Anthropic leapfrogs OpenAI as the most valuable AI startup -- and drops a new model

Anthropic announced a 65 billion dollar fundraising round that values the company at 965 billion, signing its place as the most valuable AI startup and surpassing OpenAI. That same day it released Claude Opus 4.8, a generalist LLM that improves coding, reasoning, and productivity. The funding aims to expand compute to meet the demand for Claude and support future models, including Mythos, about which the company says safeguards will be implemented and customers will gain access soon. Opus 4.8 introduces an 'effort control' to adjust computing power, and its fast mode is three times cheaper than previous versions.