New Claude, New Realities

Anthropic dropped Opus 4.8 with dynamic workflows for Claude Code and raised $65B at a $965B valuation, overtaking OpenAI. Blue Origin's New Glenn exploded during testing, Amazon killed its AI usage leaderboard, and an AI startup offers free home cleaning for training data.

• Anthropic launches Opus 4.8, saying it's "more likely to flag uncertainties about its work and less likely to make unsupported claims", at the same price as 4.7 (TechCrunch)
• Anthropic raised a $65B Series H at a $965B post-money valuation, overtaking OpenAI's $852B valuation, and says its revenue run rate crossed $47B this month (NYT)
• Blue Origin's New Glenn rocket, which exploded during testing on Thursday, was set to ferry 48 Amazon Leo satellites on Monday; Amazon paid Blue Origin $2.7B (FT)
• Sources: Amazon has shut down an internal leaderboard that tracked employees' use of AI tools after workers tried to boost their scores with needless tasks (FT)
• AI startup Shift launches a free home cleaning service in NYC to record first-person video with a camera-equipped cap and use it to train robots (The Verge)

Longreads

• Simon Willison on how coding agents gave Anthropic and OpenAI real product-market fit, burning $1,000+/month in tokens per power user and changing enterprise pricing (Simon Willison)
• Kirkland & Ellis, the world's highest-grossing law firm, is setting aside $500M to build its own AI platform rather than rely on tools available to its rivals (FT)

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