James Altucher:

Anthropic Raises $65 Billion at a $965 Billion Valuation, Releases a More “Honest” Claude Opus 4.8

Anthropic announced it has raised $65 billion in a series H fundraising round, with a staggering valuation of $965 billion. The round was led by Altimeter Capital, Dragoneer, Greenoaks, and Sequoia Capital.

The official valuation puts Anthropic well ahead of archrival OpenAI’s reported $850 billion valuation as both companies jockey to be the first to pull off an IPO later this year. It also recently skipped further ahead of OpenAI on generating annual recurring revenue.

In addition to the fundraising news, Anthropic also released Claude Opus 4.8, less than six weeks after its last version. The incremental update to Anthropic’s flagship AI model ekes out a better benchmark score for agentic coding tasks, multidisciplinary reasoning, and financial analysis.

The company says Opus 4.8 is more “honest,” and is less likely to be overconfident and make claims that it cannot support. The release rolls out a few new features as well. “Effort control” allows users to control how much effort Claude exerts for a response – where a greater effort could result in a higher cost for the user.

The company says Claude is the first frontier model available on all three major cloud hyperscalers: Amazon Web Services, Microsoft Azure, and Google Cloud.

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Greg Guenthner:

Google Engineer Charged Over $2.75 Million in Alleged Polymarket Insider Trading Bets

Federal prosecutors charged a Google employee with commodities fraud, wire fraud, and money laundering, alleging confidential data was used to trade on Polymarket prediction markets.

Michele Spagnuolo, a staff software engineer at Google who used the alias “AlphaRaccoon,” allegedly bet about $2.75 million across Google-related Polymarket contracts from October 15 to December 4 last year, the U.S. Department of Justice disclosed Wednesday. Spanuolo allegedly won about $1.2 million from the predictions.

Spagnuolo allegedly had access to a Google internal software tool that provided access to “confidential, nonpublic Year in Search data” and bore a “Google Confidential” banner, the DOJ’s criminal complaint reads.

Prediction markets are platforms that allow users to bet on the outcome of future events, with contract prices moving as traders buy and sell based on what they think will happen.

State governments such as New York, California, and Illinois have moved to restrict public employees from using nonpublic information to trade on prediction markets. Officials in the states said federal regulators had not set clear enough standards for the sector.

Earlier this week, President Donald Trump backed CFTC control over prediction markets, saying state officials should not set rules for the sector.

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Chris Campbell:

The Rise of Space Nationalism

Orbits, spectrum, ground stations, launch pads, the silicon inside the satellites – all of it is being reclassified. Nations are treating space infrastructure the way they treat rare earths and chips. Strategic. Finite. Mine.

You can't run a war without space infrastructure. You can't run a phone network without it. You can't run an AI agent paying for things through a low-Earth-orbit satellite without it. Whoever owns the sky owns the next economy.

China is positioning. In late 2025, Beijing filed paperwork for two constellations totaling nearly 200,000 satellites.

Washington is doing its version. The FCC just blessed a $40 billion EchoStar spectrum sale to SpaceX and AT&T – the biggest spectrum deal in U.S. history, done a week before the S-1. Amazon is buying Globalstar for $11.6 billion.

India carved out satellite spectrum for administrative allocation. Saudi Arabia spun up Neo Space Group. The UAE merged its satellite assets into a single sovereign vehicle. Canada is pitching Telesat Lightspeed to Five Eyes allies.

Space is being treated the way oil was treated in 1973, when it became a strategic asset. But this time, the repricing shows up in auction values and operator valuations, not at the pump.

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