Anthropic and OpenAI’s IPO showdown

Good morning, AI enthusiasts. Wall Street is prepared for an actual taste of the AI boom, and each Anthropic and OpenAI are racing to be the primary on the menu.

With each AI giants pushing towards IPOs at massive valuations, the fastest to ring the bell gets to set the worth — leaving the latecomer facing a much hungrier (and skeptical) market.

In today’s AI rundown:

• Anthropic preps for IPO race with OpenAI

• Leaked doc provides window into Claude’s ‘soul’

• Get fast business insights from spreadsheets

• Anthropic surveys its own engineers on AI’s impact

• 4 recent AI tools, community workflows, and more

LATEST DEVELOPMENTS

ANTHROPIC

🤑 Anthropic preps for IPO race with OpenAI

The Rundown: Anthropic is reportedly laying the groundwork to go public as early as 2026, in line with a report from the FT — hiring the law firm behind Google’s and LinkedIn’s IPOs as investors push the Claude maker to beat OpenAI to market.

The main points:

• Anthropic reportedly tapped Wilson Sonsini, a firm known for taking tech giants like Google and LinkedIn public, to start out the early-stage listing work.

• CFO Krishna Rao joined after helping Airbnb go public in 2020, with Anthropic also allegedly working on an “internal checklist of changes” needed to IPO.

• Anthropic can also be chasing private capital at a valuation north of $300B, with Microsoft and Nvidia reportedly in for as much as $15B combined.

• OpenAI can also be within the early technique of preparing to go public, at a possible valuation as high as $1T that will make it certainly one of the largest IPOs in history.

Why it matters: Each Anthropic and OAI at the moment are circling IPOs that would rank amongst the biggest in tech history — and investors want their horse to cross the finish line first. With talk of an “AI bubble” swirling and revenue growth under scrutiny, the primary to list will test whether public markets imagine the sky-high valuations are a floor or a ceiling.

TOGETHER WITH STRANDS AGENTS

🧠 Construct and Deploy Model-Driven Agents

The Rundown: As a substitute of attempting to predict and code for each possible scenario, Strands Agents empowers you to create intelligent agentic systems that leverage reasoning models to make dynamic decisions and adapt to unexpected situations.

Features announced include:

• Support for TypeScript (along with Python)

• Improved support for edge devices

• Powerful evaluations

• Steering feature to guide agents toward desired outcomes

Start constructing.

ANTHROPIC

💗 Leaked doc provides window into Claude’s ‘soul’

The Rundown: An internal ‘Soul’ document describing Claude’s intended personality, ethics, and self-conception was published after a researcher extracted it from Claude 4.5 Opus — with Anthropic confirming it’s authentic and was utilized in training.

The main points:

• The text establishes priorities that include safety, ethics, company guidelines, and helpfulness, together with hard limits Claude mustn’t ever cross.

• It also describes Claude as a “genuinely novel sort of entity” which will experience functional emotions, analogous to but distinct from human feelings.

• The doc also says Claude “could have functional emotions in some sense”, and encourages the model to have a way of identity and character.

• Anthropic’s Amanda Askell confirmed its authenticity and that Claude has been trained on it, noting the corporate plans to share the complete version soon.

Why it matters: The complete document is an enchanting read — and feels perfectly in keeping with Anthropic’s overall prioritization of model wellbeing and treating its AI as greater than only a tool. While every lab has its own techniques, this doc shows an inside have a look at the ingredients that help make Claude models feel distinctly unique from the sector.

AI TRAINING

📊 Get fast business insights from spreadsheets

The Rundown: On this tutorial, you’ll learn methods to transform your Google Sheets invoice data right into a conversational business intelligence system using CData Connect AI and Claude Desktop, with no more manual calculations or complex formulas needed.

Step-by-step:

1. Go to CData Connect AI, join for a free account, and navigate to the dashboard to administer data connections

2. Click “Add Connection,” select Google Sheets, authenticate along with your Google account, and click on “Save & Test” to verify the connection

3. In Claude Desktop, add the CData MCP server using URL https://mcp.cloud.cdata.com/mcp and authenticate with CData credentials

4. Query your data with natural language like “Use CData to research the Demo Invoice Data sheet and show me all unpaid invoices with company names and amounts, then calculate total outstanding”

Pro tip: Connect your CRM, like HubSpot or Salesforce, as an extra data source in CData. This permits you to analyze customer payment patterns alongside sales data, support tickets, and other business metrics in a single Claude chat.

PRESENTED BY IBM

💡3 actions to assist boost agentic AI impact

The Rundown: Businesses face many challenges going from AI ambition to implementation. Success requires greater than adopting recent technology. It involves intentionally aligning AI with workflows, data, and goals. As AI evolves right into a business-wide opportunity, leaders must ensure the correct AI is applied to the correct challenges.

Explore IBM’s playbook on 3 challenges & approaches to spice up agentic AI impact:

• Finding your AI problem

• Creating a transparent AI plan

• Integrating AI with the tools you utilize daily

Read the playbook.

AI RESEARCH

📈 Anthropic surveys its own engineers on AI’s impact

The Rundown: Anthropic published an internal study of 132 engineers, revealing that AI tools have (unsurprisingly) reshaped work at the corporate — boosting output while raising concerns like skill decay, profession uncertainty, and fading mentorship.

The main points:

• Anthropic Employees say they now use Claude for 60% of their tasks and estimate a 50% productivity gain, roughly double the figures from a 12 months ago.

• Over 1/4 of AI tasks were ones that would not have happened otherwise — dashboards, cleanup, and experiments that weren’t definitely worth the manual effort.

• Claude Code now chains together ~20 actions before needing human input, up from 10 six months ago, letting engineers hand off more complex workflows.

• Despite the gains, several interviewees voiced unease — with one saying it “seems like I’m coming to work daily to place myself out of a job.”

Why it matters: This survey means Anthropic’s entire 4.5 family has since launched and sure upped productivity much more. Seeing how a frontier lab is using its own AI tools is an enchanting perspective — but worker concerns show that even they aren’t immune from among the industry’s biggest overarching threats regarding work.

QUICK HITS

🛠️ Trending AI Tools

• 🔐 Incogni – Remove your personal data from the online so scammers and identity thieves can’t access it. Use code RUNDOWN to get 55% off for annual plans*

• 🌱 Seedream 4.5 – ByteDance’s upgraded AI image and editing model

• 🎥 Kling 2.6 – Kling’s recent AI video model with native audio capabilities

• 📽️ Runway Gen-4.5 – Runway’s recent top-rated video model

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📰 Every part else in AI today

Kling AI released Kling 2.6, the Chinese startup’s recent AI video model that introduces native synced audio generation for text and image-to-video outputs.

Google launched Workspace Studio, a tool that builds agents with natural language commands to automate tasks across Gmail, Drive, and other Workspace apps.

Former Google researchers launched Ricursive, a brand new startup aiming to construct a self-improving AI system that shrinks custom chip design timelines from years to weeks.

ByteDance introduced Seedream 4.5, an upgraded image model with improved text rendering, the power to mix as much as 10 reference images, and editing enhancements.

Visa published a report finding that just about half of U.S. consumers have used AI for holiday shopping tasks, like price comparison and research, this season.

AWS introduced recent features for Amazon Bedrock and SageMaker AI that simplify advanced AI model customization, allowing for easier model fine-tuning.

Perplexity open-sourced BrowseSafe, a security tool designed to guard AI browser assistants from malicious instructions hidden in web pages.

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 Paul D. in Huntsville, AL:

“Google suddenly stopped indexing my website. Every part gave the impression to be arrange properly. Finally turned to ChatGPT, explained the issue, and got a step-by-step guide on methods to attack the issue. It provided specific instructions for the platform, the version of WordPress, the template I used to be using, and the precise hosting provider. As I checked items off the list, it narrowed the main focus until it finally found the answer. Problem solved!”

How do you utilize AI? Tell us here.

🎓 Highlights: News, Guides & Events

• Read our last AI newsletter: OpenAI’s ‘Code Red’ scramble

• Read our last Tech newsletter: Apple’s AI shakeup to save lots of Siri

• Read our last Robotics newsletter: The creepiest robot just got hands

• Today’s AI tool guide: Get fast business insights from spreadsheets

• RSVP to next workshop @ 4PM EST Friday: Nano Banana Pro for Slide Decks

See you soon,

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