Wall Street Just Backed Anthropic Over OpenAI

Anthropic just started its consulting firm and Wall Street is loving it

Anthropic just opened a Claude consulting firm, and the people writing the checks tell you everything. Goldman Sachs, Blackstone and Hellman & Friedman are the co-founding investors, with $300M from each of them and $300M from Anthropic itself. The new firm launches at a $1.5B post-money valuation, with Anthropic engineers embedded inside it from day one.

The details:

Backers: Apollo, General Atlantic, Leonard Green, GIC and Sequoia Capital joined the round. None of them backed OpenAI's parallel venture, which launched the same day.

Target: Healthcare, manufacturing and financial services. The pitch is custom AI systems for operational use cases plus long-term support.

Structure: Standalone firm with Anthropic engineers embedded directly. Anthropic CFO Krishna Rao said demand for Claude inside large companies is moving faster than Anthropic alone can deliver.

Same day: OpenAI launched The Deployment Company with its own consulting pitch. The investor lists are not comparable.

Big consulting has spent years selling AI strategy decks and subcontracting the actual building. The labs already have the model and the engineers, and now they have nine-figure Wall Street checks behind them. Goldman, Blackstone and Hellman & Friedman are not writing $300M into a venture they think will fail.

The Trump White House is drafting pre-release review for frontier AI

The Trump administration is drafting an executive order that would create a government-industry working group to review the most powerful AI models before they reach the public, according to the New York Times. The proposal would build the first formal pre-deployment review process for frontier AI in the United States. The same administration spent the past year cutting AI safety requirements.

The details:

Mechanism: Officials are weighing how the review would integrate with existing export controls and NIST safety frameworks. No final structure has been settled.

Talks: The White House has discussed the proposal with Google and OpenAI. Anthropic is named in the article as one of the labs whose internal capability findings prompted the review.

Reversal: Earlier in the term, Trump rolled back the previous administration's AI safety executive order. Officials interviewed by the Times said the calculation changed once internal national security briefings caught up to where the capability curve actually is.

Concerns: AI-enabled cyberattacks, economic displacement and capability that is advancing faster than government understanding of it.

Pre-deployment review boards have been kicking around DC policy circles for two years with no traction. Now it looks like the classified capability briefings got a bit too worrying. Whether the executive order ships at all depends on which advisors win the internal argument.

Shopify puts every store inside ChatGPT and Claude

Shopify released its AI Toolkit and a public MCP server that lets merchants have their store inside ChatGPT and Claude. The connector covers product catalogs, inventory, orders and basic checkout.

The details:

Scope: Merchants enable the MCP server from the Shopify admin. ChatGPT or Claude users can then ask their assistant to search the store, compare items and add them to a cart.

Standard: This is the first time a platform of Shopify's scale has shipped a first-party MCP server, instead of a third-party connector built on top of public APIs.

Reach: Shopify powers millions of stores globally. Adoption among merchants is the only constraint on how fast this becomes the default checkout flow inside chat.

Roadmap: The toolkit also exposes hooks for custom actions, meaning merchants can let an assistant trigger discounts, restocks or order status checks without writing custom adapters.

MCP was a developer protocol six months ago. Shopify shipping an official server changes the audience to every merchant with an admin password. Shoppers can now ask ChatGPT or Claude to find, compare and check out without visiting a product page, and any merchant who wants to keep query-driven traffic will need the connector enabled.

Peter Thiel funds ocean data centers

Panthalassa, an Oregon-based startup building floating AI compute nodes powered by ocean wave energy, raised a $140M Series B led by Peter Thiel at close to a $1B valuation. The money funds a pilot manufacturing facility near Portland and rollout of the Ocean-3 nodes. The pitch is to park compute where the power is and skip the grid entirely.

The details:

Tech: Each Ocean-3 node is a floating orb that converts wave motion into electricity and runs AI inference on board.

Why now: US data center build-out is hitting permitting and grid limits. Wave power is steadier than wind or solar, and the ocean does not require zoning approvals.

Pattern: Founders Fund has spent two decades funding the contrarian version of physical infrastructure. SpaceX, Palantir, Anduril and now floating compute orbs.

US data center demand is breaking the grid in regions where the chips already are. Putting compute over water sidesteps grid constraints, cooling demand and zoning fights in one move. Whether the Pacific winter eats the pilot orbs is the next test, and that test happens off Oregon in the next twelve months.

Tool of the day: Bolt.new

Bolt.new is an in-browser dev environment that turns a one-line prompt into a working full-stack app. It writes the code, runs it in a sandboxed Node environment and gives you a live URL with no local setup.

Try it yourself: Head to Bolt.new , describe what you want in plain English (something like "a Notion-style note app with tags and a search bar") and watch it scaffold the project, install dependencies and boot a preview window in under a minute. Iterate by asking for changes in chat or edit the code directly in the side panel. When the app is ready, click Deploy and Bolt pushes it to a live URL backed by Netlify or your own GitHub repo. If you have ever wanted to build a side project but stalled on environment setup, this is fifteen minutes well spent.

Light Bytes

Alibaba's Qwen3.6-Max-Preview leads six coding benchmarks: The 1T-parameter mixture-of-experts model with a 262K context window holds the top spot on SWE-bench Pro, Terminal-Bench 2.0 and four other coding tests.

Unity AI hits open beta: You can vibe code video games now! Free during beta, the integrated generators for textures, animations, code and behaviors are live for every Unity 6 user.

Ollama lands inside Claude Desktop: Ollama published an official Claude Desktop integration that routes prompts to local models running on your laptop, no API key required.

Higgsfield ships a Skills marketplace: A single npx command pulls image gen, video gen and character training into Claude Code, Cursor and twelve other agents.

AI plus polarized light catches keratoconus earlier: A new screening method combines polarized-light imaging with deep learning to detect the corneal disease at stages where current tests still miss it.