Anthropic doubles its raise to a casual $10B...

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• Meta hits pause on hiring: After poaching more than 50 AI researchers with massive pay packages, Meta has frozen hiring in its AI group. The move comes right after a reorg that split its Superintelligence Labs into four teams, including one led by Scale AI founder Alexandr Wang

• Nuro pulls in $203M with Nvidia and Uber: Nuro just added another $97M to its Series E, bringing the round to $203M. Once worth $8.6B, Nuro is now valued at $6B after a tough few years and multiple pivots. Most notably dropping its own delivery bot fleet to focus on licensing its AV tech. That move is starting to pay off: Uber plans to launch robotaxis running on Nuro software, and Nvidia’s buy-in shows the startup is still deeply tied into the GPU giant’s platform.

• Ecosia takes a swing at Chrome: Berlin-based nonprofit Ecosia wants a 10-year “stewardship” of Chrome instead of Google being forced to sell it. The idea? Ecosia would manage the browser, funnel 60% of its projected $1T revenue into climate projects (rainforest protection, tree planting, green AI, etc.), and leave Google with the other 40% plus the IP. Sounds absurd — but Ecosia’s play pushes regulators to consider alternatives to the usual “sell it to another big tech giant” solution.

TWiST500

Today in TWiST500 news, Anthropic is in talks to raise $10 billion, nearly double the $5B number floated earlier this summer. Iconiq Capital is leading the round, with TPG, Lightspeed, Spark, Menlo, and sovereign wealth funds from Qatar and Singapore also circling. The money is headed where you’d expect: compute, data centers, and talent.

The company was valued at $61.5B just months ago in a $3.5B round — quite a jump in less than a year. In May, it was reported Anthropic's annualized revenue grew from $1B to $3B in five months. Meanwhile, OpenAI, reported a $10B annualized run rate in June and then hit $1B in revenue in July alone— a 20% increase in just two months.

That revenue curve looks incredible, but keeping that pace is another story. The multiples here are aggressive. OpenAI’s CFO has already said the company is “constantly under compute,” and Sam Altman has talked about spending trillions on data centers to meet demand. Anthropic will face the same reality: raising billions is one thing, but justifying a the valuation will be another. —Maddie

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