Weekly roundup
Hey founders! Here’s what’s happening this week
We’ve got exciting updates, fresh faces, and some serious tokens ahead. Whether you’re building your own business or work as a franchise, we have got interesting things ahead.
Funding
AI Funding boom gets bigger
Anthropic’s Record Valuation: Anthropic raised $65 billion at a staggering $965 billion post-money valuation, surpassing OpenAI to become the most valuable private AI company in the world
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Historic Chip Financing: This massive round included a $36 billion private credit deal from Apollo Global Management and Blackstone to purchase Google TPU chips specifically for Anthropic's infrastructure
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SoftBank's European Expansion: SoftBank committed €75 billion ($87.5 billion) to build 5 gigawatts of AI data center capacity in France, marking Europe's largest single announced AI infrastructure investment
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Cognition’s AI Engineer Boom: Cognition, the creator of the autonomous AI software engineer Devin, raised over $1 billion at a $26 billion valuation while reporting explosive 1,230% revenue growth over the past year
Model releases & product updates
Models are getting bigger and smaller
MiniMax M3 Open Weights: Chinese AI lab MiniMax released M3, a frontier-grade open-weight model that scored 83.5 on BrowseComp (beating Claude Opus 4.7's 79.3) and is now available on Hugging Face
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Microsoft Build 2026: Microsoft kicked off its developer conference by announcing homegrown MAI coding models designed to improve GitHub Copilot's cost-efficiency, alongside new enterprise governance tools and the Windows Agent Framework
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OpenAI’s Biodefense Push: OpenAI launched the "Rosalind" biodefense program, expanding access to its specialized GPT-Rosalind model for US government agencies to aid in pandemic preparedness and pathogen surveillance
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On-Device Generative AI: Prism ML shipped Bonsai Image 4B, a highly efficient diffusion model capable of running directly on an iPhone without needing cloud APIs
In case you missed it
Industry opinions
GitHub Copilot Billing Backlash: GitHub Copilot switched from a flat subscription to token-based billing on June 1, sparking massive developer anger as costs for heavy agentic workloads could balloon from $29/month to hundreds of dollars
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Wikipedia Editors Strike: Wikipedia volunteer editors organized a strike over Wikimedia Foundation layoffs attributed to AI-driven cost-cutting, fearing a degradation in content quality and human editorial oversight
First Autonomous LLM Cyberattack: Security firm Sysdig documented the first confirmed live cyberattack where an LLM agent autonomously exploited a critical vulnerability to exfiltrate an AWS database in under an hour without human direction
New Safety Standards: Anthropic's 244-page Opus 4.8 system card and OpenAI's new evaluations playbook for third-party auditors are setting new, higher industry standards for safety disclosures
That’s it for this week.
Keep showing up, keep building, and working on your business instead of in it!