AI digest: Agents everywhere and mega valuations
Coding agents flood the market, Anthropic hits $900bn valuation, and OpenAI wants your bank details.
The agent wars are heating up while valuations reach absurd heights. Plus everyone wants access to your data.
Anthropic hits $900bn valuation, overtakes OpenAI
Anthropic is raising another $30 billion just three months after their last round of the same size. The $900bn valuation puts them ahead of OpenAI for the first time, driven by revenue approaching $45bn annually. These numbers feel detached from reality, but the revenue growth is real.
Coding agents become commoditised fast
The coding agent benchmark reveals how crowded this space has become. Claude Code leads on quality whilst GPT-5.5 tops terminal tasks, but the benchmarks are already contaminated. Meanwhile x.AI launched Grok Build and Microsoft pulled Claude Code licenses to push people towards GitHub Copilot. The differentiation window is closing fast.
OpenAI wants your bank account access
ChatGPT now connects to bank accounts through Plaid for personal finance analysis. Pro users in the US get spending breakdowns and budget advice from GPT-5.5 Thinking. This feels like the natural evolution of AI assistants, but also a massive expansion of OpenAI’s data collection reach.
Zyphra converts LLM to diffusion model for 7.7x speedup
ZAYA1-8B-Diffusion-Preview shows you can convert an autoregressive MoE model to discrete diffusion without losing performance. The 7.7x inference speedup shifts bottlenecks from memory bandwidth to compute, which matters as GPUs scale FLOPs faster than memory. Smart technical move that could influence how others optimise inference.