Anthropic’s historic $13B round

Good morning, AI enthusiasts. Anthropic just pulled off considered one of the most important funding rounds in tech history… An enormous $13B raise that just about triples its valuation to $183B in only six months.

Despite the bubble warnings, the investor appetite for frontier AI labs just isn’t drying up — and though Claude is probably not the household name that ChatGPT has turn out to be, its rise in coding and enterprise circles is translating into dollar signs in an enormous way.

In today’s AI rundown:

• Anthropic’s $183B valuation after massive funding

• OpenAI acquires Statsig for $1.1B

• Create product ads with Nano Banana

• Tencent’s Voyager for 3D world creation

• 4 recent AI tools, community workflows, and more

LATEST DEVELOPMENTS

ANTHROPIC

💰 Anthropic’s $183B valuation after massive funding

The Rundown: Anthropic just announced a brand new $13B funding round that values the corporate at a whopping $183B, nearly tripling its value from six months ago and coming amid significant growth from Claude Code and enterprise accounts.

The main points:

• Anthropic now serves over 300,000 enterprise customers, with accounts value $100k+ in annual revenue growing sevenfold in 2025.

• The corporate’s Claude Code assistant now generates $500M in annual revenue, with usage up 10x in three months.

• The investor list notably includes QIA, the primary Middle East participant, as hinted at by CEO Dario Amodei in a leaked memo in July.

• Anthropic’s last raise of $3.5B in March valued the corporate at $61.5B, marking a meteoric 3x rise within the last six months.

Why it matters: While there was loads of chatter about an AI investment bubble, the dollars don’t appear to be drying up yet, especially for leaders on the frontier of the industry. While Anthropic previously turned down investments from the Gulf region, the expensive race for global compute from rivals could have modified some perspectives.

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AI ACQUISITIONS

📊 OpenAI acquires Statsig for $1.1B

The Rundown: OpenAI just announced a $1.1B all-stock acquisition of experimentation platform Statsig, bringing its founder Vijaye Raji aboard as CTO of Applications to guide ChatGPT and Codex engineering.

The main points:

• Raji will oversee product engineering across ChatGPT and Codex, reporting to Applications CEO Fidji Simo, who recently joined from Instacart.

• Statsig’s platform, which powers A/B testing and have flagging for firms including OpenAI itself, will proceed operating independently.

• The deal marks OpenAI’s second major acquisition attempt this 12 months, following a failed $3B bid for coding startup Windsurf in July.

• OAI also made several other executive moves, with Srinivas Narayanan shifting to CTO of B2B Apps and CPO Kevin Weil leading a brand new “AI for Science” team.

Why it matters: OpenAI’s last acquisition was a bumpy ride, however the leadership movement appears to have this one on solid ground. With the competition for talent at an all-time high within the AI race, the acqui-hire route may turn out to be a good more utilized tool for the giants of the space to herald top leaders and teams in areas of need.

AI TRAINING

🍌 Create product ads with Nano Banana

The Rundown: On this tutorial, you’ll learn learn how to use Google’s recent Nano Banana model (Gemini 2.5 Flash Image) to show product photos into skilled marketing ads and transform sketches into animations — all for about 4 cents per image.

Step-by-step:

1. Go to gemini.google.com, click “Tools” and toggle on “Create Images” (that is Nano Banana/Gemini 2.5 Flash Image)

2. Upload your product image and prompt: “Create ads to suit various environments with the attached image — subway, train station, bus stop, luxury magazine”

3. Watch because it seamlessly integrates your product into realistic ad environments with appropriate lighting and perspective

4. Transform sketches by uploading black and white drawings — Nano Banana adds color while preserving exact character structure

5. Take it further: Toggle on “Create videos with Veo” to show your generated images into animated videos with sound (takes ~2 minutes)

Pro tip: Mock up entire campaigns before spending real money — at 4 cents per image through the API, test different concepts on social media to see what resonates before committing to expensive production.

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TENCENT

🌎 Tencent’s Voyager for 3D world creation

The Rundown: Tencent just released HunyuanWorld-Voyager, an open-source “ultra long-range” AI world model that transforms a single photo into an explorable, exportable 3D environment.

The main points:

• Voyager uses a “world cache” that stores previously generated scene regions, maintaining consistency as cameras move through longer virtual environments.

• It topped Stanford’s WorldScore benchmark across multiple metrics, beating out other open-source rivals in spatial coherence tests.

• Users can control camera movement through keyboard or joystick inputs, with only a single reference photo needed to create the exportable 3D environments.

• The system also remembers what it creates as you explore, so returning to previous areas shows the identical consistent scenery.

Why it matters: World models have turn out to be considered one of the most popular frontiers in AI, with labs racing to construct systems that understand physical spaces fairly than simply generating flat images. Between Genie 3, Mirage, World-Voyager, and more, the range of options (and the applications for these interactive 3D environments) is growing fast.

QUICK HITS

🛠️ Trending AI Tools

• 🍌 Gemini 2.5 Flash Image Preview – Viral ‘Nano Banana’ AI editing model

• 🗣️ Hunyuan Translation Model – Open-source SOTA AI translation system

• 🍥 GenSpark AI Designer – Design anything with a single prompt

• 🔌 Le Chat MCP Connectors – Integrate Mistral with 20+ enterprise platforms

📰 Every part else in AI today

Mistral AI expanded its Le Chat platform with over 20 recent enterprise MCP connectors, also introducing “Memories” for persistent context and personalization.

Microsoft announced a brand new partnership with the U.S. GSA to offer the federal government with free access to Copilot and AI services for as much as 12 months.

OpenAI CPO Kevin Weil unveiled “OpenAI for Science,” a brand new initiative aimed toward constructing AI-powered platforms to speed up scientific discovery.

Swiss researchers from EPFL, ETH Zurich, and CSCS launched Apertus, a completely open-source multilingual language model trained on over 1,000 languages.

Chinese delivery giant Meituan open-sourced LongCat-Flash-Chat, the corporate’s first AI model that rivals DeepSeek V3, Qwen 3, and Kimi K2 on benchmarks.

ElevenLabs released an upgraded version of its sound effects AI model, with recent features including looping, prolonged output length, and better quality generations.

COMMUNITY

🤝 Community AI workflows

Every newsletter, we showcase how a reader is using AI to work smarter, save time, or make life easier.

Today’s workflow comes from reader Cathy K. in Salt Lake City, Utah:

“I used ChatGPT and Claude to jot down complex Excel formulas. I used to be solving for a technique to model assigning media spend (promoting dollars) to individual restaurants for a limited-time offer campaign. I needed a technique to account for multiple variables and tiering, all while making a bell curve distribution. Solution completed.”

How do you employ AI? Tell us here.

🎓 Highlights: News, Guides & Events

• Read our last AI newsletter: AI gives paralyzed patients robotic control

• Read our last Tech newsletter: Japan’s yen just went digital

• Read our last Robotics newsletter: Nvidia’s palm-sized robot brain

• Today’s AI tool guide: Create product ads with Nano Banana

• RSVP to our next workshop @ 4 PM EST Friday: Template-first AI workflows

See you soon,

Rowan, Joey, Zach, Shubham, and Jennifer — the humans behind The Rundown