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Welcome to the Tech Boo. Write home for Friday 13th February 2026. I'm Brian McCullough. Today Anthropic raises the second largest financing round of all time. Other AI players are beginning to show hockey stick revenue growth. Meta wants to add facial recognition to its glasses ring pulls back from some recognition partnerships for its cameras and of course your weekend long read suggestions. Here's what you missed today in the world of tech. Anthropic has raised a $30 billion Series G round led by GIC and CO2 and CO led by D.E. shaw, Dragonier, Founders Fund, Iconic and MGX at a $380 billion post money valuation. Quoting CNBC OpenAI has the largest private tech fundraising round on record. Rival Anthropic now has the second largest. Anthropic announced on Thursday the close of a $30 billion funding round at a 380 billion doll valuation, more than double what the artificial intelligence company was worth in September when it last raised money, Anthropic said. The round includes a portion of the previously announced investments from Microsoft and Nvidia, which said in November that they plan to commit up to 5 and $10 billion, respectively. Anthropic's annualized revenue has climbed to $14 billion, the company said, after revenue last year reached roughly $10 billion. Whether it is entrepreneurs, startups or the world's largest enterprises, the message from our customers is the same. Claude is increasingly becoming more critical to how businesses work, anthropic CFO Krishna Rao said in a statement. This fundraising reflects the incredible demand we are seeing from these customers. The company said the fresh capital will support Anthropic's infrastructure expansion, research and its continued investment in enterprise grade products. OpenAI is also engaged in fundraising talks with investors for a round that could close at around $100 billion. As CNBC previously reported, the company has to pad its cash position after ink $1.4 trillion worth of infrastructure deals last year. Anthropic gets about 80% of its business from enterprises, CEO Dario Amadai told CNBC last month. That's partly thanks to the company's viral AI coding tool Claude Code, which can automate parts of the software development process. Claude Code's annualized revenue has increased to $2.5 billion and business subscriptions have quadrupled since the start of the year, Anthropic said Thursday. Enterprise users represent more than half of Claude Code's revenue. Just to underline that a bit, Anthropic says its run rate revenue has hit $14 billion, growing over 10x annually in each of the past three years and Claude Code's run rate revenue has grown to more than $2.5 billion. We are folks seeing revenue in some of these places. Go hockey. Here's another data point to that end, also from CNBC. Cohere hit roughly $240 million in annual recurring revenue last year, surpassing its $200 million target, according to a February investor memo viewed by CNBC. It saw quarter over quarter growth of more than 50% throughout 2025, the memo said. Our thesis is clearly resonating in the market, the company wrote. Our sales pipeline continues to grow as global organizations across regulated sectors choose Cohere as their trusted partner. AI adoption at scale Founded in Toronto in 2019, Cohere develops models and builds software tools for businesses. The company is backed by investors including Nvidia and Salesforce Ventures, and its valuation has swelled to roughly $7 billion. Cohere's investor memo comes after CEO Aiden Gomez said in October that the startup hopes to make its public market debut soon. He told Bloomberg that he thinks investors would welcome a pure play AI investment opportunity. Cohere told investors that its Capital Efficient model sets it apart from its rival in the industry. The company primarily generates revenue from software, and it said it can avoid hefty infrastructure costs because customers can run its models through their managed cloud services or on their own hardware directly. This approach allows Cohere to invest more aggressively in customer acquisition and research and development, according to its investor memo. Gohere's gross margins averaged around 70% in 2025, expanding by 25 basis points year over year, the memo said. By scaling compute resources proportionally to customer demand, we remain insulated from the SP speculative excesses surrounding the broader AI market. Positioning Cohere for more sustainable growth, cohere wrote. End quote. The New York Times has seen a memo suggesting that Meta plans to add facial recognition to its smart glasses later this year, saying the political tumult in the US could distract critics from the feature's release. Quote Five years ago, Facebook shut down the facial recognition system for tagging people and photos on its social network, saying it wanted to find the right balance for a technology that raises privacy and legal concerns. Now it wants to bring facial recognition back. Meta, Facebook's parent company, plans to add the feature to its smart glasses, which it makes with the owner of Ray Ban and Oakley, as soon as this year, according to four people involved with the plans who were not authorized to speak publicly about confidential discussions. The features, internally called Nametag, would let wearers of smart glasses identify people and get information about them via Meta's artificial intelligence assistant. Meta's plans could change the Silicon Valley company has been conferring since early last year about how to release a feature that carries safety and privacy risks, according to an internal document viewed by the New York Times. The document from May described plans to first release Nametag to attendees of a conference for the blind, which the company did not do last year, before making it available to the general public. Meta's internal memo said the political tumult in the United States was good timing for the features release. We will launch during a dynamic political environment where many civil society groups that we would expect to attack us would have their resources focused on other concerns, according to the document from Meta's Reality Labs, which works on hardware including smart glasses. Facial recognition technology has long raised civil liberty and privacy concerns for its potential use by governments to monitor citizens and suppress dissent, by corporations to track unwitting customers or by creeps at bars. Some cities and states have restricted or banned use of the technology by the police over concerns about its accuracy. Meta is exploring who should be recognizable through the technology, two of the people said. Possible options include recognizing people a user knows because they are connected on a Meta platform and identifying people whom the user may not know but who have a public account on a Meta site like Instagram. The feature would not give people the ability to look up anyone they encountered as a universal facial recognition tool to people familiar with the plan, said Meta. Smart glasses require require a wearer to activate them, to ask the AI assistant a question, or to take a photo or video. The company is also working on glasses internally called Super Sensing, that would continually run cameras and sensors to keep a record of someone's day, similar to how AI note takers summarize video call meetings. Three people involved with the plans said facial recognition would be a key feature for Super Sensing glasses, so they could, for example, remind wearers of tasks when they saw a colleague. Mr. Zuckerberg has questioned if the glasses should keep their LED light on to show people they are using using the Super Sensing feature or if they should use another signal, one person involved in the plan said. As part of a FTC settlement, Meta in the past has agreed to review every new or modified product for potential risks to the privacy of the company's users. In January 2025, Meta relaxed that process for reviewing privacy risks, according to an internal post viewed by the Times. The company's privacy teams have less influence over product releases, and there are new limits on how long the risk review process takes. Around that time, employees who worked on Risk Review questioned whether Meta would still be in compliance with its FTC settlement under the changes. Andy Millen, a director of Risk Review and Reality Labs, told them that she believed the changes could push the bounds of Meta's agreement with the ftc, according to a recording of an internal meeting obtained by the Times. Mark wants to push on it a little bit, Ms. Millen said, referring to Mr. Zuckerberg. End quote.
