Anthropic continues to close major deals as it reportedly moves toward an IPO, possibly coming as soon as Q1 (although Sasha de Marigny, the company’s chief communications officer, said there are no immediate plans to go public). The Amazon-funded AI startup’s latest contract provides its Claude models to cloud software firm Snowflake in a $200 million multiyear deal. Snowflake’s AI agents will use Claude to help businesses handle complex data analysis. As for the IPO, Financial Times reports Anthropic is working with Wilson Sonsini Goodrich & Rosati — a law firm whose CV includes IPOs for Google, LinkedIn and Lyft — and may be in a race with OpenAI to see who can be first to offer its shares publicly. Continue reading Anthropic Secures $200M Snowflake Deal as IPO Talk Builds

Anthropic has released a new tool called Interviewer available through Claude.ai to collect data on customer usage and preferences. Among the early findings are that “the general workforce wants to delegate routine work to AI but preserve the tasks central to their professional identity.” Anthropic plans to expand the scope of inquiry “through partnerships with creatives, scientists, and teachers” and says it will share the results. The company admits it wants feedback to develop better products, but “also because understanding people’s interactions with AI is one of the great sociological questions of our time.” Continue reading Anthropic Interviewer Explores Claude Users’ Views About AI

Amazon Web Services is marking its entry into the lucrative business of providing the U.S. government with artificial intelligence and high-performance computing services via purpose-built infrastructure for which it has committed up to $50 billion in construction and equipment. The investment “will add nearly 1.3 GW of compute capacity across AWS Top Secret, AWS Secret, and AWS GovCloud (U.S.) across all classification levels,” Amazon says, adding that the commitment “expands access to AWS’s trusted infrastructure” and advances America’s AI leadership and enables U.S. agencies “to accelerate discovery and decision-making.” Continue reading AWS Earmarking $50 Billion for Government AI Infrastructure

San Francisco-based AI startup Anthropic, founded in 2021, announced plans to invest $50 billion in U.S. computing infrastructure, starting with the creation of data centers with Fluidstack in Texas and New York (with additional plans for future sites). Fluidstack builds and operates high-performance GPU clusters for researchers and AI teams. The new project with Anthropic is expected to create 800 permanent jobs and about 2,400 construction jobs. Sites are scheduled to come online throughout next year. “These facilities are custom built for Anthropic with a focus on maximizing efficiency for our workloads, enabling continued research and development at the frontier,” according to Anthropic. Continue reading Anthropic Plans to Invest $50 Billion in AI Data Centers in U.S.

Google Cloud is rolling out its seventh-generation Tensor Processing Unit (TPU), Ironwood, and new Arm-based computing options that aim to meet exploding demand for AI model deployment in what the Alphabet company describes as a business shift from training models to serving end users. “Constantly shifting model architectures, the rise of agentic workflows, plus near-exponential growth in demand for compute, define this new age of inference,” explains Google Cloud. The company said that Anthropic — known for its Claude family of large language models — “plans to access up to 1 million” of the new TPUs. The deal is reportedly “worth billions.” Continue reading Google Unveils New AI Chips, Announces Deal with Anthropic

San Francisco-based AI startup Anthropic has released a smaller, cheaper Claude model called Haiku 4.5 that can reportedly outperform larger models that are only a few months old. In terms of coding skills, Haiku 4.5 performs comparably to Claude Sonnet 4 and OpenAI’s GPT-5, per the SWE-bench Verified leaderboard. “What was recently at the frontier is now cheaper and faster,” Anthropic suggests, noting that just “five months ago, Claude Sonnet 4 was a state-of-the-art model” and “today, Claude Haiku 4.5 gives you similar levels of coding performance but at one-third the cost and more than twice the speed.” Continue reading Anthropic’s New Claude Haiku 4.5 is Available to Free Users

The Wikimedia Foundation, which runs Wikipedia, has noticed an increase in bot activity on the encyclopedic website, and a decline of approximately 8 percent in human page views. The non-profit says the trend is due to a combination of the impact of social media and generative AI as informational sources for potential visitors. AI now provides summarized answers to user questions, while younger people are increasingly finding information through social video. The Foundation’s organizers say the audience loss could have a negative effect on Wikipedia donors as well as the human volunteers who keep the site current. Continue reading AI Search and Social Video Have Impact on Wikipedia Traffic

Anthropic has introduced a new general feature called Skills that lets Claude AI access specialized expertise on demand to more efficiently deploy agents in enterprise workflows. “Claude will only access a skill when it’s relevant to the task at hand,” like when working with Excel or following an organization’s brand guidelines, Anthropic explains. Skills are folders that include instructions, scripts and resources that Claude can load as needed. And users can also build their own for use across Claude apps, Claude Code, the Claude Agent SDK and the Anthropic API. Anthropic joins tech giants such as OpenAI, Google and Microsoft in efforts to make AI agents more practically useful. Continue reading Anthropic Adds Prebuilt and Custom Agent ‘Skills’ to Claude

Anthropic and IBM have formed a strategic alliance that will see Anthropic’s Claude models integrated into select IBM software products, the first of which is a new AI-first integrated development environment (IDE) called Project Bob, now in private preview, which aims to help enterprise clients do things like modernize software. At its TechXchange 2025 conference in Orlando, IBM also debuted a new capability for AgentOps. The AgentOps practices unveiled at IBM Think in May was showcased here as a real-time governance and observability integration to help ensure autonomous agents don’t run amok. Continue reading IBM Previews Its Project Bob IDE, Intros Real-Time AgentOps

Anthropic has released its latest frontier AI model, Claude Sonnet 4.5, built for high-performance coding and building complex agents. Anthropic claims it is “the best coding model in the world” and “the best model at using computers,” with substantial gains in reasoning and math. Claude Sonnet 4.5 is distinctive in that it can build “production-ready” applications and is not limited to prototypes, Anthropic says, describing it as a major gain over previous models. The new model also excels in research as well as enterprise basics like cybersecurity and finance, per Anthropic. Continue reading Anthropic Claude Sonnet 4.5 Good at Coding and Collegiality

OpenAI and Anthropic — rivals in the AI space who guard their proprietary systems — joined forces for a misalignment evaluation, safety testing each other’s models to identify when and how they fall short of human values. Among the findings: reasoning models including Anthropic’s Claude Opus 4 and Sonnet 4, and OpenAI’s o3 and o4-mini resist jailbreaks, while conversational models like GPT-4.1 were susceptible to prompts or techniques intended to bypass safety protocols. Although the test results were unveiled as users complain chatbots have become overly sycophantic, the tests were “primarily interested in understanding model propensities for harmful action,” per OpenAI. Continue reading Anthropic and OpenAI Report Findings of Joint AI Safety Tests

Claude Opus 4 and 4.1 now have the discrete ability to end “abusive” or “harmful” conversations in consumer chat interfaces. Anthropic says the feature was developed as part of its exploratory work on the protection and well-being of its AI models. The company also envisions broader safety uses, although it does point out that having a model defensively terminate a chat is an extreme measure, intended for use in rare cases. “We’re working to identify and implement low-cost interventions to mitigate risks to model welfare,” Anthropic explains, qualifying it is unsure “such welfare is possible.” Continue reading New Anthropic Safety Updates Focus on Claude’s Well-Being

OpenAI is releasing two lower-cost, open-weight reasoning models in an effort to be more competitive with Meta, Mistral and DeepSeek and they will be the first OpenAI models available from Amazon. The new offerings — gpt-oss-120b and gpt-oss-20b — will be among the model choices on AWS’s Bedrock and SageMaker AI services. Both models are said to be well-suited for agentic use. The gpt-oss-120b model performs comparably to OpenAI o4-mini on core reasoning and can run on a single 80GB GPU. The gpt-oss-20b model is compared to OpenAI o3‑mini and can run on edge devices with just 16GB of memory. Continue reading Open-Weight Models Are a First from OpenAI in AWS Catalog

An increasing number of teens are experimenting with AI companions like chatbots for advice and sometimes even for friendship, according to a new study from Common Sense Media. The survey found that 72 percent of U.S. teens have interacted with a personal, as opposed to a productivity, chatbot at least once. The inquiry characterized either personal AI, or chatbots with recreational settings, as “companions.” Exploring the use of artificial intelligence by children ages 13 to 17 revealed that of the nearly three-quarters who had tried an AI companion, more than half — 52 percent — identified as regular users. Continue reading Study Finds Teens Are Increasingly Turning to AI Companions

Anthropic has updated its Claude AI chatbot with the ability to build, host and share AI-powered apps directly in Claude. Launching in beta, the new function builds upon the Artifacts feature Anthropic introduced last year, allowing users to see and interact with what they asked Claude to create. “Now developers can iterate faster on their AI apps without worrying about the complexity and cost of scaling for a growing audience,” according to Anthropic. The San Francisco-based AI startup adds that millions people have already used Claude to create more than 500 million artifacts — from productivity tools to educational games. Continue reading Anthropic’s Claude Chatbot Is Now a No-Code App Developer