Welcome to OHMO AI. The money is moving faster than the models now. Anthropic just leapfrogged OpenAI to become the most valuable AI company on the planet, dropped a sharper Claude the same week, and planted a flag in Italy. The race isn't just about who builds the smartest thing. It's about who shows up where, and who controls it.
In today’s newsletter:
Anthropic blows past OpenAI to a $965B valuation
Claude Opus 4.8 lands with a focus on honesty
Anthropic opens its sixth European office in Milan
Pope Leo's first big teaching takes aim at Big Tech
LATEST IN AI
ANTHROPIC
Anthropic overtakes OpenAI as the world's most valuable AI startup
Image source: OHMOAI
OHMO AI: Anthropic just raised $65 billion at a $965 billion valuation, pushing it past rival OpenAI to become the most valuable AI company in Silicon Valley. The round was led by Altimeter Capital, Dragoneer, Greenoaks, and Sequoia Capital, and nearly triples the company's worth from February.
The details:
The Series H round includes $15 billion of previously committed investments, with $5 billion of that coming from Amazon.
Anthropic's valuation sat at $380 billion back in February, so this is almost a 3x jump in a few months.
OpenAI's last raise valued it at $852 billion in March, putting it now well behind its safety-focused rival.
Why it matters: For years OpenAI was the default name in AI. This flips that story. Investors are betting the long-term winners may be the companies building the enterprise and coding tools businesses actually pay for, not just the ones with the biggest consumer brand.
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ANTHROPIC
Claude Opus 4.8 arrives with a focus on honesty
Image source: Anthropic
OHMO AI: Anthropic rolled out Claude Opus 4.8, an upgrade to its top model that improves across coding, reasoning, and agentic tasks. It launched at the same price as the previous version, alongside new features like user control over how much effort Claude puts into a task.
The details:
Anthropic says Opus 4.8 is around four times less likely than its predecessor to let flaws in its own code slip by unremarked.
A new effort control lets users on all plans dial how deeply Claude thinks, trading speed for quality or the other way around.
Claude Code gained a "dynamic workflows" feature in research preview that can run hundreds of parallel subagents on huge tasks.
Why it matters: The headline isn't raw power, it's trust. A model that flags its own uncertainty instead of bluffing is more useful for real work. For everyday users, the new effort dial means you decide when you want a fast answer versus a careful one.
ANTHROPIC
Anthropic opens a Milan office, its sixth in Europe
Image source: OHMOAI
OHMO AI: Anthropic is opening a new office in Milan, joining its existing European sites in London, Dublin, Paris, Zurich, and Munich. Led by Thomas Remy, the local team is already working with Italian companies across finance, life sciences, energy, and automotive.
The details:
Anthropic partnered with data and AI firm JAKALA to deploy Claude across more than 3,000 seats, aiming to free up roughly 70% of senior team time for higher-judgment work.
Financial super app Satispay deployed Claude across its engineering teams and compressed an 18-month roadmap into seven months.
At Bending Spoons, one of Italy's largest tech companies, the majority of code changes are now co-authored with Claude Code.
Why it matters: The valuation headlines grab attention, but this is how the lead gets built. Anthropic is wiring Claude into real European businesses, the slow groundwork that turns a hot model into an everyday tool people quietly rely on.
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POPE LEO XIV
The Pope's first AI teaching warns Big Tech holds too much power
Image source: OHMOAI
OHMO AI: Pope Leo XIV has made AI the subject of his first major encyclical, warning that the boom could hand a few tech companies too much power. The teaching, titled Magnifica Humanitas, argues for strong regulation and a slower, more careful pace of adoption.
The details:
The Pope wrote that control over platforms, data, and computing power rests with a few major actors rather than states, which can let that power evade public oversight.
He raised concerns about AI's impact on jobs, the environment, and the use of autonomous weapons in war.
Anthropic co-founder Chris Olah was invited to comment on the encyclical and mostly agreed, admitting there's no clear mechanism yet for sharing AI's gains globally.
Why it matters: When the Pope speaks, a lot of the world listens. This drags the debate about who controls AI out of tech circles and into the moral mainstream, right as a handful of companies are racing to get more powerful and more valuable than ever.
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COMMUNITY
Featured Reader
Every newsletter, we feature how a reader is using AI to work smarter, save time, or make life easier.
Today's reader is Priya N. from Manchester, England:
“My dad moved in with us last year after his stroke and his speech got hard to follow, which was wrecking him because he loves to talk. I started using AI to help. He records a voice note, it cleans up the jumbled bits, and reads it back so he can check it actually says what he meant before he sends it to my brother in Canada. We also use it at dinner now, he'll ask it to settle daft arguments about old cricket scores or explain what's on the news in plain terms. Sounds small but it gave him his voice back.”
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