AI digest: Big money, better tools
Anthropic eyes a massive funding round while developers get new tools for coding agents and audio models.
The money keeps flowing and the tooling keeps improving. Here’s what caught our attention this week.
Anthropic hunting for £40bn at nearly £1tn valuation
Sources tell TechCrunch that Anthropic is fielding multiple offers for a £50bn round at valuations between £850bn and £900bn. That’s absolutely bonkers money for a company that was worth £15bn just 18 months ago. The Claude maker is clearly riding the wave of enterprise AI adoption, but these numbers feel frothy even by 2026 standards.
Cursor launches TypeScript SDK for coding agents
Cursor dropped a TypeScript SDK for building programmatic coding agents with sandboxed cloud VMs and subagents. This feels like the next logical step after their AI-powered editor success. Token-based pricing and proper sandboxing suggests they’re serious about letting developers build production-grade coding workflows, not just demos.
Qwen’s FlashQLA delivers 3x speedups on Hopper GPUs
The Qwen team released FlashQLA, a kernel library that accelerates linear attention operations by up to 3x on NVIDIA Hopper hardware. Linear attention is becoming crucial for long-context models, so optimised kernels like this matter more than the headline numbers suggest. Good to see the Chinese AI labs contributing serious infrastructure work alongside model releases.
smol-audio makes fine-tuning accessible
HuggingFace’s smol-audio collection packages Colab-ready notebooks for fine-tuning major audio models including Whisper and the newer multimodal ones. Audio AI has lagged behind text and vision for accessible tooling, so this kind of cookbook approach is exactly what practitioners need.