OpenAI raises more money than your brain can imagine

Top News

• OpenAI completes $122B deal: The ChatGPT maker and Sora killer raised the funds at an $852 billion valuation, its largest funding round to date (and one of the largest financial transactions in history, according to Bloomberg). This includes the recently-announced $110 billion raises from Amazon, Nvidia, and SoftBank, some of which is contingent on OpenAI hitting AGI-related milestones. Other backers include Andreessen Horowitz, Shaw Ventures, T. Rowe Price, and MGX, the Abu Dhabi government fund. The company also raised more than $3 billion from individual investors via back channels, and will be included in some ETFs from Cathie Wood’s Ark Invest, providing some actual exposure for retail investors.

• Perplexity sued for sharing user info: We’re used to hearing about AI companies getting hauled into court for copyright violations, but privacy violations is a relatively new one. A lawsuit accuses the company of sharing personal information from its users with Meta and Alphabet, in violation of California law. The complaint alleges that, when you log into Perplexity, trackers on the home page are downloaded to your device, which then allow Google and Meta to monitor your chatbot conversations and “exploit” your “sensitive data for their own benefit,” such as ad targeting or re-selling that data to third parties. The suit was filed by an unnamed Utah resident who claims that he shared financial and investment information with Perplexity, which then transmitted the data along to Meta and Google. Representatives from all three companies declined to comment or gestured to their Terms of Service.

• Saronic raises $1.75B for autonomous ships: The defense tech startup — headquartered right here in Austin, Texas — produces autonomous drone boats. They have a $392 million contract with the US Navy for an undisclosed number of 24-ft. Corsair vehicles, designed to carry heavy payloads up to 1,000 nautical miles. The vehicles can be operated remotely by a single sailor via the company’s software platform, Echelon. The new raise more than doubles Saronic’s valuation from last year, to $9.25 billion. They plan to use the cash to upgrade their supply chain and shipyards, including a potential new project — Port Alpha — in South Texas’ Cameron County.

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More details are trickling in about Anthropic’s Terrible, Horrible, No Good, Very Bad Claude Code leak this week. The company has acknowledged the release of the source code behind its wildly popular AI coding assistant, Claude Code, but explained that it was due to “human error” and not a security breach. They also note that no customer information or data was shared.

Notably, this is Anthropic’s second disastrous human error-related mishap in just 7 days. Last week, Fortune got a look a never-published blog post announcing new frontier models “Mythos” and “Capybara,” and expressing concerns about their potential threats to cybersecurity.

WSJ reports that Anthropic is racing around the internet trying to contain the spread of the Claude Code leak, shipping copyright takedown notices to the more than 8,000 copies and variations of the source code already floating around there on GitHub. But this is clearly a nightmare from a containment POV. Within a few hours, the first X post sharing Anthropic’s secrets had millions of views. (As of publication time, it currently sits at 32.7M with 45K likes.)

Meanwhile, Mercor also confirmed and provided some additional background on its security incident from this week. They’re shifting some of the blame to an open-source project and Y Combinator-backed startup called LiteLLM, which apparently was hacked by a group called TeamPCP. Another hacker collective, Lapsus$, which claimed responsibility for the hack and offered to sell the compromised data on the open market. A Mercor spokesperson said they are conducting an investigation and moving promptly to contain the incident. Whatever that means. – Lon

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This Week in Startups

E2269: We’re back on our OpenClaw BS, with special guest (and Google AI PM) Shubham Saboo sharing his Top 5 Tips for getting more out of your AI agents. Find out why Shubham created a team of 6 agents (named for his favorite sitcom characters) and he he gets them to work together, seamlessly, 24/7. Plus we’ve got new demos from MoltWorld — a virtual playground where agents collaborate — and AgentMail, which hooks your agent up with their own email address.

E2268: Jason and Lon welcome AstroForge founder and CEO Matt Gialich to the show. The space mining company hopes to refine platinum group metals (PGMs) from asteroids. Their last two missions have failed, but there’s still hope for the DeepSpace-2 project, piggybacking on a SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket later on this year. Plus we’ve got Sam Dare from Templar (Subnet 3) to explain how he trained a 72 billion parameter AI model across a decentralized network of computers, and a demo of open-source Granola rival OpenOats from creator Yazin Alirhayim.

E2267: We’ve caught Subnet Fever on TWiST, so Lon and Alex welcome three sets of subnet founders to take a look at what they’re building on the TAO blockchain. The list includes MetaNova, which runs developer competitions to uncover molecular candidates that could one day lead to new drug treatments for major diseases. Plus there’s the Bitcast Network, which uses Bittensor to create a marketplace between brands and YouTube content creators. Finally, we’ve got Score, which uses a subnet model to generate small but highly specialized computer vision models.

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LAUNCH Accelerator 36!

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