Anthropics and Shovels

Top News

• Interest has surged in Anthropic’s Claude: Anthropic’s war with the US Department of Defense/War continues this week. To catch you up quickly: The Claude model maker declared that it would not allow the US military to use its technology for mass domestic surveillance or autonomous weapons. In response, the White House has publicly declared its intention to cease all government use of Claude within six months, and to stop other government contractors from collaborating with the company as well. While Axios cautions that this puts the tens of billions invested into the company at risk, the news has also generated a lot of interest in Anthropic and its products among the general public. Over the weekend, Claude rose to become the #1 most popular free app in the iOS Store, and it’s now being so widely used, the app has started showing “elevated errors” and a “degraded performance.” (Fortune reports that OpenAI is also experiencing a bit of backlash after swooping in and signing their own deal with the Pentagon.)

• Prediction market users cashed in on invasion: Both Polymarket and Kalshi accepted bets from traders on whether or not the US would strike Iran, leading to some level of controversy this week now that the military operations have come to pass. On Polymarket, contracts involving Iran drew more than $529 million in wagering volume, and traders were allowed to outright bet on whether or not the late Ayatollah Hosseini Khamenei would remain in power as the nation’s supreme leader. Over on Kalshi, there’s a rule against markets that settle on a real person’s death. They had Khamenei-related wagers live on the site, but ended up halting trading on Saturday, and have now agreed to reimburse everyone’s losses, to the tune of $2.2 million. Allowing traders to place bets on wars and military strikes is controversial enough, but there are also reports that one trader — “Magamyman” — made more than $553,000 on Polymarket trades relating to Khamenei’s removal from power and/or death, once more sparking concerns about potentially unfair “insider trading.”

• PayPay postponed US IPO: SoftBank’s popular Japanese digital payments provider was expected to file a prospectus ahead of a US IPO on Monday, but have delayed the process. They’re citing “market conditions” for the delay, apparently concerned about the impact of the US and Israeli military operations in Iran and other Middle Eastern nations. PayPay is seeking a valuation of more than $10 billion, though Bloomberg reports that iconic SoftBank founder Masayoshi Son believes this should be set even higher.

TWiST 500

US military leadership is very angry at Anthropic, but some tech companies remain in their good graces. A New York Times long read from Monday surveys the Department of War and White House’s increasingly buddy-buddy relationship with Palmer Luckey and his private military tech company Anduril, a long-time TWiST 500 standout. The Times reports that Luckey is the Pentagon’s new “It Guy,” finding himself at the center of President Trump’s plans to modernize the US military with AI and autonomous weapons systems. Anduril has generated $2 billion in revenue over just the last year, holds more than $6 billion in global defense contracts, and is now valued at around $31 billion.

In other T500 news, the Financial Times reports that “open frontier AI lab” Reflection AI is currently in negotiations for up to $2 billion in fresh funding at a $20 billion+ valuation. To give you a sense for how rapidly the company is adding value, they were valued at just $8 billion back in October, and $545 million in early 2025. It’s even more impressive considering that they build open models that developers can download and modify independently, while most of their Western rivals continue to focus on their own proprietary LLMs.

AND SPEAKING of China’s leading open source AI firms: MiniMax — makers of the M2.5 LLM — experienced a massive surge in revenue in 2025, hitting $79 million. (That’s a 159% surge over the year before.) The company’s models are benefitting from the agentic craze, proving an open-source, lower-cost and speedier alternative for powering your OpenClaw or similar set-up to US giants like OpenAI’s GPT-5.2 or Anthropic’s Claude Opus 4.6. According to CEO Yan Junjie, 70% of MiniMax’s business came from international markets in 2025. – Lon

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