of Iranian Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei and a U.S.-Iran ceasefire agreement. Notably, four wallets each profited approximately $400,000 by accurately predicting the February 28 strike. While these accounts made minor losing bets on February 20 -- potentially to avoid drawing attention -- all were funded through centralized exchanges within a tight timeframe, suggesting an effort to obscure their origins. "The on-chain patterns appear symptomatic of someone with an unfair informational advantage," Nicolas Vaiman, CEO of Bubblemaps, said in a statement. He noted that routing funds through centralized exchanges and third-party services before placing trades may have been an attempt to mask insider involvement. The findings amplify regulatory concerns about insider trading risks tied to prediction markets like Polymarket and Kalshi. These platforms allow users to trade on the outcomes of real-world events, operating without a centralized bookmaker. Instead, prices fluctuate based on supply and demand, with contracts settled via smart contracts on-chain. While this model offers transparency, it also creates fertile ground for exploitation by those with privileged information. U.S. lawmakers have been pushing for stricter oversight. On March 10, Democratic Senator Adam Schiff introduced the DEATH BETS Act, which seeks to ban federally regulated prediction markets from listing contracts tied to war, terrorism, assassination, and individual deaths. The legislation followed earlier controversies, including $1 million in profits reportedly earned by six Polymarket traders betting on U.S.-Iran conflict outcomes. California Governor Gavin Newsom also signed an executive order in late March aimed at preventing public officials from leveraging insider knowledge on prediction markets. Despite these efforts, platforms like Polymarket remain a regulatory gray area, oscillating between financial innovation and potential misuse. Since its 2020 launch, Polymarket has become a leading decentralized prediction market, hosting contracts on topics ranging from geopolitics to sports. Users trade binary options priced between $0.01 and $1.00, with settlement based on event outcomes. While the platform faced a $1.4 million fine from the U.S. Commodity Futures Trading Commission (CFTC) in 2022 for operating without proper registration, it re-entered the U.S. market under a regulated framework in 2025. Politics-related contracts currently account for 12% of Polymarket's weekly trading volume, according to Dune Analytics data. However, the platform's growing influence has drawn scrutiny from regulators, particularly as its trading volumes and user base expand. Recent cases like the $2.4 million military bets underscore the need for tighter oversight to mitigate risks of insider trading and market manipulation. With the DEATH BETS Act and state-level regulations in the pipeline, the future of prediction markets could hinge on how effectively they address insider trading concerns. For traders, platforms like Polymarket remain an intriguing but increasingly scrutinized space. Whether these markets can strike a balance between innovation and compliance will likely shape their role in crypto and traditional finance moving forward.
Dow Jones Top Company Headlines at 7 PM ET: Andrej Karpathy, Tesla Alum and OpenAI Co-Founder, Joins Anthropic | Google ...
Andrej Karpathy, Tesla Alum and OpenAI Co-Founder, Joins Anthropic Karpathy joined Anthropic's pretraining team and will lead a new group focused on using Claude to accelerate pretraining research, according to the company. ---- Google Unveils New Gemini AI Agent for Personal Tasks The tech firm highlights both Spark and Omni, a video-creation tool, at its annual developer conference. ---- Analog Devices to Buy Empower Semiconductor for $1.5 Billion The deal will help Analog Devices expand its total addressable market in artificial-intelligence compute power delivery as demand from AI developers climbs, the semiconductor company said. ---- Toll Brothers Says Its Average Home Prices Back Above $1 Million The luxury homebuilder said the average price of homes it completed sales on last quarter broke above $1 million for the first time since mid-2024. The Mediterranean fast-casual restaurant chain said it expects its momentum to continue, boosting its fiscal-year guidance. ---- Agnico Eagle Approves $2.4 Billion Investment in Gold Project The Toronto miner's investment in the Hope Bay project revives a mine in Canada's Arctic that China had hoped to run. ---- Home Depot Posts Lower Profit as Homeowners Hold Off on Large Projects Home Depot reported lower fiscal first-quarter profit and Chief Financial Officer Richard McPhail said in an interview that homeowners are continuing to pull back on large home-improvement projects due to economic uncertainty. ---- Emails Show How Lululemon's Peace Treaty With Its Founder Fell Apart A surprise note from the company's chair marked an escalation of the fight after the two sides appeared close to coming to terms. ---- Target Names a New Supply-Chain Head as It Struggles With Weak Sales Former Walmart executive Jeff England will lead supply chain and logistics at the retailer as Target tries to pull out of a yearslong sales slump. ---- United Airlines Expects an Uptick in Summer Travelers United Airlines said it expects to serve about 53 million travelers this summer-about 3 million more than last year. ---- Google and Blackstone to Create New AI Cloud Company The duo plans to launch the unnamed U.S. company with $5 billion in equity capital from Blackstone, which will be the majority owner. ---- Berkshire Hathaway Rekindles Its Tortured Love Affair With Airlines CEO Greg Abel is showing an early fondness for them with Berkshire taking a new $2.6 billion position in Delta during the first quarter. ---- Fermi's Ousted CEO Pushes for Board Overhaul Vote in June Toby Neugebauer, the co-founder, largest shareholder and former chief of Fermi, looks to wrest back control of the company from its new management. Kohler will join Gap as global brand president and chief executive of its Banana Republic brand. ---- ArcelorMittal Sells $667 Million Stake in Vallourec to Boost Shareholder Returns The steelmaker said it sold a stake equivalent to around 10% of Vallourec's outstanding share capital and plans to channel the proceeds to shareholders through its ongoing buyback.
Goldman Sachs set to be named lead left underwriter for SpaceX IPO, source says
May 19 (Reuters) - Goldman Sachs is expected to secure the much-coveted lead left position in Elon Musk's rocket and satellite maker SpaceX's initial public offering, a source familiar with the matter told Reuters on Tuesday. The position refers to the bank that holds the most senior and prominent role among all the underwriters of an IPO deal. Both Morgan Stanley and Goldman will be serving as the lead bankers on the IPO prospectus, which could be released as soon as Wednesday, the source said. Goldman declined to comment when contacted by Reuters, while SpaceX and Morgan Stanley did not immediately respond. Morgan Stanley, which has advised Musk for years, took Tesla public in 2010, alongside Goldman Sachs, which was the lead left underwriter, and others. SpaceX's debut comes at a pivotal moment for the IPO market that has rebounded after struggling over the past couple of years due to volatility fueled by U.S. tariff policy and geopolitical uncertainty. The space firm is likely to target raising about $75 billion at a valuation of roughly $1.75 trillion, which would make it the biggest stock market flotation of all time, Reuters has previously reported. The $1.75 trillion target represents a significant step up from the $1.25 trillion combined valuation of SpaceX and Musk's artificial intelligence startup xAI, when they merged in February. SpaceX is aiming to list its shares as early as June 12 and has picked the Nasdaq as the trading venue for its blockbuster market debut, Reuters exclusively reported last week. Bank of America, Citigroup and JPMorgan are also among the banks slated to lead the highly anticipated listing, with 16 other banks in smaller roles spanning institutional, retail and international channels. The Wall Street Journal first reported about Goldman's lead left role earlier on Tuesday. (Reporting by Juby Babu in Mexico City and Echo Wang in New York; Editing by Shinjini Ganguli)
Polymarket debuts prediction markets tied to private companies
May 19 : Polymarket on Tuesday launched prediction markets tied to the performance of private companies through an agreement with Nasdaq Private Market, marking a first for the rapidly growing sector, it said. Here are some details: * Prediction markets allow users to trade on the outcome of future events, with prices reflecting the perceived probability of those outcomes. * Polymarket said the new events could include private company milestones such as valuation, IPO timings and secondary market activity. * Prediction markets have grown popular as users increasingly trade on the outcomes of events ranging from elections to cryptocurrencies. * Polymarket's new offering also creates an additional price discovery tool for institutional investors, the company said. * It added that the Nasdaq Private Market will serve as the resolution data provider for private company markets on Polymarket. * The launch comes as companies stay private for longer. Several startups have reached valuations comparable to companies in the S&P 500, drawing growing investor interest in private markets. * Polymarket said nearly 1,600 unicorns globally, or startups valued at more than $1 billion, now account for over $5 trillion in cumulative value.
Anthropic makes biggest case as AI alpha with latest hire - Cryptopolitan
Anthropic has also overtaken OpenAI in corporate adoption and is seeking to raise fresh funds at a valuation of around $950B valuation. Andrej Karpathy, who was part of the founding members of OpenAI and most recently, was the director of artificial intelligence at Tesla, announced on Tuesday, May 19, that he had joined Anthropic, telling followers on X that "the next few years at the frontier of LLMs will be especially formative." For many, the move has brought back to the fore the ongoing debate about which AI firm is currently leading in terms of adoption, especially when a person of Karpathy's caliber moves to a platform that is a rival to a company he cofounded. Who is the new big-name hire at Anthropic? Karpathy is among the most recognizable researchers in the field of artificial intelligence. He co-founded OpenAI before leaving in 2017 to lead computer vision for Tesla's Autopilot and Full Self-Driving programs. In 2022, he departed Tesla, returning briefly to OpenAI, and then founded the AI education start-up Eureka Labs. Karpathy will be building a team focused on using Claude to accelerate pretraining research, the work that gives a model its core knowledge and capabilities. It is reported that he will be working with pre-training lead Nick Joseph. He wrote on X, "I am very excited to join the team here and get back to R&D. I remain deeply passionate about education and plan to resume my work on it in time." Has Anthropic jumped to the front of the AI ace? Researchers capable of advancing the frontier are seen as a far scarcer resource than capital or chips, and the contest for that small pool is as decisive as any funding round. Currently, Anthropic seems to be poaching heavyweights across various departments, with cybersecurity veteran Chris Rohlf, who used to work at Meta, recently joining its frontier red team. Karpathy also follows Ross Nordeen, a founding member of Elon Musk's xAI, who joined Anthropic earlier this month, the same day the company struck a deal with SpaceX to rent compute infrastructure at xAI's Colossus data center in Memphis. The talent is moving one way. So are the business metrics. The latest Ramp AI Index found that Anthropic overtook OpenAI in corporate adoption for the first time, reaching 34.4% of businesses in April as OpenAI slipped to 32.3%. Over the past year, Anthropic has quadrupled its business adoption while OpenAI's grew by 0.3%. Anthropic is also reportedly raising fresh capital at a valuation approaching $950 billion, ahead of OpenAI's most recent $852 billion, on the strength of growing revenue, the Claude Code developer tool and the cybersecurity-focused Mythos model that has drawn attention in Washington. Is the alpha case airtight, or is there a catch? Ramp, whose own data may be used to reference adoption claims, also pointed out that Anthropic's incentives are misaligned with customers, since the company earns more as businesses consume more tokens. Claude has faced complaints over outages and rate limits in recent weeks, and that a recent model change roughly triples token costs for prompts containing an image. Some of the fastest-growing vendors on Ramp's platform last month were inference services offering cheap, open-source models, and OpenAI's Codex remains a low-cost, low-switching-cost alternative. The hire, then, does not end the race. What it does is shift the burden of proof. A year ago, OpenAI was the unquestioned reference point against which every rival was measured. Today, the question is no longer whether anyone can catch OpenAI but whether OpenAI can hold its lead.
OpenAI co-founder and former Tesla AI executive Karpathy joins Anthropic
May 19 : Andrej Karpathy, a former Tesla AI executive and one of OpenAI's founding members, has joined Anthropic, he said on Tuesday, strengthening the Claude maker as it looks to dominate the AI race. "I think the next few years at the frontier of LLMs will be especially formative. I am very excited to join the team here and get back to R&D," he said in an X post. Karpathy, a highly influential member of the AI community, played a key role in developing Tesla's self-driving and artificial intelligence technology before leaving the firm in 2022. "I remain deeply passionate about education and plan to resume my work on it in time," Karpathy, who announced in 2024 that he was starting an AI-integrated education platform named Eureka Labs, said on X. He has joined Anthropic's pretraining team, responsible for the large-scale training runs that give Claude its core knowledge and capabilities, according to Anthropic. He started work this week and sits on the team of Nick Joseph, the company's head of pretraining. Karpathy studied under prominent Stanford AI scientist Fei-Fei Li and joined OpenAI as one of its earliest staffers, before moving to Tesla. John Schulman, another OpenAI co-founder, left for Anthropic in 2024. The ChatGPT maker has seen a slew of executives leave the firm, including former chief scientist Ilya Sutskever and former tech chief Mira Murati, founder and CEO of AI startup Thinking Machines. Anthropic has been grappling with strong competition from rival frontier model developers such as OpenAI as they seek to create the most sophisticated models for cloud providers.
OpenAI co-founder Karpathy joins Anthropic pre-training team
Karpathy will build a new team that uses Claude itself to accelerate the most expensive phase of frontier model development Andrej Karpathy, one of the original co-founders of OpenAI and among the most recognised AI researchers in the world, announced on Monday that he has joined Anthropic. The move is a significant talent coup for the Claude maker as it races to stay at the frontier of large language model development. Karpathy is joining Anthropic's pre-training team, led by Nick Joseph, where he will build a brand-new group focused on a strikingly recursive goal: using Claude itself to accelerate pre-training research. Pre-training, the massive compute-intensive phase that gives a frontier model its core knowledge and capabilities, is the single most expensive part of building systems like Claude. Finding ways to make that process faster and more efficient could reshape the economics of the entire AI industry. In an X post that racked up 13.6 million views, Karpathy wrote that he believes "the next few years at the frontier of LLMs will be especially formative." He added that he remains "deeply passionate about education" and plans to resume that work in time. The hire caps a career arc that has touched nearly every major inflection point in modern AI. Karpathy earned his PhD at Stanford under Fei-Fei Li, the computer scientist behind ImageNet, focusing on deep learning and computer vision. He was among the 11 people who co-founded OpenAI in 2015, where he worked on deep learning research before departing in 2017 to join Tesla as its director of AI. At Tesla, Karpathy led the computer vision teams behind Full Self-Driving and Autopilot, the programmes that underpin the electric carmaker's ambitions for autonomous vehicles. He left in July 2022, returned to OpenAI for roughly a year, then departed again in 2024 to found Eureka Labs, a startup applying AI assistants to education. Eureka Labs' work is now paused while Karpathy throws his weight behind Anthropic. The timing is notable. Anthropic has emerged as a magnet for top-tier technical talent at a moment when its chief rival, OpenAI, has experienced a string of high-profile departures. Over the past two years, OpenAI has lost more than a dozen senior executives and researchers, including CTO Mira Murati, reinforcement learning pioneer John Schulman, and, most recently, three executives who left on a single day in April 2026. For Anthropic, landing Karpathy signals that the company can attract talent of the highest calibre as it scales both its research and its commercial operations. The firm, led by CEO Dario Amodei, has drawn investor interest at a valuation of roughly $800 billion and is reportedly exploring an IPO that could come as early as late 2026. Karpathy's new role also underscores a broader trend in frontier AI: the use of existing models to improve the next generation. If Claude can meaningfully speed up its own pre-training pipeline, it would mark a practical demonstration of recursive self-improvement, one of the capabilities the AI safety community has long watched closely. Whether that prospect excites or unnerves observers may depend on how much trust they place in the safety-minded culture Anthropic has cultivated since its founding. For now, Karpathy appears to be exactly where he wants to be: back in the lab, building models at the frontier.
Goldman Sachs Is Said to Lead SpaceX's Mega-IPO Bank Lineup
has the leading role on the cover of 's initial public offering, according to people familiar with the matter, giving the firm a prominent position in potentially the biggest listing of all time. is also listed as a lead bank, the people said, asking not to be identified as the information isn't public. , and appear in alphabetical order on the preliminary prospectus, the people said, asking not to be identified as the information isn't public.
Musk's Failed OpenAI Lawsuit Underscores xAI's Struggles
On Monday, an Oakland jury took under two hours to unanimously reach a verdict dismissing Elon Musk's lawsuit against Sam Altman and OpenAI. Throughout the trial Musk had portrayed it as the good fight to prevent Altman from "stealing" OpenAI, which was founded as a nonprofit. Others, however, framed it as a more cynical effort. "It's too late now to gin up something to harm a competitor," said OpenAI's lead lawyer, William Savitt, during his opening arguments. In 2015, Musk co-founded OpenAI with Altman, among others, out of concern that powerful future AI systems would be developed by Google and controlled by other billionaires. He founded xAI in 2023, after a dispute over control of OpenAI. Musk had asked the court to reverse OpenAI's for-profit conversion, which the company completed late last year, and to return roughly $150 billion to the nonprofit. Such a decision would have been "catastrophic" for OpenAI, says Charlie Bullock, a senior research fellow at LawAI, and would have "sent shockwaves through the global economy." The jury's decision that Musk waited too long to sue, exceeding a three-year statute of limitations, is just the latest blow to Musk and xAI. Rather than strengthening xAI's position in the industry, the trial mostly served to illustrate its various weaknesses. In February, Musk's SpaceX acquired xAI, with the AI company reportedly valued at around $250 billion -- far short of OpenAI's most recent $852 billion valuation. Over 50 employees subsequently departed for competitors such as Meta and Thinking Machines Lab. Downloads of Grok, the company's flagship chatbot, have fallen by 60% since January. And less than 1% of Grok users had a paid subscription, compared to roughly 6% of ChatGPT users who say that they pay for the upgraded product. "xAI is currently falling behind in the AI race," Peter Wildeford, head of policy at the AI Policy Network, told TIME. Musk's sworn testimony on April 30 dealt another blow to his AI company's credibility. The xAI CEO seemed to admit on the stand that xAI "partly" trains its models on the outputs of OpenAI's models, and suggested that "all the AI companies" train on competing models' outputs. While Chinese AI companies, which lag frontier AI companies' models by about eight months, have been accused of the same practice, there is no indication that other Western frontier AI labs do so. Grok lags OpenAI's latest model, GPT-5.5, by about five months, according to data from Epoch AI, an AI research institute. It would be "pretty surprising" if OpenAI, Anthropic, or Google DeepMind were training on competing models' outputs, says Wildeford. And outside of the courtroom, xAI was making moves that weakened the company's position in developing AI models. On May 6, xAI announced that Anthropic would take over all compute capacity at Colossus 1, a facility xAI had already vacated in favor of its newer Colossus 2 data center. Musk had previously called Anthropic "woke" and "evil," but backtracked as the deal was announced. "Everyone I met [at Anthropic] was highly competent and cared a great deal about doing the right thing. No one set off my evil detector," he wrote on X. The fact that xAI is renting out its computing resources to another AI company is a sign that there is insufficient demand to use its models, and that they "don't know exactly what to do with those data centers," says Nathan Calvin, general counsel at Encode AI, an AI advocacy group. "That's clearly not good [for xAI]." If xAI does fall behind in the race to develop AI models, Musk could still profit from the AI boom by providing computing power to other AI companies. Colossus 1 was built in just 122 days, demonstrating xAI's capability for such infrastructure projects. Anthropic has "expressed interest" in renting orbital computing capacity from SpaceX. SpaceX, complete with its new AI division, is reportedly aiming for an IPO on June 12, which could value the company at $1.75 trillion. But a pivot away from developing the AI models themselves would be yet another blow for Musk -- both financially and personally.
Anthropic's Stainless steal tightens grip on AI dev tooling
Claude maker nabs SDK and MCP tooling biz, plans to sunset platform Anthropic is acquiring Stainless, a maker of software development tools that counts rivals OpenAI and Google as clients. The deal, reportedly for more than $300 million, demonstrates Anthropic's continued interest in exercising greater control over the AI technical stack and suggests that speculation about the commodification of models is on the mark. Frontier models will not be so strong that they serve as a moat or barrier to competition, but the tooling and workflow around those models should provide some cover. Anthropic has made several recent acquisitions that give it more say in the software that orchestrates model input, output, and tool calls. In December, it snarfed Bun, a JavaScript runtime, package manager, and test runner. Two months later, it bought Vercept, a company focused on AI-mediated computer usage. In April, it admitted healthcare AI startup Coefficient Bio into the fold. Enter Stainless. "Hundreds of companies rely on Stainless to generate SDKs, CLIs, and MCP servers - the libraries, command-line tools, and connectors that let developers and agents use an API," Anthropic said in its announcement. "Stainless turns an API spec into SDKs across TypeScript, Python, Go, Java, Kotlin, and more." SDKs are sticky. Whoever ships the cleanest one wins the long tail of developer mindshare One of those hundreds of companies is OpenAI - its Python, Node, Java, Go, and Ruby clients are based on SDKs generated by Stainless. With Stainless now planning to shutter its platform on September 1, 2026, OpenAI and other industry customers will have to shoulder the burden of maintaining existing SDKs and find equivalent tools elsewhere. It should be noted that OpenAI in March agreed to acquire Python tool maker Astral, one of six such deals this year. So far, the Astral acquisition hasn't affected the ability of Anthropic or developers to use Astral's tooling. Jan Schmitz, who runs AI analytics biz BrightBean, described the Stainless acquisition as both offensive and defensive. "By acquiring the SDK infrastructure used across the industry, Anthropic gets visibility into how competitors evolve their APIs, even if only through generator usage patterns, and it gains the ability to set the pace on integration tooling," he said in a blog post. "The defensive read: If OpenAI or Google had bought Stainless first, the damage to Anthropic's developer ecosystem would have been worse. SDKs are sticky. Whoever ships the cleanest one wins the long tail of developer mindshare." Schmitz also argues that Anthropic sees value in controlling the MCP standard that it proposed and promoted. "The pattern looks like this: Control the standard by giving it away, then control the implementation by owning the toolchain," he said, noting that Google followed that playbook with Kubernetes and then making GKE the leading managed version. ®
