After a volunteer developer rejected its code, an autonomous AI agent independently researched his background and published a hit piece attacking his character. The incident at Matplotlib shows how theoretical AI safety risks are becoming real.
Anthropic has closed a $30 billion Series G funding round, bringing the AI company's post-money valuation to $380 billion.
The round was led by GIC, Singapore's sovereign wealth fund, and U.S. investment firm Coatue. D. E. Shaw Ventures, Dragoneer, Founders Fund, ICONIQ, and MGX, an Abu Dhabi-based technology investment fund, joined as co-leads. Microsoft and Nvidia also participated, building on previously announced strategic partnerships. Anthropic says it will use the capital for research, product development, and infrastructure expansion.
Anthropic reports annualized revenue of $14 billion, having grown more than tenfold in each of the past three years. Claude Code, the company's coding tool, now accounts for over $2.5 billion in annualized revenue on its own.
One notable detail about how companies are using AI: more than 500 customers spend over $1 million per year on Claude, according to Anthropic, and eight of the ten largest Fortune companies are among its users.
Microsoft AI CEO Mustafa Suleyman predicts the end of traditional white-collar work in 18 months.
"I think that we're going to have a human-level performance on most, if not all, professional tasks," Suleyman says in an interview with the Financial Times. "So white-collar work, where you're sitting down at a computer, either being a lawyer or an accountant or a project manager or a marketing person — most of those tasks will be fully automated by an AI within the next 12 to 18 months."
Suleyman leads Microsoft's AI division, which has invested billions in OpenAI and Anthropic and operates Copilot, one of the most widely used AI work tools. He describes the shift as already underway: In software engineering, developers are already using "AI-assisted coding for the vast majority of their code production."
Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei even predicted that half of entry-level office jobs could disappear within one to five years. He is already observing that fewer junior and mid-level employees are needed. AI could be better than humans in many areas within one to two years, while the labor market adapts with a delay.
Suleyman's boss, Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella, on the other hand, sees more of a shift where existing cognitive tasks might be automated, but new, more demanding tasks would emerge.
The Pentagon is pressing leading AI companies including OpenAI, Anthropic, Google, and xAI to make their AI tools available on classified military networks – without the usual usage restrictions.
The company plans to fully absorb grid upgrade costs, invest in new power generation, and cap its data centers' energy consumption during peak hours. Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei told NBC News that the costs of AI models should fall on Anthropic, not on citizens.
Microsoft and OpenAI made similar commitments back in January. The pledges come amid growing political pressure: New York senators introduced a bill that would pause new data center permits, and Senator Van Hollen is pushing legislation that would require AI companies to cover expansion costs themselves.
According to Politico, the Trump administration is also preparing a voluntary agreement that would commit AI companies to covering electricity price increases. The Lawrence Berkeley National Lab estimates that data centers could consume around 12 percent of all US electricity by 2028 - up from 4.4 percent in 2024.
French AI startup Mistral reports an annualized revenue run rate of over $400 million. Europe’s growing desire for digital sovereignty is driving the business.
Bytedance is in talks with Samsung to produce a custom AI chip, a deal that could also give the TikTok parent company access to hard-to-get memory chips, according to Reuters.
Bytedance is developing its own AI chip for inference tasks under the codename SeedChip and is negotiating with Samsung to manufacture it, Reuters reports. What makes the deal especially interesting: the talks also cover access to memory chip supplies, which are extremely scarce amid the global AI infrastructure buildout - making the arrangement particularly valuable for Bytedance.
The company plans to receive its first sample chips by the end of March and produce at least 100,000 units this year, with a possible ramp-up to 350,000. Bytedance intends to spend more than 160 billion yuan (roughly $22 billion) on AI-related procurement in 2026 - more than half of that going toward Nvidia chips, including H200 models, and development of its own chip.
Bytedance executive Zhao Qi acknowledged during an internal meeting in January that the company's AI models still trail global leaders like OpenAI, but pledged continued support for AI development. Bytedance itself denies the chip project - a spokesperson told Reuters the information was inaccurate without providing further details.
