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Tuesday, May 26, 2026
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Today’s top story
FUNDING
Anthropic to close $30B round at $900B+ valuation, eclipsing OpenAI
Bloomberg
Anthropic is set to close more than $30 billion in fresh financing as soon as this week at a pre-money valuation above $900 billion, with Sequoia, Dragoneer, Altimeter and Greenoaks co-leading. The round would make Anthropic the most valuable private AI company, surpassing OpenAI's $852 billion March mark, and follows a Q2 in which Anthropic projects $10.9 billion in revenue and its first quarterly operating profit.
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Why it matters
The deal rearranges the pecking order at the top of the AI market and signals that frontier-lab valuations are still climbing despite mounting compute costs. It also gives Anthropic the balance sheet to keep pace with OpenAI's IPO-fueled spend and Google's vertically integrated stack.
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More headlines
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POLICY
Pope Leo XIV's first encyclical centers on AI and human dignity
Pope Leo XIV presented Magnifica Humanitas on Monday, his first encyclical, devoted to safeguarding the human person in the age of artificial intelligence. The document warns against concentrations of AI power and frames the technology within the Church's social teaching from Rerum Novarum through Laudato Si'.
Vatican News
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RELEASE
Google's Gemini Spark agent goes live for Ultra subscribers
Gemini Spark, Google's always-on personal agent built on Gemini 3.5 Flash and the Antigravity 2.0 harness, began rolling out to US Google AI Ultra subscribers at the newly cut $100-per-month tier. Spark runs persistently on Google Cloud VMs and can execute multi-step tasks across Workspace plus launch partners like Canva, OpenTable and Instacart.
TechTimes
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INDUSTRY
OpenAI files confidentially for trillion-dollar IPO
OpenAI submitted a confidential draft S-1 to the SEC late last week with Goldman Sachs and Morgan Stanley leading, targeting a public debut as early as September at a valuation approaching $1 trillion. The filing will force OpenAI to disclose details of its $13.1 billion 2025 revenue, ~$9 billion net loss, and ~$1.4 trillion in long-term infrastructure commitments.
Fortune
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RESEARCH
Anthropic's Glasswing program reports 10,000 vulnerabilities found by Claude Mythos
Anthropic's Project Glasswing said its Claude Mythos Preview model has surfaced more than 10,000 software vulnerabilities, including a critical WolfSSL flaw (CVE-2026-5194) and multi-bug exploit chains crossing browser and OS sandboxes. Partners including AWS, Apple, Cisco, Google, JPMorgan and Microsoft have early access, and Anthropic says the Mythos class will stay off general release until misuse safeguards mature.
Anthropic
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FUNDING
Exa Labs raises $250M at $2.2B for AI search infrastructure
Andreessen Horowitz-backed Exa Labs closed a $250 million round at a $2.2 billion valuation as agentic search startups attract record capital. The wave includes Parallel Web Systems' $100 million Sequoia-led round at a $2 billion valuation, with buyers shifting from chatbot wrappers to tools that retrieve and act on live web data.
TechCrunch
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This week in benchmarks
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vs. Tuesday, May 19, 2026
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Intelligence
Kimi K2.6 fell from #7 to #9
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Intelligence
MiMo-V2.5-Pro fell from #8 to #10
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Intelligence
Gemini 3.5 Flash (high) entered the top 10 at #8
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Intelligence
Qwen3.7 Max entered the top 10 at #7
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Intelligence
Grok 4.3 (high) fell out of the top 10 (was #10)
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Intelligence
GPT-5.3 Codex (xhigh) fell out of the top 10 (was #9)
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Read past briefs and the live benchmarks at
ai-newsletter-eta-lemon.vercel.app.
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