Anthropic Gets $183B Valuation

Anthropic just pulled in a staggering $13 billion in Series F funding, tripling its valuation to $183 billion. ICONIQ, Fidelity, and Lightspeed led the round, joined by a wave of institutional backers betting big on the corporate’s momentum. And the numbers justify the hype: revenue has rocketed from $1 billion initially of the yr to $5 billion, with Claude Code, the AI coding assistant launched in February, already accounting for $500 million.

Claude Code runs on Anthropic’s flagship Claude Opus 4.1, which just smashed records on the SWE-bench Verified coding benchmark with a 74.5% rating, outpacing Google’s Gemini 2.5 Pro and OpenAI’s o3. Demand is off the charts. Usage jumped 10x in three months despite rate caps, and Anthropic’s enterprise customer base spending above $100,000 grew sevenfold in a yr, and exploded past 300,000. The money infusion will bankroll GPUs, international expansion, and AI safety research. Read more.

OpenAI is making considered one of its biggest bets yet, acquiring product-testing startup Statsig in a $1.1 billion all-stock deal and naming founder Vijaye Raji as CTO of Applications. Raji will report back to Fidji Simo, the previous Instacart CEO now leading OpenAI’s Applications division, and can oversee engineering for ChatGPT, Codex, and future consumer products. Statsig’s experimentation and feature-management platform, already in use at OpenAI, will now be fully integrated to speed up product iteration and deployment.

As Raji comes on board, OpenAI is making changes to its leadership team. Chief Product Officer Kevin Weil shifts to steer “OpenAI for Science,” a brand new group focused on AI-driven research platforms, while head of engineering Srinivas Narayanan becomes CTO of B2B applications, working with COO Brad Lightcap on enterprise partnerships.

Statsig will proceed serving external customers independently from its Seattle office, pending regulatory approval. Read more.

ElevenLabs has rolled out version 2 of its AI sound effects model, bringing longer clips, higher fidelity, and tighter editing control. The update boosts maximum clip length from short bursts to 30 seconds, raises sampling quality to 48 kHz, and adds seamless looping directly contained in the ElevenLabs Studio editor. Users can generate effects with text prompts through the net app or API, making it easier to integrate into production workflows.

The corporate also revamped its SFX library, adding improved search, a favorites function, and a remix tool for quick variations. Hardware support is expanding too: the SB-1 soundboard now runs the updated model with built-in MIDI connectivity, opening up real-time performance options. The discharge builds on ElevenLabs’ push to dominate generative audio, following its earlier launches of Eleven Music and the 11ai workflow assistant. Read more.

Google is pushing hard on AI while sidestepping regulatory fire. NotebookLM is about to get a serious audio upgrade with three latest modes: Temporary, a two-minute summary for quick hits; Critiquewhere dual AI hosts break down content like built-in editors; and Debatewhich stages opposing viewpoints to stress-test ideas. Google can be experimenting with latest female and male voices, a long-requested fix to provide users more control and personality in how AI speaks.

For developers, Google dropped Stax, a practical evaluation toolkit for big language models. As an alternative of counting on leaderboard hype, Stax lets teams run structured tests with customizable “autoraters” that check fluency, factual grounding, and safety, or industry-specific criteria like compliance. Quick Compare accelerates prompt iteration, dataset-level evaluations bring reproducibility, and analytics dashboards reveal how models behave under pressure.

Google also dodged a breakup of Chrome after a court’s ruling, but must share search data with rivals and ditch exclusive deals like its Safari pact. The ruling reins in its dominance without tearing down its core business, sending shares up 7%. Read more.