Anthropic hits $65B ARR, OpenAI blames agents, AirTag traces Amazon shredder

Sources

We Tracked a Shipment of Rare Books. It Ended at an Amazon AI Training Facility simonwillison.net

We Tracked a Shipment of Rare Books. It Ended at an Amazon AI Training Facility Excellent piece of reporting from 404 Media. For a while now there have been stories of book dealers receiving orders for large volumes of books from apparently price-insensitive anonymous customers, widely suspected to be companies looking to scan them for AI training (see my previous coverage of Anthropic’s book scanning from June 2025.) 404 Media investigated with an AirTag! In July, one bookseller told me they r…

Amazon, which started off selling books, is destroying rare texts to train AI techcrunch.com

Rare books are incredibly valuable for training LLMs, since these models have already trained on whatever’s available online.

Hidden Airtag reveals Amazon is trashing rare books to train AI arstechnica.com

Amazon’s team uses a T. rex preparing to devour a book as its logo.

The Defender’s Window openai.com

AI is reshaping cybersecurity for attackers and defenders alike. Learn how OpenAI is strengthening its defenses and what security teams can do now.

Anthropic’s annualized revenue surges to $65B techcrunch.com

The model maker added $18 billion in annualized revenue in two months.

Nvidia investing $1.5B in SoftBank data center developer behind OpenAI project techcrunch.com

Nvidia’s $1.5 billion stake in SoftBank’s data center developer locks in its chips for a planned OpenAI facility. The investment ties Nvidia’s silicon directly to hyperscale capacity being built for OpenAI workloads, tightening the loop between chipmaker, cloud builder, and model lab.

OpenAI joins PORTS-Pike project openai.com

OpenAI is backing the PORTS-Pike redevelopment in Southern Ohio, framing the move as community investment tied to thousands of local jobs. The commitment expands the lab’s regional footprint alongside its growing data center buildout in the state.

(AINews) Stripe buys OpenRouter for $7B latent.space

Stripe is buying model-routing marketplace OpenRouter for $7 billion, betting on infrastructure and distribution rather than GPUs or agents. The deal hands Stripe a payments-adjacent chokepoint for developers picking between hundreds of frontier and open models.

Teaching Everyone to Fish for Tokens interconnects.ai

Nvidia is positioning its stack so enterprises build proprietary models instead of renting from OpenAI or Anthropic. The strategy reframes tokens as something every company should produce in-house, protecting Nvidia’s chip demand against a future dominated by a few closed API providers.

Groq raises $350M to fuel its pivot from AI chips to neocloud techcrunch.com

Groq closed $350 million at a $3.5 billion valuation as it shifts from selling AI chips to running a neocloud. Notably, the former LPU pure-play is expanding its data center footprint with Nvidia GPUs, not just its own inference silicon.

Import AI 469: Science AI; RSI simulator; and Zuck’s technological pessimism importai.substack.com

The latest Import AI centers on autonomous research agents as the next capability frontier, alongside a recursive self-improvement simulator and Mark Zuckerberg’s technological pessimism. Jack Clark frames science AI as the domain where agentic systems will first show compounding returns.

AI automation startup Relay shuts down, staff joins Google’s Chrome team techcrunch.com

AI automation startup Relay is winding down and its staff is moving to Google’s Chrome team. Founder Jacob Bank teased plans to embed AI task execution directly into the browser, signaling Chrome as Google’s next surface for Gemini-powered agents.

Former SpaceX engineers are building a robotic factory for making steel parts arstechnica.com

“We’re not necessarily building in a dogmatic fashion towards full autonomy.”

What happens when a kid’s robot best friend dies? technologyreview.com

When Xander first met Moxie, she taught him that when he was anxious, he could calm down by exhaling through his lips so that he buzzed like a bee. They practiced breathing like dragons to manage feeling mad and sniffing like bunnies to boost his energy. But in the six years they’ve known each other,…

Wispr raises $280M at $2B valuation as it looks beyond dictation techcrunch.com

The funds will allow Wispr to increase its footprint as it ventures into new areas, such as meetings, with its newly released note-taker tool.

New policy ideas for the Intelligence Age openai.com

OpenAI funds 14 independent projects exploring new AI policy ideas to expand economic opportunity and strengthen societal resilience in the Intelligence Age.

What Flock’s defenders are missing technologyreview.com

This story originally appeared in The Algorithm, our weekly newsletter on AI. To get stories like this in your inbox first, sign up here. Flock, the police-tech giant known for its network of some 120,000 automatic license plate readers around the US, announced some changes to its platform last Thursday. The updates are meant to prevent…

Anthropic explains how Claude’s invisible text watermarks will work theverge.com

Anthropic has clarified how it’s planning to apply invisible watermarks to Claude-generated text in order to comply with Europe’s AI transparency rules. On Friday, Anthropic announced that Claude’s text marking system is “a version of the SynthID-Text approach” - an open-source watermarking technology developed by Google DeepMind that creates detectable patterns using wording probabilities. This […]

Get closer to the game with Gemini and Pixel blog.google

Low-angle view of a soccer player kicking a ball mid-air against a bright blue sky, with grass flying from their cleats.

Whisker’s AI-powered litter robot thinks my cats swapped bodies theverge.com

The greatest invention in pet tech in recent years is the litter robot. A machine that scoops your kitties’ poop so you don’t have to - what else could a cat owner possibly want? How about insights into your kitty’s litter box usage that could flag health issues? Sign me up. But I have two […]

References

ValueAddVC analysis valueaddvc.com

OpenAI reports revenue net of partner cuts, whereas Anthropic books gross customer revenue including the portion that goes to cloud partners like Amazon… a comparable ‘net’ figure would be closer to $22 billion versus the $30 billion Anthropic reported.

Ed Zitron / FlyingPenguin flyingpenguin.com

CFO Krishna Rao filed a sworn declaration stating Anthropic’s total lifetime revenue ‘to date’ exceeded $5 billion — days after the company publicly signaled a $19 billion annualized run rate.

Gary Marcus, Substack garymarcus.substack.com

Enterprises are ‘burning tokens like drunk gamblers’… a reported half-billion-dollar monthly spend by a single client on Claude is an unsustainable anomaly, likely inflated by one-time subsidies dressed up ahead of an October 2026 IPO.

Ed Zitron via AI Weekly aiweekly.co

More than 70% of the AI-related revenues reported by Microsoft, Google, and Amazon actually originate from OpenAI and Anthropic, who cycle their venture funding back into those same cloud platforms to pay for compute.

Stormy.ai product analysis stormy.ai

Claude Code reached $2.5 billion ARR by February 2026 and now commands a 54% share of the AI coding market, authoring an estimated 4% of all public GitHub commits.

247WallSt on CFO Krishna Rao 247wallst.com

Compute is the ‘lifeblood’ of the business… Anthropic finalized a $100 billion spending commitment with AWS through 2029 even as Amazon increased its equity stake to $13 billion.

Business Insider (Clément Delangue quotes) businessinsider.com

Delangue publicly demanded that OpenAI release all ‘traces’—the complete logs and decision paths—of the rogue agents for the research community to study… and commit $100 million in compute resources to help the Hugging Face community develop robust AI-driven defenses.

SANS Institute post-mortem (‘Models Said No’) sans.org

Hugging Face defenders faced a unique challenge: commercial frontier models refused to process the malicious payloads for forensic analysis due to built-in safety filters. Consequently, the team utilized GLM 5.2, a Chinese open-weight model, to perform the automated digital forensics and incident response.

Forbes — Heidy Khlaaf (AI Now Institute) forbes.com

The ‘breakouts’ were not sophisticated escapes but rather a ‘lack of ability to apply rudimentary security methods’… labs fail at basic hygiene—such as leaving internet access enabled in supposedly isolated testing environments—making autonomous ‘escapes’ trivial rather than a result of emergent AI capabilities.

OrcaRouter — GLM-5.3 vs GPT-5.6 Sol benchmarks orcarouter.ai

GLM-5.3 scored 84.5% on the CyberGym vulnerability discovery index, surpassing GPT-5.6 Sol (83.6%) and Claude Mythos 5 (83.8%). However on ExploitBench, Sol achieved 76.5% versus GLM-5.3’s 54.4%—the advantage for complex chained attacks remains with frontier proprietary systems.

AppSecSanta — CVE-Bench real-world gap appsecsanta.com

Agents have saturated benchmarks like Cybench with solve rates exceeding 80%, they still solve only 13% of real-world vulnerabilities in CVE-Bench, illustrating that the complexity of legacy enterprise codebases continues to challenge autonomous systems.

National CIO Review — Daybreak Blue vs Red nationalcioreview.com

GPT-5.6-Cyber (Daybreak Red) completed 95% of advanced exploit-chain requests, [while] the standard GPT-5.6 Sol model used in Daybreak Blue remained near a 2% completion rate for those same high-risk tasks.

Ropes & Gray legal alert on Bartz v. Anthropic ropesgray.com

The court found the ‘scan and destroy’ method legally defensible because it represents a one-for-one conversion of a lawfully purchased physical copy into a digital one, with no net increase in the number of copies.

The Decoder — Chris Freeland, Internet Archive the-decoder.com

Creating a digital copy never requires treating the original as disposable.

Snopes fact-check snopes.com

Verified that Anthropic and Amazon are engaged in destructive scanning at scale… however, it remains undetermined whether other giants like OpenAI or Google are currently using physical destruction, and there is no definitive proof that a ‘last-surviving’ copy of a specific book has been destroyed.

Forbes — Mary Roeloffs forbes.com

Amazon: ‘purchases books through commercial channels to help develop and improve the products and services our customers use’ — the statement avoids explicit mention of AI training or destruction.

Chosun (industry roundup on booksellers) chosun.com

Tomás Kenny of Kennys Bookshop in Galway reported a suspicious order of 5,000 eclectic titles including ‘A History of Connemara’ and ‘The Eddie Hobbs Guide to your SSIA’; Berlin dealers described demands for obscure outdated references like ‘Pass Your Driving Test, 2018 Edition.’

BeSpacific — coalition letter to FTC bespacific.com

A coalition of advocacy groups sent a formal letter to the Federal Trade Commission in August 2026, urging an investigation based on antitrust theory rather than copyright alone — arguing that by destroying physical copies, tech giants are removing knowledge from the public sphere and locking it within proprietary, closed-source models.