This week has been absolute chaos in the AI space. Between the sheer scale of the capital moving around and the public feuds, it feels like we’ve entered a completely different phase of the race.
Here’s my take on the big shifts over the past few weeks:
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The $20B Flex: I’ve been watching Anthropic’s valuation skyrocket, but hitting $350 billion is insane. They doubled their original target, likely because investor FOMO is at a fever pitch. With Nvidia and Microsoft leading the charge, the “compute loop” is officially closed and the chip makers are now the ones funding the labs to buy more of their own chips.
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Claude Code and Opus 4.6 are the Real Deal: I’m seeing Opus 4.6 being talked about all over since its release earlier this month and is becoming the go-to choice for engineers. And to top it off, Claude Code also seems to be gaining real traction in the enterprise market.
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SaaS becoming AIaaS?: All the hype around Claude Code and Cowork has contributed to a $300 billion rout in ‘legacy’ IT stocks these past couple of weeks (ServiceNow, Workday, Atlassian, DocuSign, etc.), as the market is assuming AI will now create a much shorter path for SaaS product development and therefore competition for those companies. But at the same time, the move does look a little overdone. I can see value investors are salivating at the idea of getting companies like Adobe at a PE under 15.
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The Super Bowl Pettiness: The vibes on X were wild after Anthropic dropped their Super Bowl ads. Seeing Sam Altman go on a rant calling the ads “dishonest” and labeling Anthropic “authoritarian” was peak Silicon Valley drama. It’s clear Anthropic’s “no-ads” stance is really getting under OpenAI’s skin.
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Global Friction in India: Even with billions in the bank, expansion is messy. Anthropic is dealing with a local trademark suit in India from a firm that’s used the name since 2017. It’s a classic speed bump, but with a $20B war chest, I expect they’ll just buy their way out of the confusion.
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The SpaceX-xAI Merger: The scale of this is hard to wrap your head around. Musk merging these two into a $1.25 trillion giant to build orbital data centers is the most ambitious thing I’ve seen yet. We aren’t just looking at an AI race anymore; we’re looking at a full-scale infrastructure war.
What a time to be paying attention.