← Tech Brew Ride Home
Tech Brew Ride Home
Anthropic’s Laundry Has Been Aired
00:19:10
OpenAI closes a monster round, but does Anthropic continue to steal their thunder? Is that Anthropic code leak from yesterday a bigger deal for them than I thought it was? What can happen when all the self-driving cars shut down at once. And you are finally able to change that embarrassing Gmail account you’ve been living with.
Loading summary
Transcript10 lines
- [00:00]
A
K Pop demon hunters, Saja Boy's breakfast meal and Hunt Trick's meal have just dropped at McDonald's. They're calling this a battle for the fans. What do you say to that Rumi? It's not a battle. So glad the Saja Boys could take breakfast and give our meal the rest of the day.
- [00:14]
B
It is an honor to share.
- [00:16]
A
No it's our honor.
- [00:18]
B
It is our larger honor. No really stop.
- [00:22]
A
You can really feel the respect in this battle. Pick a meal to pick a side.
- [00:27]
B
Ba da ba ba ba and participate
- [00:29]
A
in McDonald's while supplies last Foreign
- [00:34]
B
welcome to the Tech Brew Ride home for Wednesday, April 1st, 2026. I'm Brian McCullough. Today OpenAI closes a monster round, but does Anthropic continue to steal their thunder? Is that anthropic code leak from yesterday a bigger deal for them than I thought it was? What can happen when all the self driving cars shut down at once and you are finally able to change that embarrassing Gmail account you've been living with for years? Here's what you missed today in the world of tech. OpenAI has officially closed $122 billion in committed capital, led by SoftBank, A16Z and others, at an $852 billion post money valuation after previously saying the round would only total 110 billion. So they got 12 billion more. Quoting CNBC, OpenAI said Tuesday that it's generating $2 billion in revenue per month. It made $13.1 billion in revenue last year burning cash and is not yet profitable. But the company also notes that enterprise sales now account for more than 40% of revenue, and Enterprise is on track to reach parity with consumer sales by the end of 2026. In February, OpenAI revealed $110 billion of commitments from some of its strategic investors that anchored its funding round. Amazon agreed to invest up to $50 billion in the startup. Nvidia invested $30 billion and SoftBank invested also 30 billion. The additional 12 billion in capital that OpenAI raised came from a broader pool of investors. OpenAI said it extended participation to investors through bank channels for the first time and raised $3 billion from individual investors. More on that from the FT. OpenAI has tapped retail investors for the first time through a trio of banks and exchange traded funds managed by Cathie Wood's Ark Invest. The company framed their participation as a way of giving more people the opportunity to share in the upside of OpenAI and the AI era. The deals were the largest private placements the banks had completed, said Sarah Fryer, OpenAI's chief financial officer. Retail investors are expected to play an important role in the public listings anticipated over the next 12 months, accounting for as much as 30% of SpaceX's float and participating in IPOs for OpenAI and Anthropic, said people familiar with the matter. Fryer said broadening access was consistent with the company's mission of ensuring powerful AI was created for the benefit of humanity. That meant not just access to the technology, but access to the financial upside, she said on Tuesday. Currently, only wealthy retail investors could access the stock, but Fryer said one of her main priorities was to expand that in time. End quote but did you take note that OpenAI really wants you to know things are still going gangbusters in terms of growth, especially in sales to the enterprise? You want to know why? Well, Bloomberg is noting something that I've heard whispered about and actually seen myself in recent weeks. QUOTE OpenAI shares have fallen out of favor on the secondary market, in some cases becoming almost impossible to unload as investors pivot quickly to Anthropic, its biggest competitor. Even as OpenAI raced in recent months to raise tens of billions of dollars next Round Capital founder Ken Smith said his secondary marketplace was seeing a drop in demand for the artificial intelligence giant's shares. About half a dozen institutional investors, including hedge funds and venture capital firms that hold large stakes, approached his company in recent weeks looking to sell about $600 million worth of OpenAI shares. Last year, they would have been snatched up within days, but now no one's biting. We literally couldn't find anyone in our pool of hundreds of institutional investors to take these shares, said Smith, whose Firm has handled $2.5 billion worth of transactions. Meanwhile, buyers have indicated they have $2 billion of cash ready to deploy into Anthropic. Other marketplaces are also seeing record demand for Anthropic, including Augment and Hive. The large between OpenAI's $852 billion valuation and Anthropic's $380 billion valuation has investors rushing to grab equity in the latter before it rises, according to Augment co founder Adam Crawley. It's just better risk reward right now, he said. People are betting that Anthropic's valuation will catch up with OpenAI's. But if you buy OpenAI shares, it's less clear what the return will be in the near term. Primary fundraising and secondary sales don't always follow the same playbook. In fundraising rounds, existing investors are often offered the chance more shares to maintain their stakes and instead of saying no, which founders may not like. They can buy in and then sell some of that exposure on the secondary market. Anthropic and OpenAI don't allow investors to trade shares on the secondary market without their permission. Still, access to the shares is available on many platforms as investors sell their interest through other mechanisms such as special purpose vehicles. Some investors have grown cautious over OpenAI's soaring operating costs. The company has committed to spend far more than Anthropic on infrastructure to support its AI ambitions in the coming years. And while OpenAI touts a strong consumer base, it's moving slowly on capturing more lucrative enterprise clients. Anthropic, meanwhile, has dominated that higher margin market, and as a result its growth trajectory appears to be stronger than OpenAI's, Crowley said. Next round sees bids for OpenAI coming in at a valuation of about $765 billion, a 10% discount from the previous 850 billion. The market is much more in demand for Anthropic augments, Crowley said his firm and Nexround are both seeing huge bids for Anthropic, that value at roughly $600 billion, more than 50% higher than its previous funding round. Meanwhile, Hive has registered more than $1.6 billion of demand for Anthropic shares, also at a premium, said co founder Prabh Rattan. The demand is one of the highest we've ever seen, crowley said. It's essentially unlimited interest, end quote. But Anthropic has other problems. Remember the whole Department of War kerfluffle from last so there was this from just yesterday quoting the journal Anthropic is racing to contain the fallout after accidentally exposing the underlying instructions it uses to direct Claude code, the popular artificial intelligence agent app that has won the company an edge with developers and businesses. By Wednesday morning, Anthropic representatives had used a copyright takedown request to force the removal of more than 8,000 copies and adaptations of the raw Claude code instructions, known as source code, that developers had shared on programming platform GitHub. The leak of some internal source code didn't expose any customer information or data, a spokesman for Anthropic said. Nor did it divulge the valuable inner mathematics, sometimes called weights, of the company's expensive and powerful AI models. This was a release packaging issue caused by human error, not a security breach. We're rolling out measures to prevent this from happening again, the spokesman said. But the leak did reveal commercially sensitive information, including Anthropic's proprietary techniques, tools and instructions for cajoling its AI models to work as coding aids agents. Those techniques and tools are called a harness because they are what allow users to control and direct those models, much like a harness allows a rider to guide a horse. The result is that Anthropic's competitors and legions of startups and developers now have a detailed roadmap to clone Claude Code's features without needing to reverse engineer them, something that is already common in the cutthroat AI race. Leak also gives hackers a large amount of new information to probe for bugs they could use to exploit the Claude code software or manipulate its Claude AI model into helping with their cyber attacks, creating risks for Anthropic and the developers who use its tools. The leak is a blow for Anthropic because it risks both undermining its reputation for safety and also revealing valuable trade secrets in the pitched battle for enterprise customers. Anthropic has been riding a wave of growing use because of the viral popularity of Claude code, helping it close a new round of funding that values the company at $380 billion ahead of a possible public offering this year. Much of the excitement about Claude code is about how it manages to stitch together the company's AI models and coax them into working well in a way that helps developers get work done, something called tooling that in AI is as much an art as it is a science. Programmers combing through the source code so far have marveled on social media at some of Anthropic's tricks for getting its Claude AI models to operate as Claude code. One feature asks the models to go back periodically through tasks and consolidate their memories, a process it calls Dreaming. Another appears to instruct Claude code, in some cases to go undercover and not reveal that it is an AI when publishing code to platforms like GitHub. Others found tags in the code that appeared pointed at future product releases. The code even included a Tamagotchi style pet called Buddy that users could interact with. More on all that from the Information Quote While this is far from a disaster and doesn't involve the proprietary model weights of Anthropic's AI models, competitors now have a window into upcoming features it will launch for Claude code. One of the most significant is Kairos, a collection of updates that will allow Claude to work in the background, sending updates about its progress to a customer's phone and using a dream mode to automatically consolidate Claude's memories from past sessions. The updates also include a proactive feature that prompts Claude to take initiative, explore, act and make progress without waiting for instructions. Kairos is an ancient Greek word that can mean an opportune moment. These features continue Anthropic's efforts to catch up to OpenClaw, the software for creating AI agents that run in the background on a user's computer and automatically update their memory files. Of course, we've seen multiple examples of how the proactive nature of OpenClaw and similar agents can backfire, so let's hope that Anthropic has found some solutions. Kairos also introduces a chat interface for interacting with Claude code. Right now, customers use a standard computer terminal window to talk to the product. Anthropic also intends to release buddies or virtual duck avatars to visualize the coding agents the leaked source code implies. Anthropic hopes to generate sustained Twitter buzz from the feature. One competitor to Claude code told us that thanks to the source code leak, they might change their product development plans so they can beat Anthropic to the punch when it comes to launching some of these features. As for the idea that more companies could launch Claude Code like products to rival the original, don't count on it, because much of this secret sauce is still tied to the underlying AI models. End Quote. Protein is now at Starbucks and it's never tasted so good. You can add protein cold foam to your favorite drink or try one of our new protein lattes or Matcha. Try it today at Starbucks. Just a quick break. Here's a tip. Planning your next fishing trip on TikTok? You'll find gear reviews, lake tips and local tricks. Short videos straight to the point. Download TikTok now.
- [11:47]
A
Ryan Reynolds here from Mint Mobile with a message for everyone paying Big Wireless way too much. Please, for the love of everything good in this world, stop with Mint. You can get premium wireless for just 15amonth. Of course, if you enjoy overpaying. No judgments. But that's weird. Okay, one judgment anyway, give it a try@mintmobile.com Switch upfront payment of $45 for 3 month plan equivalent to $15 per month required intro rate first 3 months only, then full price plan options available, taxes and fees extra.
- [12:15]
B
See full terms@mintmobile.com A suspected Baidu system failure apparently caused a number of robo taxis to stop all across Wuhan in China, trapping passengers inside those vehicles and reportedly causing traffic disruptions and crashes. Quoting Wired an unknown technical problem caused a number of robo taxis owned by the Chinese tech giant Baidu to freeze on Tuesday in the middle of traffic, trapping some passengers in the vehicles for more than an hour in Wuhan, a city in central China where Baidu has deployed hundreds of its Apollo Go self driving taxis. People on Chinese social media reported witnessing the cars suddenly malfunction and stop operating. Photos and videos shared online show the Baidu cars halted on busy highways, often in the fast lane. A college student in Wuhan tells Wired that she was stuck in Baidu robo taxi with two friends for about 90 minutes on Tuesday. She asked to be identified only by her last name, he to protect her privacy. The student says the car malfunctioned and stopped four or five times during the trip before it eventually parked in front of an intersection in eastern Wuhan. Luckily, it was not a busy road and the group was not in immediate danger. The screen display in the car asked the passengers to remain in the car with seatbelts on and wait for a company representative to come in five minutes, according to a photo he shared with Wired. He says it took about 30 minutes to reach a Baidu customer representative on the phone. They kept saying it would be reported to their superior, but they didn't explain what caused the outage or let us know how long we needed to wait for the staff to come, he says. No one ever came, and after another hour of waiting, the three passengers decided to just get out and go home by themselves. The doors weren't locked on Chinese social media. Other passengers also complained about being unable to reach Baidu's customer support. I tried every way I could think of to call for help using the options the app showed, but the flight phone line wouldn't go through and when I pressed the SOS button it told me it was unavailable. So then, what exactly is sos for? Wrote1 person in a post on Rednote alongside a video showing the button not working. She said she had to force the door to open and get out of the car as traffic halted to a complete stop behind her Robotaxi Apollo Go. You really owe me an apology, she wrote. Baidu didn't immediately respond to a request for comment. Local police in Wuhan issued a statement around midnight in China that said the situation was likely caused by a system malfunction, but the incident is still under investigation. No one was injured and all passengers have exited the vehicles, the police added. It's unclear how many of Baidu's robotaxis may have been impacted. One dashcam recording posted to Rednote shows a car passing 16 Apollo GO vehicles parked on the road in the span of 90 minutes on several occasions. The video shows the driver narrowly avoiding hitting the robotaxis by braking or changing lanes at the last minute. End quote. Finally today Google says all users in the US can now change their Google Account username Users are restricted to one username change every 12 months, but that effectively means quoting the Verge. If you've been stuck with a regrettable Gmail username you picked years ago, you might finally have a way out. Starting Tuesday, Gmail users in the US can change the portion of their email address before the mail.com section as reported by Android Authority. After changing your Gmail username, your old email address will remain connected to your account as an alternate address, so any messages sent to it will continue reaching your inbox. Choose carefully. Though you could only create one new email address every 12 months, you also won't be able to use whatever new username you pick for a separate Google account in the future. The option to change your Gmail address started rolling out last year, but is now available to all Google account users in the US Besides replacing embarrassing email addresses, it could also be useful for updating your email address after a name change. Keep in mind, after changing your Gmail username, you may need to manually update your email address and your login info for any apps and websites you use it to sign into. To try out the feature, open the Gmail app and tap your profile icon. Select Manage your Google Account to go to your account settings, then tap Personal Info and choose the Email option. In that menu, you should see an arrow button beside your email address which shows the option option to change Google Account Email if you tap it. If you already changed your username already, this option might not show up. End quote. Nothing more for you today. Talk to you tomorrow.