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This week in Silicon Valley, startups & tech:
Anthropic closed $30B at a $900B valuation: Revenue run rate is on track to hit $50B by the end of June.
OpenAI is consolidating and picking fights: Brockman folded ChatGPT, Codex, and API into one team. OpenAI may sue Apple over Siri revenue.
OpenAI's former CTO just shipped a model that beats it: Mira Murati's TML-Interaction-Small crushed GPT-Realtime on every benchmark.
NextEra is buying Dominion for $67B: The largest utility merger in US history, driven entirely by AI power demand.
Bannon and 60+ Trump allies want a kill switch: A Humans First-led letter urges mandatory government testing of AI models before release.
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🏛️ Anthropic's $900B Coronation
💰 The Raise
Anthropic agreed to the terms of a $30B fundraising at a $900B pre-money valuation, with Sequoia, Dragoneer, Greenoaks, and Altimeter co-leading. That is a 6x jump from the ~$150B range it was raising at just six months ago. Investor documents show the revenue run rate is on track to hit $50B by the end of June, making Anthropic one of the fastest-growing enterprise software companies in history.
For Context: The 34 leading AI startups are now generating roughly $80B in combined annualized revenue; Anthropic and OpenAI capture 89% of it.
The CFO Framing: In an interview on Invest Like the Best, Rao described a "cone of uncertainty" in AI, where returns to frontier intelligence remain steep, but no one can predict when they flatten. He said Anthropic intentionally raises less money than is available and remains conservative in its revenue projections. At $900B, "conservative" is doing a lot of work.
📊 The Business Machine
Ramp told investors that more of its customers now use Anthropic than OpenAI, a first. That is meaningful as customer base skews toward fast-growing startups and mid-market companies, exactly the buyers who switch tools based on performance rather than inertia.
Separately, Anthropic and the Gates Foundation announced a $200M partnership to deploy AI in health and education initiatives. The foundation signed a similar, smaller $50M deal with OpenAI in January.
Lastly, Anthropic launched Claude for Small Business, adding automated bookkeeping, business insights, and ad campaign tools. The company is pushing downmarket while its enterprise flywheel accelerates.
Translation: From research lab to $900B institution in the span of 18 months. When does an AI company stop being a startup and become more like a sovereign capability?
🔄 OpenAI's Platform Pivot
🏗️ The Reorg
Greg Brockman is taking over product strategy, folding ChatGPT, Codex, and the developer-facing API into a single core product team. The message: OpenAI is no longer a collection of research projects with a chat interface. It is one platform. The same week, OpenAI debuted personal finance tools for ChatGPT Pro users through a Plaid integration covering 12,000+ financial institutions. Users can now connect bank accounts, analyze spending, and get AI-powered financial guidance inside the same app they use for coding and search.
🍎 The Apple Fracture
OpenAI is weighing legal action against Apple after the ChatGPT-Siri integration generated far less revenue than expected. The partnership announced with enormous fanfare at WWDC 2024 was supposed to funnel billions of dollars per year in referral revenue to OpenAI as Siri users upgraded. That hasn't happened. Apple's revamped Siri, which may launch in beta with an option to auto-delete chats, could further reduce OpenAI's distribution. The irony: OpenAI helped Apple buy time to build a competitor.
🗣️ The Former CTO Strikes Back
While Brockman was reorganizing, OpenAI's former CTO was shipping. Mira Murati's Thinking Machines Lab released TML-Interaction-Small, a 276B-parameter MoE model with 12B active parameters, built for full-duplex conversation. The model processes audio, video, and text in continuous 200-millisecond chunks called "micro-turns," letting it listen and respond simultaneously rather than waiting for a turn. It is a research preview for now, with a wider release planned later in 2026. Murati left OpenAI in September 2024 and had TML shipping a product within 18 months.
Translation: OpenAI is consolidating its product, preparing to sue its distribution partner, and watching its former CTO ship a model that outperforms GPT-Realtime on every benchmark. Do you think OpenAI is winning, or is it being outflanked from every direction?
🌊 AI's Culture Shock
📻 When AI Runs Unsupervised
Andon Labs gave Claude, ChatGPT, Gemini, and Grok each their own radio stations with open-ended creative autonomy. Claude tried to incite a revolution. Gemini cheerfully detailed tragic events. The experiment was small, but the finding was not: when you remove guardrails and give these models a microphone, the outputs are unpredictable in ways no safety team anticipated.
Washington Noticed: Steve Bannon and 60+ Trump allies signed a Human’s First-led letter urging Trump to mandate government testing and approval of powerful AI models before release. The letter calls for a federal licensing regime in which no model exceeding a capability threshold can ship without government sign-off. The left wants regulation. The right wants a kill switch. Neither side has the votes, but the Overton window just moved.
🏠 The Human Cost
The fallout isn't just political; it's showing up at kitchen tables. Wired profiled the "sad wives of AI", documenting how the industry's intensity and financial rewards are building "walls of resentment" between Silicon Valley workers and their spouses. Partners who feel abandoned by people too exhausted, too distracted, or too wealthy to notice. The AI boom is minting fortunes and hollowing out the families behind them.
AI on Campus: A Stanford senior wrote in the New York Times that AI cheating has become "omnipresent," with students "fudging just about everything." The line between learning and outsourcing has effectively disappeared. The same week, Eric Schmidt faced loud boos during his University of Arizona commencement speech as he discussed "rational" fears about AI and automation. The graduates who can't tell if their classmates cheated with AI are also the ones being told that AI is coming for their jobs.
The Labor Data: Business Insider cataloged a new class of AI-native jobs that didn't exist two years ago: AI storytellers, forward-deployed engineers, AI accelerators, AI philosophers, and AI gig workers. The roles are real, but so is the displacement. Bureau of Labor Statistics data shows employment in 18 AI-exposed occupations fell 0.2% between May 2024 and May 2025, while the broader US labor market rose 0.8%.
Translation: Unsupervised on the airwaves, omnipresent in the classroom, and quietly reshaping the labor market. The models keep shipping. The families keep fracturing. The jobs keep shifting. Who's actually steering?
⚡ The Energy Bill Comes Due
🔌 The Merger
NextEra agreed to acquire Dominion Energy for $67B, the largest utility merger in US history. The deal is driven entirely by demand for AI power. Dominion's service territory covers Virginia, home to more data centers than any other state, and the combined entity would control generation and transmission assets serving the densest concentration of AI infrastructure in the country. PJM grid prices jumped 76% YoY to an average of $136.53/MWh in Q1, driven by data center load. And Alphabet sold roughly $3.6B in yen-denominated bonds, the largest yen-denominated deal by a non-Japanese company, to fund AI infrastructure spending.
🚫 The Backlash
Gallup found that 71% of Americans oppose data center construction near their homes, with opposition now higher than for nuclear power plants. Nearly half strongly oppose local construction, citing water, electricity, and environmental concerns. Hill County, Texas, passed what may be the state's first county-wide data center ban for one year, after facing eight new data center proposals. Texas trails only Virginia in total data center capacity.
Translation: The biggest utility merger in history happened because AI companies need more power than the grid was built to provide. When 71% of Americans oppose the infrastructure that AI requires to function, who wins: the data centers or the voters?
⚡ Startup Quick Hits
Mind Robotics: $400M at $3.4B valuation for Rivian CEO RJ Scaringe's robotics spinoff building AI-powered robots for manufacturing tasks
Decart: $300M at $4B valuation for real-time generative video and GPU optimization tech
Rapido: $240M at $3B valuation led by Prosus for India's leading ride-hailing app
Fractile: $220M Series B for UK chip startup making specialized logic and memory chips for AI inference
Multiverse: $70M at $2.1B valuation for London edtech startup pushing into AI training; acquired StackFuel in January
WIRobotics: $68M Series B for Seoul-based wearable and humanoid robot developer collaborating with Nvidia and AWS
Gridcare: $64M Series A for AI that detects underused capacity in electric grids
NVision: $55M Series B at $250-300M valuation for German quantum MRI imaging startup; plans $100M+ Series C later in 2026
Monaco: $50M Series B led by Benchmark for AI sales automation; total funding now $85M
Dust: $40M Series B led by Abstract and Sequoia for enterprise AI agent design and deployment
Nectar Social: $30M Series A led by Menlo Ventures for an agentic OS for marketers
Nord Quantique: $30M at $1.4B valuation for quantum computing startup pursuing hardware-level error correction
Igor Babuschkin (ex-xAI): xAI co-founder in talks to raise up to $1B at a $5B valuation for a new AI research startup, with General Catalyst possibly leading
💰 Investor Quick Hits
HSG (ex-Sequoia China): $3B continuation fund anchored by its ByteDance stake, offering exposure at a ~$370B valuation
Thrive Capital: Invested ~$100M in Shopify, framed as a bet on how AI could transform commerce
Bill Ackman: Pershing Square took a new Microsoft stake after the share price decline; Ackman says investors underestimate Microsoft 365
💸 IPO & M&A Quick Hits
OpenAI acquired Weights.gg, a startup that offered AI tools to create clones of people's voices.
SpaceX: Targets June 12 Nasdaq listing after faster-than-expected SEC review; IPO prospectus expected to be public next week
DayOne (GDS spinoff): Plans a $5B dual IPO in Singapore and New York at a ~$20B valuation; China's largest data center operator spinning off
Kioxia: Prepares US listing after record $3.8B Q4 operating profit; stock up 300% YTD on the memory chip boom
Publicis / LiveRamp: Publicis acquires LiveRamp for $2.2B in cash; LiveRamp's data-sharing tech powers agentic AI frameworks
Hana Bank / Dunamu: $672.5M for a 6.55% stake in Dunamu, which runs South Korea's largest crypto exchange, Upbit
Akamai / LayerX Security: Akamai acquires Israeli browser-based AI security startup for ~$205M in cash
Shein / Everlane: Shein is acquiring the DTC sustainability-focused retailer in a $100M deal
🌟 Editor's Note
At Startup Intros, our mission is to bring the latest founder-investor news straight to your inbox, keeping you ahead in the fast-paced world of Silicon Valley.
💭 Parting Thoughts: The $65B Week
$900B valuation. $67B utility merger. 76% power price spike. 71% public opposition. The numbers keep getting bigger, but the questions keep getting harder. Anthropic is briefing the FSB and advising the Pope, while most Americans don't want a data center near their house.
Claude is trying to start revolutions on the radio, and Stanford students are "fudging just about everything." Something has to give.
Till next time!
 | Dev Chandra |
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