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Anthropic closed a $3.5 billion series E funding round, valuing the AI company at $61.5 billion post-money, the firm announced today. Lightspeed Venture Partners led the round with a $1 billion contribution, cementing Anthropic’s status as one of the world’s most valuable private companies and demonstrating investors’ unwavering appetite for leading AI developers despite already astronomical valuations.

The financing attracted participation from an impressive roster of investors including Salesforce Ventures, Cisco Investments, Fidelity Management & Research Company, General Catalyst, D1 Capital Partners, Jane Street, Menlo Ventures and Bessemer Venture Partners.

With this investment, Anthropic will advance its development of next-generation AI systems, expand its compute capacity, deepen its research in ten and alignment, and accelerate its international expansion, the company said in its announcement.

Anthropic’s dramatic valuation reflects its exceptional commercial momentum. The company’s annualized revenue reached $1 billion by December 2024, representing a tenfold increase year-over-year, according to people familiar with the company’s finances. That growth has accelerated further, with revenue reportedly increasing by 30% in just the first two months of 2025, according to a Bloomberg report.

Founded in 2021 by former OpenAI researchers including siblings Dario and Daniela Amodei, Anthropic has positioned itself as a more research-focused and safety-oriented alternative to its chief rival. The company’s Claude chatbot has gained significant market share since its public launch in March 2023, particularly in enterprise applications.

Krishna Rao, Anthropic’s CFO, said in a statement that the investment fuels our development of more intelligent and capable AI systems that expand what humans can achieve, adding that continued advances in scaling across all aspects of model training are powering breakthroughs in intelligence and expertise.

Softbank Group chief executive officer Masayoshi Son plans to borrow $16 billion to invest in artificial intelligence (AI), the company’s executives told banks last week, The Information tech news Web site reported on Saturday, citing people familiar with the matter.

The Japanese technology investor might borrow another $8 billion early next year, the report added. It was reported in January that Softbank is in talks to invest up to $25 billion in ChatGPT owner OpenAI, as the Japanese conglomerate continues to expand into the sector.

Softbank’s investment would be on top of the $15 billion it has already committed to Stargate, a private sector investment of up to $500 billion for AI infrastructure — funded by Softbank, OpenAI and Oracle Corp — to help the US stay ahead of China and other rivals in the global AI race.

The Information — a tech industry-focused publication headquartered in San Francisco — previously reported that Softbank was planning to invest a total of $40 billion into Stargate and OpenAI, and had begun talks to borrow up to $18.5 billion in financing, backed by its publicly-listed assets.

Separately, Arm Holdings PLC is set to sign a pact next week to establish a base in Malaysia, the Malaysian news agency Bernama reported on Friday, citing Malaysian Prime Minister Anwar Ibrahim. Anwar had a discussion with Arm chief executive officer Rene Haas on Friday, he told reporters in Putrajaya, Malaysia. Son also took part in the meeting, he said.

(https://open.substack.com/pub/remunerationlabs/p/softbank-gr…Share=true)


This would be on top of the $15 billion SoftBank has already committed to Stargate.

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Lumma Stealer is a fully-featured crimeware solution that’s offered for sale under the malware-as-a-service (MaaS) model, giving a way for cybercriminals to harvest a wide range of information from compromised Windows hosts. In early 2024, the malware operators announced an integration with a Golang-based proxy malware named GhostSocks.

“The addition of a SOCKS5 backconnect feature to existing Lumma infections, or any malware for that matter, is highly lucrative for threat actors,” Infrawatch said.

“By leveraging victims’ internet connections, attackers can bypass geographic restrictions and IP-based integrity checks, particularly those enforced by financial institutions and other high-value targets. This capability significantly increases the probability of success for unauthorized access attempts using credentials harvested via infostealer logs, further enhancing the post-exploitation value of Lumma infections.”

Peggy Hoyt is a Florida-based estate planner and co-author, with Rudi Hoffman, of The Cryonics Estate Planning Handbook. We discuss dynastic trusts, the Rule Against Perpetuities and why it isn’t a problem in the USA, reasons to have a living will, how to build in financial incentives to revive you, the components of a cryonics/biostasis estate plan, the role of the trust protector, financing the preservation of pets, and more.

Tech juggernaut Nvidia continued its winning streak on Wednesday, posting record quarterly revenue of $39.3 billion, up 12% from last quarter and 78% a year ago, compared to Wall Street’s projection of $38.3 billion. Sales for the year came in at $130.5 billion, up 114% from the previous year.

The company forecast revenue for next quarter to hit $43 billion, slightly above the Street’s projections. Gross margins dipped for a second consecutive quarter, however, coming in at 73.5%, matching the guidance CFO Colette Kress offered last quarter. She said margins are expected to temporarily drop into the low 70s amid the Blackwell rollout.

Another amazing quarter from the company, said Will Rhind, founder and CEO of GraniteShares, who manages leveraged ETFs that give investors double the exposure to long or short positions on the stock. The only slight thing that I guess you could probably nitpick on is margins.

Today, the company’s data center business accounts for most of its sales as customers, including nearly all of Big Tech, race to amass as much compute power as possible. The data center division’s $35.6 billion in revenue increased 93% from the same quarter last year and beat the Street’s expected number of $34.2 billion.

Nvidia stock rose 171% in 2024, accounting for more than a fifth of the S&P 500’s overall gain. The company’s earnings are viewed as a reckoning for the whole Gen AI trade, making the chip behemoth’s financial results a momentous occasion for the entire equities landscape.

Rhind noted this latest batch of earnings comes as the market deals with increased uncertainty about issues such as tariffs and inflation. It really feels like the emphasis on this particular earnings call is more important than perhaps any of the others so far, he said.

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An Android malware app called SpyLend has been downloaded over 100,000 times from Google Play, where it masqueraded as a financial tool but became a predatory loan app for those in India.

The app falls under a group of malicious Android applications called “SpyLoan,” which pretend to be legitimate financial tools or loan services but instead steal data from devices for use in predatory lending.

These apps lure users with promises of quick and easy loans, often requiring little documentation and offering attractive terms. However, upon installation, they request excessive permissions, allowing the apps to steal personal data such as contacts, call logs, SMS messages, photos, and device location.

‘Quantum Supremacy’ author Dr. Michio Kaku discusses the future of quantum computing on ‘Making Money.’ #foxbusiness #makingmoney.

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In today’s AI news, Mercor, the AI recruiting startup founded by three 21-year-old Thiel Fellows, has raised $100 million in a Series B round, the company confirmed to TechCrunch. Menlo Park-based Felicis led the round, valuing Mercor at $2 billion — eight times its previous valuation. Existing investors Benchmark and General Catalyst, as well as DST Global and Menlo Ventures participated.

In other advancements, GPT-4.5 could arrive as soon as next week, as Microsoft gets ready to host OpenAI’s latest artificial intelligence models.

Microsoft engineers are currently readying server capacity for OpenAI’s upcoming GPT-4.5 and GPT-5 models. While OpenAI CEO Sam Altman acknowledged recently that GPT-4.5 will launch within a matter of weeks.

Then, OpenAI’s astounding growth rate potential is luring possible investors as questions loom over whether the startup will go public. “In terms of a multiple to pay for stock like ours, there’s incredible interest at the moment,” finance chief Sarah Friar told CNBC’s David Faber on Thursday. Its future growth potential has also enabled OpenAI to “achieve valuations that are on par with the growth rate of the scale” it is reaching.

S internal testing, it could mark a meaningful step forward for an all-purpose multimodal AI that can operate interactively in both real and digital spaces. + In videos, Figure is introducing Helix, a generalist Vision-Language-Action (VLA) model that unifies perception, language understanding, and learned control to overcome multiple longstanding challenges in robotics. A detailed report on Helix can be found in text accompanying the video.

Then, in this episode of Moonshots Peter Diamandis is joined by a panel of leaders in the session Transforming Business with AI: Opportunity or Overload? at Miami FII. Panelists include: Prem Akkaraju, CEO, Stability AI Ramin Hasani, Co-Founder & CEO, Liquid AI Jack Hidary, CEO, SandboxAQ Jim Keller, CEO, Tenstorrent Alexander Sukharevsky, Senior Partner & Managing Partner, QuantumBlack, AI, McKinsey & Company.

Meanwhile, AI is evolving into a mysterious new form of intelligence — powerful yet flawed, capable of remarkable feats but still far from human-like reasoning and efficiency. To truly understand it and unlock its potential, we need a new science of intelligence that combines neuroscience, AI and physics, says neuroscientist and Stanford professor Surya Ganguli.